全球資訊新聞導讀

Global Information Technology News

  1. Course Number: 210174
  2. Course Objectives: This course gives a broad view of global information technology news. Students will collect and study news reports from all over the world, and highlight key concepts for oral discussion. After a semester of reading and speaking, students will be familiar with key concepts in IT as well as proficient at English presentation.
  3. Time: Wednesday 08:10-11:00
  4. Classroom: TC-321
  5. Students: 29
  6. Instructor Office Hour: Wednesday 14:10-16:00, TC-213-1
  7. Teaching Approach: Reading Assignment, Presentation, Group Discussion
  8. Grading criteria:
  9. 彈性教學 Flexible Studying
  10. Textbook:
  11. References:
    1. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr.
    2. 閱讀課 : 與孩子共讀15篇商業周刊好文章
    3. 大前研一, "思考的技術"
  12. Teaching Assistant tasks: Homework Evaluation, Presentation Rehearsals

Syllabus

  1. Photonic Integrated Circuit
  2. AI in Industry
    1. Arjun Kharpal, "Jeff Bezos says AI is in an industrial bubble", CNBC, October 3, 2025.
    2. Jason Ma, "‘Godfather of AI’ says the technology will create massive unemployment and send profits soaring — ‘that is the capitalist system’", Fortune, September 7, 2025.
    3. Elissa Welle, "Data Centers May House AI—But Operators Don’t Trust AI (Yet) - Data-center engineers are skeptical of putting AI in charge", IEEE Spectrum, August 28, 2025.
    4. Noor Al-Sibai, "Desperate Companies Now Hiring Humans to Fix What AI Botched", Futurism, September 2025.
    5. "20 emerging jobs created by artificial intelligence (AI) in 2025", RoboticsBiz, January 18, 2025.
  3. Robot
    1. Yomiuri Shimbun, "7-Eleven Begins Trial of Robots for Stocking, Floor Cleaning; Company Expects New Machines to Cut Employee Workload by About 30%, The Japan News, September 10, 2025.
    2. Rebecca Cairns, "Could AI nursing robots help health care staffing shortages?", CNN, September 12, 2025.
    3. Nick Glass and Matthew , "Would you have surgery at hands of a robot?, CNN, August 5, 2013.
  4. AI in English Learning
    1. "Artificial intelligence and English language teaching: Preparing for the future", British Council, July 2024.
    2. NKUST, "HKUST Secures $30 Million Grant to Develop AI-Powered English Learning System", January 18, 2025.
    3. Christine Bedwell, "Improve your English using AI", Studio Classroom, September 1st, 2025.
      1. QuizLet lets you create vocabulary flash card or use sets made by others. It also turns studying into a game, making learning fun and helping you remember words better. Quizlet is a great tool for reviewing vocabulary and helping you prepare for tests.
      2. Write & Improve offers various writing tasks and provides instant feedback to help you improve.
      3. Microsoft Reading Coach uses passages at different levels to improve your reading speed and pronunciation. It records your reading and then identifies words that were pronounced wrong. You can listen to the correct pronunciation and practice until you get it right.
      4. Record your speech into SpeechTexter, which writes down what it hears you say. Paste this text and your written speech into DiffChecker to see where the two texts are different. This shows you whcih words you didn't pronounce correctly so you can practice.
      5. Use SmallTalk2Me to practice conversing in English without any stress.
  5. Cybersecurity
    1. React2Shell
    2. Vas Panagiotopoulos, "US Investment in Spyware Is Skyrocketing", WIRED, September 10, 2025.
      3.
    3. Tereza Pultarova, "White Hat Hackers Reveal Vulnerabilites in Software Used by NASA, IEEE Spectrum, September 10, 2025.
    4. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, "The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++", The Register, November 8, 2024.
    5. Mattathias Schwartz, "Federal Courts Slow to Fix Vulnerable System After Repeated Hacking", New York Times, September 3, 2025.
    6. Jason Aten, "Why Google Is Really Warning 2.5 Billion Gmail Users to Stop Using Their Passwords", MSN, September 2, 2025.
    7. Jean-Yves Marion, "Ransomware: Extortion Is My Business, Communications of the ACM, April 24, 2025.
    8. The accident that created the world's first computer virus, BBC, July 25, 2023.
    9. Ralph Langner, "To Kill a Centrifuge: A Technical Analysis of What Stuxnet's Creators Tried to Achieve", June 13, 2016.
  6. 2023 Turing Award Laureate: Robert Metcalfe
    1. Podcast
    2. Transcript
  7. Video Game
    1. Paul Hatton, "What is Unreal Engine 5? Everything you need to know", Creative Bloq, August 20, 2025.
    2. Stav Dimitropoulos, "Why Hollywood needs computer games tech more than ever", BBC, July 10, 2020.
