Machine Learning… Everywhere | Machine Learning - SemiEngineering

How ML can enable self-optimizing tools that look for DRC hotspots, EM/IR distribution, and more, notes Stelios Diamantidis, director of AI products and research at Synopsys.

Photo: JumpStory

AI is transforming the world around us, creating an avenue to innovation across all sectors of the global economy. Today, AI can interact with humans through natural language; identify bank fraud and protect computer networks; drive cars around city streets; and play complex games like chess and Go. Machine-learning is offering solutions to many complex problems around us where analytical solutions may be too expensive or practically impossible. How about chip design? Can ML offer solutions to key problems in semiconductor engineering?

A deluge of design challenges
Over the years, the EDA industry has offered many solutions in the modeling and design creation of complex systems. Most design problems in EDA are NP-hard; there are simply no polynomial-time algorithms to solve these problems and hence an optimal solution cannot be identified analytically. Today’s EDA systems are finding it difficult to keep up with advanced process node requirements due to a deluge of new design challenges (figure 1).

Figure 1

To make things worse, these requirements are interdependent and need to be considered concurrently across multiple planes of design optimization. The actual application and techniques used depend highly on each specific problem space. How does one prepare a general solution for a specific problem when there is limited access to the design environment?
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Source: SemiEngineering

Is It Possible for Artificial Intelligence to Rival Human Creativity? | Technology - The National Interest Online

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 
Read the original article. 

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Wonders of the world, says Tim Schweisfurth, Associate Professor and René Chester Goduscheit, Professor.

Photo: Reuters

The European Patent Office recently turned down an application for a patent that described a food container. This was not because the invention was not novel or useful, but because it was created by artificial intelligence (AI). By law, inventors need to be actual people. This isn’t the first invention by AI – machines have produced innovations ranging from scientific papers and books to new materials and music.

That said, being creative is clearly one of the most remarkable human traits. Without it, there would be no poetry, no internet and no space travel. But could AI ever match or even surpass us? Let’s have a look at the research.

From a theoretical perspective, creativity and innovation is a process of search and combination. We start from one piece of knowledge and connect it with another piece of knowledge into something that is new and useful. In principle, this is also something that can be done by machines – in fact, they excel at storing, processing and making connections within data...

In addition, our analysis is based on the fact that machines mostly innovate on narrow datasets. AI could become much more creative if it could combine big, rich and otherwise disconnected data.

Also, machines may get better at creativity when they get better at the kind of broad intelligence humans possess – something we call “general intelligence”. And this might not be too far in the future – some experts assess that there is a 50% chance that machines reach human-level intelligence within the next 50 years.
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Source: The National Interest Online

Using math to understand inequity | Social Sciences - OUPblog

What can math tell us about unfairness? by Cailin O'Connor, associate professor of logic and philosophy of science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine.

Photo: Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Bias, discrimination, and inequity are phenomena that are deeply complex, context sensitive, personal, and intersectional. The mathematical modeling of social scenarios, on the other hand, is a practice that necessitates simplification. Using models to understand what happens in our social realm means representing the complex with something much less complex in order to study it.

Nonetheless, when used carefully models can help us learn about deep patterns related to inequity, including those that govern how unfair norms and patterns of behavior emerge in groups of people.   They are especially useful in highlighting spaces of possibility.   What might happen in the complex dynamics of the social realm?   Once we answer this question, we can use experiments and experimental studies to learn more about these possibilities.

In recent work by fellow modelers and myself, we’ve looked in particular at what minority status means for patterns of unfair behavior.   Suppose you are part of a company where people work together, but are still figuring out some of the social rules for how this is done.  Suppose further that men make up the majority of workers and women the minority.  And lastly suppose, as argued by Cecilia L. Ridgeway in Framed by Gender, that like most humans your coworkers notice gender, and use it to shape their interactions with others in ways that can be subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle).  In a case like this, even without gender biases coming into play, women can end up disadvantaged...

Evolutionary biologists have shown that when it comes to mutualistic interactions between species, sometimes the species that evolves more quickly ends up at a disadvantage simply by dint of this quick evolution.   This is called The Red King Effect.   Surprisingly, starting with the work of Justin Bruner, it has become clear that a similar thing might happen in the cultural realm.  How?
Read more...

Recommended Reading

The Origins of Unfairness:
Social Categories and Cultural Evolution

Source: OUPblog

French mathematician and spider aficionado Cédric Villani honoured with a new orb-weaver | Pensoft blog

With their astonishingly precise spiral webs, orb-weaving spiders are the arachnid analogy of first-class mathematicians, note the researchers behind the study by Pensoft Editorial Team.

The newfound Araniella villanii is an orb-weaver spider, a group that uses math to spin their webs.

