Fitness centrality: New tool finds critical points in everything from cybersecurity to ecological conservation

What if you could break apart a network like grating cheese—isolating its most crucial elements, fragmenting it into disconnected pieces to reveal where disruptions would be most devastating? That's the power of fitness centrality, a new method introduced by researchers at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) in a recent study published in Journal of Physics: Complexity.

Phys.org > Computer Sciences Fitness centrality: New tool finds critical points in everything from cybersecurity to ecological conservation

Using network science, study shows music has become less complex

A team of Italian computer scientists from Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Padova reports that network science can be used to measure the complexity of a piece of music, allowing for comparison between genres. In their study, reported on the arXiv preprint server, the team used network science techniques to compare the complexity of types of music over time.

Phys.org > Computer Sciences Using network science, study shows music has become less complex

Initiative Aims to Enable Ethical Coding LLMs

AI coding assistants are quickly becoming indispensable tools for developers. But the provenance of the code they’re trained on is often murky, leading to concerns around transparency and author rights. A new initiative launched yesterday by the nonprofit Software Heritage hopes to change this by providing the world’s largest repository of ethically sourced code for training AI. The large language models (LLM) that underlie chatbots and coding assistants are trained on vast reams of data scraped from the Internet. But AI developers rarely provide details of what’s included in their training datasets, says Roberto Di Cosmo, director of Software Heritage. This makes it hard to reproduce ..

IEEE Spectrum > Computing

Humanoid robots join human musicians for synchronized musical performances

In a fascinating blend of technology and artistry, researchers present a study in PeerJ Computer Science, showcasing how humanoid robots can collaborate seamlessly with human musicians during live musical performances. This innovative work highlights the evolving role of robotics in entertainment and creativity.

Phys.org > Computer Sciences Humanoid robots join human musicians for synchronized musical performances

New Neural Network Slashes Sensor Data Overload

Modern technology collects vast amounts of data from sensors, with one estimate placing global data from Internet of Things devices at about 73 zettabytes (or 73 trillion gigabytes) in 2025. And as more data are collected, the infrastructure required to store, transfer, and run compute on that data also grows. But what if, instead of collecting all possible data from a sensor, we could be more selective, collecting just enough data to accurately identify whatever we’re looking for? That’s the approach proposed by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and MIT. Their paper, recently published in Nature Scientific Reports, demonstrates how a neural network can achieve an accuracy of ..

IEEE Spectrum > Artificial Intelligence

The Download: China’s DeepSeek, and useful quantum computing

This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How a top Chinese AI model overcame US sanctions The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model.  The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which…

MIT Technology Review The Download: China’s DeepSeek, and useful quantum computing