    3. Mash Yang, "Volvo uses Unreal Engine to build the in-car interface for its next electric flagship", mashdigi, June 1, 2022.
    4. [YouTube] Thomas Brush, "Which Game Engine Is Best In 2025? UNITY vs. UNREAL?", YouTube, July 18, 2025.
  8. Drone
  9. Internet of Things (IoT)
    1. Tereza Pultarova, "Old Smartphones Get New Life as Tiny Data Centers - Even decade-old phones can still outperform IoT-specific devices", IEEE Spectrum, June 24, 2025.
    2. Ryan Daws, "Eseye: Why the true cost of IoT connectivity is often hidden", IoT News, August 11, 2025.
    3. Ryan Daws, "CSA releases Zigbee 4 and Suzi standards for IoT resilience", IoT News, November 19, 2025.
    4. Ryan Daws, "Can one AI model run your robotic fleet?", IoT News, November 10, 2025.
    5. David Thomas, "Three inspirations from the age of IBM Watson IoT", IoT News, May 2, 2025.
    6. Bob Violino, "IoT breakthrough lets battery-free devices power up from environment", CNBC, March 10, 2025.
    7. Bob Violino, "Walmart is deploying millions of IoT sensors across U.S.", CNBC, October 15, 2025.
    8. Tiffany McDowell, "IoT technology in 2025: Emerging trends and insights", Telnyx, October 1, 2025.
      • Well, this is basically an article published by Telnyx to promote their eSim API.
    9. Haltian, "Sustainability in IoT - is it environmentally sound?", Haltian, October 14, 2024.
    10. Ryan Daws, "Synopsys and NVIDIA launch digital twin of F1 racetrack, IoT news, September 29, 2025.
  10. 11/5 Open Source
    1. Peter Ray Allison, "Open Source Promises Advantages for Business Applications", ComputerWeekly, March 11, 2024.
    2. Russ Cox, "Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security", Communications of the ACM, September 19, 2025.
  11. 11/12 CPU
    1. Carla Tardi, "Understanding Moore's Law: Is It Still Relevant in 2025?", Investopedia, August 13, 2025.
    2. Stephen Shankland, Apple's Brainiest Mac Chip So Far, the M2 Ultra, Means No More Intel, CNET, June 5, 2023.
    3. MATTHEW CONNATSER, For Intel's Meteor Lake, the tech inside is more important than the overall product, XDA Newsletter, October 1, 2023.
    4. Catalin Cimpanu, Intel CPUs impacted by new Zombieload side-channel attack, ZDNet, May 14, 2019.
  12. GPU
  13. Cooling System
    1. Wes Fenlon, Overclocking a CPU to 7 GHz with the science of liquid nitrogen, PC GAMER, June 10, 2017.
    2. Niels Broekhuijsen, How to Install a Waterblock on a GPU: Liquid Cooling Your Graphics Card, time's HARDWARE, August 28, 2020.
    3. Jacob Ridley, MSI prototypes for the future of graphics card cooling look impressive and expensive, PC GAMER, May 30, 2023.
  14. DPU
    1. Janakiram MSV, What Is A Data Processing Unit (DPU) And Why Is NVIDIA Betting On It?, Forbes, October 11, 2020.
    2. John Russell, Hot Chips: Here Come the DPUs and IPUs from Arm, Nvidia and Intel, HPCwire, August 25, 2021.
  15. TPU
    1. 今周刊, "Google TPU 逆襲輝達 GPU！AI 晶片霸主之爭進入第二回合，誰將勝出？", TechNews, December 6, 2025.
    2. Sebastian Moss, Project Suncatcher: Google to launch TPUs into orbit with Planet Labs, envisions 1km arrays of 81-satellite compute clusters, Data Center Dynamics, November 4, 2025.
    3. Joe Osborne, Google's Tensor Processing Unit explained: this is what the future of computing looks like, TechRadar, August 23, 2016.
    4. Anton Shilov, ASUS & Google Team Up for ‘Tinker Board’ AI-Focused Credit-Card Sized Computers,AnandTech, November 12, 2019.
  16. 11/19 Neural Net
    1. Matthew S. Smith, "Topographic Neural Networks Help AI See Like a Human", IEEE Spectrum, July 8, 2025.
      • Humanlike behavior doesn’t mean better performance, but it does reduce energy.
      • CNNs remained the king of image classification with an accuracy at 43.2 percent.
      • Energy efficiency wasn’t their primary goal. They hope that new neural network architectures, will provide a more complete framework for understanding intelligence—both artificial and human.
    2. Anne Trafton, "Study urges caution when comparing neural networks to the brain", MIT News, November 2, 2022.
      • As the neural network analyzes huge amounts of data, the weights of connections to other nodes change as the network learns to perform the desired task.
      • Path integration is the task to predict an animal’s next location based on a given starting point and a velocity.
      • Researchers found that neural networks only produced grid-cell-like activity when they were given very specific constraints
      • Neural networks have many parameters, so getting them to replicate an existing result is not as surprising.
