Missions . Ventures . Futures
In 1928 Jacob Levy Moreno, a Vienna-trained psychiatrist who had recently emigrated to New York, developed an innovative way of identifying ‘at risk’ children. He analysed social patterns at the State…
It seems indisputable that there are holes. For example, there are keyholes, black holes and sinkholes; and there are holes in things such as sieves, golf courses and doughnuts. We come into the world…
Imagine a heap of sand. You carefully remove one grain. Is there still a heap? The obvious answer is: yes. Removing one grain doesn’t turn a heap into no heap. That principle can be applied again as y…
Engineers have developed mathematical tools that determine when randomness emerges in any stochastic (random) system. The research looks to answer a long-standing question: When does randomness set in…
Innovation is one of the driving forces in our world. The constant creation of new ideas and their transformation into technologies and products forms a powerful cornerstone for 21st-century society. …
ABSTRACT Humans appear to be able to learn new concepts without needing to be programmed explicitly in any conventional sense. In this paper we regard learning as the phenomenon of knowledge acquisiti…
1 Introduction What can be computed in a distributed system? This is a very broad question. There are many di erent models of distributed systems that reect di erent system architectures and di erent …
The natural tendency for things to tangle may help explain the three-dimensional nature of the universe and how it formed. A team of physicists has developed an out-of-the-box theory: shortly after th…
I. Introduction. In his celebrated paper [1], A. M. Turing investigated the computability of sequences (functions) by mechanical procedures and showed that the setofsequences can be partitioned into c…
Defining artificial intelligence is no easy matter. Since the mid-20th century when it was first recognized as a specific field of research, AI has always been envisioned as an evolving boundary, rath…
March 4, 2013 Last week the ‘Prince’ reported a groundswell, or at least a tremor, of support for a plan to make the Wednesday before Thanksgiving a de jure vacation day — currently, it is merely a de…
February 22, 2010 Big numbers are everywhere these days, what with lost jobs (millions), bailouts (billions), and the budget and its deficits (trillions). I think most of us don’t grasp these numbers …
More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined. Why is this cause of disaster so common? First, our techniques of estimating are poorly developed. M…
This paper reviews algorithmic information theory, which is an attempt to apply information-theoretic and probabilistic ideas to recursive function theory. Typical concerns in this approach are, for e…
THE recent development of various methods of modulation such as PCM and PPM which exchange bandwidth for signal-to-noise ratio has intensified the interest in a general theory of communication. A basi…
A grammar can be regarded as a device that enumerates the sentences of a language. We study a sequence of restrictions that limit grammars first to Turing machines, then to two types of system from wh…
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about so=ware engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theo…
April 20, 2009 It’s hard to sit through a meeting or go to a lecture these days without seeing someone lovingly stroking an iPhone, perhaps researching some vitally important topic or (much more likel…
