#International Conference In Electrical Engineering

[jackthebard]

Ok I normally don't comment on things like this, but I HAVE to share the beef that I have with my sophomore year (I was about 15, for our international audiences) Introduction to Electronics teacher.

For the record: I still know this person's name. I can find them on facebook. I have since gone into teaching, myself, and I often think about reaching out to her and dropping her a message saying "Hey. Thank you for teaching me how NOT to be a teacher, you miserable" I'm not going to finish that on Tunglr.fuck.

I made an off-color joke at the start of the year, and she made it personal. She kept on messing with my grades, practically insulting me in the middle of class, and it got to the point where I had to ask my dad for help.

Just to give you a bit of an idea where my dad and I were at in our relationship: At this point in time, he would later tell me that there were moments he wanted to kill me with his own hands. We did not have a good relationship, but I was so A-type brained at the time and wanted to do so well in school that I was willing to ask my dad for assistance even though we were on the rocks. Retrospectively, I think this was what started to mend our relationship.

He helped me with an assignment, and I turned it in. When it was returned, I got 5 points... out of 50.

I returned home on the verge of tears because I was wondering what I had done wrong, how I had messed up. My mother took a look at me, a look at the assignment, and a look at my dad. We all knew how messed up things had been with this teacher, and my parents were daggers drawn against her because she had been screwing me over so bad.

My mother said, "Honey. You're going to have to go into that parent-teacher conference, otherwise she is not going to come out of it alive." Mom was about to be on the news.

So the day of the PTC comes by and I'm sitting in the room with the dean of students, this miserable fucking termagant of a teacher, and my dad is running a little late.

He shows up in his United States Air Force dress blues, captain's insignia proudly displayed on his shoulder, his cover tucked under one arm alongside a blue folder (Dad always said "Important shit goes into the blue folder"). He walks in and sits down. Says hi to me, greets the dean, nothing to the teacher.

He opens the folder and pulls out my homework, slides it across the table and says "Show me where this is wrong."

This rancid bitch, wearing shorts and a t-shirt in contrast to a man in LITERAL MILITARY DRESS, says "I don't think I need to. I'm certified to teach this field, and I'm an expert in Electrical Engineering. If I say the homework is wrong, then it's wrong."

Dad pauses. Reaches back into his folder. Pulls out another piece of paper. Slides it across the table.

"I am," my old man says, "A NASA certified Electronics Technician. I did this assignment with him. If you are not able to produce a matching level of certification or show me where this is wrong, you have two options: Either you fix my son's grade, or I will have your job."

She changed the assignment to 50/50.

But she still didn't pass up an opportunity to throw me under the bus when she was legally allowed to get away with it.

Anyways! Fuck that bitch, may her pillow always be warm, her meals always be unsatisfying, and may she get stood up on every date she goes on.

does everyone have a teacher that they still have beef with/ hold a grudge against today??

[sageuniversitybpl]

Sage school of engineering and technology & advanced computing organizing international conference on current development in engineering and technology CCET2023 on 29-30th December in collaboration with CSI & IETE.

[freaktoru]

summary: sung jinwoo x fem!reader -you fly to the international guild conference with your rich s-rank hunter boyfriend, sung jinwoo in a private jet. wc; 2k+ warnings: minor manhwa spoilers, smut, unprotected sex, use of pet names, dirty talk, creampie, fingering, pnv, pwp, female bodied reader, not proofread lol authors note: hi! this is my first fic. please enjoy, and please feel free to send any ideas into my inbox, i'm happy to chat and excited to write more for jinwoo. [best viewed in dark mode]

since becoming an s-rank hunter and the guild master of the Ahjin guild, there was no doubt about the fact that your boyfriend, sung jinwoo, was in high demand. as expected, jinwoo was invited to attend this year’s international guild conference to represent south korea and of course, asked you to join him. this conference was important to jinwoo as it would host all of the strongest hunters in the world and discuss the rise in numbers of gates spawning globally. 

sung jinwoo had made a lot of money since becoming an s-rank hunter, you knew this very well and experienced it first hand with him constantly spoiling you with your favourite food, new clothes, expensive jewelry and your shared penthouse apartment in the heart of seoul. jinwoo was not one to make a statement with his money, but when it came to you, he had no limits. thats why jinwoo decided to take you with him on a private jet to fly to america for this years conference. and that’s exactly where you currently found yourself—miles high in the air with your s-rank hunter boyfriend. 

“thank you, that’ll be all for now” you heard jinwoo say to the only flight attendant on the plane. you walk out of the washroom, hearing the flight attendant’s footsteps fade as you return to your seat. the interior of the jet was a smooth ivory colour with black accents and clean leather seats. you sat down in your seat across from your boyfriend who was looking out the window with a bored expression on his face, listening to the low hum of the plane engine. 

“sung” you say softly, drawing his attention away from the window. 

“hm?” he replies, his eyes darting in your direction and his gaze falling on your face. 

“what’s on your mind?” you ask.

“nothing, just thinking about the conference” he replies in an indifferent tone, clearly caught up in his own thoughts.

“i’m sure it’ll be fine, you’re one of the strongest hunters in the world right now, if not the strongest, i’m sure you can handle whatever is going to happen” you reassure him, hoping to pull him out of whatever he was thinking about. this happened often—jinwoo got caught up in his own thoughts and strength, and found it hard to pull himself back to reality.

“you’re right” he mumbled quickly and after a brief moment of silence he added, “come here baby” while patting his thigh, indicating that he wanted you on his lap. his voice alone was enough to send what felt like a current of electricity through your body.

since the press would be waiting when you landed, jinwoo was dressed in his usual expensive black outfit with black trousers, polished black shoes, a fine black dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and an expensive black and silver watch on his left wrist. as an upper A rank hunter yourself, you were also dressed to impress, wearing a cream coloured blouse, a black pencil skirt with black heels to match and expensive jewelry purchased for you by none other than sung jinwoo himself.

you stood up from your seat and took a few steps over to where your boyfriend currently sat. as soon as you were within his reach, he grabbed you by the waist and pulled you into his lap. you felt your cheeks heat as he looked up at you with half lidded eyes, a lustful expression painted on his face.

“sung..” the words died on your lips as jinwoo strengthened his grip on your waist with one hand and lifted the other to your cheek. 

“shhh baby, i want to spend these last few hours of the flight with just you before we get hounded by the press and the public” he explains in a slightly annoyed tone, lightly pulling at your bottom lip with his thumb. 

“m’kay” you reply, too busy to utter a full reply as you wrap your arms around jinwoo’s neck, entangling your fingers in his hair and pressing a soft, wet kiss on his lips. sung jinwoo rarely loses his composure, but when you’re sitting on his lap, looking like that and placing such an innocent, soft kiss on his lips, he simply cannot contain himself any longer.

he pulls you close instantly—as if on instinct, as close as he can get you while you’re already on his lap. he deepens the kiss, one hand glued to your waist and the other tangled playfully in your hair. you moan, feeling jinwoo harden underneath you. 

“jinwoo- ah” you gasp breathlessly, pulling away from the kiss as you feel him move his fingers under your pencil skirt to rub lazy, teasing circles on your clothed clit. 

“look who’s already wet” he points out in a mocking tone all while ignoring your gasps and pleas. he pulls his hand away, unbuttoning your blouse and skillfully unclipping your bra with one hand, letting your breasts spill out into his ready hands. he grabs hold of one, squishing the soft skin of it while lowering his lips to your other nipple. you whimper at the feeling of his teeth grazing your nipple. you think to yourself that it must be the change in pressure from being miles high in the air because you feel so sensitive to his touch, almost feeling like your skin is melting under his hands. 

his fingers make their way back under your skirt while his mouth moves on to the other nipple, lightly biting and licking it, sending pulses of pleasure to your throbbing core. he moves his hands over your clit but this time, pushes aside your thong to coat his fingers in your slick. he slides in two of his slender fingers with ease and starts lazily pumping in and out of you. it feels so so good, his fingers knowingly hitting the exact spot to make you melt. jinwoo wears a seductive smirk on his face as he quickens his pace and watches you mutter incoherent words while gasping and moaning from the sheer pleasure of just his fingers. he pinches your nipple with his other hand and lowers his lips to your neck, sucking on the sensitive flesh. this feeling simply surpasses anything you’ve ever felt before, sending you into oblivion. you feel the flame inside you spread throughout your whole body as you release onto his fingers. 

