2016 Spring Contours

Light from a blue diode laser is reflected from two mirrors and enters an acousto-optic modulator (the small box in the center) in Al Meldrum’s (physics) luminescence spectroscopy lab. The modulator causes the initially continuous blue beam to become pulsed. The pulses can be as short as a few nanoseconds with up to tens of millions of pulses per second. Pulsed lasers are used for a wide variety of optical applications and for basic research into the time-dependent electronic properties of materials.

Professor Rolf Vinebrooke (biological sciences) introduces undergraduate students to various techniques used in the monitoring of lakes and streams. Pictured here prior to a plunge at Hasse Lake, the black and white Secchi disk is used to measure how much sunlight penetrates below the surface of the water. A well-known freshwater ecologist, Vinebrooke studies the impacts of global change on the biodiversity and ecosystem functioning of lakes.

A team of computing scientists led by University of Alberta grads have developed the first computer Go program capable of professional-level play. AlphaGo was developed by the team at Google DeepMind, led by UAlberta PhD grad David Silver (’09 Phd), AlphaGo was able to achieve a 99.8 per cent win rate against other Go programs and in March defeated human world Go champion Lee Sedol by four games to one—a feat previously thought to be at least a decade away. Read more here: Deep Minds master the game of Go.

Pictured here: University of Alberta computing science professors (L-R) Ryan Hayward, Martin Mueller, Rich Sutton, and Michael Bowling from the Computer Games and Reinforcement Learning research groups, who supervised AlphaGo researchers David Silver, Aja Huang, and Marc Lanctot during their time at the University of Alberta.