Lifeboat Foundation

To many people, the introduction of the first Macintosh computer and its graphical user interface in 1984 is viewed as the dawn of creative computing. But if you ask Dr. Nick Montfort, a poet, computer scientist, and assistant professor of Digital Media at MIT, he’ll offer a different direction and definition for creative computing and its origins.

Defining Creative

“Creative Computing was the name of a computer magazine that ran from 1974 through 1985. Even before micro-computing there was already this magazine extolling the capabilities of the computer to teach, to help people learn, help people explore and help them do different types of creative work, in literature, the arts, music and so on,” Montfort said.

“It was a time when people had a lot of hope that computing would enable people personally as artists and creators to do work. It was actually a different time than we’re in now. There are a few people working in those areas, but it’s not as widespread as hoped in the late 70’s or early 80s.”

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Trong Toan Tran states: “Ultimately we want to build a ‘plug and play’ device that can generate single photons on demand…” #QuantumComputing.

A team of UTS researchers has made a major breakthrough that could pave the way for the next generation of quantum communications.

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Who needs a peep hole when a wifi network will do? Researchers from MIT have developed technology that uses wireless signals to see your silhouette through a wall—and it can even tell you apart from other people, too.

The team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are no strangers to using wireless signals to see what’s happening on the other side of a wall. In 2013, they showed off software that could use variations in wifi signal to detect the presence of human motion from the other side of a wall. But in the last two years they’ve been busy developing the technique, and now they’ve unveiled the obvious — if slightly alarming — natural progression: they can use the wireless reflections bouncing off a human body to see the silhouette of a person standing behind a wall.

Not only that, the team’s technique, known is RF-Capture, is accurate enough to track the hand of a human and, with some repeated measurements, the system can even be trained to recognise different people based just on their wifi silhouette. The research, which is to be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia next month, was published this morning on the research group’s website.

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Microsoft’s Surface Book in under a minute.

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http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-10-25

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Even D-Wave’s detractors are starting to feel like quantum computers are getting close, though only for some applications.

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Theoretical physicists have proposed a scalable quantum computer architecture. The new model, developed by Wolfgang Lechner, Philipp Hauke and Peter Zoller, overcomes fundamental limitations of programmability in current approaches that aim at solving real-world general optimization problems by exploiting quantum mechanics.

Within the last several years, considerable progress has been made in developing a quantum computer, which holds the promise of solving problems a lot more efficiently than a classical computer. Physicists are now able to realize the basic building blocks, the quantum bits (qubits) in a laboratory, control them and use them for simple computations. For practical application, a particular class of quantum computers, the so-called adiabatic quantum computer, has recently generated a lot of interest among researchers and industry. It is designed to solve real-world optimization problems conventional computers are not able to tackle. All current approaches for adiabatic quantum computation face the same challenge: The problem is encoded in the interaction between qubits; to encode a generic problem, an all-to-all connectivity is necessary, but the locality of the physical quantum bits limits the available interactions.

“The programming language of these systems is the individual interaction between each physical qubit. The possible input is determined by the hardware. This means that all these approaches face a fundamental challenge when trying to build a fully programmable quantum computer,” explains Wolfgang Lechner from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck.

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You might not be able to control the 7Bot robotic arm with your mind or your eyes, but at least it’ll only cost you around $350 — cheaper than an iPhone, its creators point out — to get one. Even better, you don’t need to know how to code to program it: just physically guide the arm or use a gesture control device like a Kinect or a Leap motion sensor to make it mimic your movements. In the video below the fold and on its Kickstarter page, you can see it doing calligraphy after a team member’s grandfather physically taught it how. The team also managed make it paint cherry blossoms and do basic mathematics, and we’ll bet you can teach it other productive things, like how to terrorize your cat.

If you prefer the more hands-off approach, you can remotely control it using its 3D visualization app on a computer. And, in case you’re more tech-savvy than the average user, you can program it using the C and C++ open source APIs the 7Bot team provides. In addition to the basic model, the team also offers packages with more features, such as a version with two arms and one that comes with a 3D printer, though they’re also understandably more expensive. According to its campaign page, rewards should start shipping out as soon as January 2016, but as always, it’s best not to treat Kickstarter and other crowdfunding websites as a store.

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In the television series Star Trek, virtual reality-chambers called “holodecks” take humans into computer-generated worlds where they interact with avatars — and with each other. Imagine being able to visit a distant planet or Tahiti during your lunch break. In Star Trek, holodecks come into existence in the 24th century and reproduce all sensory perceptions, including touch and smell.

Chambers that replicate the touch and feel of solid materials are still a decade or two away. But virtual reality worlds that are amazingly similar to what we saw in Star Trek are already here. Hundreds of companies are working on virtual reality hardware, software, applications and content. I expect that 2016 will be the year when we start visiting exotic lands from the comfort of our offices and living rooms.

There are several technology developments which are bringing the future to us ahead of the Star Trek schedule. For starters, there is what is called “full-immersion virtual reality.” These are systems that take us out of the real world, into an entirely different digital realm. We hear stereo sounds and see panoramic displays that are so convincing that users lose track of time and space (they also, until very recently, suffered from serious nausea and motion sickness). Facebook’s Oculus Rift is the leading immersive virtual reality (VR) system but numerous others are either on the market or in the works.

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