Computer Science: Research Guide

Quantum computers could in principle solve some complex mathematical problems that would take far too long on a regular, classical computer. However, efforts to make them practical and easily scalable have been stymied by the inherent instability of quantum states.Researchers in Japan recently developed an optical quantum computer that can be used for a variety of applications, a feature they say makes it the first general-purpose optical quantum computer in the world. While purpose-built optical quantum machines have been available for years, a general-purpose one has long been a goal of the industry. “The previous optical quantum computers are purpose-specific devices, such as a boson sa..

Over the last year, Spectrum’s editors have noticed an emerging through line connecting several major stories: the centrality of technology to geopolitics. Last month, our cover story, done in partnership with Foreign Policy magazine, was on the future of submarine warfare. And last October, we focused on how sea drones could bolster Taiwan’s “silicon shield” strategy, which rests on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s domination of high-end chip manufacturing. So when I asked the curator of this issue, Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore, what he saw as the major theme as we head into 2025, I wasn’t surprised when he said, without hesitation, “geopolitics and technology.” In ..

Buried in the inner workings of your laptop is a secret blueprint, dictating the set of instructions the computer can execute and serving as the interface between hardware and software. The instructions are immutable and hidden behind proprietary technology. But starting in 2025, you could buy a new and improved laptop whose secrets are known to all. That laptop will be fully customizable, with both hardware and software you’ll be able to be modified to fit your needs. This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2025. RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) poised to make personal computing more, well, personal. Though RISC-V is still early in its life cycle, i..

Michael Frank has spent his career as an academic researcher working over three decades in a very peculiar niche of computer engineering. According to Frank, that peculiar niche’s time has finally come. “I decided earlier this year that it was the right time to try to commercialize this stuff,” Frank says. In July 2024, he left his position as a senior engineering scientist at Sandia National Laboratories to join a startup, U.S. and U.K.-based Vaire Computing. Frank argues that it’s the right time to bring his life’s work—called reversible computing—out of academia and into the real world because the computing industry is running out of energy. “We keep getting closer and cl..

Users of Google’s Chrome browser can rest easy knowing that their surfing is secure, thanks in part to cryptographer Joppe Bos. He’s coauthor of a quantum-secure encryption algorithm that was adopted as a standard by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in August and is already being implemented in a wide range of technology products, including Chrome.Rapid advances in quantum computing have stoked fears that future devices may be able to break the encryption used by most modern technology. These approaches to encryption typically rely on mathematical puzzles that are too complex for classical computers to crack. But quantum computers can exploit quantum phenome..

This year, IEEE Spectrum readers had a keen interest in all things software: What’s going on in the tumultuous world of open-source, why the sheer size of code is causing security vulnerabilities, and how we need to take seriously the energy costs of inefficient code. The ever-growing presence of artificial intelligence also made itself known in the computing world, by introducing an LLM-powered Internet search tool, finding ways around AI’s voracious data appetite in scientific applications, and shifting from coding copilots to fully autonomous coders—something that’s still a work in progress.And if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of our list of top computing stories of th..

When Chinese researchers’ announced in May last year they had used a quantum computer to crack RSA encryption, a widely used method to secure private data transmission, it caused a stir in the information security community. But after looking into the details presented, Western researchers suggested the claims were exaggerated and that there was no reason to panic. Nevertheless, the announcement underscored the point that the days of trusting traditional methods of protecting data relying on mathematical complexity are numbered. In the approaching era of quantum computing, new data protection methods will become indispensable.One such method on the horizon that’s initially targeting the ..

Using liquid metal, scientists have devised a new way to make electronics that assemble themselves. With prototypes including nanoscale to microscale transistors and diodes, the researchers suggest their research might help greatly simplify electronics production.Existing chip manufacturing techniques require many steps and depend on extremely complex technologies, which makes fabrication costly and time-consuming, says Martin Thuo, a professor of material science and engineering at North Carolina State University.As such, for decades, scientists have sought to develop self-assembling electronics. “Self-assembly is the default approach in nature—the brain is self-assembled,” Thuo says...

