What if it were your father?

What would you do if it were your kid?

What if Chomsky were right?

The outcome of scientific research depends on how a phenomenon is viewed and how the questions are phrased. This applies also to the nativist view of language acquisition. As a complement to MacWhinney’s discussion of nativism from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology, I would like to devote this commentary to the question of the title from the viewpoint of computational linguistics. Formally,...

What if entropy were dimensionless?

One of entropy’s puzzling aspects is its dimensions of energy/temperature. A review of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics leads to six conclusions: ~1! Entropy’s dimensions are linked to the definition of the Kelvin temperature scale. ~2! Entropy can be defined to be dimensionless when temperature T is defined as an energy ~dubbed tempergy!. ~3! Dimensionless entropy per particle typicall...

What would you ask to your home if it were intelligent? Exploring user expectations about next-generation homes

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research is giving birth to a multitude of futuristic home scenarios and applications; however a clear discrepancy between current installations and research-level designs can be easily noticed. Whether this gap is due to the natural distance between research and engineered applications or to mismatching of needs and solutions remains to be understood. This paper disc...

What if MPI Collective Operations Were Instantaneous?

Collective MPI operations are an interesting research topic, since their implementation is complex and there are many different possible ways to improve their performance. It is not always obvious how much a given application will gain from such improvements and some of the methods to improve collective performance are costly and time-consuming to implement. In this paper we use a hybrid MPI si...