Three Universal Truths that Will Destroy Your University

Won’t Hold Still

Frequency Analysis with the Hilbert-Huang Transform

We start to look at vectors and their importance to motion analysis around chapter three of the freshman physics text. By that time, the related concepts of position, displacement, velocity and acceleration have been…

Say Hello to ADIOS

Unsupervised Learning of Linguistic Structures

“I brang it to school yesterday” is the most recent conversation starter with our fourth-grader. Like many parents, I would like to have the phrase “Use brought; ‘brang’ isn’t a word” emblazoned on a shirt so I can simply…

I Didn’t Expect this From the Bicycle Lobby

I am an experimental physicist that returned to academia in 1999 to help design and teach in a new integrated major. I’ve been teaching a course on Intelligent Systems since 2003 and the topics to be covered have included autonomous vehicles since the…

Algorithmic Intelligence

Very Real Advances in the Hierarchical Temporal Memory Platform

I had the great pleasure of dinning with Dr. John McCarthy, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University, when he received the 2003 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and…

When You Can’t Read Your Own Writing

Metamorphic File Formats

I once worked on a development team contracted with the Air Force Research Laboratory to design and deploy a wind-tunnel diagnostic system that could measure two-dimensional, on-body pressure profiles. At the heart…

World of Pure Imagination

On the Rise of Materials Informatics

We have enjoyed a century of innovation and productivity since Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company developed the moving assembly line manufacturing process over the years of 1908 to 1915. While originally proposed by…

Simplifying Complexity

Algorithmic Contributions of Richard M. Karp

During an April award ceremony in Philadelphia, the Franklin Institute awarded the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive science to Richard M. Karp for “his contributions to the understanding of…

Thinking in Pictures

General-purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units

In the mid-1970s filmmaker George Lucas sought to capture his vision for a space opera called The Star Wars on motion picture film. The difficulty was that the technology did not yet exist to create the vast…

Spelunking v. Thunking

Acquiring Data from Acquired Data

While working on his Ph.D. thesis at Yale’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the mid-1970s, James Meehan developed a LISP program capable of generating Aesop ‘s Fable-style stories from a database of facts and character…