̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - software

Cambridge partners with Schmidt Futures in new software engineering network

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 10:39:36 +0000

Schmidt Futures and its partner institutions are establishing the Virtual Institute of Scientific Software (VISS), starting with a network of four centres based at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Georgia Institute of Technology, the Johns Hopkins ̽��ֱ�� and the ̽��ֱ�� of Washington.

This interdisciplinary virtual institute will address the growing demand for software engineers with backgrounds in science, complex data and mathematics who can build dynamic, scalable, open software to facilitate accelerated scientific discovery across fields.

While science has become increasingly reliant on complex programming and technology, many researchers lack the training or experience in software engineering, tools and methods to produce effective, reliable, and scalable solutions. As a result, successful research and scientific discovery is sometimes delayed as researchers looking to conduct further experiments struggle to adapt unstable and outdated programming.

VISS seeks to improve the quality of research, accelerate advancements and encourage scalable open-source solutions by providing scientific researchers with access to full-time professional engineers and state of the art technology to develop high quality, maintainable and adaptable software.

“Schmidt Futures’ Virtual Institute for Scientific Software will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery through the development of robust, well-engineered software, supporting longer-term platforms and systems, encouraging best practices in open science, and providing access to techniques such as high-end computing, massive databases, and machine learning,” said Elizabeth McNally, Executive Vice President, Schmidt Futures.

Cambridge's Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS) will apply its existing expertise in climate sciences and artificial intelligence with the research teams from Schmidt Futures’ Virtual Earth Systems Research Institute (VESRI) to address the specific computation and research software needs in the area of climate modelling.

̽��ֱ��centre represents a collaboration between Cambridge Zero, the Departments of Computer Science and Technology, Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and ̽��ֱ�� Information Services. ̽��ֱ��other three centres will be dedicated to a range of scientific focus areas, including astrophysics, life sciences, engineering and climate.

“With this truly visionary new institute, Cambridge will blend its world-leading climate science, software engineering and computer science expertise,” said Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen J Toope. “This interdisciplinary powerhouse will enable the development of next-generation climate models. We are delighted to be partnering with Schmidt Futures and engaging with the international research community to inform the response to our most urgent global challenge.”

̽��ֱ��ICCS will be led by Emily Shuckburgh (Academic Director; Cambridge Zero), Dominic Orchard (Co-director; Computer Science/Software Engineering), Chris Edsall (Co-director; Engineering), and Colm-cille Caulfield (Co-director; Science). All have a long-term research agenda to improve understanding of our changing climate through the development, implementation, maintenance, and dissemination of models for scientific computing, data assimilation and analysis.

Being part of the ̽��ֱ��, ICCS will also have a significant education and training component, through the commitment towards sharing its scientific insights openly and broadly. ICCS will play a key role in Cambridge Zero, the ̽��ֱ��'s climate change initiative, that is identifying routes to the creation of a sustainable, zero-carbon future for all.

Over the coming months, ICCS will build a team of researchers and software engineers who share the vision of the power of modern computer science, data science and software engineering for addressing the pressing challenges of our changing climate.

Director of Cambridge Zero and Academic Director of ICCS, Dr Emily Shuckburgh, said “ ̽��ֱ��Institute of Computing for Climate Science will be the first of its kind, supporting the application of the latest developments in computer science and data science to climate modelling. It is tremendously exciting to launch this Institute, which will be the core of an international network of climate research initiatives supported by Schmidt Futures, and will help drive forwards the frontiers of climate science.”

̽��ֱ��interdisciplinary network of centres, which will benefit from the experience of the Schmidt Software Academy at Caltech, will have an initial lifespan of five years.

Adapted from a release published by Schmidt Futures.

Software engineers will bridge the gap between modern science and scalable complex software at four leading universities.

̽��ֱ��Institute of Computing for Climate Science will be the first of its kind, supporting the application of the latest developments in computer science and data science to climate modelling

Emily Shuckburgh

Sir Cam

Centre for Mathematical Sciences

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Humanity's last invention and our uncertain future

fpjl2 — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 04:00:45 +0000

In 1965, Irving John ‘Jack’ Good sat down and wrote a paper for New Scientist called Speculations concerning the first ultra-intelligent machine. Good, a Cambridge-trained mathematician, Bletchley Park cryptographer, pioneering computer scientist and friend of Alan Turing, wrote that in the near future an ultra-intelligent machine would be built.

This machine, he continued, would be the “last invention” that mankind will ever make, leading to an “intelligence explosion” – an exponential increase in self-generating machine intelligence. For Good, who went on to advise Stanley Kubrick on 2001: a Space Odyssey, the “survival of man” depended on the construction of this ultra-intelligent machine.

