Four short links: 10 September 2018
Optoelectronics, Checked C, MagicScroll, Quantum AWS
- The Largest Cognitive Systems Will be Optoelectronic — Electrons and photons offer complementary strengths for information processing. Photons are excellent for communication, while electrons are superior for computation and memory. Cognition requires distributed computation to be communicated across the system for information integration. We present reasoning from neuroscience, network theory, and device physics supporting the conjecture that large-scale cognitive systems will benefit from electronic devices performing synaptic, dendritic, and neuronal information processing operating in conjunction with photonic communication.
- Checked C — This paper presents Checked C, an extension to C designed to support spatial safety, implemented in Clang and LLVM. Checked C’s design is distinguished by its focus on backward-compatibility, incremental conversion, developer control, and enabling highly performant code. Like past approaches to a safer C, Checked C employs a form of checked pointer whose accesses can be statically or dynamically verified. Performance evaluation on a set of standard benchmark programs shows overheads to be relatively low. More interestingly, Checked C introduces the notions of a checked region and bounds-safe interfaces. Here’s the source.
- MagicScroll: A Rollable Display Device with Flexible Screen Real Estate and Gestural Input — a rollable tablet with two concatenated flexible multitouch displays, actuated scrollwheels, and gestural input. When rolled up, MagicScroll can be used as a rolodex, smartphone, expressive messaging interface, or gestural controller. When extended, it provides full access to its 7.5-inch high-resolution multitouch display, providing the display functionality of a tablet device.
- Rigetti Launches Quantum Cloud Services (FastCompany) — AWS-style cloud platform with a fast connection to 128-qubit computing. Grabbing land ahead of quantum computing actually being useful.
