Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Japan, have developing an optical chip that can process photons in an infinite number of ways.

It’s a major step forward in creating a quantum computer to solve problems such as designing new drugs, superfast database searches, and performing otherwise intractable mathematics that aren’t possible for super computers.

The fully reprogrammable chip brings together a multitude of existing quantum experiments and can realise a plethora of future protocols that have not even been conceived yet, marking a new era of research for quantum scientists and engineers at the cutting edge of quantum technologies.

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The microprocessor inside a computer is a single multipurpose chip that has revolutionised people’s life, allowing them to use one machine to surf the web, check emails and keep track of finances.

Now, researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in Japan, have pulled off the same feat for light in the quantum world by developing an optical chip that can process photons in an infinite number of ways.

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For any computer, being able to manipulate information is essential, but for quantum computing, singling out one data location without influencing any of the surrounding locations is difficult. Now, a team of Penn State physicists has a method for addressing individual neutral atoms without changing surrounding atoms.

“There are a set of things that we have to have to do quantum computing,” said David S. Weiss, professor of physics. “We are trying to step down that list and meet the various criteria. Addressability is one step.”

Quantum computers are constructed and operate in completely different ways from the conventional digital computers used today. While conventional computers store information in bits, 1‘s and 0’s, quantum computers store information in qubits. Because of a strange aspect of quantum mechanics called superposition, a qubit can be in both its 0 and 1 state at the same time. The methods of encoding information onto neutral atoms, ions or Josephson junctions—electronic devices used in precise measurement, to create quantum computers—are currently the subject of much research. Along with superposition, quantum computers will also take advantage of the quantum mechanical phenomena of entanglement, which can create a mutually dependent group of qubits that must be considered as a whole rather than individually.

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As great as computers are at crunching their way through millions of numbers in just a few seconds, they’re not well known for having deep emotions or a sense of humour — until now. A new artificial intelligence system developed by Microsoft has been trained to spot the funniest submissions to the ongoing New Yorker cartoon caption competition. Indeed, the software has been developed partly out of necessity, with so many entries flooding in that the human editors can’t cope.

“The process of looking at 5,000 caption entries a week usually destroys [my editorial assistant’s] mind in about two years, and then I get a new one,” the New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff explained to Bloomberg. “It’s a little bit daunting. It’s like going snow blind; you go humour blind.”

That’s why Mankoff has been working alongside Microsoft researchers Dafna Shahaf and Eric Horvitz in developing the new humour-sensitive AI software. Of course, the program needs to be trained in what’s funny and what isn’t, because it doesn’t have an innate sense of what makes something witty: by feeding in thousands of previous submissions, the AI gets a large database of previous responses to work from.

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) website reports that two of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award (YFA) recipients have developed nanoscale electronic switches with reprogrammable features, similar to those at play in inter-neuron communication in the brain, which could find uses in next-generation reconfigurable electronic devices and brain-inspired computing.

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A 20-node BlueDBM Cluster (credit: Sang-Woo Jun et al./ISCA 2015)

There’s a big problem with big data: the huge RAM memory required. Now MIT researchers have developed a new system called “BlueDBM” that should make servers using flash memory as efficient as those using conventional RAM for several common big-data applications, while preserving their power and cost savings.

Here’s the context: Data sets in areas such as genomics, geological data, and daily twitter feeds can be as large as 5TB to 20 TB. Complex data queries in such data sets require high-speed random-access memory (RAM). But that would require a huge cluster with up to 100 servers, each with 128GB to 256GBs of DRAM (dynamic random access memory).

Continue reading “Cheap, power-efficient flash memory for big data without sacrificing speed” »

Technology » Forum Email Print Ban Killer Robots before They Become Weapons of Mass Destruction By Peter Asaro | August 7, 2015 Vladislav Ociacia/Thinkstock SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Last week the Future of Life Institute released a letter signed by some 1,500 artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and technology researchers. Among them were celebrities of science and the technology industry—Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak—along with public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett. The letter called for an international ban on offensive autonomous weapons, which could target and fire weapons without meaningful human control.

This week is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together killing over 200,000 people, mostly civilians. It took 10 years before the physicist Albert Einstein and philosopher Bertrand Russell, along with nine other prominent scientists and intellectuals, issued a letter calling for global action to address the threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. They were motivated by the atomic devastation in Japan but also by the escalating arms race of the Cold War that was rapidly and vastly increasing the number, destructive capability, and efficient delivery of nuclear arms, draining vast resources and putting humanity at risk of total destruction. They also note in their letter that those who knew the most about the effects of such weapons were the most concerned and pessimistic about their continued development and use.

The Future of Life Institute letter is significant for the same reason: It is signed by a large group of those who know the most about AI and robotics, with some 1,500 signatures at its release on July 28 and more than 17,000 today. Signatories include many current and former presidents, fellows and members of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the Association of Computing Machinery and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society; editors of leading AI and robotics journals; and key players in leading artificial-intelligence companies such as Google DeepMind and IBM’s Watson team. As Max Tegmark, Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor and a founder of the Future of Life Institute, told Motherboard, “This is the AI experts who are building the technology who are speaking up and saying they don’t want anything to do with this.”

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In the next half of this century, humans will be regularly engaging in sexual activity with robots, and maybe even falling in love with them, according to Helen Driscoll, a psychologist who specialises in sex and mate choices at the University of Sunderland in the UK.

Her comments came while discussing the technological advances that are making sex dolls more interactive than ever before, and they present a future eerily similar to that of the Joaquin Phoenix film Her, where the main character falls in love with an operating system on his computer (voiced by Scarlett Johansson no less, who could blame him?)

“As virtual reality becomes more realistic and immersive and is able to mimic and even improve on the experience of sex with a human partner; it is conceivable that some will choose this in preference to sex with a less than perfect human being,” Driscoll told David Watkinson from the Daily Mirror.

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Researchers from Berkeley Lab and Columbia University have created the world’s highest-performance single-molecule diode, using a combination of gold electrodes (yellow) and a “TDO” molecule (purple, with molecular structure on the left) in propylene carbonate, an ionic solution (light blue). The circuit symbols on the right represent a battery and an ammeter (A) to measure current flow. (credit: Brian Capozzi et al./Nature Nanotechnology)

A team of researchers from Berkeley Lab and Columbia University has created “the world’s highest-performance single-molecule diode,” using a combination of gold electrodes and an ionic solution.

The diode’s rectification ratio (ratio of forward to reverse current at fixed voltage) is in excess of 200, “a record for single-molecule devices,” says Jeff Neaton, Director of the Molecular Foundry, a senior faculty scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the Department of Physics at the University of California Berkeley and a member of the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute at Berkeley (Kavli ENSI).

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