Entries by Falk Pollok

GPU-Accelerated Containers on Windows

A while ago I have already written a side note on external GPUs, but what could be a real game changer is Nvidia Container Toolkit support in the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 which available both on Windows 10 (Insider Preview) and 11. I recently got a Thinkpad P16 with an Nvidia Quadro RTX A4500 […]

Regarding Gifts: What is the Best Swag?

It is close to Christmas, so it is a fitting time to reflect on presents: To prepare my move from the US to Switzerland I came across some advertising gifts / swag I have collected over the years. Good ideas in this area are difficult to come up with, because companies should not give away […]

Machine Common Sense Through Embodied AI

I finally got approval to write about my work on the DARPA Machine Common Sense project. I was part of the MIT-Harvard-Stanford team and we built embodied agents for an ai2thor-based simulation environment with the goal of mimicking the cognitive abilities of young children, in particular regarding interaction with the environment, intuitive physics and goal […]

EXSUM: Engineering Excellence Reflection

I founded IBM’s internal Engineering Excellence work stream and grew it from a single man initiative to an executive-led program with multiple individual tracks endorsed by our SVP and director of Research. The executive leading it now, Danny Barnett, established a steering committee on which I have been serving and I was named one of […]

Notable Software Engineers

Who are the most notable software engineers? The following distinguished colleagues can be expected to pop up in many responses and are definitely inspiring role models to be aware of as a software engineer: Name Claim to Fame Anders Hejlsberg Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# Augusta Ada King / Ada Lovelace Contributions to Babbage’s Analytical Engine […]

What Lies Ahead Regarding Online and Remote Development

A lot has happened in the IDE space over the last 5 years – a quick journey through promising directions. Eclipse Che and Theia, Monaco Editor and Language Servers A little over six years ago in early 2016 Eclipse Che was released to the world, a radically new direction for Eclipse. Rather than the SWT-based […]

Nvidia Container Toolkit and Podman on Ubuntu 20.04

I did not immediately find a good tutorial on how to use the Nvidia Container Toolkit with Podman to be able to run GPU-accelerated containers. The solution turned out to be quite straightforward. First, you can install Podman as usual: Afterwards, you can install the Nvidia Container Toolkit as usual: However, before you can start […]

Musing on Brain Architecture

I need to find more time to look deeper into neuroscience again. A lot of the emphasis in Deep Learning has been on models of neurons starting from the McCulloch–Pitts (MCP) neuron in 1943 over Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron in 1958 to the Hodgkins-Huxley model which models action potentials in neurons and led to a Nobel […]