Month: September 2020

Nothing says "scientist" like test tubes. (credit: Håkan Dahlström / Flickr)

On Tuesday, the Pew Research Center released survey results that represent a picture of how the publics of 20 different countries view science and the technologies it enables—or at least how those countries viewed science and tech immediately before the pandemic struck. The good news is that there's widespread trust in scientists and a strong desire to act on their findings on issues like climate change.

But the results also contain plenty of reasons for concern. Some of the outcomes of scientific development, such as genetically modified foods, are widely mistrusted by the public in most countries. And, in many countries, there's a large partisan divide in views of scientists—and the divide is the most extreme in the United States.

Respect

Normally, we'd spend some time discussing the details of how survey data was gathered. But with 20 countries, each with its own independent surveys, we'll just link you to the details and note that at least 1,000 people were surveyed in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Enlarge / Machine learning doesn't actually have a face. But if it ever does, we'd like that face to look something like this. (credit: Alex Knight)

We've been following Intel's oneAPI—an artificial intelligence development platform designed to abstract hardware away from the task of developing AI code—with great interest since its launch last November. This week, Intel and the Heidelberg University Computing Center (URZ) announced a new Academic Center of Excellence (CoE) which will support and conduct research on the oneAPI platform.

The new collaboration immediately followed Intel's own announcement of the oneAPI specification reaching 1.0 status. The 1.0 milestone is significant, since it enables collaborators to focus on adapting hardware to a standard, fixed implementation, worrying about the specification itself shifting rapidly beneath their feet.

URZ's own announcement of the oneAPI Center of Excellence begins by reiterating the raison d'etre of oneAPI itself: