Imre Bartos

In 1965 the engineer and future Intel co-founder Gordon Moore famously noticed that the number of transistors on microchips has been exponentially growing for several years, and predicted their unstoppable increase would thenceforward drive computing. Now known as “Moore’s law,” this remarkable forecast has largely held ever since. Given the constant changes and advances in making microchips, a consistent trend of exponential growth seems nothing short of miraculous.

On May 24, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) will resume its hunt for gravitational waves—tiny, periodic variations in the curvature of space and time created by distant, violent cosmic events such as two colliding black holes. Some would call gravitational-wave scientists lucky, based on their field’s remarkable series of transformative discoveries occurring in less than a decade’s time.

Abstract As engineered systems grow in complexity, there is an increasing need for automatic methods that can detect, diagnose, and even correct transient anomalies that inevitably arise and can be difficult or impossible to diagnose and fix manually.