Fast forward almost 50 years and the world looks very different. Computers dominate modern life across vast swathes of the planet, underpinning key functions of global governance and economics, increasing precision in healthcare, monitoring identity and facilitating most forms of communication – from the paradigm shifting to the most personally intimate. Technology advances for the most part unchecked and unabated.

While few would deny the benefits humanity has received as a result of its engineering genius – from longer life to global networks – some are starting to question whether the acceleration of human technologies will result in the survival of man, as Good contended, or if in fact this is the very thing that will end us.

Now a philosopher, a scientist and a software engineer have come together to propose a new centre at Cambridge, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), to address these cases – from developments in bio and nanotechnology to extreme climate change and even artificial intelligence – in which technology might pose “extinction-level” risks to our species.

“At some point, this century or next, we may well be facing one of the major shifts in human history – perhaps even cosmic history – when intelligence escapes the constraints of biology,” says Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and one of CSER’s three founders, speaking about the possible impact of Good’s ultra-intelligent machine, or artificial general intelligence (AGI) as we call it today.

“Nature didn’t anticipate us, and we in our turn shouldn’t take AGI for granted. We need to take seriously the possibility that there might be a ‘Pandora’s box’ moment with AGI that, if missed, could be disastrous. I don’t mean that we can predict this with certainty, no one is presently in a position to do that, but that’s the point! With so much at stake, we need to do a better job of understanding the risks of potentially catastrophic technologies.”

Price’s interest in AGI risk stems from a chance meeting with Jaan Tallinn, a former software engineer who was one of the founders of Skype, which – like Google and Facebook – has become a digital cornerstone. In recent years Tallinn has become an evangelist for the serious discussion of ethical and safety aspects of AI and AGI, and Price was intrigued by his view:

“He (Tallinn) said that in his pessimistic moments he felt he was more likely to die from an AI accident than from cancer or heart disease. I was intrigued that someone with his feet so firmly on the ground in the industry should see it as such a serious issue, and impressed by his commitment to do something about it.”

We Homo sapiens have, for Tallinn, become optimised – in the sense that we now control the future, having grabbed the reins from 4 billion years of natural evolution. Our technological progress has by and large replaced evolution as the dominant, future-shaping force.

We move faster, live longer, and can destroy at a ferocious rate. And we use our technology to do it. AI geared to specific tasks continues its rapid development – from financial trading to face recognition – and the power of computing chips doubles every two years in accordance with Moore’s law, as set out by Intel founder Gordon Moore in the same year that Good predicted the ultra-intelligence machine.

We know that ‘dumb matter’ can think, say Price and Tallinn – biology has already solved that problem, in a container the size of our skulls. That’s a fixed cap to the level of complexity required, and it seems irresponsible, they argue, to assume that the rising curve of computing complexity will not reach and even exceed that bar in the future.

̽��ֱ��critical point might come if computers reach human capacity to write computer programs and develop their own technologies. This, Good’s “intelligence explosion”, might be the point we are left behind – permanently – to a future-defining AGI.

“Think how it might be to compete for resources with the dominant species,” says Price. “Take gorillas for example – the reason they are going extinct is not because humans are actively hostile towards them, but because we control the environments in ways that suit us, but are detrimental to their survival.”

Price and Tallinn stress the uncertainties in these projections, but point out that this simply underlines the need to know more about AGI and other kinds of technological risk.

In Cambridge, Price introduced Tallinn to Lord Martin Rees, former Master of Trinity College and President of the Royal Society, whose own work on catastrophic risk includes his books Our Final Century (2003) and From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons (2011). ̽��ֱ��three formed an alliance, aiming to establish CSER.

With luminaries in science, policy, law, risk and computing from across the ̽��ֱ�� and beyond signing up to become advisors, the project is, even in its earliest days, gathering momentum. “ ̽��ֱ��basic philosophy is that we should be taking seriously the fact that we are getting to the point where our technologies have the potential to threaten our own existence – in a way that they simply haven’t up to now, in human history,” says Price. “We should be investing a little of our intellectual resources in shifting some probability from bad outcomes to good ones.”

Price acknowledges that some of these ideas can seem far-fetched, the stuff of science fiction, but insists that that’s part of the point. “To the extent – presently poorly understood – that there are significant risks, it’s an additional danger if they remain for these sociological reasons outside the scope of ‘serious’ investigation.”

