About Social Network Analysis
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Social network analysis studies relationships rather than only individuals. That small change in perspective can reveal a lot. Read more
Blog Posts
Google Announces the First Pixel Phones
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Google introduced the first Pixel and Pixel XL phones in October 2016, replacing the Nexus line as its flagship Android hardware. HTC manufactured the devices, but Google controlled the branding, software experience, and much more of the product design. Read more
Welcome to Our Department
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Starting university is exciting, but it can also feel unfamiliar. New courses, new people, new expectations, and a new environment all arrive at once. If you are joining Computer Engineering in 2016, you are entering a field that is changing quickly and creating opportunities in almost every part of modern life. Read more
Chatbots Before The Hype
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Chatbots are receiving renewed attention in 2016. Messaging platforms are opening APIs, companies are experimenting with automated assistants, and services such as Facebook Messenger are becoming places where software can talk to users directly. Read more
Apple Removes the Headphone Jack from the iPhone
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Apple removed the 3.5 mm headphone jack from the iPhone 7 in September 2016. The decision was controversial because the analog connector had been a universal audio standard for decades. Read more
Why Choose Computer Engineering in 2016?
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Choosing a university department means thinking about both the present and the future. In 2016, Computer Engineering is one of the fields where those two perspectives meet especially well. Read more
Intel Announces More Details of Kaby Lake
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Intel detailed its seventh-generation Core processors, codenamed Kaby Lake, in 2016. The architecture was notable because it broke Intel’s long-running “tick-tock” rhythm of alternating process shrinks and new microarchitectures. Read more
How To Be A Good Software Developer
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Becoming a good software developer is not only about learning more programming languages. Languages matter. Tools matter. Frameworks matter. But after spending enough time around software, I think the deeper skills are more stable. Read more
Pokemon Go Brings Augmented Reality to the Mainstream
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Pokémon Go launched in July 2016 and turned location-based augmented-reality gaming into a global phenomenon. The game used GPS and map data to place virtual creatures and locations into the player’s physical surroundings. Read more
Docker Announces Built-In Swarm Mode
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Docker announced a redesigned Swarm mode at DockerCon in June 2016, integrating cluster orchestration directly into the Docker Engine rather than requiring a separate orchestration product. Read more
Containers Are Changing The Way Software Is Delivered
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Docker has made the word “container” common in software development. The basic idea is attractive because deployment problems often come from differences between environments. A program works on one machine, then behaves differently on a server because a library, configuration, or dependency is not the same. Read more
Google Introduces the Tensor Processing Unit
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Google revealed the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, in 2016 as a custom accelerator designed specifically for machine-learning inference. Instead of trying to be a general-purpose CPU or graphics processor, the first TPU focused heavily on the matrix operations common in neural networks. Read more
Vim A Powerful Text Editor
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Vim is one of those tools that looks unfriendly before it starts to make sense. The first time someone opens Vim, even leaving the program can become a small problem. That has become a joke among programmers, but it also explains something important about the editor. Vim does not try to behave like a normal graphical text editor. It has its own language. Read more
Deep Learning Is Changing Computer Vision
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Computer vision has always fascinated me because the task sounds simple when we describe it in human language. Read more
Microsoft Releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview
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Microsoft surprised many developers in 2016 by introducing the Windows Subsystem for Linux and making an Ubuntu user space available on Windows 10. This was not a traditional virtual machine and did not initially run a Linux kernel. Read more
Raspberry Pi 3 And The Small Computer That Keeps Growing
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The first Raspberry Pi was exciting because it made a computer feel inexpensive enough to experiment with. The new Raspberry Pi 3 continues that idea, but the small board is becoming much more capable. A faster processor, built-in Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth make it easier to use without adding several external devices. Read more
AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol
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AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol 4–1 in Seoul in March 2016. The result was surprising because many Go experts had expected computers to remain below the strongest human players for years. Read more
Google Announces Accelerated Mobile Pages
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Google began rolling out Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, in early 2016 as an attempt to make news and publishing pages load much faster on phones. AMP restricted what page authors could do and encouraged content to be served from caches close to users. Read more
Why Progressive Web Apps Are Interesting
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The web and mobile applications have been moving toward each other for years. A website can now do much more than display documents, while native mobile applications have taught users to expect speed, offline access, notifications, and an icon on the home screen. Progressive Web Apps are an attempt to bring some of those expectations to the browser. Read more
AlphaGo Prepares for Its Match Against Lee Sedol
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In January 2016, DeepMind published the Nature paper describing AlphaGo and announced that the system would face Lee Sedol, one of the world’s strongest Go players. The paper was significant because Go had long resisted the brute-force search methods that worked well in games such as chess. Read more