Allison Parshall

Contributing Writer

Latest Articles

Risky Giant Steps Can Solve Optimization Problems Faster

August 11, 2023

New results break with decades of conventional wisdom for the gradient descent algorithm.

Q&A

The Cryptographer Who Ensures We Can Trust Our Computers

July 27, 2023

Yael Tauman Kalai’s breakthroughs secure our digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.

Q&A

The Computer Scientist Peering Inside AI’s Black Boxes

April 27, 2023

Cynthia Rudin wants machine learning models, responsible for increasingly important decisions, to show their work.

Inside Ancient Asteroids, Gamma Rays Made Building Blocks of Life

January 4, 2023

A new radiation-based mechanism adds to the ways that amino acids could have been made in space and brought to the young Earth.

After a Quantum Clobbering, One Approach Survives Unscathed

December 7, 2022

A quantum approach to data analysis that relies on the study of shapes will likely remain an example of a quantum advantage — albeit for increasingly unlikely scenarios.

New Entanglement Results Hint at Better Quantum Codes

October 24, 2022

A team of physicists has entangled three photons over a considerable distance, which could lead to more powerful quantum cryptography.

Machine Learning Highlights a Hidden Order in Scents

October 10, 2022

Efforts to build a better digital “nose” suggest that our perception of scents reflects both the structure of aromatic molecules and the metabolic processes that make them.

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