“ah baby-” you gasp, your words cut off as jinwoo slowly pulls his cum coated fingers out of you, making you go limp from the orgasm. 

“clean up your mess kitten” he orders, tone bordering on serious. he brings his fingers up to your panting mouth, sliding them past your soft lips. you welcome his fingers, sucking your cum off of them and gazing at jinwoo suggestively as he slowly pumps them in and out of your mouth. once clean, he removes his fingers from your mouth and inhales sharply when you move your hand over the bulge in his pants. “my turn” you coo, while unzipping his pants slowly, freeing his cock. 

jinwoo was pretty, everyone knew this— and his cock certainly did not deviate from that description. it wasn’t wide but it made up for that in its length. it looked almost elegant in your hands as you started running your fingers gently along his shaft, always noticing that one vein that ran down the side of it. you watched any remaining tension leave his body as he groaned and relaxed into the seat. you pumped his cock teasingly for a couple of minutes and momentarily lowered yourself onto your knees to lick the beads of precum off the head of his cock. this is where sung jinwoo’s composure completely snapped. 

“stop teasing” he grit out as he lifted you up from your knees and back onto his lap. the movement was fast, almost animalistic. with the way he manhandled you, you could tell that jinwoo was simmering with need, and could wait no longer to get himself inside of you. 

he gave you no warning as he slid himself inside you, practically impaling you on his cock. you whimpered at the sudden intrusion, gripping jinwoo's shoulders so hard that your knuckles were turning white. he gave you a minute to adjust and you felt the pleasure override the initial pain. even though this wasn’t your first time with jinwoo, his sheer length was still difficult to adjust to every time. 

“fuck you feel so good” he rasped as he slowly starting moving your hips up and down on his cock. you were convinced this bliss would never go away, even after countless times with jinwoo, it was still the most euphoric feeling you’ve ever felt. this would beat any drug, you were sure of it.

this went on for a couple more minutes, jinwoo quickening his pace and hitting that sweet spot again and again, making your eyes roll to the back of your head. 

“nnngh baby please” you moaned, feeling yourself coming close to your climax. you looked down at jinwoo, his head thrown back against the seat, his jet black hair tousled and messy with stray strands sticking to his sweat covered forehead. the scene was a pure depiction of lust. his half lidded eyes and the slight smirk he wore on his face was enough to make you absolutely melt. 

“please jinwoo, i’m going to cum” you uttered breathless, tears beading at the corners of your eyes, hoping that jinwoo was close. “not until i say so baby” he replied, just as breathless as you. this was a rule jinwoo had for you, he would never let you come alone and would make you wait until he was ready to cum with you. this always pushed you over the edge because it took him longer to get there, however the wait was always worth it. 

“aaah” you gasped, feeling your boyfriend tense underneath you, indicating that he was going to cum. “cum for me baby” he said, and you felt yourself snap free. you crashed your lips onto his to seal the moment and felt that warm flame spread through your body once again. you felt the tension erase from jinwoo’s body and before you knew it, you went limp in his arms. 

jinwoo stayed buried in your warmth for a couple of minutes as you both came down from your high. you placed your head in the crook of his neck and the two of you stayed there like that, panting and catching your breath. 

“you did so good f’me” he rasped, his voice sending a warm tingle down your spine. you moved your head to look up at him and gave him a quick smile before pressing a kiss to his lips. jinwoo finally pulled out and quickly cleaned you and himself up with some napkins he found nearby. 

he then placed you back in his lap so that your head was back in the crook of his neck and you were both facing the window looking out at the clouds, still miles away from your destination. he ran his fingers through your hair softly, placing warm kisses on your forehead occasionally. you enjoyed the view and being in his arms more than anything, and mentally prepared for the inevitable doom that you knew would soon descend over the earth.

“sung?” you murmured the question, slowly feeling yourself getting emotional. 

“hm?” he responded, looking down at the frown on your face with confusion. “what’s wrong?” he asked. 

“we’re going to be okay right?” you asked in a worried tone. jinwoo instantly picked up on your worry and understood your stress.  

“of course. i’ll make sure of it” he replied softly, brushing a stray strand of hair behind your ear. 

“i love you” you whispered, followed by a quick peck. when you pulled back, you saw your favourite sight: sung jinwoo’s most genuine smile, the one he only reserved for you. 

“i love you too” he replied and pressed a soft kiss to your forehead. you felt yourself slowly drifting off into sleep, and heard the flight attendant come back out to inform jinwoo of the arrival time as you fell limp from sleep in his strong arms. 

no matter what, as long as you were with sung jinwoo, you knew that you would be okay.

© @blessedmisery 2025.

[redflagshipwriter]

Hot Ghouls in Your Area 8

Chapter 8

Masterpost

“You're just now going to campus?” Jazz said. Danny scowled ahead at the sidewalk. Her tone wasn't judgmental so much as mildly surprised. He still hated it. “That's a lot later than usual. Is everything alright?” Danny hunched his shoulders up and consciously reminded himself not to get defensive. He wasn't slacking. He'd gotten home after his class and slept 13 hours. He still felt wiped out.

“Ghost stuff,” he said cryptically. “Ruined my night.” He dodged someone on the sidewalk without thinking about it, used to the crowds by now.

Jazz inhaled sharply into his ear. “They're supposed to leave you alone to focus on your education,” she hissed. “Just so you know, I do have the venomous Fenton electric creep stick-”

“Yeah, I know,” Danny cut her off. She was probably holding it up right now, thumb on the trigger. He couldn't fight off the rueful smile. She had his back, didn't she? Always did. With that in mind… “I think I need help,” he admitted. Oof. Felt bad. Not as bad as failing his classes, though, which was the danger if he got pulled too deep into more Ghost bull honkey.

“Of course!” Jazz enthused. He stepped off the curb and then quick-stepped backwards to avoid getting hit by some asshole running the red light. Danny lifted up his free hand to flip them off as he hung on his heels on the edge of the pavement drop. He dropped lightly back onto the balls of his feet and jogged across the street.

Jazz was still talking, voice clear over the morning meld of honking and running engines. “How about you come over to my place after your classes tonight? My roommate is out for a conference.”

“You just don't want to come to Crime Alley,” Danny accused her. “Even for me, your beloved baby brother.” He dodged a car that was parked on the cross walk and made an ugly face at the driver. “Despite your professed love for crime, when it counts, it's all talk.”

“I don't love crime,” Jazz reiterated with her inhuman patience. She didn't take the bait of his deliberate mischaracterization of her career plans. “But I am exquisitely stabbable." Her tone went lofty with the brag. "So yes, I avoid Crime Alley.”

Danny blew an unimpressed raspberry to show what he thought of that.

He hadn't met anyone in Gotham yet who he thought would really throw Jazz for a loop. She was a 6ft 2 judo black belt, and she was liminally spooky as fuck. “No one would stab you,” he said, making it sound like an insult. His janky ass was more likely to get held up. "But fine, I'll haul my poor broken corpse all the way over there to do you a favor-”

“So I can do you a favor,” Jazz corrected wryly.

“My poor broken corpse,” Danny cut back in, because that was a really relevant factor to him. He put the back of his hand to his forehead and swooned a little. He felt like he'd been in a tumble dryer. Missing a full night of sleep was an insufferable insult to his desperate shoe-string construction of a healthy routine.

“I would so get robbed if I came there,” Jazz argued. “Maybe even kidnapped.” He could all but hear her flip her hair.

He snorted but let her keep her delicate feminine delusions about not being one of the scariest motherfuckers in the crime capital of the country. He wasn't actually worried about her interning at Arkham Asylum. Maybe he'd freaked out a little when she'd moved here, but that wasn't why he was here. No matter what anyone said.

“There's no immediate danger, right?” Jazz checked. “No reason I need to be concerned today?”

“Nah,” Danny reassured her, as the campus came into sight. He had about an hour before class to spend in the lab before his lecture. “It's not that kind of problem.” He felt his face arranged itself into a wry smile. “You might like this one.”

“Oh?” Jazz asked, intrigued. “Do tell.”

