Lifeboat Foundation

Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author and futurist, crossed paths with the scientists of the Bell System on numerous occasions. In 1945, he concurrently, but independently, conceived of the first concept for a communications satellite at the same time as Bell Labs scientist, John Robinson Pierce too, was a science fiction writer. To avoid any conflict with his day job at Bell Labs, Pierce published his stories under the pseudonym J.J. Coupling.

In the early 1960s, Clarke visited Pierce at Bell Labs. During his visit, Clarke saw and heard the voice synthesis experiments going on at the labs by John L. Kelly and Max Mathews, including Mathews’ computer vocal version of “Bicycle Built for Two”. Clarke later incorporated this singing computer into the climactic scene in the screenplay for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the computer HAL9000 sings the same song. According to Bob Lucky, another Bell Labs scientist, on the same visit, Clarke also saw an early Picturephone, and incorporated that into 2001 as well.

Continue reading “Interview with author/futurist Arthur C. Clarke, from an AT&T-MIT Conference, 1976” »

Advances in brain-computer interface technology are impressive, but we’re not close to anything resembling mind control.

Beating the previous record of 127 qubits.

IBM unveiled its most powerful quantum computer to date at the IBM Summit 2022 on Wednesday. Named “Osprey,” the 433 qubit processor has the largest qubit count of any IBM processor and is triple the size of the company’s previously record-breaking 127-qubit Eagle processor.

“The new 433 qubit ‘Osprey’ processor brings us a step closer to the point where quantum computers will be used to tackle previously unsolvable problems,” said Dr. Darío Gil, senior vice president of IBM and Director of Research.

The cloud is everywhere, in almost every piece of technology we use. It powers all the ways we live and learn and play!

But what is the cloud? Imagine a massive network spanning the globe, with millions of computers all working to make our technology tick.

That network lives in hundreds of Microsoft datacenters around the world!

In 1994, the computer scientist Peter Shor discovered that if quantum computers were ever invented, they would decimate much of the infrastructure used to protect information shared online. That frightening possibility has had researchers scrambling to produce new, “post-quantum” encryption schemes, to save as much information as they could from falling into the hands of quantum hackers.

Earlier this year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology revealed four finalists in its search for a post-quantum cryptography standard. Three of them use “lattice cryptography” — a scheme inspired by lattices, regular arrangements of dots in space.

Lattice cryptography and other post-quantum possibilities differ from current standards in crucial ways. But they all rely on mathematical asymmetry. The security of many current cryptography systems is based on multiplication and factoring: Any computer can quickly multiply two numbers, but it could take centuries to factor a cryptographically large number into its prime constituents. That asymmetry makes secrets easy to encode but hard to decode.

Science Applications International Corporation years ago began work on the Cloud One program — a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Virginia-based company at the time said it would transition approximately 800 Air Force and Army mission applications to the cloud.

The teasing of Cloud One Next comes as the Defense Department readies a potential $9 billion cloud computing contract known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and as leaders advocate for greater uptake of digital ecosystems.

JWCC, as it’s known, is expected to be awarded in December, some eight months after its initial deadline. The arrangement is meant to beef up the Defense Department’s capabilities by bridging unclassified, secret and top-secret tranches while still reaching the military’s most remote edge. It’s also a crucial piece of Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the department’s vision of seamless information sharing and international coordination.

Staying ahead of the emerging trend of serverless software development, Alibaba Cloud is making its key cloud products serverless to enable customers to concentrate on product deployment and development without worrying about managing servers and infrastructure. Essentially, Alibaba Cloud’s updated products focus on turning computing power into an on-demand capability for users.

Examples of these are the cloud native database PolarDB, the cloud-native data warehouse AnalyticDB (ADB) and ApsaraDB for Relational Database Service (RDS). Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s serverless technologies, customers can enjoy automatic scaling with extreme elasticity based on actual workloads and a pay-as-you-go billing model to reduce costs. The automatic elastic scaling time on demands can be as little as one second. The use of updated database products can help businesses in the internet industry reduce their costs by 50%, on average, compared to using traditional ones. Currently, Alibaba Cloud has more than 20 serverless key products in total and is adding more product categories to become serverless.

Alibaba Cloud also upgraded its ODPS (Open Data Platform and Services), a self-developed integrated data analytics and intelligent computing platform, to provide companies with diversified data processing and analytics services. The platform can handle both online and offline data simultaneously in one system, providing businesses dealing with complex workloads with analytics for business decision-making with reduced cost and increased efficiency.

IBM’s new quantum computer, Osprey, is more than triple the size of its previous record-breaking Eagle processor.

A series of demonstrations by Micius—a low-orbit satellite with quantum capabilities—lays the groundwork for a satellite-based quantum communication network.

Few things have captured the scientific imagination quite like the vastness of space and the promise of quantum technology. Micius—the Chinese Academy of Science’s quantum communications satellite launched in 2016—has connected these two inspiring domains, producing a string of exciting first demonstrations in quantum space communications. Reviewing the efforts leading up to the satellite launch and the major outcomes of the mission, Jian-Wei Pan and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China provide a perspective on what the future of quantum space communications may look like [1]. The success of this quantum-satellite mission proves the viability of several space-based quantum communications protocols, providing a solid foundation for future improvements that may lead to an Earth-spanning quantum communications network (Fig. 1).

Photons, the quanta of light, are wonderful carriers of quantum information because they are easy to manipulate and travel extremely fast. They can be created in a desired quantum state or as the output of some quantum sensor or quantum computer. Quantum entanglement between multiple photons—the nonclassical correlation between their quantum states—can be amazingly useful in quantum communications protocols such as quantum key distribution (QKD), a cryptography approach that can theoretically guarantee absolute information security. QKD schemes have been demonstrated on distances of a few hundreds of kilometers—sufficient to cover communications networks between cities. But increasing their range, eventually to the global scale, is a formidable challenge.