ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Bob Metcalfe--engineer, entrepreneur, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin--is embarking on his sixth career, as a Computational Engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is always willing to tell the story of his first career, as a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where, in 1973, Metcalfe and then-graduate student David Boggs invented Ethernet, a standard for connecting computers over short distances. In the ensuing years, thanks in no small part to Metcalfe's entrepreneurship and advocacy, Ethernet has become the industry standard for local area networks. Leah Hoffmann spoke to Metcalfe about the development of Ethernet and what it has meant for the future of connectivity. You published your first paper about Ethernet in Communications in July 1976 (https://bit.ly/403Sxmm).

When he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe briefly considered pursuing a career in tennis. He was captain of the 1968–1969 MIT tennis team, which had a record of 15 wins and 4 losses, and he was ranked sixth in New England in doubles, even while taking classes and holding a programming job at defense contractor Raytheon. That, unfortunately, was not enough to make a go of it. "There's playing pros and there's teaching pros," Metcalfe says. "I could easily be a teaching pro, but that just seemed boring. Metcalfe wrote his undergraduate thesis on a bus coming back from a tennis match and submitted it to Minsky at the last possible moment. The tennis world's loss was the computer world's gain, however, as Metcalfe went on to become an Internet pioneer, develop Ethernet, and help get it named a networking standard, actions that earned him the 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award on the 50th anniversary of the invention of the technology.

ChatGPT warned me against asking legendary engineer Bob Metcalfe about his 1996 prediction that the internet would collapse. This came after I sought the chatbot's guidance on what questions to ask the man who this week received the ACM Turing Award, the $1 million prize dubbed the Nobel of computing. The AI oracle suggested I stick to quizzing him on his famous accomplishments--inventing Ethernet, starting the 3Com Corporation, codifying the value of networks, and teaching students in Texas about innovation, which he did until he retired last year "to pursue a sixth career." But ChatGPT thought it was a terrible idea to bring up Metcalfe's bold prognostication, just as the network he'd helped pioneer was taking off, that the volume of bits zipping around the internet would cause the mother of all crashes. OpenAI's black box told me that since Metcalfe's guess had flopped in a very public manner, I'd be risking the honoree's pique if I raised it, and from then on he'd be too annoyed to share his best thoughts.

Currently, there are no convincing proxies for the fundamentals of cryptocurrency assets. We propose a new market-to-fundamental ratio, the price-to-utility (PU) ratio, utilizing unique blockchain accounting methods. We then proxy various fundamental-to-market ratios by Bitcoin historical data and find they have little predictive power for short-term bitcoin returns. However, PU ratio effectively predicts long-term bitcoin returns. We verify PU ratio valuation by unsupervised and supervised machine learning. The valuation method informs investment returns and predicts bull markets effectively. Finally, we present an automated trading strategy advised by the PU ratio that outperforms the conventional buy-and-hold and market-timing strategies. We distribute the trading algorithms as open-source software via Python Package Index for future research.

LONDON - Thousands of protesters greeted President Donald Trump's U.K. visit with anger and British irony Tuesday, crowding London's government district while the U.S. leader met Prime Minister Theresa May nearby. Feminists, environmentalists, peace activists, trade unionists and others demonstrated against the lavish royal welcome being given to a president they see as a danger to the world, chanting "Say it loud, say it clear, Donald Trump's not welcome here." "I'm very cross he's here," said guitar teacher Katie Greene, carrying a home-made sign reading "keep your grabby hands off our national treasures" under a picture of one of Queen Elizabeth II's corgis. My sign is flippant and doesn't say the things I'd really like to say." A day of protests began with the flying of a giant blimp depicting the president as an angry orange baby, which rose from the grass of central London's Parliament Square. One group came dressed in the red cloaks and bonnets of characters from Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," which is set in a dystopian, misogynist future America. Demonstrators filled Trafalgar Square and spilled down Whitehall, a street lined with imposing government offices, before marching half a mile to Parliament. Many paused to photograph a robotic likeness of Trump sitting on a golden toilet, cellphone in hand. The robot caught the attention of passers-by with its recitation of catchphrases including "No collusion" and "You are fake news." "It's 16 feet high, so it's as large as his ego," said Don Lessem from Philadelphia, who built the statue from foam over an iron frame and had it shipped by boat across the Atlantic. Lessem, a dinosaur expert who makes models of prehistoric creatures, said "I'm interested in things that are big, not very intelligent and have lost their place in history." "I wanted people here to know that people in America do not support Trump in the majority .

When it comes to making predictions about technology it's easy to end up looking daft. Take Thomas Watson, who was chairman of IBM in 1943 when he boldly claimed: "There's a world market for maybe five computers." Some 75 years later, it's fair to say his forecast was a little out. Or how about the president of the Michigan Savings Bank, who advised his clients not to invest in the Ford Motor Company, saying: "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty -- a fad." My favourite example is an engineer called Robert Metcalfe who grabbed headlines worldwide in the mid-Nineties for predicting that the internet would "catastrophically collapse" in 1996.

Under CEO Ginni Rometty's leadership, IBM has been undergoing its riskiest transformation since the Gerstner era. With massive bets on artificial intelligence, blockchain, and quantum computing, Big Blue is essentially using its massive inertia and deep pockets as the bluest chip in tech to drive innovation forward. After a few years questioning IBM's ability to execute on this world-changing vision, I trekked to the IBM Think 2018 conference – the company's largest conference ever, now that it has rolled its InterConnect, Edge, World of Watson, and PartnerWorld conferences into one massive Las Vegas shindig. The central lesson of the show: while IBM's bets are both massive and risky, it has chosen its bets wisely – hoping to get into the ground floor of world-changing trends that each promise to follow Moore's Law patterns of exponential growth. True, IBM still carries the baggage of legacy products and business models, and the Big Blue battleship is slow to turn, but if any of its bets pay off, IBM will once again be at the top of its game.

LAS VEGAS – IBM's Think 2018 conference, the first-of-its-kind rollup of five older conferences--IBM World of Watson, InterConnect, Edge, Amplify and Connect--has attracted more than 35,000 people representing most of the countries in the world to the Mandalay Bay Conference Center this week. "This is officially the largest event in IBM's history!" Ginny Rometty (pictured, with Dave McKay of Royal Canadian Bank), who holds the gold trifecta titles of CEO, chairman and president of the most venerable IT company on the globe, said March 20 in her opening remarks. While it's true that all the other topics that bring people together at a major show like this include security, networking, servers, processors, cloud services, automation, software development and many more, at the core of it all remains one simple entity: Watson, the IBM stake in the ground of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. Make no mistake about it: IBM is into a lot of business use cases, but it's now made Watson its beating heart, impacting virtually all parts of its business. 'Be the Disruptor, Rather than the Disrupted' Rometty captured well the theme of the conference in her first few sentences on stage.