The future of memory is massive, diverse, and tightly integrated with processing. That was the message of an invited talk this week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco. H.-S. Philip Wong, an electrical engineer at Stanford University and former vice president of research at TSMC who remains a scientific advisor to the company, told the assembled engineers it’s time to think about memory and computing architecture in new ways.The demands of today’s computing problems—particularly AI—are rapidly outpacing the capabilities of existing memory systems and architectures. Today’s software assumes it’s possible to randomly access any given bit of memory. Moving..

This week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, research teams spanning academia and industry presented data on high-performance carbon nanotube transistors (CNTs) and circuits. While it may be a decade or more before these devices are integrated into products, engineers at the conference argued that the field has made tremendous progress—and that carbon nanotubes will play a key role in future systems by enabling low-power, high-performance computation that can boost silicon chips.CNTs are about a nanometer in diameter, and electrons sail through them. Back in 2016, researchers made the first CNT transistor that outperformed one based on silicon. However, buildin..

It seems to me that every item in the Computer History Museum’s collection has a biography of sorts—a life before CHM, a tale about how it came to us, and a life within the museum. The chapters of that biography include the uses made of it, and the historical and interpretive stories it can be made to tell. This then is a biography of one item that recently entered the museum’s collection—an early Memorex videotape containing a recording from 1968—and the historical discovery it has afforded. Our biography begins in May 2020, with an email. Debra Dunlop, a dean at New England College, wrote to the museum about a large collection of documents, audiovisual materials, and a rare comp..

Stanford University professor Fei-Fei Li has already earned her place in the history of AI. She played a major role in the deep learning revolution by laboring for years to create the ImageNet dataset and competition, which challenged AI systems to recognize objects and animals across 1,000 categories. In 2012, a neural network called AlexNet sent shockwaves through the AI research community when it resoundingly outperformed all other types of models and won the ImageNet contest. From there, neural networks took off, powered by the vast amounts of free training data now available on the Internet and GPUs that deliver unprecedented compute power. In the 13 years since ImageNet, computer visio..

Quantum computers are currently error-ridden machines, greatly limiting practical applications. In a study published today in Nature, researchers at Google and their colleagues reveal they have, for the first time, developed a quantum processor that can reliably fix errors faster that it generates them.The qubits at the heart of quantum computers are very error-prone pieces of technology. Currently, quantum computers typically suffer roughly one error every thousand operations, far short of the one-in-10-billion error rates needed for the machines to run long enough for many practical applications, the new study notes. Scientists often hope to compensate for these high error rates by spreadi..

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.There’s a lot of hype around ChatGPT’s ability to produce code and, so far, the AI program just isn’t on par with its human counterparts. But how good is the AI program at catching its own mistakes?Researchers in China put ChatGPT to the test in a recent study, evaluating its ability to assess its own code for correctness, vulnerabilities and successful repairs. The results, published 5 November in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, show that the AI program is overconfident, often suggesting that code is more satisfactory than it is in reality. The results also show what sort of prom..

When I was eight years old, I won a coloring contest that earned me a free birthday party at my hometown Chuck E. Cheese. We don’t have any photos from the event because, as my mother recalls, it was absolute mayhem. Kids were running from room to room playing video games and Skee-Ball. The adults couldn’t corral anyone for pizza and cake. And then there was the show: The animatronic rat Charles “Entertainment” Cheese and the Pizza Time Players entertained—or terrified—attendees with their songs and corny banter. That may have been the last time I entered a Chuck E. Cheese pizzeria. And yet, when I heard that the company was phasing out the animatronic bands from all but five lo..