“Only after I've sworn you to perfect silence,” Danny shot back instantly. “I mean it, for real, you can't tell a soul living or dead or nonliving or-”

“I think I get it,” she cut him off. Jazz huffed. “As if I can't keep a secret. You think I can't keep secrets? I know the most incredible things that you could never dream up.”

“...Big if true,” Danny snarked, pretending that he wasn't extremely interested.

“You never knew what happened to the Robinsons,” Jazz said airily. “And you never will.”

“...that doesn't bother me at all,” Danny lied. He stopped walking.

“Ahuh,” Jazz said knowingly. “Hey, remember the neon cheese incident?”

Danny gritted his teeth. “Can't say I do,” he said. It was bullshit, and even he knew it wasn't convincing Jazz. He was dying to know the truth. It had been the talk of the town for weeks and was still occasionally featured on unsolved mystery podcasts. He'd gone far enough to ask the Dairy King, but even the dead wouldn't speak on it.

“Have a good day of classes, little brother,” Jazz said sweetly. She ended the call.

He rubbed at his temples. Ancients, she gave him a headache. She was fantastic. She was killing him and absolutely ruining his unlife. He couldn't even beg her for answers about the neon cheese, because if he managed to badger it out of her, it would prove she could be manipulated into telling secrets. That would be a loss anyway. It was more likely that either she didn't know anything or that she knew and her lips would stay sealed: Danny didn't have any to waste his breath.

He did a few calming rounds of breathing, now that he was thinking about it, and then went on with his day a bit invigorated by the familial aggravation.

Danny felt a little better about focusing on class now that he knew he could count on Jazz in his corner. She was the smartest person he knew. She could probably get him divorced by the end of the day. Hell, she probably already had a contingency plan for getting him a divorce. She was so ready for him to have a relationship so that he would have relationship problems to ask her about.

When he finished up on campus, Danny cut across town to pick up takeout food as an offering. He presented it to Jazz as soon as she opened the door, head bowed and food theatrically high.

“Oh, come in,” Jazz said, exasperated. She grabbed him by the back of his collar and bodily pulled him inside. “My neighbors are going to think I'm so weird, Danny!”

“My liege,” he intoned seriously. “I come bearing- ow! Stop hitting my- hey, my face!” Danny wrestled away from the horrible pinching grip his terrible sister had on his cheeks, scowling. “That hurt,” he complained. “Have you ever thought that you're getting caught up in the cycle of violence?”

“I don't lose sleep over it.” Jazz lowered herself delicately onto one of the weird puffs she had instead of chairs and made grabby hands at the takeout. “What did you get me?”

“Coal,” Danny snarked. But he handed over the bag without a fight and plopped himself onto the closest poof thing. He fully laid out and let his head flop past the edge to hang upside down.

“Inversion therapy, so chic,” Jazz said absently.

He considered flipping her off, but his balance was really off in this position and it would be hard to defend himself if she lunged at him. Hell, if she picked up his legs he'd probably tip over onto the floor. Danny dug his heels into the side of the poof in defensive preparation. He kept her in his peripheral vision.

“Oh, Malaysian,” Jazz enthused. “I wanted to have this!” She sounded a little too surprised.

He shot her a thumbs up. Two days ago, she'd sent him a screenshot of a text landing from someone else that had shown most of her screen was the active map app she was using to get to an appointment. The Malaysian restaurant had the star mark that she put on the places that she wanted to try.

He'd gambled that she hadn't gone yet because she hadn't had a late night at work. Jazz only got takeout with company or if she got home too late to cook.

“Cool,” Danny said, because he didn't want his rotten sister to think he cared about her interests. “It was on the way and it smelled good.”

Jazz hummed and put the food on the side table. “So I see.” She folded her fingers in front of her face and peered at him over the steeple. “What happened? What ghost do I need to soup with a fragrant combination of turmeric and saffron?”

“Please don't waste that, ghosts taste fine on their own,” Danny said.

Jazz grimaced. “Ew, Danny,” she enunciated carefully. She paused. “Ew.”

He shrugged and accidentally slipped a little closer to the floor. “Just saying. But actually, no one dead was involved, unless we count-”

“We don't count,” Jazz cut him off, serenely unbothered by his attempts to score empathy points off his death. She was a cold customer.

“Boo,” Danny said, because he knew his brand and respected ghost tradition. “Anyway, Jeremy Waters. Remember -”

“How could I forget,” Jazz muttered. She put her hands on her face.

“Hey,” Danny said, offended that Jeremy got that reaction and he got a big fat impassive nothing no matter how annoying he was.

“What’s Jeremy done?” Jazz sounded exhausted by the concept.

“Well… He uh.” Danny stared at the ceiling. He couldn't look at her directly. “Well. You know how he wants the good favor of the god of the underworld?”

“Yup.” Jazz hit the ‘p’ sound hard.

“He uh, hit the idea that uh. Maybe a Persephone of sorts was just the thing to suck up.”

He heard fabric rustle as Jazz sat up. “He did?”

Wow, she had one of the most fascinating ceilings in the world. Danny stared intently up at a splotch that looked vaguely malign. She ought to get that checked out by an expert before it possessed somebody. “Yeah, so he's been trying to vault people into the Ghost Zone as bridal sacrifices.”

“Ahuh.” Jazz sounded a little bit choked up. She wasn't laughing, so he couldn't complain.

“I had Dani get Vlad look into it-” because Dad or Mom would have been mortifying- “and apparently, he told her the odds of some hack wizard managing to send a living human to the ghost zone was laughable.”

He paused. He couldn't go on.

“And Vlad would know,” Jazz said leadingly.

Danny put a hand over his face. “Yeah, see, the thing is that I'm now very concerned that Vlad might not know.” His words came out muffled.

Jazz was so intent on him. He pretended even harder not to know she was leaning in towards him. “Does- does the ghost king have a bride, Danny?” She somehow managed in a professional tone.

He nodded miserably.

She promptly lost her shit laughing at his misfortune.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The federal government will grant car and auto parts factories in eight states $1.7 billion to begin producing electric vehicles and other clean energy technology, the Biden administration announced on Thursday.

Among the 11 recipients will be a Jeep factory in Belvidere, Ill., that the brand’s parent company Stellantis closed last year. The money will allow the plant to reopen and produce electric vehicles, officials said, restoring almost 1,450 jobs.

Other beneficiaries include a factory in Georgia that plans to make Blue Bird electric school buses, a General Motors factory in Michigan that will shift production from gasoline to electric vehicles, and a Harley-Davidson factory in Pennsylvania that will increase production of electric motorcycles.

The funding helps to address fears that electric vehicles will endanger jobs at factories that make gasoline-powered vehicles or parts for internal combustion engines as the industry shifts to E.V.s. To qualify for the money, companies had to commit to retraining their existing workers.

Employees at all of the factories chosen are represented by unions. Officials said they gave priority to communities that suffered disproportionately from pollution or lack of investment.

Several of the factories are in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Georgia, states where narrow margins will determine the outcome of the presidential election. President Biden, in a statement, sought to contrast his industrial policies with those of former President Donald J. Trump.

The funds will preserve 15,000 jobs and create almost 3,000 new ones, Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary, said on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. In a reference to China, she said the money will allow the United States to “compete with other countries who were subsidizing their auto industries.”

The awards will draw on funds allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Democrats in Congress in 2022. The legislation provided subsidies that have fed a boom in construction of electric vehicle factories and battery plants.

[jcmarchi]

Toward a code-breaking quantum computer

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/toward-a-code-breaking-quantum-computer/

Toward a code-breaking quantum computer

The most recent email you sent was likely encrypted using a tried-and-true method that relies on the idea that even the fastest computer would be unable to efficiently break a gigantic number into factors.

Quantum computers, on the other hand, promise to rapidly crack complex cryptographic systems that a classical computer might never be able to unravel. This promise is based on a quantum factoring algorithm proposed in 1994 by Peter Shor, who is now a professor at MIT.

But while researchers have taken great strides in the last 30 years, scientists have yet to build a quantum computer powerful enough to run Shor’s algorithm.

As some researchers work to build larger quantum computers, others have been trying to improve Shor’s algorithm so it could run on a smaller quantum circuit. About a year ago, New York University computer scientist Oded Regev proposed a major theoretical improvement. His algorithm could run faster, but the circuit would require more memory.

