Computing Science

Barbara Liskov is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She has spent the past forty or so years finding and describing new ways…

Can we build a functional brain using computers? In order to answer that question, we need to know how the brain is built in nature. The human brain is composed of more than 10 billion cells called neurons that can be electrically activated upon…

Cars that drive themselves. A program that trounces the best human players at Jeopardy! A machine that defeats the world champion at chess. It would seem that the quest to create human-level artificial intelligence (AI) is making astounding progress, and…

“Bruce, did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans’ Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do –…

Alan Turing’s revolutionary ideas about computation helped launch the field of cognitive science. One of his major contributions to cognitive science was the idea of a Turing machine, a hypothetical contraption capable of carrying out any algorithm or…

-- If you believe Hollywood’s interpretation, the advent of intelligent robots rarely ends well for mankind. Movies like The Matrix, Terminator, and I, Robot all depict robots as quite intelligent, capable, and horrifyingly destructive machines that…

-- In the last decade or so, various fields with the suffix –omics have risen in biological and biomedical sciences. The oldest and most well-known is genomics, the high throughput study of all the genes in the genome. Together with other emerging fields…

--You are most likely reading this article on a computer, and as you scroll down the page, you may decide to briefly switch over to Facebook or Twitter to type a quick status update. We usually do not stop to think that the ease with which we can do…