Penn doctoral candidate part of first-place software contest team
Doctoral candidate David Weiss is part of the software-engineering team currently in first place for The Netflix Prize, a $1 million contest to improve the company’s movie recommendation software.
“The goal is to have the processor understand a preference,” Weiss says, describing the algorithm theory the team utilized. “Each user will have 10 numbers indicating how much they like any given quality in a movie. The question then becomes: Is there a function that can compare a film’s similarities, and can we use that to predict preferences?”
Weiss and his teammates will have to wait until later this year for Netflix to determine a winner. He is hopeful that the technology they developed will impact the fields of speech recognition and computer vision.
Penn physicists led by Bo Zhen have created hybrid light-matter particles that interact strongly enough to compute, pointing toward ultrafast, low-energy optical AI hardware.
Penn’s newest supercomputer is transforming research
Penn’s first campus-wide HPC and AI cluster, “Betty,” is expanding access to powerful computing, enabling groundbreaking projects, and fostering new collaborations across disciplines.
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Fighting oral cancer with bioengineered chewing gum
Research led by Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell shows that antiviral and antibacterial chewing gums reduce the levels of three microbes linked to worse outcomes in oral cancers, paving the way for more effective and affordable therapies.
The performing arts at Penn: Process, practice, and purpose
In the vivid tapestry of performing arts groups at Penn, students prepare for their performances while simultaneously enriching their college experience.