Building off those results, MIT researchers have proposed a best-of-both-worlds approach that combines the speed of Regev’s algorithm with the memory-efficiency of Shor’s. This new algorithm is as fast as Regev’s, requires fewer quantum building blocks known as qubits, and has a higher tolerance to quantum noise, which could make it more feasible to implement in practice.

In the long run, this new algorithm could inform the development of novel encryption methods that can withstand the code-breaking power of quantum computers.

“If large-scale quantum computers ever get built, then factoring is toast and we have to find something else to use for cryptography. But how real is this threat? Can we make quantum factoring practical? Our work could potentially bring us one step closer to a practical implementation,” says Vinod Vaikuntanathan, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and senior author of a paper describing the algorithm.

The paper’s lead author is Seyoon Ragavan, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The research will be presented at the 2024 International Cryptology Conference.

Cracking cryptography

To securely transmit messages over the internet, service providers like email clients and messaging apps typically rely on RSA, an encryption scheme invented by MIT researchers Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman in the 1970s (hence the name “RSA”). The system is based on the idea that factoring a 2,048-bit integer (a number with 617 digits) is too hard for a computer to do in a reasonable amount of time.

That idea was flipped on its head in 1994 when Shor, then working at Bell Labs, introduced an algorithm which proved that a quantum computer could factor quickly enough to break RSA cryptography.

“That was a turning point. But in 1994, nobody knew how to build a large enough quantum computer. And we’re still pretty far from there. Some people wonder if they will ever be built,” says Vaikuntanathan.

It is estimated that a quantum computer would need about 20 million qubits to run Shor’s algorithm. Right now, the largest quantum computers have around 1,100 qubits.

A quantum computer performs computations using quantum circuits, just like a classical computer uses classical circuits. Each quantum circuit is composed of a series of operations known as quantum gates. These quantum gates utilize qubits, which are the smallest building blocks of a quantum computer, to perform calculations.

But quantum gates introduce noise, so having fewer gates would improve a machine’s performance. Researchers have been striving to enhance Shor’s algorithm so it could be run on a smaller circuit with fewer quantum gates.

That is precisely what Regev did with the circuit he proposed a year ago.

“That was big news because it was the first real improvement to Shor’s circuit from 1994,” Vaikuntanathan says.

The quantum circuit Shor proposed has a size proportional to the square of the number being factored. That means if one were to factor a 2,048-bit integer, the circuit would need millions of gates.

Regev’s circuit requires significantly fewer quantum gates, but it needs many more qubits to provide enough memory. This presents a new problem.

“In a sense, some types of qubits are like apples or oranges. If you keep them around, they decay over time. You want to minimize the number of qubits you need to keep around,” explains Vaikuntanathan.

He heard Regev speak about his results at a workshop last August. At the end of his talk, Regev posed a question: Could someone improve his circuit so it needs fewer qubits? Vaikuntanathan and Ragavan took up that question.

Quantum ping-pong

To factor a very large number, a quantum circuit would need to run many times, performing operations that involve computing powers, like 2 to the power of 100.

But computing such large powers is costly and difficult to perform on a quantum computer, since quantum computers can only perform reversible operations. Squaring a number is not a reversible operation, so each time a number is squared, more quantum memory must be added to compute the next square.

The MIT researchers found a clever way to compute exponents using a series of Fibonacci numbers that requires simple multiplication, which is reversible, rather than squaring. Their method needs just two quantum memory units to compute any exponent.

“It is kind of like a ping-pong game, where we start with a number and then bounce back and forth, multiplying between two quantum memory registers,” Vaikuntanathan adds.

They also tackled the challenge of error correction. The circuits proposed by Shor and Regev require every quantum operation to be correct for their algorithm to work, Vaikuntanathan says. But error-free quantum gates would be infeasible on a real machine.

They overcame this problem using a technique to filter out corrupt results and only process the right ones.

The end-result is a circuit that is significantly more memory-efficient. Plus, their error correction technique would make the algorithm more practical to deploy.

“The authors resolve the two most important bottlenecks in the earlier quantum factoring algorithm. Although still not immediately practical, their work brings quantum factoring algorithms closer to reality,” adds Regev.

In the future, the researchers hope to make their algorithm even more efficient and, someday, use it to test factoring on a real quantum circuit.

“The elephant-in-the-room question after this work is: Does it actually bring us closer to breaking RSA cryptography? That is not clear just yet; these improvements currently only kick in when the integers are much larger than 2,048 bits. Can we push this algorithm and make it more feasible than Shor’s even for 2,048-bit integers?” says Ragavan.

This work is funded by an Akamai Presidential Fellowship, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a Thornton Family Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship, and a Simons Investigator Award.

[mariacallous]

Oil may be the lifeblood of many Middle Eastern economies, but some of the region’s biggest players are now setting their sights on another booming energy sector: critical minerals. 

Minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earths power the world’s clean energy technologies and electric vehicle batteries. As these resources take center stage with the clean energy transition, oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are also ramping up investment in critical minerals supply chains in a bid to diversify their economic portfolios and carve out a stake in the growing industry.

“This is not about replacing the bedrock of their economic engine away from oil to minerals,” said Ahmed Mehdi, managing director at Renaissance Energy and a visiting fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy. “This is more about making sure that they have a seat at the table in the energy transition, especially given how geopolitically charged this industry is.” 

Rising geopolitical tensions have cast a new spotlight on these minerals and the countries that wield outsized influence over their supply and production. China, in particular, dominates the processing of many of these resources, which has heightened fears of strategic vulnerabilities and catalyzed efforts to secure alternative supply chains. And in the Middle East, where fears of fossil fuel revenue over-dependence run high, many governments refuse to be left out of this new race. 

“Saudi and the UAE are coming out as big players in the critical minerals space,” said Gracelin Baskaran, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “These are oil-dependent countries who realize that the clean energy transition and electric vehicles are going to reduce global demand for oil, so if they are going to economically grow, it’s not going to be purely on continuing an oil-only model.”

“They are the new big kids in town,” she said.

Take Riyadh, which has outlined big ambitions in the mining sector. The country highlighted the importance of mining in Vision 2030, the government’s big plan to overhaul Saudi Arabia’s economy and slash its dependence on fossil fuel revenues. It has also set aside some $182 million for a mineral exploration incentive program. Saudi Arabia is home to some $2.5 trillion in untapped mineral reserves, according to government estimates, and in 2021, it launched its own annual mining conference, the Future Minerals Forum.

“Saudi Arabia is being transformed. Through this transformation we want to be an economic powerhouse,” Khalid al-Mudaifer, Saudi Arabia’s vice minister for mining, told Semafor. “To be an industrial [power], we need minerals. To build projects, we need minerals. Therefore, mining of Saudi Arabia [is] the first step, bringing minerals from outside is the second step, third step is to build Saudi Arabia as a hub.”

To execute this vision, Riyadh has focused on securing new partnerships, including by signing memorandums of understanding focused on mining with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Russia, the United States, and Morocco. Washington and Riyadh were reportedly in talks to purchase mining stakes in several African countries, the Wall Street Journal reported last year; Saudi Arabia is also weighing investments in Brazil and has dispatched a delegation to Argentina to discuss that country’s lithium wealth.

The UAE is also ramping up efforts to carve out a stake in the sector, including by inking a $1.9 billion mining partnership in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and securing new agreements in copper-rich Zambia. The UAE and Australia are reportedly also in talks for a free trade agreement that could see Abu Dhabi invest in Canberra’s critical minerals sector. And in nearby Qatar, Doha has taken its own initial steps by signing mining agreements with Nigeria and underscoring the importance of cooperation in the critical minerals space during talks with Washington.

Baskaran said that Abu Dhabi and Riyadh both have the means of financing their ambitions. “Both of these countries have a lot of capital to deploy in the sector,” she said. “So at a time when most Western companies are pulling back on their drilling and exploration because lithium, nickel, cobalt prices are low, these Middle Eastern countries are like, ‘I have capital to play.’”

Still, experts caution that regulatory, environmental, and investment challenges loom ahead. 

