Browsing: The Conversation

The explosive popularity of YOLO has led to warnings of the same problem that led to Yik Yak’s shutdown, namely that its anonymity could lead to cyberbullying and hate speech. But in an age of online surveillance and self-censorship, proponents view anonymity as an essential component of privacy and free-speech. And our own research on anonymous online interactions among teenagers in the UK and Ireland has revealed a wider range of interactions that extend beyond the toxic to the benign and even beneficial.

Despite their names, artificial intelligence technologies and their component systems, such as artificial neural networks, don’t have much to do with real brain science. I’m a professor of bioengineering and neurosciences interested in understanding how the brain works as a system – and how we can use that knowledge to design and engineer new machine learning models.

These days all text is digital. From writing an email to publishing a new edition of War and Peace, text nearly…

It’s more likely that blockchain, and even Libra, is a means to a end; Calibra is about Facebook wanting to be not only the world’s biggest social media platform but also the globe’s go-to marketplace, putting Amazon, eBay, Apple and Google in the shade.

Gestures and emoji don’t break down into smaller parts. Nor do they easily combine into larger words or sentences (unless we’re using a clunky version of the grammar of our language).

NASA’s Apollo programme was one of the most challenging technological achievements in the 20th century. Beyond the space race and exploration, it contributed to several inventions and innovations that are still having an impact on our lives. But at the same time, there are several myths regarding what technologies actually came out of it.

If you’ve ever participated in a virtual reality (VR) experience, you might have found yourself navigating the virtual world as…

As a cryptocurrency, there is no physical form that gives Bitcoin value, so it is impossible to perform traditional fundamental analysis of the currency. Consequently, many investors track the so-called technical trading indicators (geometric patterns constructed from historical prices and trading volumes) in order to understand and predict Bitcoin’s future movement.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing. This was possible thanks to an extraordinary acceleration of…

The Apollo computer was state-of-the-art in its time, but what would have been different if the moon landing had the state-of-the-art computers that are available today?

I suspect that the software development time would have been a lot faster, due to the software development tools that are available today. It would have been a lot quicker to write, debug and test the complex code required to deliver a man to the moon.