In 1965, the United States and other nuclear powers committed to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a successor to the Manhattan Project, now tests nukes only in simulation. To that end, the NNSA yesterday unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer to air in its mission to maintain a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear stockpile. El Capitan was announced yesterday at the SC Conference for supercomputing in Atlanta, Georgia, and it debuted at #1 in the newest Top500 list, a twice-yearly ranking of the world’s highest performing supercomputers. El Capitan, housed at Lawrence Livermore National Labor..

Quantum computers that can theoretically find answers to problems no regular computer could ever solve rely on components known as qubits. Now scientists have created the first mechanical qubit—basically, a microscopic version of a drum skin that can behave a bit like Schrödinger’s cat, both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time. These could lead to mechanical quantum computers capable of running long, complex programs, as well as novel quantum sensors, researchers say.Currently, most qubits rely on superpositions of electronic states—for instance, two different levels of electric charge. However, electromagnetic qubits typically have short lifespans, or coherence times, before..

Servers consume a lot of energy in data centers, but it’s easy to forget their carbon footprints begin before they’re ever placed on racks inside air-conditioned mega-warehouses. After all, it takes energy to extract minerals and manufacture them into things like processors, motherboards and memory modules. These “embodied” carbon emissions are a target of research by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft, and the University of Washington, who created and tested prototype servers they call GreenSKUs designed to run in the Azure cloud service environment. (SKU refers to a stock keeping unit, which is how the hardware world sometimes refers to physical products.)..

A new saga is unfolding in the open-source realm. Matt Mullenweg, founder of open-source web content management system WordPress, which powers about 40 percent of the world’s websites, has accused WP Engine, a hosting provider for WordPress-built websites, of violating WordPress trademarks. They’re currently embroiled in a legal battle.As Mullenweg wrote in a post on his personal website, “We offered WP Engine the option of how to pay their fair share: either pay a direct licensing fee, or make in-kind contributions to the open source project. This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to..

Nvidia, Oracle, Google, Dell and 13 other companies reported how long it takes their computers to train the key neural networks in use today. Among those results were the first glimpse of Nvidia’s next generation GPU, the B200, and Google’s upcoming accelerator, called Trillium. The B200 posted a doubling of performance on some tests versus today’s workhorse Nvidia chip, the H100. And Trillium delivered nearly a four-fold boost over the chip Google tested in 2023. The benchmark tests, called MLPerf v4.1, consist of six tasks: recommendation, the pre-training of the large language models (LLM) GPT-3 and BERT-large, the fine tuning of the Llama 2 70B large language model, object detecti..

Generative AI is now increasingly used to synthesize images, video, text and code. Now Amazon says it will invest US $110 million in university-led research into generative AI to help drive breakthroughs in the field, the company announced.Generative AI systems such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion now regularly conjure photorealistic images. ChatGPT, perhaps the most well-known generative AI chatbot, has passed law school and business school exams, successfully answered interview questions for software-coding jobs, written real estate listings, and developed ad content.However, developing novel generative AI applications increasingly requires a lot of computing power. Such resour..

Despite significant investments, software supply chains remain vulnerable, evidenced by breaches affecting major enterprises. The Security Systems Research Center (SSRC) at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) is pioneering new tools and frameworks to secure the entire software supply chain. From Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) generation and vulnerability management automation to Zero Trust development pipelines, SSRC's innovations aim to protect enterprises and governments against escalating cyber threats. This white paper outlines SSRC's comprehensive approach to bolstering software supply-chain security through key advancements like the Ghaf platform and an automated secure build ..

Lightning is one of the most common natural hazards on Earth, and our warming planet is just beginning to feel the effects of a future with more severe thunderstorms and increased lightning strikes. But there’s a lot that atmospheric scientists don’t understand about how lightning works. Better lightning data could improve severe weather forecasts and warnings, and could help researchers to understand where hazards will increase in the future—and the associated impacts such as wildfires and need for lightning-proofed infrastructure.A unique optical sensor that just spent two years on the International Space Station could help fill those gaps. Researchers at Western Sydney University, s..

