CompuCast

This episode we've got two great features for you. Laurence Tratt talks about domain specific languages and Thomas Wenisch discusses energy efficient data centers.

Edd fails miserably in the quiz and has to listen to a terrible joke from Alex as punishment.

How is the world trying to build faster and faster routers that enable you to download at higher rates? That's the question that Hugh picks in his interview with Gordon Brebner. They talk about many interesting topics, like, how FPGAs are used at the core of the Internet. Moreover, in our second feature, Alex talks to Patrick Lam about proving specific properties for computer programs, yet another step in program analysis.

This month, Edd is challenged by Ali's quiz questions. Quite honestly, Edd seems to have become unbeatable!

This month, compucast gives your another short episode, this time with the taste of networking.

Hugh talks with Nitin Vaidya about network aware distributed algorithms and Ali, in his interview with Marwan Fayed, tries to understand what "Next Generation Internet" is. They even talk about issues such as SOPA. In our quiz this month, Helen challenges Edd, who is now so confident about computer science that he started to read us the CS news.

This month we bring you another special episode. This time it's all about computers and music!

Mark, our newest team member, interviews composer Michael Edwards, who unveils the merits of algorithmic composition. Chris talks to Dave Murray Rust who has built an agent-based system that can jam alongside real musicians and finally Helen discusses computational analysis of music and its relationship to language with Mark Steedman.

Also in this episode: Edd, with his musical background, has a fair chance to meet our Quiz master's challenge. And look out at the end for a special Christmas performance by the CompuCast crew.

Here is another half hour helping of CompuCast Goodness. After last month's special episode, we are back to our new, snappy format. In this episode, we talk with Micrsoft Research chief research officer, Rick Rashid, about the data driven world. Phil Wadler has a chat with Gregory Chaitin and finally we honour the life of Dennis Ritchie, who passed away last month.

We also had to deal with the problem of Edd losing his voice just before the quiz. The wimp, we know he's just faking because he wasn't able to cheat so easily this month! Instead we drag two unsuspecting PhD students down for a grilling.

PS: Don't forget to checkout the videos for our interviews.

What has a robot done for me lately?

From a very early age, especially in today's technology centric world, one seems to grow up with this image of robots as almost mythical creatures - sometimes evil, sometimes noble. But, what is a robot, really? How much do we know about the gentle robots that actually inhabit our world today? What will robots of tomorrow really look like? Why do computer scientists spend so much time working on these mechanical gizmos?

This month's episode, a special issue on robotics, aims to shed some light on these questions. We begin with a fun look at robots that play football, aspiring (perhaps naively) to be able to one day take on world champion human footballers. On that optimistic note, we hear what a cross section of people - experts and laypersons - think about the future of robotics. Finally, we take a look at how researchers are using robotics to shed light on biology and vice versa.

Yes, we can!

After our birthday episode last month we looked back at what we set out to do when we started CompuCast one year ago: Creating a half-hour episode each month giving you an informed, concise overview of computer science research. Seeing that over the year the episodes have become increasingly longer it is now time for a change!
We hope you enjoy the brand-new CompuCast and we look forward to your feedback.

This month's episode starts off with our new 64 bit news: a snappy compilation of computer science news in just 64 seconds. Also in this episode is an interview of Stephan Wong from Delft University on reconfigurable computing by Hugh. Chris and Iain argue about the pros and cons of language oriented programming. And Ali talks to Nigel Goddard from Edinburgh University about computational models for global change.

P.S. Don't forget to check out the YouTube video for the Stephan Wong interview:

Our thirteenth and birthday episode!

In this month's episode we bring you our birthday celebrations. Edd gets to find out what we do when we're not producing CompuCast and Helen and Dominik bring us an extra special Birthday Oddity.

Also in this episode Hugh speaks to Laurie Hendren about compiling Matlab and Chris finds out about Elastic Cloud Computing from Paul Horvath of Amazon Webservices.

Enjoy!

P.S. Don't forget to check out the YouTube video for the Laurie Hendren interview:

Our twelth episode - can you believe it!

A double-helping of Hugh this month, with two interviews: Uday Khedker on heap liveness analysis, and Richard Mortier about controlling, and utilising, your personal data online. Chris brings us a wide-ranging chat with John Aycock and Heather Crawford. Listen to it and find out why studying ancient Greek could be dangerous, that there are such things as good worms, and what super-liminal audio steganography is!

Also in this jam-packed episode, Helen brings us a primer on Computational Neuroscience, an exciting new field studying brain function from a CS perspective; Edd behaves shockingly in the quiz, leaving quizmaster Fensch speechless; and Iain discovers a new dimension to internet dating. Thanks also go to Don Sannella for being our guest host.

Enjoy!

P.S. The observant listener may have detected Iain's attempts at super-liminal audio steganography. He doesn't think anyone can break his code and is offering a reward for anyone who emails or facebooks - it's a verb now - him with the right decoding (it's one word). A couple of hints: it resembles morse code in that there are two different beeps; and, remember the fundamental theorem of arithmetic!

