Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code, born 14 January 1967
Black Girls Code aims to teach one million Black girls to code before 2040.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Gary Starkweather (b 9 Jan 1938) invented the laser printer and colour management
Gary Starkweather (9 January 1938 – 26 December 2019) invented and developed the first laser printer. In the late 1960s he was an engineer working in the US for...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Pepper’s Ghost: an 1860s illusion used in ‘head-up displays’ ^JB
by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London (first published in 2007) When Pepper’s Ghost first appeared on the stage as part of one of Professor Pepper’s shows...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Making sense of squishiness – 3D modelling the natural world
by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London Look out the window at the human-made world. It’s full of hard, geometric shapes – our buildings, the roads, our...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Watching whales well – the travelling salesman problem ^JB
Island-hopping your way around the Travelling Salesman Problem (and back again).
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
A round up of our posts for #BlackHistoryMonth 2022
A round up of our blog posts, published during #BlackHistoryMonth 2022.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Recognising (and addressing) bias in facial recognition tech – the Gender Shades Audit #BlackHistoryMonth ^JB
A 2018 study found that facial recognition systems were ess able to recognise darker skinned women because of bias in the data used to train them - but things are...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Happy Hallowe’en – free spooky puzzles and activities
Free Hallowe'en activities and puzzles for the classroom or at home ^JB
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Devices that work for everyone #BlackHistoryMonth ^JB
Good design should take everyone into account - examples here from a variety of sensors (cameras, soap dispenser sensors and oximeters) which didn't take account...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Facing up to the problems of recognising faces #BlackHistoryMonth ^JB
How the use of facial recognition technology caused a mistaken arrest.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Hidden Figures – NASA’s brilliant calculators #BlackHistoryMonth ^JB
The African-American women of NASA Langley who helped programme our way to the Moon.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Writing together: Clarence ‘Skip’ Ellis #BlackHistoryMonth ^JB
Back in 1956, Clarence Ellis started his career at the very bottom of the computer industry. He was given a job, at the age of 15, as a "computer operator"... because...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
An Inspiration: computer scientist Mark Dean #BlackHistoryMonth ^JB
In 2006 QMUL one of the winning essays in the first year essay competition was written by one of our computing students, Dean Miller. He wrote about a fellow Black...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Freddie Figgers – the abandoned baby who became a runaway telecom tech star
Freddie Figgers' parents encouraged him to fix things - he now owns the first Black-owned telecommunications company in the US. #BlackHistoryMonth
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Gladys West: Where’s my satellite? Where’s my child? #BlackHistoryMonth
Gladys West solved the maths problems behind the positioning of satellites. She worked closely with programmers to write the code to do calculations based on her...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Kakuro, Logic and Computer Science – problem-solving brain teasers
Imagine being able to pick up an ordinary banana and use it as a phone. That's part of the vision of 'invoked computing', which is being developed by Japanese researchers...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Cold hard complexity: learning to talk in nature’s language
Think of an ecosystem like a sentence – there are thousands of words in the English language but in order to make a sentence you have to put them together in the...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Love your data
Some councils put up 'Ignore your sat nav' signs because drivers kept relying more on the wrong information from electronic directions instead of trusting their...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Delicious computing: gestural computing with bananas and pizzas…
Imagine being able to pick up an ordinary banana and use it as a phone. That's part of the vision of 'invoked computing', which is being developed by Japanese researchers...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)