Private investment in generative AI has grown from about US $3 billion in 2022 to $25 billion in 2023, and about 80 percent of private companies expect AI to drive their business in the next 3 years, according to Deloitte. Keeping up with the latest advancements means upgrading GPUs, CPUs, and other electronic equipment in data centers as newer, more advanced chips become available. And that, researchers project, will lead to an explosion in the production of electronic waste.A study published last week in the journal Nature Computational Science estimates that aggressive adoption of large language models (LLMs) alone will generate 2.5 million tonnes of e-waste per year by 2030.“AI doesn..

In the spirit of the Halloween season, IEEE Spectrum presents a pair of stories that—although grounded in scientific truth rather than the macabre—are no less harrowing. In today’s installment, Pete Warden shares two tales of last-minute deadlines and security concerns.In 1998, Pete Warden was working long hours as a graphics engineer at Visual Sciences, a small U.K.-based studio leading the latest Formula One installment for PlayStation. The stakes were high for Formula 1 98: Publisher Psygnosis had previously collaborated with Bizarre Creations on two successful F1 titles. But this time, Bizarre turned down the project, leaving Visual Sciences’ 10-person team scrambling to build th..

Along the country road that leads to ATL4, a giant data center going up east of Atlanta, dozens of parked cars and pickups lean tenuously on the narrow dirt shoulders. The many out-of-state plates are typical of the phalanx of tradespeople who muster for these massive construction jobs. With tech giants, utilities, and governments budgeting upwards of US $1 trillion for capital expansion to join the global battle for AI dominance, data centers are the bunkers, factories, and skunkworks—and concrete and electricity are the fuel and ammunition. To the casual observer, the data industry can seem incorporeal, its products conjured out of weightless bits. But as I stand beside the busy constru..

This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering.Deepfakes, hyper-realistic videos and audio created using artificial intelligence, present a growing threat in today’s digital world. By manipulating or fabricating content to make it appear authentic, deepfakes can be used to deceive viewers, spread disinformation, and tarnish reputations. Their misuse extends to political propaganda, social manipulation, identity theft, and cybercrime.As deepfake technology becomes more advanced and widely accessible, the risk of societal harm escalates. Studying deepfakes is crucial to developing detection methods, raising awareness, and establishing legal frameworks to mitigat..

Cloud computing underpins much of our digital lives, but it’s dominated by a handful of companies. A group of Indian technologists wants to change that by creating an open market for cloud providers of all sizes. The technology got its first demonstration last week at a hackathon in Bengaluru. Rapid digitization of the economy and the AI boom are converging to create unprecedented demand for computing capacity. But Amazon, Google, and Microsoft account for 67 precent of the global cloud market, leaving customers with little choice or bargaining power. The proprietary tools and systems these companies provide can also make it a headache to switch from one to another, and in developing count..

Clark Johnson says he has wanted to be a scientist ever since he was 3. At age 8, he got bored with a telegraph-building kit he received as a gift and repurposed it into a telephone. By age 12, he set his sights on studying physics because he wanted to understand how things worked at the most basic level. “I thought, mistakenly at the time, that physicists were attuned to the left ear of God,” Johnson says. Clark JohnsonEmployer Wave DomainTitle CFOMember grade Life Fellow After graduating at age 19 with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1950 from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, he was planning to go to graduate school when he got a call from the head of the physics section a..

Pavel Durov, the founder of the chat app Telegram, was arrested in late August in France on charges that the company hasn’t done enough to prevent malicious and illegal activity on the app. One might be tempted to think that Telegram’s high level of data protection would prevent it from effectively addressing malicious activity on the platform: If Telegram can’t read their users’ messages, they can’t spot lawbreakers. Founded in 2013, Telegram has positioned itself as a privacy-focused, secure messaging platform that prioritizes user freedom and data protection. Durov has emphasized his strong commitment to privacy and free speech. In a tweet about the arrest, Durov wrote “Our e..