“Attracting substantial international investments requires competitive fiscal terms and predictable regulations to incentivize the participation of private companies,” Hamid Pouran, a critical minerals expert at the University of Wolverhampton, wrote for the Middle East Institute. “Strict environmental and social safeguards need to be implemented to ensure ethical and sustainable mining, and enhancing energy efficiency will be critical for the energy-intensive processes involved in refining minerals and metals.”

Yet powers like Saudi Arabia also have one key advantage: their ability to work with everybody, said Bryan Bille, a policy analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. 

“They’ve got more wiggle room than other players, so they can do business with Russia, China, and the U.S. at the same time,” he said. “For them, that’s a major asset.”

[usafphantom2]

RAF typhoons are sent to Poland for joint exercises before the Warsaw Security Forum

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 03/10/2023 - 16:00in Military

Four British Royal Air Force (RAF) Typhoon fighters were sent to Poland to conduct joint training exercises alongside allied aircraft from Poland, Spain and Italy.

The deployment will provide an opportunity for RAF pilots to practice air combat against different types of aircraft and develop tactics to exploit their weaknesses.

The Typhoons, which were sent to Poznan Air Base today, will remain in Poland for two weeks and will attack targets outside visual range, simulating several possible combat scenarios. They will be supported by a team of more than 50 RAF employees during the deployment.

It is just one of many joint exercises carried out with Polish forces, including the permanent sending of hundreds of troops from the United Kingdom to Poland, as part of NATO's commitment under Operation CABRIT.

The activity comes before the participation of UK Ministers in the Warsaw Security Forum this week. Defense Minister James Heappey and FCDO ministers Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Lord Ahmad will use the forum to emphasize the need to maintain support for Ukraine and pressure on Russia.

Earlier this year, the foreign ministers and defense ministers of the United Kingdom and Poland signed a strategic partnership on foreign policy, security and defense - emphasizing the commitment of both countries to European security and collective defense through NATO.

On Wednesday, James Heappey will visit the RAF personnel deployed with the Typhoons, as well as the troops deployed in eastern Poland operating the Sky Sabre surface-to-air missile system, strengthening Poland's air defenses near the border with Ukraine.

The Warsaw Security Forum focuses on transatlantic cooperation in response to common challenges, organized for the first time in 2014, bringing together ministers and senior officials from all over the defense to provide a forum to discuss the challenges faced by Central and Eastern Europe, and the international community in general.

The United Kingdom is the partner nation of this year's Warsaw security forum and the British Embassy in Warsaw worked closely with the Polish government and conference organizers to design a program that reflected the UK's objectives and views, as described in the Refresh 2023 Integrated Review and Defense Command Document 2023.

Tags: Military AviationEurofighter TyphoonNATO - North Atlantic Treaty OrganizationRAF - Royal Air Force/Royal Air Force

Sharing

tweet

Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Daytona Airshow and FIDAE. He has work published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. Uses Canon equipment during his photographic work throughout the world of aviation.

Related news

A Swedish Gripen fighter taking off. GKN Aerospace was hired to upgrade the Gripen's RM12 engine, a modified General Electric F404, with improved software designed to improve performance and reduce life cycle costs. (Photo: GKN)

MILITARY

GKN Aerospace receives request to upgrade the RM12 engine for the JAS39 Gripen

03/10/2023 - 14:00

MILITARY

Turkey presents ANKA drone in meeting with Argentine military

03/10/2023 - 12:00

HELICOPTERS

Italian Navy receives its latest NH90 helicopter from Leonardo

03/10/2023 - 11:00

MILITARY

IMAGES: Croatia receives its first Rafale fighter

03/10/2023 - 08:00

MILITARY

Royal Danish Air Force celebrates the arrival of the first four F-35 aircraft in the country

02/10/2023 - 14:00

The first C295 aircraft of the Serbian Air Force. (Photo: Peda Vucetic)

MILITARY

Serbian Air Force receives its first C295 military transport aircraft from Airbus

02/10/2023 - 11:00

[justforbooks]

Alfred Nobel stipulated that his annual prizes be awarded to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”. Few scientific advances have had a greater impact on our lives than that made by the American materials chemist John Goodenough, a chemistry Nobel laureate in 2019 for his role in inventing the rechargeable lithium battery.

If you are reading this on a handheld device, it will almost certainly have a lithium battery inside. These power packs have been instrumental to the advent of electric cars, and their ability to store power such as that generated by ephemeral renewable sources could aid the transition away from a fossil-fuel energy economy.

For year after year Goodenough, who has died aged 100, featured in the list of Nobel predictions. Only his remarkable longevity saved the Swedish committee from an embarrassing injustice – he is the oldest person to have been awarded a Nobel. He seemed phlegmatic about being repeatedly overlooked, even though he did not enjoy any financial reward for his breakthrough either: in the 1980s he was not encouraged to take out a patent on the battery breakthrough he made at Oxford University. He was glad enough still to be able to do research, which he sustained almost until the very end of his life.

He left Oxford in 1986 for the University of Texas at Austin to escape compulsory retirement at 65, convinced – rightly – that he had a lot more still to offer. “Why would anyone retire and simply wait to die?” he asked. His vitality and enjoyment in the lab well into his 90s, punctuated by his loud and high-pitched laugh, was a constant cause of amazement.

One would hardly have guessed from that demeanour how unhappy his childhood had been, as the second of three children of extremely distant parents in what he called “a disaster” of a marriage. He was born in the city of Jena, Germany, to Helen (nee Lewis) and Erwin Goodenough.

They were both Americans who were living in Oxford – Erwin was studying for a DPhil at the university and, according to his son, “enjoyed the culture of the Weimar Republic; he spent much of his long summer vacations in Germany as well as in Rome”.

John was taken as a baby to the US, where his father became a professor of religious history at Yale University. John grew up mostly in a boarding school in Massachusetts, from where, despite being an undiagnosed dyslexic, he won a place to study mathematics at Yale. After wartime military service as a meteorologist, he gained a doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago and in 1952 began research on magnetic materials for information storage at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That work qualified him to switch to inorganic materials chemistry when in 1976 he moved to Oxford. At that time, interest was growing in electric vehicles, which were being held back by the lack of suitable batteries.

The potential benefits of electric cars as quieter and less polluting than those using the petrol-fired internal combustion engine had been recognised since their inception. But the lead-acid batteries used as starter batteries and the power source for vehicle electronics were utterly unequal to the task of supplying the motive power: they were too heavy and offered too little power.

The dream of battery-powered cars was resurrected in the 60s, but it was only a decade later, with the Opec oil crisis in full swing, that the industry took them seriously.

The key was to find the right materials for the battery electrodes. Lithium metal looked attractive because it is lightweight and capable of delivering high voltages. The idea was that lithium at the positive electrode would provide electrically charged ions that travel to the negative electrode, where they could be trapped between the layers of atoms in materials called intercalators.

The British chemist Stanley Whittingham, one of Goodenough’s co-laureates, working at the Exxon laboratories in New Jersey, found a suitable intercalator called titanium disulfide in 1976. Four years later, Goodenough in Oxford identified the material – a form of cobalt oxide – that became the industry standard, offering a higher voltage and greater power density.

Early lithium batteries had a tendency to catch fire because of the high chemical reactivity of pure lithium. But the third 2019 laureate, the Japanese researcher Akira Yoshino, of the Asahi Kasei Corporation in Tokyo, replaced lithium electrodes with graphite-like carbon made from petroleum coke, which also intercalates lithium so that the ions merely shuttle back and forth between the two sets of layers, making them easily rechargeable.

The lithium-ion battery was commercialised in 1991 by the Sony Corporation, and now commands an estimated $92bn market. Without it there could have been none of today’s handheld electronics – laptops, smartphones, tablets. Elon Musk’s Tesla electric cars depend on them.

There is still room for improvement and Goodenough never stopped seeking it. In the past decade he was working, among other things, on making batteries that operate at low temperatures, suitable for powering cars in the winter.

He was also seeking a new, safer way to reinstate pure lithium electrodes, which could give lithium batteries more energy capacity. At the same time, he expressed concerns about the international tensions that might arise over the limited global supplies of lithium.

Goodenough maintained a strong Christian belief throughout his life, seeing no conflict with his scientific work. “The scientist is trying to do something for society and for his fellow man,” he said. “In that sense why should there be a conflict?” During his 90s he cared for his wife, Irene (nee Wiseman), who had Alzheimer’s disease. They had married in 1951; she died in 2016.

