data – Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org Illuminating science Mon, 16 Sep 2024 14:10:47 -0400 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2 Topologists Tackle the Trouble With Poll Placement https://www.quantamagazine.org/topologists-tackle-the-trouble-with-poll-placement-20240326/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/topologists-tackle-the-trouble-with-poll-placement-20240326/#respond Tue, 26 Mar 2024 13:50:38 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=136566 The post Topologists Tackle the Trouble With Poll Placement first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> In Georgia’s 2020 gubernatorial election, some voters in Atlanta waited over 10 hours to cast a ballot. One reason for the long lines was that almost 10% of Georgia’s polling sites had closed over the preceding seven years, despite an influx of about 2 million voters. These closures were disproportionately concentrated in predominantly Black areas that tended to vote Democratic.

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]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/topologists-tackle-the-trouble-with-poll-placement-20240326/feed/ 0 Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-find-optimal-balance-of-data-storage-and-time-20240208/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-find-optimal-balance-of-data-storage-and-time-20240208/#respond Thu, 08 Feb 2024 15:19:07 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=135161 The post Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> About 70 years ago, an engineer at IBM named Hans Peter Luhn quietly changed the course of computer science. Luhn already held several patents, including one for a device that could measure a cloth’s thread count and another for a guide that determined what mixed drinks you could make from the ingredients in your kitchen. But in a 1953 internal IBM paper, he proposed a new technique for storing...

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]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-find-optimal-balance-of-data-storage-and-time-20240208/feed/ 0 The Computing Pioneer Helping AI See https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-computing-pioneer-helping-ai-see-20231024/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-computing-pioneer-helping-ai-see-20231024/#respond Tue, 24 Oct 2023 18:00:39 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=131582 The post The Computing Pioneer Helping AI See first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> When Alexei Efros moved with his family from Russia to California as a teenager in the 1980s, he brought his Soviet-built personal computer, an Elektronika BK-0010. The machine had no external storage and overheated every few hours, so in order to play video games, he had to write code, troubleshoot, and play fast — before the machine shut down. That cycle, repeated most days...

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]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-computing-pioneer-helping-ai-see-20231024/feed/ 0 The Computer Scientist Peering Inside AI’s Black Boxes https://www.quantamagazine.org/cynthia-rudin-builds-ai-that-humans-can-understand-20230427/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/cynthia-rudin-builds-ai-that-humans-can-understand-20230427/#respond Thu, 27 Apr 2023 13:51:57 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=125318 The post The Computer Scientist Peering Inside AI’s Black Boxes first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> Machine learning models are incredibly powerful tools. They extract deeply hidden patterns in large data sets that our limited human brains can’t parse. These complex algorithms, then, need to be incomprehensible “black boxes,” because a model that we could crack open and understand would be useless. Right? That’s all wrong, at least according to Cynthia Rudin, who studies interpretable machine...

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]]> https://www.quantamagazine.org/cynthia-rudin-builds-ai-that-humans-can-understand-20230427/feed/ 0 The Researcher Who Would Teach Machines to Be Fair https://www.quantamagazine.org/he-protects-privacy-and-ai-fairness-with-statistics-20230310/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/he-protects-privacy-and-ai-fairness-with-statistics-20230310/#respond Fri, 10 Mar 2023 15:20:33 +0000 https://www.quantamagazine.org/?p=123782 The post The Researcher Who Would Teach Machines to Be Fair first appeared on Quanta Magazine

]]> Once in a while, a person can take an abstract concept that’s seemingly too vague for formal study and offer an elegant formal definition. Claude Shannon did it with information, and Andrey Kolmogorov did it with randomness. For the past few years, researchers have been trying to do the same for the concept of fairness in machine learning. Unfortunately, this has been trickier. Not only is the...

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