50th known Mersenne prime ever found, on computer volunteered in collaborative project.

The Latest Trends in Computer Science

1 - Quantum computing: Moore’s law is failing[1]. Both physically and economically we are at the end of our silicon rope. We are almost at the physical limit of how many transistors we can cram into a chip. This is why over the last few years it has been all about adding cores and better load distribution rather than architecture. You can do so much with silicon and classical computing. To preserve the long term exponential growth of computing power per dollar cost we need a paradigm shift. That paradigm shift is coming from quantum computing. However using qubits instead of bits has its own limits. Quantum computers are very good at somethings and very very inept at others. Over the medium term (10–15 years) most advances will come from designing hybrid systems that combine quantum and classical components. This will require hitherto non existing computer science jobs and topics. If I were 20 I would definitely devote some serious effort to follow quantum computing innovations.

2 - Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing: These two are in fact indispensable for building a system that can apply a general learning ability (we are not there yet) using existing, non-structured (i.e. specifically designed to be input into the system) sources of information (we are halfway there). If we are to move towards general artificial super intelligence we will have to build a system that can do unsupervised learning on multiple domains without explicit interference from programmers. Much effort will be spent to develop learning algorithms that are not designed for specific problems but general information processing.

3 - Data visualization: This will sound strange to most but in my opinion existing data visualization practices are well behind our ability to make inferences from data. Many good routines exist but many are still very labor intensive. We are yet to develop an intelligent interface between analytical inference and visual representation of that inference. I am not an expert on this but in the next 10 years we might witness dramatic changes in how we translate data analysis results to end users.

4 - Autonomous systems: Self driving cars, homeostatic control systems for your house, health monitoring implants, robotic asteroid miners, self-replicating robots for space exploration and the like. Internet of things is here but it has still not exploded. A lot of room for rapid development is on the horizon. People who can design efficient and seamless communication and coordination between the “things” in the internet of things will be high in demand.

5 - Neural interfaces between digital and biological systems: As Elon Musk says the main bottleneck in brain - computer communication is human output. Our input system (visual cortex) is incredibly high bandwidth. We can absorb immense amounts of information through our visual (and auditory) systems. The problem is output (or input to the digital system). We have a very precise but very inefficient meat stick method (i.e. typing commands) and a much faster but more difficult to process vocal system (speech recognition). Speech recognition has reached impressive levels but we are still way short to match our own input bandwidth with our output bandwidth. In order to match our visual information processing capacity we need direct neural interfaces with computers. Systems that can interpret neural signals as information output. Some rudimentary success have been reported over the last few years but real development is still ahead. I think we can probably think many more future topics of computer science. If we go into details I think we will see some interdisciplinary cross-breeding between medicine and computer science (very much similar to what happened in genomics and bioinformatics), and probably many more that few people can predict.

                                                                                                      Posted By

                                                                                                      P.Revathi,M.Sc.,M.Phil.,

                                                                                                      Department of Computer Science

                                                                                                      MKJC, Vaniyambadi.