“I’d like to get all the gas emissions off the highways of the world”, Goodenough said in 2018. “I’m hoping to see it before I die.” It was always an ambitious aspiration, even for someone with his staying power. But if it happens one day, Goodenough will have played a central part in that.

🔔 John Bannister Goodenough, materials scientist, born 25 July 1922; died 25 June 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[saramalinovic]

ISCon Conference

Activity description: ISCon Conference

Type of activity: Creativity,Service

Duration: 7-9.12.2023.

Learning Outcomes

1. Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

2. Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

3. Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences

Activity description:

Attending an scientific conference

Reflection:

‘ISCon’ is an international scientific conference organized by UG ‘ATTEND IT’ and the Union of Students of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. ISCon is a regional conference that gathers over 500 participants from different parts of BiH, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Germany, Austria and Hungary. I had the opportunity to listen and talk with many experts from the IT sector. I learned many things that I hope will help me in my further education. I also had the opportunity to talk with representatives of various companies that offer internships, scholarships and mentorships to students in the IT sector. The lectures that I would single out are the lectures of the engineer who worked at Google and the engineer who created ‘Slagalica’.

[mit]

AI model speeds up high-resolution computer vision

The system could improve image quality in video streaming or help autonomous vehicles identify road hazards in real-time.

Adam Zewe | MIT News

Researchers from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and elsewhere have developed a more efficient computer vision model that vastly reduces the computational complexity of this task. Their model can perform semantic segmentation accurately in real-time on a device with limited hardware resources, such as the on-board computers that enable an autonomous vehicle to make split-second decisions.

Recent state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models directly learn the interaction between each pair of pixels in an image, so their calculations grow quadratically as image resolution increases. Because of this, while these models are accurate, they are too slow to process high-resolution images in real time on an edge device like a sensor or mobile phone.

The MIT researchers designed a new building block for semantic segmentation models that achieves the same abilities as these state-of-the-art models, but with only linear computational complexity and hardware-efficient operations.

The result is a new model series for high-resolution computer vision that performs up to nine times faster than prior models when deployed on a mobile device. Importantly, this new model series exhibited the same or better accuracy than these alternatives.

Not only could this technique be used to help autonomous vehicles make decisions in real-time, it could also improve the efficiency of other high-resolution computer vision tasks, such as medical image segmentation.

“While researchers have been using traditional vision transformers for quite a long time, and they give amazing results, we want people to also pay attention to the efficiency aspect of these models. Our work shows that it is possible to drastically reduce the computation so this real-time image segmentation can happen locally on a device,” says Song Han, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and senior author of the paper describing the new model.

He is joined on the paper by lead author Han Cai, an EECS graduate student; Junyan Li, an undergraduate at Zhejiang University; Muyan Hu, an undergraduate student at Tsinghua University; and Chuang Gan, a principal research staff member at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision.

A simplified solution

Categorizing every pixel in a high-resolution image that may have millions of pixels is a difficult task for a machine-learning model. A powerful new type of model, known as a vision transformer, has recently been used effectively.

Transformers were originally developed for natural language processing. In that context, they encode each word in a sentence as a token and then generate an attention map, which captures each token’s relationships with all other tokens. This attention map helps the model understand context when it makes predictions.

Using the same concept, a vision transformer chops an image into patches of pixels and encodes each small patch into a token before generating an attention map. In generating this attention map, the model uses a similarity function that directly learns the interaction between each pair of pixels. In this way, the model develops what is known as a global receptive field, which means it can access all the relevant parts of the image.

Since a high-resolution image may contain millions of pixels, chunked into thousands of patches, the attention map quickly becomes enormous. Because of this, the amount of computation grows quadratically as the resolution of the image increases.

In their new model series, called EfficientViT, the MIT researchers used a simpler mechanism to build the attention map — replacing the nonlinear similarity function with a linear similarity function. As such, they can rearrange the order of operations to reduce total calculations without changing functionality and losing the global receptive field. With their model, the amount of computation needed for a prediction grows linearly as the image resolution grows.

“But there is no free lunch. The linear attention only captures global context about the image, losing local information, which makes the accuracy worse,” Han says.

To compensate for that accuracy loss, the researchers included two extra components in their model, each of which adds only a small amount of computation.

One of those elements helps the model capture local feature interactions, mitigating the linear function’s weakness in local information extraction. The second, a module that enables multiscale learning, helps the model recognize both large and small objects.

“The most critical part here is that we need to carefully balance the performance and the efficiency,” Cai says.

They designed EfficientViT with a hardware-friendly architecture, so it could be easier to run on different types of devices, such as virtual reality headsets or the edge computers on autonomous vehicles. Their model could also be applied to other computer vision tasks, like image classification.

Keep reading.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr!

[babyawacs]

ZANZIBAR Conference with IEEE and Scopus publication chance - Final deadline extension

5th International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME 2025) www.iceccme.com 16-19 October 2025 ZANZIBAR If you don’t want to receive these emails in the future, please unsubscribe. Dear colleague, Due to many requests, the paper submission deadline has been extended to 7 July 2025. This is the last extension. The 5th International Conference…

[sunaleisocial]

Unpacking the bias of large language models

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/unpacking-the-bias-of-large-language-models/

Unpacking the bias of large language models

Research has shown that large language models (LLMs) tend to overemphasize information at the beginning and end of a document or conversation, while neglecting the middle.

This “position bias” means that, if a lawyer is using an LLM-powered virtual assistant to retrieve a certain phrase in a 30-page affidavit, the LLM is more likely to find the right text if it is on the initial or final pages.

MIT researchers have discovered the mechanism behind this phenomenon.

They created a theoretical framework to study how information flows through the machine-learning architecture that forms the backbone of LLMs. They found that certain design choices which control how the model processes input data can cause position bias.

Their experiments revealed that model architectures, particularly those affecting how information is spread across input words within the model, can give rise to or intensify position bias, and that training data also contribute to the problem.

In addition to pinpointing the origins of position bias, their framework can be used to diagnose and correct it in future model designs.

This could lead to more reliable chatbots that stay on topic during long conversations, medical AI systems that reason more fairly when handling a trove of patient data, and code assistants that pay closer attention to all parts of a program.

“These models are black boxes, so as an LLM user, you probably don’t know that position bias can cause your model to be inconsistent. You just feed it your documents in whatever order you want and expect it to work. But by understanding the underlying mechanism of these black-box models better, we can improve them by addressing these limitations,” says Xinyi Wu, a graduate student in the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and first author of a paper on this research.

Her co-authors include Yifei Wang, an MIT postdoc; and senior authors Stefanie Jegelka, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and a member of IDSS and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Ali Jadbabaie, professor and head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a core faculty member of IDSS, and a principal investigator in LIDS. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning.

Analyzing attention

LLMs like Claude, Llama, and GPT-4 are powered by a type of neural network architecture known as a transformer. Transformers are designed to process sequential data, encoding a sentence into chunks called tokens and then learning the relationships between tokens to predict what words comes next.

These models have gotten very good at this because of the attention mechanism, which uses interconnected layers of data processing nodes to make sense of context by allowing tokens to selectively focus on, or attend to, related tokens.

But if every token can attend to every other token in a 30-page document, that quickly becomes computationally intractable. So, when engineers build transformer models, they often employ attention masking techniques which limit the words a token can attend to.

For instance, a causal mask only allows words to attend to those that came before it.

Engineers also use positional encodings to help the model understand the location of each word in a sentence, improving performance.

The MIT researchers built a graph-based theoretical framework to explore how these modeling choices, attention masks and positional encodings, could affect position bias.

“Everything is coupled and tangled within the attention mechanism, so it is very hard to study. Graphs are a flexible language to describe the dependent relationship among words within the attention mechanism and trace them across multiple layers,” Wu says.

Their theoretical analysis suggested that causal masking gives the model an inherent bias toward the beginning of an input, even when that bias doesn’t exist in the data.

If the earlier words are relatively unimportant for a sentence’s meaning, causal masking can cause the transformer to pay more attention to its beginning anyway.

“While it is often true that earlier words and later words in a sentence are more important, if an LLM is used on a task that is not natural language generation, like ranking or information retrieval, these biases can be extremely harmful,” Wu says.

