Engineering
Understanding the workings and behaviors of a city requires knowledge of the different processes that allow people and other biological organisms to live and thrive, as well as understanding of their interrelationships—many ...
Oct 2, 2019
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Engineering
After months of product development, University of Nebraska–Lincoln engineers are leaving safe harbor to test their prototype on the open ocean.
Oct 2, 2019
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Security
The call came on a Saturday in July delivering grim news: Many of the computer systems serving the government of LaPorte County, Indiana, had been taken hostage with ransomware. The hackers demanded $250,000.
Sep 20, 2019
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Hi Tech & Innovation
Space. The final frontier. And on Nov. 2, 2018, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft crossed into the vastness of interstellar space, following Voyager 1, which made the leap six years earlier. Since their launch in 1977, the two ...
Sep 13, 2019
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Computer Sciences
Researchers at the University of Sfax, in Tunisia, have recently developed a new method to recognize handwritten characters and symbols in online scripts. Their technique, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, has ...
Hundreds of local clerks are using outdated computer systems and aren't installing security patches on their current systems, leaving Wisconsin's election system vulnerable to potentially devastating cyberattacks, state elections ...
Aug 9, 2019
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Computer Sciences
The holy grail of artificial intelligence is a machine that truly understands human language and interprets meaning from complex, nuanced passages. When IBM's Watson computer beat famed "Jeopardy!" champion Ken Jennings ...
Aug 6, 2019
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Robotics
Told to optimize for speed while racing down a track in a computer game, a car pushes the pedal to the metal … and proceeds to spin in a tight little circle. Nothing in the instructions told the car to drive straight, and ...
Jun 24, 2019
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Robotics
Researchers at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, in Italy, have recently developed a cutting-edge architecture that enables the operation of an assistive robot via a P300-based brain computer interface (BCI). ...
Energy & Green Tech
Solar power researchers have traditionally only used the power measurements from single residential solar photovoltaic (PV) systems to estimate the power generated within a city. But one installation isn't a good representation ...
May 28, 2019
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A computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a set of instructions.
Although mechanical examples of computers have existed through much of recorded human history, the first electronic computers were developed in the mid-20th century (1940–1945). These were the size of a large room, consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers (PCs). Modern computers based on integrated circuits are millions to billions of times more capable than the early machines, and occupy a fraction of the space. Simple computers are small enough to fit into a wristwatch, and can be powered by a watch battery. Personal computers in their various forms are icons of the Information Age and are what most people think of as "computers". The embedded computers found in many devices from MP3 players to fighter aircraft and from toys to industrial robots are however the most numerous.
The ability to store and execute lists of instructions called programs makes computers extremely versatile, distinguishing them from calculators. The Church–Turing thesis is a mathematical statement of this versatility: any computer with a certain minimum capability is, in principle, capable of performing the same tasks that any other computer can perform. Therefore computers ranging from a mobile phone to a supercomputer are all able to perform the same computational tasks, given enough time and storage capacity.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
