From the category archives:

Software technologies

Making vs. Modeling:
A paradox of progress in nanotechnology

February 25, 2009

Knowledge and know-how often go together. Where technologies are concerned, we tend to understand the things we make, and often can make the things we understand. This is a widespread pattern, but it’s important to recognize the exceptions, and nanofabrication is one of them.
There’s no necessary connection between understanding something and being able to make [...]

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Design Software for Atomically Precise Nanotechnologies

February 23, 2009

Design software is arguably the chief limiting factor in the rate of progress toward advanced nanotechnologies, and this makes it a topic of central importance. Questions of design and modeling also touch on diverse topics: technology objectives, scientific knowledge and unknowns, research directions that deserve many millions of dollars of funding, and specific problems that [...]

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Advanced Nanotechnology Keynote
for WORLDCOMP’09

February 17, 2009

I’ll be giving a keynote talk for the opening plenary session of WORLDCOMP’09, the 2009 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing. The conference, to be held July 13–16 in Las Vegas, is the largest annual gathering of researchers in computer science, computer engineering and applied computing.
In my keynote, I’ll describe critical [...]

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Computation and Mathematical Proof

November 10, 2008

The Notices of the American Mathematical Society has published a special issue on “formal proof”, leading off with an article [pdf] on the where the field stands. I find this subject exciting because of its promise, not just as a tool in mathematics, but to solidify the foundations of the computational world.

Inference Rules in HOL [...]

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