This month we have a complete mix of computer science, from parallel skeletons to emotions. Jane Hillston joins us to talk about how Edinburgh will be celebrating the Centenary of Alan's Turing's birth, Maciej Zurawski talks to Gaya about emotion technology in entertainment and Murray Cole discusses the parallel skeletons in the closet.

As always, Edd tells a fantastic joke (better than usual) and struggles with this month's quiz.

And don't forget to check out our Youtube videos giving introductions to this month's interviews.

This month is compilers month! You'll hear about all sorts of compilery topics, from automated security to building compilers through partial specialisation. It's all good stuff, we think you'll like it.

And, you can, as always, find out if Edd has stopped cheating at the quiz and if his terrible jokes have improved any. (Hint, no and no).

In our most high profile episode ever, we bring you a live debate between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on the future of mobile computing, exclusive to CompuCast. At times tempers flare and the language may be occasionally 'mature', so parental guidance is advised.

This month, Donald and Jill Knuth let Hugh ruin their breakfast plans. They talk about everything under the sun and even manage to eat the food, too! (The full, unedited interview is available in the downloads section).

We hear your views about women in computer science and why there are so few of them. We also speak to Timothy Mattson about parallel programming and in this month's oddity corner we introduce you to the bizarre chemical abstract machine.

Finally, Edd wins pints from Hugh in the quiz, but we all know he's just learning to cheat better, right? If it's any consolation, Edd's joke is even worse than usual.

This month we talk to Lambda man himself, Phil Wadler, about functional web programming, Ian Sommerville introduces us to cloud computing and we get a report about the most recent HiPEAC conference. Oh, and Edd fails miserably at the quiz!

Have you ever wanted to know how bad guys crack passwords? Well this month we explain how they do it, showing you how rainbow tables and salts work. And once you've listened to the feature, try and crack the passwords of the CompuCast crew!

The Password Cracking Game

The evil Professor Moriarty has managed to get hold of the passwd file from CompuCast's servers! He has asked you to crack the passwords for him. Below is the file with the usernames and hashes, you can try to log in to see if you have managed to crack the passwords.

Moriarty has found out that the passwords contain only lower case letters and digits and that the hashes are MD5 hashes. He has also discovered that CompuCast doesn't use salts and that some users may have left clues about their passwords in episode 7 (others may be harder). Try your own rainbow table, dictionary attack or get clues from the episode. Let us know on Facebook if you crack them!

By the way, if you are implementing a password store yourself have a look at key stretching, not just salts. Key stretching uses a slow hash algorithm so that only an attacker can't brute force billions of passwords per second. The hash can be made slower as computers get faster. You might also look into zero knowledge exchange protocols. Sadly we didn't have time to cover these things in the episode.

It's our first episode of a new year, how exciting! Our New Year's resolution is to make CompuCast the greatest computer science podcast ever unless there's something better out there. We hope this resolution lasts longer than Hugh's one to keep fit.

This episode we'll show you the beautiful relationship between proofs and programs, talk about super low-power processor design and discover how to program the Single Chip Cloud Computer. We also honour the life and work of the late Maurice Wilkes, who died at the end of last year.

It's Christmas! So we've sent Hugh off to the North Pole to talk to Santa's elves about their computer science problems. It's the best place for him as far as we're concerned and peace reigns in the CompuCast studios at last! If only we'd thought of this a few episodes back.

While Hugh's as far away as we could send him, the rest of us get down to business. We speak to Ben Kuipers about modelling the human cognitive map and to Luis von Ahn about games with a purpose. We also find out that it's not the gift that counts, it's the theory.

In this episode we pay tribute to Benoit Mandelbrot who died this month. We also interview Gerard Berry of INRIA, talk about neuroscience and delve into the odd ways number systems have been used.

Finally, Edd does rather well in the quiz this month (are we turning him into a nerd?). But normal service resumes as his joke returns to the usual appalling levels.

This episode we pay tribute to the late Robin Milner, we avoid avoiding deadlocks and warn against expecting everything to be as easy as it is for physicists. We pit Edd, our producer, against three artificial intelligences to find out if he's smarter than them. And, as always, we bring you the computer science quiz and the joke of the month (which Edd promises will not be as lame as usual!).

We've made the second episode! No turning back now.

In this episode we interview three leading Computer Science researchers: Rahul Santhanam, John Quinn, and Michael Herrmann. We also report on the news that God's number is 20, discuss Omega: Chaitin's number of knowledge, and bring you the CompuCast quiz and joke of the month!

This is our first ever episode! We're quite excited and can't wait to hear what you think about it.

In this episode we overturn the conventional wisdom about CPUs and GPUs; talk to the father of computational complexity and find out about the latest in interactive theorem provers. We also bring you news from around the world, introduce you to Turing tar-pits, test your knowledge with our computer science quiz and tickle your funny bone with a computer science joke of the month.