Tag Archives: Steven Johnson

Wilkinson Prize for numerical software: call for 2015 submissions

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The Wilkinson Prize is not meant to recognize a nice, shiny new algorithm, rather it’s meant for the implementation phase and, as anyone who have ever been involved in that phase of a project can tell you, that phase is often sadly neglected. So, bravo for the Wilkinson Prize!

From the March 27, 2014 Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) news release, here’s a brief history of the Wilkinson Prize,

Every four years the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and Argonne National Laboratory award the prestigious Wilkinson Prize in honour of the outstanding contributions of Dr James Hardy Wilkinson to the field of numerical software. The next Wilkinson Prize will be awarded at the [2015] International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Beijing, and will consist of a $3000 cash prize.

NAG, NPL [UK National Physical Laboratory] and Argonne [US Dept. of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory] are committed to encouraging innovative, insightful and original work in numerical software in the same way that Wilkinson inspired many throughout his career. Wilkinson worked on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) while at NPL and later authored numerous papers on his speciality, numerical analysis. He also authored many of the routines for matrix computation in the early marks of the NAG Library.

The most recent Wilkinson Prize was awarded in 2011 to Andreas Waechter and Carl D. Laird for IPOPT. Commenting on winning the Wilkinson Prize Carl D. Laird, Associate Professor at the School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, said “I love writing software, and working with Andreas on IPOPT was a highlight of my career. From the beginning, our goal was to produce great software that would be used by other researchers and provide solutions to real engineering and scientific problems.

The Wilkinson Prize is one of the few awards that recognises the importance of implementation – that you need more than a great algorithm to produce high-impact numerical software. It rewards the tremendous effort required to ensure reliability, efficiency, and usability of the software.

Here’s more about the prize (list of previous winners, eligibility, etc.), from the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software call for submissions webpage,

Previous Prize winners:

  • 2011: Andreas Waechter and Carl D. Laird for Ipopt
  • 2007: Wolfgang Bangerth for deal.II
  • 2003: Jonathan Shewchuch for Triangle
  • 1999: Matteo Frigo and Steven Johnson for FFTW.
  • 1995: Chris Bischof and Alan Carle for ADIFOR 2.0.
  • 1991: Linda Petzold for DASSL.

Eligibility

The prize will be awarded to the authors of an outstanding piece of numerical software, or to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to an existing piece of numerical software. In the latter case applicants must clearly be able to distinguish their personal contribution and to have that contribution authenticated, and the submission must be written in terms of that personal contribution and not of the software as a whole. To encourage researchers in the earlier stages of their career all applicants must be at most 40 years of age on January 1, 2014.
Rules for Submission

Each entry must contain the following:

Software written in a widely available high-level programming language.
A two-page summary of the main features of the algorithm and software implementation.
A paper describing the algorithm and the software implementation. The paper should give an analysis of the algorithm and indicate any special programming features.
Documentation of the software which describes its purpose and method of use.
Examples of use of the software, including a test program and data.

Submissions

The preferred format for submissions is a gzipped, tar archive or a zip file. Please contact us if you would like to use a different submission mechanism. Submissions should include a README file describing the contents of the archive and scripts for executing the test programs. Submissions can be sent by email to wilkinson-prize@nag.co.uk. Contact this address for further information.

The closing date for submissions is July 1, 2014.

Good luck to you all!

Should we love our robots or are robots going be smarter than we are? TED’s 2014 All Stars Session 5: The Future is Ours (maybe)

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Rodney Brooks seems to be a man who loves robots, from his TED biography,

Rodney Brooks builds robots based on biological principles of movement and reasoning. The goal: a robot who can figure things out.

MIT professor Rodney Brooks studies and engineers robot intelligence, looking for the holy grail of robotics: the AGI, or artificial general intelligence. For decades, we’ve been building robots to do highly specific tasks — welding, riveting, delivering interoffice mail — but what we all want, really, is a robot that can figure things out on its own, the way we humans do.

Brooks makes a plea for easy-to-use (programme) robots and mentions his Baxter robot as an example that should be improved; Brooks issues a challenge to make robots better. (Baxter was used as the base for EDI introduced earlier in TED’s 2014 Session 8 this morning (March 20, 2014).

By contrast, Sir Martin Rees, astrophysicist has some concerns about robots and artificial intelligence as per my Nov. 26, 2012 posting about his (and others’) proposal to create the Cambridge Project for Existential Risk. From his TED biography,

Martin Rees, one of the world’s most eminent astronomers, is a professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and the UK’s Astronomer Royal. He is one of our key thinkers on the future of humanity in the cosmos.

Sir Martin Rees has issued a clarion call for humanity. His 2004 book, ominously titled Our Final Hour, catalogues the threats facing the human race in a 21st century dominated by unprecedented and accelerating scientific change. He calls on scientists and nonscientists alike to take steps that will ensure our survival as a species.

Rees states that the worst threats to planetary survival come from humans not, as it did in the past, nature. While science offers great possibilities, it has an equally dark side. Rees suggests robots going rogue, activists hijacking synthetic biology to winnow out the population, and more. He suggests that there is a 50% chance that we could suffer a devastating setback. Rees then mentions the proposed Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk and the importance of studying the possibility of human extinction and ways to mitigate risk.

Steven Johnson, writer, was introduced next (from his TED biography),

Steven Berlin Johnson examines the intersection of science, technology and personal experience.

A dynamic writer and speaker, Johnson crafts captivating theories that draw on a dizzying array of disciplines, without ever leaving his audience behind. Author Kurt Anderson described Johnson’s book Emergence as “thoughtful and lucid and charming and staggeringly smart.” The same could be said for Johnson himself. His big-brained, multi-disciplinary theories make him one of his generation’s more intriguing thinkers. His books take the reader on a journey — following the twists and turns his own mind makes as he connects seemingly disparate ideas: ants and cities, interface design and Victorian novels.

He will be hosting a new PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) series, ‘How We Got to Now’ (mentioned in Hector Tobar’s Aug. 7, 2013 article about the PBS series in the Los Angeles Times) and this talk sounds like it might be a preview of sorts. Johnson plays a recording made 20 years before Alexander Graham Bell ‘first’ recorded sound. The story he shares is about an inventor who didn’t think to include a playback feature for his recordings. He simply didn’t think about it as he was interested in doing something else (I can’t quite remember what that was now) and, consequently, his invention and work got lost for decades. Despite that, it forms part of the sound recording story. Thankfully, modern sound recording engineers have developed a technique which allows us to hear those ‘lost’ sounds today.