As a model grows, with additional layers of attention mechanism, this bias is amplified because earlier parts of the input are used more frequently in the model’s reasoning process.

They also found that using positional encodings to link words more strongly to nearby words can mitigate position bias. The technique refocuses the model’s attention in the right place, but its effect can be diluted in models with more attention layers.

And these design choices are only one cause of position bias — some can come from training data the model uses to learn how to prioritize words in a sequence.

“If you know your data are biased in a certain way, then you should also finetune your model on top of adjusting your modeling choices,” Wu says.

Lost in the middle

After they’d established a theoretical framework, the researchers performed experiments in which they systematically varied the position of the correct answer in text sequences for an information retrieval task.

The experiments showed a “lost-in-the-middle” phenomenon, where retrieval accuracy followed a U-shaped pattern. Models performed best if the right answer was located at the beginning of the sequence. Performance declined the closer it got to the middle before rebounding a bit if the correct answer was near the end.

Ultimately, their work suggests that using a different masking technique, removing extra layers from the attention mechanism, or strategically employing positional encodings could reduce position bias and improve a model’s accuracy.

“By doing a combination of theory and experiments, we were able to look at the consequences of model design choices that weren’t clear at the time. If you want to use a model in high-stakes applications, you must know when it will work, when it won’t, and why,” Jadbabaie says.

In the future, the researchers want to further explore the effects of positional encodings and study how position bias could be strategically exploited in certain applications.

“These researchers offer a rare theoretical lens into the attention mechanism at the heart of the transformer model. They provide a compelling analysis that clarifies longstanding quirks in transformer behavior, showing that attention mechanisms, especially with causal masks, inherently bias models toward the beginning of sequences. The paper achieves the best of both worlds — mathematical clarity paired with insights that reach into the guts of real-world systems,” says Amin Saberi, professor and director of the Stanford University Center for Computational Market Design, who was not involved with this work.

This research is supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.

[billconrad]

Group Document Editing

    Over the last three months, I have been coordinating the editing of five technical documents. They are assembly instructions for electrical parts used on aircraft. While I am the lead author (having completed 80% of the first draft), many people have contributed to the content, format, and approval of the document. My epic journey to release these documents has led to some interesting observations, which I thought would be fun to share. Wait. “Fun” is not the best word to describe it. Amusing? No. Therapeutic? Wrong direction. Painful? Yup, that’s the word.

    Group editing differs vastly from group creating because the effort lacks spirit and focus. I think this is because each team member did not have a hand in the initial development, they do not apply great effort. Instead, participating editors desire to shift the document to their own style and content. And to make matters worse, their effort lacks pride. I like to think of it as they are boxers smacking an opponent around versus a painter lovingly capturing a stunning scene.

    However, the editors sometimes take on a peculiar, twisted pride after making many edits to a single section. Then, they treat this section as their own and do not like it when others try to edit it. Then, they lightly review their edits and pick apart the other sections. Often, the comments are mean-spirited.

    Now, I must take a sidestep from the fun world of fiction writing. Engineers do a lot of writing, but it is vastly different from fiction. Their words are dry, complex, terse, and explanation-heavy. Plus, a new writer has entered the engineering world, the vast tentacles of the legal community. For example, I must carefully apply the term “shall” and follow all the rules associated with legal directives. A significant rule is never to guarantee anything. But this is supposed to be an assembly document meant only for internal use. Really? You bet.

   However, it is not all boring. Engineers sometimes add a touch of humor, and I have even seen Dilbert cartoons incorporated into serious documents.

    Back to the group editing. Individuals have an innate desire to contribute to or make a change. This means it is difficult for them to lay down the pen and say, “This document is good enough.” This desire leads to endless revisions, awkward sections, strong opinions, and hurt feelings. To make matters worse, people often struggle to concede that their approach is not the best.

    Group editing is not a team-building exercise due to the numerous compromises, arguments, and flawed final results that often occur. I have found the best way to group edit is in a meeting. This is when people gather in a conference room, review a section, share ideas, and quickly eliminate incorrect directions. That’s nice, but group editing is rarely done this way.

    Instead, a document is emailed or placed on a shared server with the tracked changes enabled. This flawed approach introduces numerous errors because not all changes are tracked, recorded, and synchronized. Additionally, there can be numerous changes to one section, and the resulting over-changed mess is difficult to unscramble.

   Another problem is that five people can discover the same error and make five corrections, each with a slightly different approach. However, the worst problem is when somebody works on an older revision and saves it over the latest version. Meaning they overwrite other people’s work. Then there is the sneaky change. This occurs when the group overrides an edit, but the person wants it restored. So, they save over somebody else’s work, and the edit magically gets reintroduced. Sometimes, the change is discovered in time, and at other times, the flawed document is released. Of course, the sneaky author claims innocence.

    Change tracking helps, but it also can be an enormous obstacle. The problem is that it records a change, but it does not register the intent behind the change (unless a note is provided). This feature also prevents the document from being updated, as the prior information remains present. I have witnessed conversation loops lasting weeks around changes that were approved, unapproved, and then re-approved. It is maddening.

    Another enormous problem with change tracking occurs when people view the edits (I call this red editing) rather than the final document. Imagine a cut-and-paste type of edit. If done while red editing, it is easy to overlook an extra space or miss a space between two words. Also, the result can be grammatically incorrect. This method seems like an easy pitfall to avoid by simply clicking the “view final result” button. True, but nearly every editor uses the view edits mode, including professional copy editors, who should know better.

    The difficulty of group editing increases exponentially with the number of editors involved. Currently, I am working with five people, which is already a challenge. 30 people? Wow, that would be a nightmare.

    Another aspect of having so many people is that they often gang up on other members of the group, leading to good ideas not being appreciated and strong opinions prevailing. This inevitably leads to side negotiations, which often result in unpopular changes being approved. Does this not sound like an awful election?

    To give you an idea of the effectiveness of group editing, I estimate we collectively spent 200 hours of work on each 20-page document. Yet, the resulting changes affected less than 10% of the original content. This is because group editing rarely makes wide-sweeping changes. Instead, group edits focus on small areas that are sometimes important. Of course, that was because my original document was excellent:)

    Here is my recommendation to have the most effective group edit. Use a maximum size of three knowledgeable people. Start with a discussion about editing goals and editing direction. Another way to do a group edit is no direct editing. Instead, insert notes and let the original author make the corrections. I also appreciate notes that include justification, which leads to less confusion. Additionally, the author’s pride is less hurt, and they can learn positively from their mistakes.

    As a group editor, I have learned to apply edits with great care and precision. This is one of those “less is more” situations. Finally, group editing requires one person who has the final authority. Hmm. Sounding like a government.

    You’re the best -Bill

    June 07, 2025

    Hey, book lovers, I published four. Please check them out:

    Interviewing Immortality. A dramatic first-person psychological thriller that weaves a tale of intrigue, suspense, and self-confrontation.

    Pushed to the Edge of Survival. A drama, romance, and science fiction story about two unlikely people surviving a shipwreck and living with the consequences.

    Cable Ties. A slow-burn political thriller that reflects the realities of modern intelligence, law enforcement, department cooperation, and international politics.

    Saving Immortality. Continuing in the first-person psychological thriller genre, James Kimble searches for his former captor to answer his life’s questions.

    These books are available in softcover on Amazon and in eBook format everywhere.

[dekhocampus11]

National Institute of Technology, Surathkal

The National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, is one of India’s most prestigious engineering institutions. Established in 1960 as Karnataka Regional Engineering College (KREC), it was later renamed after being granted the status of a National Institute of Technology in 2002. Recognized as an Institute of National Importance, NITK is known for its excellence in engineering education, research, and innovation.

Located along the scenic coastline of the Arabian Sea in Surathkal, near Mangaluru in Karnataka, NITK's campus spans over 295 acres. The institute combines academic excellence with a serene, natural environment, offering an ideal setting for holistic development.

Academic Programs

NITK Surathkal offers a wide range of academic programs across undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral levels. The institute has 14 departments, including civil engineering, computer science and engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, chemical engineering, electronic and communication engineering, and mining engineering. In addition , there are departments for Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Humanities, and Management.

