What Do Gene Sequencing, Radio Astronomy And Particle Physics Have In Common?

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Modern scientific discovery is driven by one thing, without which breakthroughs like gene sequencing, the search for the Higgs boson and dark matter and huge telescope arrays wouldnt be possible High Performance Computing (HPC).

With the computational might to blitz through millions of bytes of data, calculations and statistical possibilities, scientists were able to posit the existence of particles like the Higgs boson and campaign for expensive projects like the Large Hadron Collider because they could show what they were looking for.

The same kind of processing power is whats allowing the UKs version of the Genome Project, attempting to sequence whole genomes rather than just excerpts known as exons, to go ahead.

Cambridge University has had HPC in one form or another for 18 years, from the old 80s supercomputer sitting in the middle of a room, to its modern new server facility, which is based on a large Dell Dell server cluster made up of 9.600 cores and four petabytes of storage running on a Hadoop platform and is currently getting its finishing touches after a 20m investment.

Cambridge Universitys new HPC system, used for particle physics, radio astronomy, gene sequencing and other big data, big science projects. (Credit: Cambridge University)

The university has one of the largest research and development budgets in the UK education sector, devoting 40 per cent of its 1438m annual revenue to funding advances in the fields of astronomy, genomics, medicine, physics and many more.

But its HPC time is also hired out to businesses in the nearby science and technology park, helping the university to pay for top IT support, while providing a valuable niche service to firms.

Just a few years ago, that kind of commoditisation of HPC wouldnt have been possible, Dr Paul Calleja, director of HPC Service at Cambridge, told visitors in a talk attended by Forbes.

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What Do Gene Sequencing, Radio Astronomy And Particle Physics Have In Common?

Chasing The Mystery Of Spacetime's Local 'Bulk Flow'

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For decades, the root cause of our Milky Way galaxys bulk flow in the direction of the Centaurus and Hydra constellations has retained an air of mystery. Our own stars motion through the Milky Way is relatively well understood. But a full understanding of the exact forces driving our Local Group of galaxies peculiar velocities at rates of 631 kilometers-per-second remains elusive.

Quite apart from our universes long-documented inflationary expansion (known as the Hubble Expansion), the local cosmos which surrounds us over millions of light years has its own peculiar trajectory and velocity.

What is known is that we are moving in bulk towards the Great Attractor (a region of half a dozen galaxy clusters some 150 million light years away), and the Shapley Concentration (a supercluster of galaxies some three times farther distant).

Hubble Space Telescope view towards the Great Attractor. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Is this just the result of gravity towards more massive and much more distant galaxy superclusters, or

A paper just submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) details cosmological distance measurements from some 8000 objects, most of which were from within our own Laniakea supercluster. As reported last September by Brent Tully, a cosmologist at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and colleagues in the journal Nature, the Milky Way is actually an outlier of this newly-named supercluster whose estimated 100,000 galaxies span some 500 million light years.

Yehuda Hoffmann, an astronomer at Israels Hebrew University, and colleagues used the Cosmicflows-2 catalogue (CF-2), the largest and most accurate ever catalog of galaxy peculiar velocities to reconstruct a large segment of our local cosmos large scale structure.

We [used] the CF-2 database to uncover the distribution of matter out to distances of hundreds of million of light years, Hoffmann, the papers lead author, told Forbes. Our main result is that the bulk velocity estimated from the CF-2 data is fully consistent with the standard model of cosmology. As Tully told Forbes, from our perspective, both downtown Laniakea and the Shapley supercluster lie in the same direction. Its the combination of these two things lined up like a spring tide that is pulling us. but we dont yet have a full accounting for whats causing our motion, said Tully. Until we can actually add up all the vectors and [still] come up with this number of 600 kilometers per second, theres still an incomplete story.

How do researchers actually use such data?

The team used 8000 separate distance measurements for their MNRAS paper; including 300 distances derived from Type 1a supernovae.

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Chasing The Mystery Of Spacetime's Local 'Bulk Flow'

Artificial Intelligence App Review – Technically, You Can Make A 82.7% Return Of Investment – Video

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Is artificial intelligence threat looming?

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In the last several months, top tech heavyweights including Bill Gates and Elon Musk and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking warned of threats artificial intelligence (AI) could pose. Along with a collection of intellectuals who signed a Future of Life Institute letter in January, the three leading innovators support development of AI to benefit society, but are wary of the potential dangers.

"They said this is one of the largest existential threats facing humanity. They worry that you're going to have robots that are more intelligent than humans, that will have their own volition and that will have hugely negative effects on society," CBS News contributor and NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson said Monday on "CBS This Morning."

Robots like HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Chappie from the recently released sci-fi film of the same name, employ their underestimated sentient capabilities to cause problems for their human counterparts -- Hollywood fantasies spurring real-life concerns.

"The larger, long-term concern is that humanity will be shunted aside and that's what people think about, but they can't really conceptualize and can't really see exactly what's happening, but that's where angst comes from," Thompson said.

Robots outside the big screen are not yet as sophisticated, but engineers are making big strides.