Considered as one of the best studied spiders, the orb-weavers remain poorly known in the central parts of the Palearctic ecozone. Hence, an international research team took to the Caucasus, Middle East and Central Asia. Their article in the open-access peer-reviewed journal ZooKeys documents three new-to- science species, where one is named after the Indo-Iranian god of light Mithra. Another carries the name of the flamboyant French mathematician and spider aficionado Cédric Villani.

Despite being considered as one of the best-studied spiders in the Palearctic, the orb-weaver spiders (family Araneidae) remain poorly known in the central parts of the ecozone. To bridge the knowledge gaps, an international research team of researchers took to the Caucasus, Middle East and Central Asia to study two of those genera: Araniella and Neoscona. 

As a result, in their article, recently published in the open-access scientific journal ZooKeys, arachnologists Alireza Zamani (University of Turku, Finland), Yuri M. Marusik (Institute for Biological Problems of the North RAS, Russia) and Anna Šestáková (The Western Slovakian Museum, Slovakia) describe three new-to-science species, where one: Araniella villanii – carries the name of the flamboyant French mathematician and spider aficionado Cédric Villani, who has been dubbed the “Lady Gaga of Mathematics”. Even if unknown until now, the species turned out to have a wide distribution, ranging from south-western Iran to eastern Kazakhstan and northern India.

French mathematician and spider aficionado Cédric Villani (left) with lead author and discoverer of the three new-to-science orb-weaver spiders Alireza Zamani (right) in Iran (2015).
Photo: Alireza Zamani

"It's a well-known fact within the arachnological community that spiders are masters of mathematics and architecture", explains lead author of the study Alireza Zamani. "Orb-web spiders, in particular, tend to build beautiful and architecturally aesthetic webs, some of which are formed in spirals in line with the repetitive pattern of the golden ratio."...

"Araniella villanii is known from a few localities in southwestern Iran, eastern Kazakhstan and northern India, a distribution range covering at least ten countries, and yet the species was unknown to science until now. I think that the message that this particular discovery implies is that while there are such widely-distributed undescribed species out there, we need more and more taxonomic research, both in the field and in the natural history museum collections, which house a considerable number of undescribed species, in order to preserve the remaining biodiversity on earth, before it's too late.
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Additional resources 
Zamani A, Marusik YM, Šestáková A (2020) On Araniella and Neoscona (Araneae, Araneidae) of the Caucasus, Middle East and Central Asia. ZooKeys 906: 13-40.  
https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.906.47978

Source: Pensoft blog

The Theorem that Made a Mathematician | Math - Scientific American

Photo: Evelyn Lamb

Evelyn Lamb, Freelance math and science writer based in Salt Lake City, Utah explains, Sometimes unimportant math can change your life.

Photo: Getty Images

In the most recent episode of our podcast My Favorite Theorem, Kevin Knudson and I talked with aBa Mbirika (who goes by aBa), a math professor at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. You can listen to the episode here or at kpknudson.com, where there is also a transcript.

If you'd like to see aBa's talk from the Joint Mathematics Meetings, which he mentioned in the episode, it was recorded, and you can watch it here.


As is the case for many of our guests, aBa had trouble choosing a favorite theorem. He took us on a tour of a few of his favorites before settling on one to tell us more about. The theorem he settled on is not an important theorem. You won’t find it in any textbooks. But it was important to aBa when he was a beginning math student.

Many people are familiar with divisibility tests for 3 and 9: if the (base ten) digits of a number add up to a multiple of 3, the number is divisible by 3. If they add up to a multiple of 9, the number is a multiple of 9. There are also easy ways to tell whether a number is divisible by 2 or 5 or 11. But you probably didn’t learn a divisibility test for 7. (There is one, but it’s not as easy to use as the rules for 3 and 9.)...

I suspect many other mathematicians have similar stories of the simple, often unimpressive theorems and exercises that first made them feel like they had the power to create in mathematics. I certainly felt this way in my very first proof writing class. So today I salute the tiny theorems that helped us become mathematicians.
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Source: Scientific American

EQ Is the Skill You Need in 2020—Here’s How to Improve It | Top Skills - The Learning Blog

We asked Gemma Leigh Roberts, organizational psychologist, executive coach, and LinkedIn Learning instructor, to explain EQ and offer three ways to cultivate the highly coveted skill.  

EQ Is the Skill You Need in 2020—Here’s How to Improve It
 Photo:  Learning Blog - LinkedIn Learning

Emotional intelligence is one of the most in-demand skills in 2020. That means people with emotional intelligence, also known as EQ, are getting hired and promoted at a faster rate than others, according to data recently surfaced from LinkedIn’s network of over 660+ million professionals and 20+ million jobs. 

So, what is emotional intelligence and why is it so important to hiring managers today?...

