Computer scientists develop open-source tool for dramatically speeding up the programming language Python

A team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, led by Emery Berger, recently unveiled a prize-winning Python profiler called Scalene. Programs written with Python are notoriously slow—up to 60,000 times slower than code written in other programming languages—and Scalene works to efficiently identify exactly where Python is lagging, allowing programmers to troubleshoot …

Mineralogy meets zero-shot computer vision

Identifying minerals is a complex and time-consuming problem for geologists, often taking anywhere from 30 minutes to several days per sample. Further complicating the situation is the fact that a sufficient portion of minerals remain inadequately researched, leaving us with just a few hundred comprehensively characterized out of the 6,000 currently identified minerals.