Toggle light / dark theme

The US military agency responsible for developing new technologies plans to embark on an effort to rewrite significant volumes of C code by funding a new research challenge to create an automated translator capable of converting old C code with function written in the security-focused Rust language.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will hold a workshop, known as Proposers Day, on Aug. 26 to outline its vision for the Translating All C to Rust (TRACTOR) project. The effort calls for academic and industry research groups to compete to create a system that can turn C code into idiomatic — that is, using native features — Rust code. The project’s ultimate goal is to provide tools so that any organization with large volumes of software written in C can convert that code to Rust and eliminate the memory-safety errors that account for a large source of software vulnerabilities.

Without an automated system, developers are unlikely to take on the task, says Dan Wallach, program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O).

New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows that programming robots to create their own teams and voluntarily wait for their teammates results in faster task completion, with the potential to improve manufacturing, agriculture and warehouse automation. The study is published in 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

This research was recognized as a finalist for Best Paper Award on Multi-Robot Systems at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2024.

“There’s a long history of debate on whether we want to build a single, powerful humanoid robot that can do all the jobs, or we have a team of robots that can collaborate,” says one of the study authors, Hao Zhang, associate professor at the UMass Amherst Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences and director of the Human-Centered Robotics Lab.

$665 million in cash is nothing to sneeze at, and for AMD, the acquisition is the latest step in the company’s broader pivot that puts its main focus on AI and AI-related technologies. This is nothing new; we’ve seen the same shift happen in other companies like Google, Meta, Apple, and, of course, NVIDIA. However, NVIDIA’s AI focus started many years ago.

“AI is our number one strategic priority,” said Vamsi Boppana, AMD senior vice president, AIG. “We continue to invest in both the talent and software capabilities to support our growing customer deployments and roadmaps.”

“The Silo AI team has developed state-of-the-art language models that have been trained at scale on AMD Instinct accelerators, and they have broad experience developing and integrating AI models to solve critical problems for end customers,” Vamsi Boppana adds. “We expect their expertise and software capabilities will directly improve the experience for customers in delivering the best performing AI solutions on AMD platforms.”

Biological neural networks demonstrate complex memory and plasticity functions. This work proposes a single memristor based on SrTiO3 that emulates six synaptic functions for energy efficient operation. The bio-inspired deep neural network is trained to play Atari Pong, a complex reinforcement learning task in a dynamic environment.