    3. Ian Sample, "Nobel Prize in physics awarded to AI pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton", The Guardian, October 8, 2024.
    4. Ali Behrouz, Student Researcher, and Vahab Mirrokni, "Introducing Nested Learning: A new ML paradigm for continual learning", Google Research Blog, November 7, 2025.
      • L2 regression loss
      • Titans architecture
    5. Will Knight, "Liquid AI Is Redesigning the Neural Network", WIRED, October 23, 2024.
    6. David Beer, "AI will soon become impossible for humans to comprehend – the story of neural networks tells us why", The Conversation, March 31, 2023. (4000 words)
    7. Oluwaseyi Taiwo, "The Cutting Edge of Machine Learning: What’s New in 2025", Medium, March 23, 2025.
    8. Natalie Wolchover, "New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Learning", Quanta Magazine, September 21, 2017.
      • An old article. Is the "Information Bottleneck" theory proved to be true or false?
    9. Victor Zhou, Machine Learning for Beginners: An Introduction to Neural Networks, MARCH 3, 2019.
    10. Tiernan Ray, Intel architect Koduri says every chip will be a neural net processor, ZDNet, August 19, 2021.
    11. Josh Taylor and Alex Hern, ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers of misinformation, The Guardian, May 2, 2023.
  17. 11/26 Quantum Computing
  18. LaTeX
    1. Leslie Lamport - Turing Award Laureate, 2014.
    2. Overleaf, Online LaTeX Editor
    3. Brian Rushton, How should LaTeX be taught to university students?, Mathematics Educators Stack Exchange, March 19, 2014.
    4. Leslie Lamport, "Password Authentication with Insecure Communication", Communications of the ACM 24.11 (November 1981), pp.770-772.
  19. Programmers
    1. Sebastian Nicolajsen and Claus Brabrand, "What Is Programming?", Commmunications of the ACM, May 6, 2025.
    2. Vinton G. Cerf, ACM and the Professional Programmer, Communications of the ACM, August 2014, Vol. 57 No. 8, Page 7 doi:10.1145/2639107
    3. Bertrand Meyer, AI Does Not Help Programmers, BLOG@CACM, June 3, 2023.
    4. 何佩珊, 台灣「未來獨角獸」報到，軟體黃金10年來了, BusinessWeekly Vol. 1863, pp.66-87, July 31, 2023.
  20. 12/3 ChatBot
    1. Andrew R. Chow, "ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study", TIME, June 23, 2025.
    2. Joel R. McConvey, "Calls for chatbot age assurance increase as allegations of self-harm, psychosis grow", Biometric Update, November 10, 2025.
    3. Mike Isaac, "OpenAI Races to Quell Concerns Over Its Finances", New York Times, November 6, 2025.
    4. Nandini Asavari Bharadwaj & Adam Kenneth Dubé, "Rate my AI teacher? Students’ perceptions of chatbots will influence how they learn with AI", The Conversation, October 25, 2025.
    5. Cade Metz and Karen Weise, "A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse", New York Times, May 9, 2025.
    6. Chirag Shah, "From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science with Humans in the Loop", Communications of the ACM, May 9, 2025.
    7. A Factual Error by Bard AI Chatbot Just Cost Google $100 Billion, TIME Magazine.
    8. Natalie Sherman, Google's Bard AI bot mistake wipes $100bn off shares, BBC, February 8, 2023.
    9. Eric Griffith, GPT-4 vs. ChatGPT-3.5: What’s the Difference?, PC Magazine, March 16, 2023.
    10. Herbert Bruderer, Is Bard Better than ChatGPT?" BLOG@CACM, July 17, 2023.
    11. AMRITANSHU MUKHERJEE, OpenAI Could Go Bankrupt By 2024 Due To ChatGPT, AUGUSTMAN, August 14, 2023.
    12. Philippa Wain, Chatbots: Why does White House want hackers to trick AI? BBC, August 6, 2023.
    13. AVI STAIMAN, "Academic Publishers Are Missing the Point on ChatGPT", The Scholarly Kitchen, March 31, 2023.
    14. Clare Duffy, Google rolls out a major expansion of its Bard AI chatbot, CNN, September 19, 2023.
  21. Code Generator
    1. Samuel Greengard, "AI Rewrites Coding," Communications of the ACM, April 2023, Vol. 66 No. 4, Pages 12-14. doi:10.1145/3583083
    2. CodePal
    3. GitHub Copilot
    4. Alex McFarland, 10 Best AI Code Generators, Unite.AI, August 1, 2023.
  22. Quantum Communication
  23. CS Education
  24. Turing Test
    1. Turing Test 75th Anniversary Celebration

News Source

  1. The Verge
  2. ACM TechNews
  3. WIRED
  4. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
  5. CNN Technology
  6. BBC Technology
  7. CNET
  8. ZDNet
  9. PC Magazine
  10. Wall Street Journal Technology (Podcast)
  11. The New York Times Technology
  12. The Guardian Technology
  13. Tech & Learning
  14. Business Weekly Taiwan)
  15. Bloomberg Businessweek

Reference:

  1. BBC Learning English
  2. Better Writing through Appropriate Vocabulary and Grammar (Activity about "Semantic Markers")
  3. 政治及財經新聞解讀
  4. Journalism on Coursera