Lifeboat Foundation

A radical discovery by researchers at Harvard and Raytheon BBN Technology about graphene’s hidden properties could lead to a model system to explore exotic phenomena like black holes and high-energy plasmas, as well as novel thermoelectric devices.

Continue reading “A black hole on a chip made of a metal that behaves like water” »

Jungsang Kim is trying to create a quantum computer by controlling the frequency of a laser to within a millionth of a percent.

According to David DiVincenzo, a prominent computer scientist at IBM, researchers must meet five criteria to create a true quantum computing device.

First, Kim needs a well-defined system that can represent different states. For example, classical computers use small electrical switches made out of semiconductors to indicate a 1 or a 0. But because an atom’s quantum spin can point in an infinite number of directions, controlling its state with a high degree of reliability is very difficult. Kim’s group has demonstrated this feat with an accuracy on par with anyone in the world.

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This is one that truly depends on the targeted audience. I still believe that the 1st solely owned & operated female robotics company will make billions.

Beyond correct pronunciation, there is the even larger challenge of correctly placing human qualities like inflection and emotion into speech. Linguists call this “prosody,” the ability to add correct stress, intonation or sentiment to spoken language.

Today, even with all the progress, it is not possible to completely represent rich emotions in human speech via artificial intelligence. The first experimental-research results — gained from employing machinelearning algorithms and huge databases of human emotions embedded in speech — are just becoming available to speech scientists.

Continue reading “How designers are grappling with the challenges of creating a computer ‘personality’” »

Radiation works as a ‘tuning fork’ to control the spin of electrons.

Scientists have found a new way of moving information between quantum bits in a computer. They used a highly purified sample of silicon doped with bismuth atoms (left) before fitting a superconducting aluminium resonator to it (middle and right).

Continue reading “Could microwaves finally crack quantum computing?” »

Theoretical physicists at MIT recently reported a quantum computer design featuring an array of superconducting islands on the surface of a topological insulator. They propose basing both quantum computation and error correction on the peculiar behavior of electrons at neighboring corners of these islands and their ability to interact across islands at a distance. “The lowest energy state of this system is a very highly entangled quantum state, and it is this state that can be used to encode and manipulate qubits,” says graduate student Sagar Vijay, lead co-author of the paper on the proposed system, with senior author Liang Fu, associate professor of physics at MIT, and Timothy H. Hsieh PhD ’15. As Vijay explains it, the proposed system can encode logical qubits that can be read by shining light on them. At the simplest level of explanation, the system can characterize the state of a quantum bit as a zero or a one based on whether there is an odd or even number of electrons associated with a superconducting quantum bit, but the underlying physical interactions that allow this are highly complex.

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Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years.

Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving.

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“Computers are becoming more and more intelligent in the sense that they adapt to us.”

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Frankly brainwashing tactics never worked with me. I am not sure what the media is up to; but this is truly become a bit ridiculous. Up until last week; the media and dooms day believers where telling everyone in the next 10 years; most of the jobs would no longer be held by humans. Until me and a few other folks on the web started sharing the facts on why that was not a reality. So, recently, the journalists new story is in 30 years most of the jobs will be taken by robots.

Again, we will settle down from the hype and learn that the reality is people will have jobs because new careers will be created plus some of the corporate and special skilled jobs that we have today have too much access to IP and other private information. And, this type of information most companies will want some level of human oversight managing the information and operations around it. Also, we will see that in order to keep creativity and real innovation moving forward that we will always need humans involved.

Continue reading “Machines could make half of humans unemployed in 30 years” »

The pace at which robots and intelligent machines are able to take over the jobs traditionally performed by humans will result in more than half the population being unemployed within 30 years, an expert in computing has predicted.

While some may look forward to a life of leisure, many others face the dismal prospect of long-term unemployment as a result of the rise of smart machines, from self-driving cars and intelligent drones to smart financial-trading machines, said Moshe Vardi, professor of computational engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

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