Lifeboat Foundation

Linksys, a division within Belkin International and Foxconn Interconnect Technology, has announced that it is offering a new motion detection service with its mesh Wi-Fi routers. As part of its announcement, the company said that the service will be subscription-based and will only be available (for now) with its Linksys Velop Tri-Band AC2200 routers. The new service is called Linksys Aware.

Mesh routers are designed to be placed in multiple locations in a home or business to ensure that there are no dead spots. Since the signals create a signal mesh, software in the routers detect how the signals are bounced around, creating imprints of individual rooms and what the signals look like. If signals are interrupted, it means that something is physically blocking them, such as a person. If such a blockage is detected, the routers can send a message to an app, also created by Linksys, alerting homeowners to a possible intruder.

Users who want the new service need only install the software on their current routers, along with the app—and then sign up to pay either $2.99 each month or $24.99 for a full year. The company is also offering a 90-day free trial of the service.

If the race for powerful A.I. is indeed a race among civilizations for control of the future, the United States and European nations should be spending at least 50 times the amount they do on public funding of basic A.I. research. Their model should be the research that led to the internet, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, created by the Eisenhower administration and arguably the most successful publicly funded science project in American history.

We need to stop pretending that Silicon Valley can compete with China on its own.

Researchers led by Delft University of Technology personnel have made two steps in the conversion of quantum states between signals in the microwave and optical domains. This is of great interest for connecting future superconducting quantum computers into a global quantum network. This week they report on their findings in Nature Physics and in Physical Review Letters.

Conversion between signals in the microwave and optical domains is of great interest, particularly for connecting future superconducting quantum computers into a global quantum network. Many leading efforts in quantum technologies, including superconducting qubits and quantum dots, share quantum information through photons in the microwave regime. While this allows for an impressive degree of quantum control, it also limits the distance the information can realistically travel before being lost to a mere few centimeters.

At the same time, the field of optical quantum communication has already seen demonstrations over distance scales capable of providing real-world applications. By transmitting information in the optical telecom band, fiber-based quantum networks over tens or even hundreds of kilometers can be envisaged. “In order to connect several quantum computing nodes over large distances into a quantum internet, it is therefore vital to be able to convert quantum information from the microwave to the optical domain, and back,” says Prof. Simon Groeblacher of Delft University of Technology. “This will not only be extremely interesting for quantum applications, but also for highly efficient, low-noise conversion between classical optical and electrical signals.”

In the past, a trip to the circus was nothing without seeing some exotic animals doing impressive tricks. But as we become more aware of human impact on the world, and more inclined to be careful about how we interact with other species on earth, the simple pleasure no longer seems so pure. In fact, using other animals for our enjoyment seems deeply unethical, and, for many, precludes any circus-related enjoyment.

But one innovative circus has come up with a solution to this problem. Wanting to enchant visitors with traditional shows of the past without having to make shady ethical calls, they’ve gone for a different approach. Instead of performing these tricks with living beings, they’ve used technical advancements to achieve beautiful effects — and the internet is loving it.

US tech firm is among first leading overseas multinationals to establish foothold in southern China boomtown.

This thorough review focuses on the impact of AI, 5G, and edge computing on the healthcare sector in the 2020s as well as a look at quantum computing’s potential impact on AI, healthcare, and financial services.

Researchers in the lab of UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi have enabled, for the first time, determining whether the person behind a wall is the same individual who appears in given video footage, using only a pair of WiFi transceivers outside.

This novel video-WiFi cross-modal gait-based person identification system, which they refer to as XModal-ID (pronounced Cross-Modal-ID), could have a variety of applications, from surveillance and security to smart homes. For instance, consider a scenario in which law enforcement has a video footage of a robbery. They suspect that the robber is hiding inside a house. Can a pair of WiFi transceivers outside the house determine if the person inside the house is the same as the one in the robbery video? Questions such as this have motivated this new technology.

Continue reading “Researchers’ new method enables identifying a person through walls from candidate video footage, using only WiFi” »

The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s Research Enterprise in Singapore, has announced the successful development of a commercially viable way to manufacture integrated Silicon III-V Chips with high-performance III-V devices inserted into their design.

In most devices today, silicon-based CMOS chips are used for computing, but they are not efficient for illumination and communications, resulting in low efficiency and heat generation. This is why current 5G mobile devices on the market get very hot upon use and would shut down after a short time.

This is where III-V semiconductors are valuable. III-V chips are made from elements in the 3rd and 5th columns of the elemental periodic table such as Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Indium Gallium Arsenide (InGaAs). Due to their unique properties, they are exceptionally well suited for optoelectronics (LEDs) and communications (5G etc) — boosting efficiency substantially.

While most of the attention has been on Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud, Tencent has also been working on cloud gaming. China’s biggest gaming company has been talking about letting people go from viewing live streams to playing along with the same streamer with just a click — without ever having to download the game.

One of the big reasons China is perfect for cloud gaming? 5G.

Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud are pushing cloud gaming, but Tencent could be the real one to watch.

Continue reading “Why China is the perfect place for cloud gaming to succeed” »