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In his book, Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith lays out a series of important considerations for the continued adoption of artificial intelligence into an ever increasing amount of applications and daily uses. While artificial intelligence has historically held a rather loose definition, Brad Smith quotes Dave Heiner of Microsoft who describes AI as “a computer system that can learn from experience by discerning patterns in data fed to it and thereby make decisions” (Tools and Weapons pg. 194). This ability to learn based on experience and modeling is integral to creating flexible systems that can react to their environments in meaningful ways. ...

Rural Broadband: The Electricity of the Twenty-First Century Electricity is truly one of humanity’s most impactful and profound discoveries. We’ve successfully harnessed electrons to rid our world of darkness at a moment’s notice, communicate with other people over large distances, drive our cars, restart human hearts, and so much more. The harnessing of electricity has been an innovation that has seen no bounds. It has wove itself into the very fabric of humanity and had drastic effects that one no could have possibly predicted. ...

Cyber Security: The Wake-up Call for the World Humans love shortcuts. We love finding better, easier, and quicker ways of doing things. This has allowed us to innovate and automate away many of the mundane parts of life. It also has allowed us to progress the general standard of living exponentially. This shortcut nature usually proves us well. We’re scrappy, we’re creative, and we know how to handle hard things. However, a critical ingredient to healthy progression is ethical direction. When Ethics are lacking, individuals and groups tend to look for shortcuts that bypass important issues such as human rights and ownership. ...

Folding at Home and Rosetta at Home are both distributed computing platforms organized and put together to provide researchers with an alternative high-compute platform. These services take advantage of crowdsourcing and dormant computing power ranging from full server environments to last decade’s netbooks. Both services work to compute the complex and diverse ways that proteins assemble themselves by folding. Proteins assume a particular shape in order to perform their various functions and interface with each other. By understanding more about the ways that proteins fold, the medical community can better understand the cause and effect of different proteins and develop better drugs and treatments for all kinds of diseases. ...

Check out the Repo and Readme on GitHub: Ceres on Github I built Ceres as part of my time with the Campus Web Services team at the University of Arizona to monitor our vast portfolio of sites. Ceres pays attention to the site connection over HTTP and if it detects a problem it will log the potential outage in a DynamoDB table and notify a specified Slack Channel. Once it detects the end of the potential outage it will update the database entry and notify the channel again. ...