“What better place than Cambridge, one of the oldest of the world’s great scientific universities, to give these issues the prominence and academic respectability that they deserve?” he adds. “We hope that CSER will be a place where world class minds from a variety of disciplines can collaborate in exploring technological risks in both the near and far future.

“Cambridge recently celebrated its 800th anniversary – our aim is to reduce the risk that we might not be around to celebrate its millennium.”

For more information on the Centre for Study of Existential Risk, visit http://cser.org/

For more information on this story, please contact Fred Lewsey (fred.lewsey@admin.cam.ac.uk) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Office of External Affairs and Communications.

L-R: Huw Price, Jaan Tallinn and Martin Rees. Photo copyright/credit: Dwayne Senior

A philosopher, a scientist and a software engineer have come together to propose a new centre at Cambridge to address developments in human technologies that might pose “extinction-level” risks to our species, from biotechnology to artificial intelligence.

With so much at stake, we need to do a better job of understanding the risks of potentially catastrophic technologies.

Huw Price

Jason A. Samfield from Flickr

Light cycles

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Project to improve radiotherapy planning

amb206 — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:54:10 +0000

Radiation therapy (radiotherapy) is an essential part of cancer treatment and is used in the treatment of 40 per cent of all patients who are cured of their disease. All radiotherapy treatments work by the application of ionising radiation to malignant cells in tumours. ̽��ֱ��free radicals released by this process damage the DNA of the exposed tissue, killing off the cancerous cells. By targeting the radiation to the tumour, the damage to surrounding healthy tissue is minimised.

Modern radiotherapy machines can now deliver highly targeted radiotherapy treatment. However, the use of high precision radiotherapy techniques is extremely demanding in terms of hours spent, from the physician who defines the tumour target and healthy tissues, to the physicist who has to calculate a plan of optimum beam angles and trajectories for the treatment, and the radiographer, who must ensure that the treatment is delivered accurately to the target every day during a six or seven week course of radiotherapy.

Accel-RT is an innovative partnership between oncologists, physicists and computer scientists at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Over the next three years the collaborators will develop software tools and processes that will speed up the process of planning of radiotherapy. Once completed, free software tools will be available to radiotherapy treatment centres. These tools will increase patient access to high precision radiotherapy by reducing the bottle-necks in the clinical workflow. ̽��ֱ��system will operate as a 'virtual oncologist', observing what the oncologist is treating and using novel search algorithms to recall similar cases from a clinical archive. Models of tissue structures will be used to help outline normal tissue automatically, as well as to track the movement of these structures during the course of radiotherapy treatment.

Accel-RT is being funded by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), through its Innovations Partnership Scheme, and will benefit from the support of Siemens Healthcare, a leading supplier of imaging technology and radiotherapy treatment devices throughout the world.

̽��ֱ��key players in the project are established leaders in their fields. At the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Dr Neil Burnet has been an 'early adopter' of novel radiotherapy technologies at Addenbrooke's, from the commissioning of the first in-house 3D computerised treatment planning system, through to the evaluation of the TomoTherapy image guided intensity modulated radiotherapy system conducted for the Department of Health. At Oxford ̽��ֱ��, Professor Jim Davies and his team from the Department of Computer Science have experience in the handling of 'smart' data systems - using metadata elements to allow data to be searched and processed in more intuitive ways.

Professor Andy Parker and his team at the High Energy Physics group in Cambridge have extensive experience in the storage and handling of large quantities of image data, and the use of grid computing techniques to accelerate this process. "In essence, Accel-RT is helping to identify tumours and surrounding organs during the planning and delivery of radiotherapy treatment. Tracking the change in position and volume of these structures is a complex problem. To perform these calculations in real time for a single patient would require up to 16 Teraflops of processing power – approximately 100 times the power of a standard PC workstation,” said Professor Parker, who is Professor of High Energy Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory and Principal Investigator for Accel-RT.

For more details about the project, and to register for project news emails, go to www.accelrt.org.

A collaborative project between physicists, oncologists and computer scientists at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, launched last month, will develop improved tools for the planning of high precision radiotherapy. Accel-RT will also help overcome time constraints that currently limit the use of complex radiotherapy treatment.

̽��ֱ��system will operate as a 'virtual oncologist', observing what the oncologist is treating and using novel search algorithms to recall similar cases from a clinical archive.

Andy Parker

Neil Burnet

Image-guided intensity modulated RT plan for a patient with a spinal tumour. ̽��ֱ��radiation dose is shaped away from the kidneys (yellow outlines) and the spinal nerve roots (inside the green outline). ̽��ֱ��colour wash represents radiation dose

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