Boston Dynamics developed a velociraptor-inspired robot that outran Usain Bolt; a 6-foot 2-inch, 330-pound humanoid named ATLAS; and a "cheetah" robot that uses less power than a microwave.

Engineers at DeepMind, a British start-up acquired by Google, recently pitted its creation in an Atari-style battle of the minds against a human competitor -- and won.

"It can't master Halo, but it can do the earlier video games," Thompson said.

While the computer's game-playing success came from self-taught techniques, Demis Hassabis, AI intelligence researcher at DeepMind, said at a news conference in February: "We are decades away from any technology we need to worry about."

Thompson would agree.

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Is artificial intelligence threat looming?

Artificial intelligence could encourage war, experts fear

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Hollywood fantasy: The reality of AI development is a little more nuanced and a lot less advanced than movies might have us believe. Photo: Supplied

It's the theme of so many dystopian sci-fi books and movies: a super intelligent machine in charge of lethal military hardware becomes self-aware and decides to wreak havoc. But could it actually happen?

At the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's annual conference in Texas last month, a workshop was held on the ethics of AI development and a panel discussed whether or not so-called 'lethal autonomous weapons' should be banned.

"There are many arguments, legal, ethical, political and technical for a ban," Toby Walsh, head of theOptimisation Research Groupat Australia's research body NICTA and chair of the proceedings, told Fairfax Media.

"One that particularly appeals to me is that [autonomous weapons] will lower the barrierto war. If one side can launch an attack, without fear of bodies cominghome, then it is much easier to slip into battle," Professor Walsh said.

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While the advent of drones might already have the bar falling, those in favour of a ban would look to stop a potential arms race in "killer robots" before it begins. One the other hand, there are plenty of voices against a ban.

"Machines are not inherently dangerous", said Francesca Rossi, president of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and a participant in the AAAI panel, who points out the huge difference between super-intelligence and sentience.

"We should build [autonomous weapons]by specifying all the relevant context for the desired goal to be achieved by the machine. Otherwise, a goal could be reached by violating some basic assumptions on how we want a machine to behave. Since machines are not sentient, their behaviour depends on how a human built them,"Professor Rossi said.

The specification of "all" relevant context could prove a troublesome task, however, since as Professor Walsh points out, "many ethical principles that we holdas universal are not", and ethics and decision-making processes across different cultures vary.

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Java Makes Programmers Want To Do Absolutely Anything Else With Their Time

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This question originally appeared on Quora: Why do many software engineers not like Java?

Answer by Michael O Church, functional programmer and machine learning engineer, on Quora

First, lets cover the technical issues. Its verbose, combines the worst of both worlds between static and dynamic typing by having a hobbled but extremely clunky type system, and mandates running on a VM that has a macroscopic startup time (not an issue for long-running servers, but painful for command-line applications). While it performs pretty well nowadays, it still isnt competitive with C or C++ and, with a little love, Haskell and OCaml can or will eclipse it in that domain. For real-world production servers, it tends to require a fair amount of JVM tuning.

The VM itself has a lot to recommend it. It offers concurrency and garbage collection at a level of quality that, until recently, wasnt found anywhere else. Python may have a better user experience, but it also has a GIL, which rules out parallelism. Much important software in the early 2000s was written in Java because, at the time, it was the best choice, even taking the mediocrity of the language itself into account. It had Unicode (albeit, UTF-16) from the start and a strong concurrency story, and it was a notch above C++ in terms of user experience (because, really, who wants to debug template errors deep in someone elses legacy code?)

If you put Java on a technical trial, it doesnt do so bad. The language sucks, the platform is pretty good for most purposes. I do hate the dominant interpretation of object-oriented programming with a passion, because it objectively sucks. See: Michael O. Churchs answer to Was object-oriented programming a failure?

So lets talk about the political and cultural issues. First, the dominant Java culture is one of mediocrity and bad taste, with MetaModelVibratorVisitorFactory classes dominating. Ive heard a number of experts on the Java issue argue that Javas biggest problem is the community, and that comes directly from the fact that good programmers dont want to deal with the bastardization of OOP that has entrenched itself in mainstream corporate development. You have a lot of people who trained up as Java programmers, havent seen a command line ever, and have no clue how the computer actually works. Most of them have never actually written a program; they just write classes and some Senior Chief Architect (who makes $246,001 per year and hasnt written a line of code since the 1990s) figures out how to stitch them together, and then tells some other clueless junior how to implement the glue in the gutshot hope that one will actually have the talent to make an actual working program out of the mess.

This isnt inherent to the JVM, because Clojure (currently hosted on the JVM, although its endgame seems to be language-agnosticism) has a radically different (and better) community. Scalas community is more mixed, but the top Scala engineers (the ones making tools like Spark and Kestrel) are really freaking good.

The root problem, lying under all of this, is that God clearly intended for the programmer-to-program ratio to be one-to-many. Its much more productive and engaging to work that way. Programs should be small, and when you need a lot of code to solve a large problem, you should create a system and give it the respect that systems deserve. The vision that seems ensconced in the modern Java community is one of Big Programs where the programmer-to-program ratio is many-to-one. Ive written at length about why this leads inexorably to political behavior and low productivity: Java Shop Politics.

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