Month: May 2020

Obvious disaster

COVID-19 is anything but a black swan. It is perhaps the most foreseen (and foreseeable) disaster of its kind in history. Which makes the people who “saw it coming” more like the ideological equivalent of self-important Yelp commenters, rather than Hari-Seldon-grade psychohistorical geniuses.

Glycans

There’s a reason why genomics and proteomics have leapt ahead of glycomics: The sheer complexity of sugars makes them more difficult to study. DNA, RNA and proteins are linear molecules built according to defined sets of rules, and scientists have the tools to sequence, analyze and manipulate them. But glycans are branching structures that assemble without a known template. The same site on 2 identical proteins might be occupied by very different glycans, for instance. Glycans also have exponentially more potential configurations than DNA or proteins: 3 different nucleotides can make 6 distinct DNA sequences; 3 amino acids can make 6 unique peptides; 3 glycan building blocks can form more than 1000 structures. Glycans are flexible, wobbly and variable; intricate, dynamic and somewhat unpredictable. Their analysis demands greater technical expertise and more sophisticated equipment.

AI Chip Design

A fast, high-quality, automatic chip placement method could greatly accelerate chip design and enable co-optimization with earlier stages of the chip design process. Although we evaluate primarily on accelerator chips, our proposed method is broadly applicable to any chip placement problem.