At the undergraduate level, it offers B.Tech degrees in various disciplines. For postgraduate students, M.Tech, M.Sc., and MBA programs are available. Doctoral programs (Ph.D.) are also offered in all departments, allowing students to engage in cutting-edge research and development.

Infrastructure and Campus Facilities

NITK is known for its state-of-the-art infrastructure that supports both academics and student life. The central library is a modern facility with a large collection of books, national and international journals, e-books, and digital databases. It spans over 2,700 square meters and is fully automated.

The Central Computer Center provides high-speed internet and computing services to students and faculty. All academic and administrative departments are connected via a secure campus-wide network. Lecture halls are equipped with smart boards, projectors, and audio-visual aids to facilitate modern teaching methodologies.

The campus is fully residential, with separate hostels for male and female students. Each hostel is equipped with essential amenities, including internet connectivity, common rooms, mess facilities, and recreation spaces. Faculty quarters and guest houses are also available.

NITK also houses a commercial complex with a bank, ATMs, a post office, a medical center, shopping outlets, and multiple food courts and cafeterias. The presence of the private NITK beach, located right beside the campus, adds a unique charm to the student experience.

Sports and Extracurricular Activities

NITK places a strong emphasis on overall student development. The campus includes extensive sports facilities: a modern gymnasium, indoor and outdoor courts, athletics tracks, and a swimming pool. Students actively participate in sports, cultural events, and technical festivals.

The institute hosts various clubs and societies that cater to interests in robotics, music, dance, drama, literature, coding, and photography. Major student-run festivals include “Engineer” (technical fest), “Incident” (cultural fest), and “Spandan” (sports fest), attracting participants from across the country.

Research and Innovation

Research is a core focus area at NITK. Each department actively participates in research initiatives funded by government agencies such as the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and the Ministry of Education.

The institute is home to several Centers of Excellence and specialized research labs. These centers work on contemporary challenges in renewable energy, data science, artificial intelligence, climate change, materials science, and more.

Students and faculty regularly publish in peer-reviewed international journals and present papers at global conferences. The institute also encourages innovation through entrepreneurship development programs, startup support initiatives, and intellectual property facilitation.

Industry Collaboration and Placements

NITK has established strong linkages with industry through its Training and Placement Cell. The institute enjoys an excellent reputation among recruiters, with over 300 companies visiting the campus annually. These include top multinational corporations in software, core engineering, consulting, finance, and analytics sectors.

Some of the key recruiters include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Infosys, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, Larsen & Toubro, Mahindra & Mahindra, and Schlumberger. Many students also secure international job offers or pursue higher studies at globally reputed universities.

The placement statistics at NITK are consistently impressive. The average salary package for undergraduate students ranges between ₹12 to ₹18 lakh per annum, with the highest packages going above ₹50 lakh per annum. Internship opportunities, pre-placement offers (PPOs), and industry-sponsored projects are a regular part of the academic journey.

Global Exposure and Academic Collaborations

NITK promotes internationalization through academic exchange programs, research collaborations, and MoUs with foreign universities. The institute partners with institutions across the USA, Germany, Japan, and other countries to facilitate faculty and student exchange, joint degree programs, and collaborative research projects.

Students are encouraged to participate in international conferences, workshops, and internships abroad, adding a global perspective to their technical expertise. Faculty members are also active in global research communities and advisory boards.

Community Engagement and Recent Initiatives

In addition to academic excellence, NITK contributes actively to social development. The institute recently partnered with the Dakshina Kannada district administration to form a civic think tank consortium. This initiative allows faculty and students to contribute to local governance and policy-making in areas like infrastructure, sustainability, and urban planning.

NITK also runs outreach programs aimed at school students, women in STEM, and rural education. Through initiatives such as workshops, rural internships, and awareness drives, the institute fulfills its social responsibility.

Student Life and Campus Culture

Life at NITK Surathkal is vibrant, diverse, and enriching. Students come from all parts of India, creating a multicultural and inclusive campus environment. The institution promotes a strong sense of community and independence among students. Hostel life, evening walks on the beach, late-night group studies, and festival celebrations all contribute to memorable college experiences.

The Student Council and various departmental associations ensure that students have a voice in decision-making and event organization. NITK’s alumni network is active and spread across top companies, universities, and leadership roles worldwide, offering a strong support system and mentorship opportunities.

Conclusion

National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, stands out as a model institution for engineering education in India. With its picturesque campus, rigorous academics, cutting-edge research, and strong industry integration, NITK continues to nurture future leaders, innovators, and socially conscious engineers. Its commitment to academic freedom, community service, and global competence ensures that students graduate not just with degrees, but with the skills, ethics, and vision to shape a better world.

[serviceshuttle]

Is Rolla Ready for a Smarter Airport Shuttle?

As Rolla, Missouri, continues to grow in both population and prominence, the need for more efficient transportation options becomes increasingly clear. One essential aspect of this need is reliable airport shuttle service. Whether you're a frequent traveler, a student at Missouri S&T, or a visitor exploring the Ozarks, convenient access to airports can be a game-changer. Enter City Taxi Shuttle Service with their promising new initiative: the Cou Airport Shuttle Rolla — a smarter, more connected shuttle experience designed to meet modern expectations.

Why a Smarter Airport Shuttle Matters

Transportation is evolving rapidly across the globe. From rideshares to electric vehicles, the industry is adapting to consumers who demand convenience, affordability, and sustainability. Rolla’s strategic location between major airports — including Columbia Regional Airport (COU), St. Louis Lambert International Airport, and Springfield-Branson National Airport — means that a smart, tech-integrated shuttle service could significantly improve the city's connectivity.

City Taxi Shuttle Service has recognized this opportunity and is stepping up with a solution: an airport shuttle system tailored to Rolla’s unique travel needs. But is the city truly ready for this next-level service? Let’s explore.

What Makes This Shuttle “Smart”?

The proposed Cou Airport Shuttle Rolla isn’t your standard point-to-point van. It’s built around technology, user-friendly scheduling, and streamlined logistics. Here are some of the intelligent features being introduced:

Online Booking & Real-Time Tracking: Riders can book their seat from their smartphone or computer, with instant confirmation and trip updates.

Shared Rides to Reduce Costs: The system is designed to intelligently match travelers going to the same destination at similar times, optimizing routes and reducing fares.

On-Demand Scheduling: For those not traveling at peak times, flexible scheduling options ensure that the service is available when it’s needed most.

Eco-Friendly Options: With fuel-efficient or hybrid vehicles in the fleet, the shuttle aims to reduce environmental impact while maintaining comfort.

These features aim to transform what is often a stressful part of travel into a smooth and predictable experience. Want to find out more? You can check the official City Taxi Shuttle Service platform or simply check over here to explore route maps, fare details, and customer testimonials.

Why Rolla is the Perfect Fit

Rolla is more than just a university town — it's a growing hub of innovation and engineering. With students and professionals constantly traveling for conferences, internships, and leisure, the demand for airport connectivity is undeniable.

Additionally, the city’s lack of a large commercial airport makes dependable shuttle service essential. Public transportation options are limited, and not everyone has access to a personal vehicle for long drives. That’s where a reliable Cou Airport Shuttle Rolla becomes vital — bridging the gap between Rolla and major regional airports.

If you're wondering whether this new shuttle is already in operation, go right here to view the current schedule and service availability. Early adopters have praised the service for its punctuality, courteous drivers, and ease of booking.

More Than Just a Ride

Beyond just transportation, this shuttle initiative is also an economic opportunity. With increased travel convenience, Rolla becomes more attractive for businesses, conferences, and tourism. Local hotels, restaurants, and retail outlets benefit when visitors can easily access the city. Furthermore, the service creates jobs, supports sustainable transport, and promotes smart city values.

Final Thoughts

So, is Rolla ready for a smarter airport shuttle? All signs point to yes. The community needs it, the technology supports it, and the service is already gaining traction. City Taxi Shuttle Service’s Cou Airport Shuttle Rolla initiative may just be the right solution at the right time — offering residents and visitors a more intelligent, connected way to travel.

Whether you're a traveler, a local business owner, or simply a curious resident, it’s worth taking a closer look. To find out more, check over here for updates, FAQs, and exclusive discounts — or go right here to book your first trip.

Original Link: https://citytaxishuttleservice.blogspot.com/2025/06/is-rolla-ready-for-smarter-airport.html