Brian Cantwell Smith – Semantics in the Time of Computing

December 8th, 2016 Much of the technical terminology of computer science betrays its logical heritage: ‘language’, ‘symbol’, ‘syntax’, ‘semantics’, ‘value’, ‘reference’, ‘identifier’, ‘data’, etc.  Classically, such terms were used to name essential phenomena underlying logic, human thought and language — phenomena, it was widely believed, that would never succumb to…

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David Harel – On Artificial Olfaction, and How to Test For It

November 3rd, 2016 For years there has been interest in the possibility of building a reliable odor reproduction system (AOS), with its vast spectrum of applications: from e-commerce, games and video, via the food and cosmetics industry, to medical diagnosis. Such a system would enable an output device — the…

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Jean-Paul Delahaye – Le Bitcoin et les monnaies cryptographiques

20 octobre 2016 En 2008 une nouvelle façon de concevoir la monnaie a été proposée, qui remet en cause les anciennes idées sur cette institution. Comme pour le courrier électronique ou internet qui ne sont aux mains d’aucune autorité et conduisent donc à une meilleure appropriation de l’information par tous,…

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Peter Selinger – Number-theoretic methods in quantum computing

April 28th, 2016 An important problem in quantum computing is the so-called approximate synthesis problem: to find a quantum circuit, preferably as short as possible, that approximates a given unitary operator up to given epsilon. Moreover, the solution should be computed by an efficient algorithm. For nearly two decades, the…

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