• Question: How have you best applied computer technology to your work during the past year?

    Asked by 355artk37 to Peppe, Greg, Petros, Pooja on 15 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Greg Chance

      Greg Chance answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      Deep learning has made huge improvement to the way i make predictions on data. I use this to control my robot in a better, safer and more intuitive manner. I think this will make my robots more natural to interact with.

    • Photo: Giuseppe Cotugno

      Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 20 Nov 2017:

      I think one of the finest use I’ve done of computer science recently, was when I was examining some efficiency issues on the way errors are generated in software and how you can play around with software components to let the same software element behave differently withing rules (it is called technically “polymorphism”). My problem was to explore the waste of space and of execution time of the mentioned two operations if executed from a microcontroller (a sort of minicomputer embedded in things like cars or mobiles) since those minicomputers are much more limited than a modern PC (one of the most advanced we use is as powerful as a Pentium I of early 2000s).

      The result of this analysis showed me that, the second operation has a high cost in term of execution time but is affordable in term of space, while the error handling operation – once thought to be very demanding – it might not be so bad anymore as technology has evolved. To came to this conclusion, I ended up studying the structure of a program in terms of how a .exe file (the program executable file) is structured: where the operations are (at the beginning, end or middle of the file), where the constant values are stores, how everything is put together from different individual source files and such. This knowledge is often used by hacker when they want to alter a program externally to make it do something else (but it requires more knowledge than what I have now)

      Another less recent good example is when I used an external software (called “library”) property of Nokia with a lot of functions used to program Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs, the buttons on a window or this website are two different GUIs). This library allowed me to create graphs from data, and perform other little tricks and stunts (buttons changing colour if the mouse is around, etc.) within few hours. back when I was at university the same things would have had taken me a few days.

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