What is emotional intelligence and why is it so important in the workplace today?
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Source: The Learning Blog

The butterfly effect is not what you think it is | Weather - Washington Post

Jeremy Deaton, Associate Director, Editorial at Nexus Media writes, There is an iconic scene in “Jurassic Park” where Jeff Goldblum explains chaos theory.

A monarch butterfly in Vista, Calif.
Photo: Gregory Bull/AP

“It simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems,” he says. “The shorthand is ‘the butterfly effect.’ A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine.

Goldblum is right that chaos theory deals with unpredictability, but his description of the butterfly effect is a little misleading.

When meteorologist Ed Lorenz, the so-called “father of chaos theory,” first invoked a butterfly’s wings, it wasn’t to say that we can’t predict the weather in New York because we can’t account for all the butterflies in China...

Here is the story behind the confusion, as recounted in a 2014 paper by physicist Timothy Palmer, mathematician Gregory Seregin and mathematical physicist Andreas Doering. At the time, all of them were affiliated with the University of Oxford. Palmer further detailed the mix-up in a 2017 lecture at Oxford...

“The Butterfly Effect isn’t one simple idea; it encompasses a set of mathematical discoveries that have been expressed in different ways at different times,” he said in an email.

It’s easy to see how “the butterfly effect” could have come to take on multiple meanings. Lorenz wrote about the term’s “cloudy history” in his book, “The Essence of Chaos,” noting that his 1963 paper featured a graph that was said to resemble a butterfly, which may have created some confusion.

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Source: Washington Post

New books: February 2020 | Commentary and Reviews - Physics Today

Check out these book from Physics Today below.

New books: February 2020

A listing of newly published books spanning several genres of the physical sciences.
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Additional resources 
DOI:10.1063/PT.6.3.20200203a

Source: Physics Today

Singapore maths adds up for educators around the world | Mathematics - The Straits Times

Fifty Secrets Of Singapore's Success

A new Straits Times Press book launched last week, Fifty Secrets Of Singapore's Success, has 50 essays on various aspects of the nation that have gained acclaim over the years. This essay by Senior Education Correspondent Sandra Davie recounts how Singapore's maths has made a mark globally. 

The curriculum, teaching approach and textbooks developed by Singapore's Ministry of Education have helped make schoolchildren here world beaters in maths, an achievement recounted in a new book.
PHOTOS: KHALID BABA, ST PRESS

The irony will not be lost on British educators. In 2019, Singapore commemorated the 200th year since Sir Stamford Raffles arrived on its shores. As the former colony reflected on what it inherited from Britain, schools there have joined more than 50 education systems around the world in adopting Singapore-style mathematics.

Little Singapore first started to draw a lot of attention when it came out tops among 37 countries, including Britain and the United States, in the 1995 and 1999 rankings of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).

In the US, some like parents Jeffery Thomas and his Singaporean wife, Dawn, began importing Singapore textbooks to supplement their daughter's public schooling, and for other parents who were homeschooling their children. When a handful of schools also started asking for the books, the couple, based in Portland, Oregon, set up Singapore Math Inc in 1998 to import the books...

In the UK, the Inspire Maths series of textbooks, adapted from the Singapore books, were trialled in 70 primary schools by the Department for Education in 2015 and 2016. Independent research conducted by the Oxford University Department of Education in 2016 found that British schoolchildren made more progress in maths when teachers used Singapore-style methods. Teachers reported that the programme could boost children's motivation and engagement, and the evaluation found that it could be used creatively and flexibly.
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Source: The Straits Times

Carleton awarded Clare Boothe Luce grant to create professorship for female mathematician | Academics - Carleton College News

The professorship will enable the Carleton Department of Mathematics and Statistics to advance further its role as a leader in the education of women mathematicians by Carleton College.

Aerial view of the Carleton College campus.

The Clare Boothe Luce Program of the Henry Luce Foundation has awarded Carleton College a $495,341 grant to support the hiring of a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Mathematics. The professorship will enable the Carleton Department of Mathematics and Statistics to advance further its role as a leader in the education of women mathematicians.

Since its first grants in 1989, the Clare Boothe Luce Program has been a leading source of private support for women in science, mathematics and engineering in higher education. Clare Boothe Luce was a playwright, journalist, U.S. Ambassador to Italy and the first woman elected to Congress from Connecticut. In her bequest establishing this program, she sought “to encourage women to enter, study, graduate, and teach” in science, mathematics and engineering.

“The Clare Boothe Luce Professorship at Carleton will honor the legacy of Ambassador Luce by nurturing a talented female mathematician who will be a successful researcher, a brilliant teacher, and a leader committed to increasing the representation of women in math nationally,” Dean of the College Beverly Nagel said. “Carleton faculty will provide mentoring that will enable the assistant professor to achieve her full potential in teaching, research and leadership, both on campus and in national STEM communities.”
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Source: Carleton College News