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Category: computing – Page 839

Over the past few days, Wired has published some articles that give us the closest look yet at the ambitious, enigmatic augmented reality company called Magic Leap. They’ve left us with both a lot of fascinating possibilities and a lot of questions, because most of Magic Leap’s technological explanations are couched in the language of either science fiction or, well, magic. As poetic as “[talking] to the GPU of the brain” and “dreaming with your eyes open” sounds, this is probably the clearest and most interesting description of Magic Leap’s work in the piece:

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Many think author, inventor and data scientist Ray Kurzweil is a prophet for our digital age. A few say he’s completely nuts. Kurzweil, who heads a team of more than 40 as a director of engineering at Google, believes advances in technology and medicine are pushing us toward what he calls the Singularity, a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outthink the brain and allow people—you, me, the guy with the man-bun ahead of you at Starbucks—to live forever. He dates this development at 2045.

Raymond Kurzweil was born February 12, 1948, and he still carries the plain, nasal inflection of his native Queens, New York. His Jewish parents escaped Hitler’s Austria, but Kurzweil grew up attending a Unitarian church. He worshipped knowledge above all, and computers in particular. His grandmother was one of the first women in Europe to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. His uncle, who worked at Bell Labs, taught Ray computer science in the 1950s, and by the age of 15, Kurzweil was designing programs to help do homework. Two years later, he wrote code to analyze and create music in the style of various famous composers. The program won him the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a prize that got the 17-year-old an invitation to the White House. That year, on the game show I’ve Got a Secret, Kurzweil pressed some buttons on a data processor the size of a small car. It coughed out original sheet music that could have been written by Brahms.

After earning degrees in computer science and creative writing at MIT, he began to sell his inventions, including the first optical character recognition system that could read text in any normal font. Kurzweil knew a “reading machine” could help the blind, but to make it work, he first had to invent a text-to-speech synthesizer, as well as a flatbed scanner; both are still in wide use. In the 1980s Kurzweil created the first electronic music keyboard to replicate the sound of a grand piano and many other instruments. If you’ve ever been to a rock concert, you’ve likely seen the name Kurzweil on the back of a synthesizer.

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Again; many problems with AI & IoT all ties back to the infrastructure of things. Focus on fast tracking QC and an interim solution (pre-QC) such as a mix of Nvidia’s GPU, blockchain for financial transactions, etc. to improve the infrastructure and Net then investors will begin to pay more attention to AI, etc.

After more than 60 years since its conceptual inception — and after too many hype-generating moments — AI is yet again making its presence felt in mainstream media.

Following a recent WEF report, many perceive AI as a threat to our jobs, while others even go so far to assert that it poses a real threat to humanity itself.

What is clear for the time being is that there are many questions that still remain unanswered: Can we actually create conscious machines that have the ability to think and feel? What we do we mean by the word conscious in the first place? What is the accurate definition of intelligence? And what are the implications of combining the Internet of Things (IoT) with intelligence?

Continue reading “What Does it Mean to “Move to the Cloud”? This eBook Breaks Down the Myths” | >

Very nice; Silicon based Quantum Laser has been achieved. Imagine what this does for ISPs and other communications. smile

A team of researchers from across the country, led by Alexander Spott, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, have built the first quantum cascade laser on silicon. The advance may have applications that span from chemical bond spectroscopy and gas sensing, to astronomy and free-space communications.

Integrating lasers directly on chips is challenging, but it is much more efficient and compact than coupling external light to the chips. The indirect bandgap of silicon makes it difficult to build a laser out of silicon, but diode lasers can be built with III-V materials such as InP or GaAs. By directly bonding an III-V layer on top of the silicon wafer and then using the III-V layers to generate gain for the laser, this same group has integrated a multiple quantum well laser on silicon that operates at 2 µm. Limitations in diode lasers prevent going to longer wavelengths where there are many more applications, so the group turned their attention to using quantum cascade lasers instead.

Building a on silicon was a challenging task made more difficult by the fact that becomes heavily absorptive at longer wavelengths in the mid-infrared.

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Quantum physics has a reputation for being mysterious and mathematically challenging. That makes it all the more surprising that a new technique to detect quantum behaviour relies on a familiar tool: a “zip” program you might have installed on your computer.

“We found a new way to see a difference between the quantum universe and a classical one, using nothing more complex than a compression program,” says Dagomir Kaszlikowski, a Principal Investigator at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT).

Dag worked with other researchers from CQT and collaborators at the Jagiellonian University and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland to show that compression software, applied to experimental data, can reveal when a system crosses the boundary of our classical picture of the Universe into the quantum realm. The work is published in the March issue of New Journal of Physics (“Probing the quantum–classical boundary with compression software”).

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The pace of progress in computers has been accelerating, and today, computers and networks are in nearly every industry and home across the world.

Many observers first noticed this acceleration with the advent of modern microchips, but as Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near, we can find a number of eerily similar trends in other areas too.

According to Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns, technological progress is moving ahead at an exponential rate, especially in information technologies.

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Some fundamentals to consider when implementing online bots. It truly has to be for companies/ businesses a cultural, operating model, and business model fit. And, for consumers it is about your own personable fit. Not all bots are created equal meaning no one size fits all. Do your due diligence like you would on any investment as a business and any long term relationship as a consumer.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

We’ve now had two major developer events in a row where chat bots were a significant theme, with both Microsoft’s Build and now Facebook’s F8 focusing on this rapidly emerging new form of interaction with companies and brands. With two such big names behind the trend, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype and enthusiasm these companies obviously share for the technology. But it’s important to stay grounded as we evaluate chat bots as a potential successor to today’s app model.

The first thing to note is that Facebook and Microsoft have strong incentives to pursue the bot vision. Both companies failed to make a meaningful dent in the mobile operating system battle and, as such, find themselves in secondary roles as makers of apps that run on other people’s platforms. This shuts them out of many of the opportunities associated with owning a mobile operating system, and puts them perennially in a secondary position, having to work around the limitations placed on third-party apps and the inherent disadvantages they face relative to pre-installed applications. So it’s not surprising both companies are now embracing what — in at least some visions of the future — promises to be the replacement for mobile apps. But it’s important to keep these incentives in mind in evaluating their claims about the potential of bots — Facebook and Microsoft have a massive vested interest in seeing this trend succeed.

Continue reading “The Limits of Bots” | >

Could we see BMI technology used as part of our ID?

A team of researchers at Binghamton University, led by Assistant Professor of Psychology Sarah Laszlo and Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Zhanpeng Jin, recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram headset while they looked at a series of 500 images designed specifically to elicit unique responses from person to person — e.g., a slice of pizza, a boat, Anne Hathaway, the word “conundrum.” They found that participants’ brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer’s “brainprint” with 100 percent accuracy.

“When you take hundreds of these images, where every person is going to feel differently about each individual one, then you can be really accurate in identifying which person it was who looked at them just by their brain activity,” said Laszlo.

In their original study, titled “Brainprint,” published in 2015 in Neurocomputing, the research team was able to identify one person out of a group of 32 by that person’s responses, with only 97 percent accuracy, and that study only incorporated words, not images.

Continue reading “Researchers can identify you by your brain waves with 100 percent accuracy” | >

Like it — turning those old plastic into Graphene bags.

Summary: The project will also motivate people to collect used plastic bottles and other plastic waste, which is degrading to the environment, and help us in putting it to good use. Once the varsity is able to make graphene out of the plastic waste, it can eventually also be used as an alternate source of energy. We received an approval letter for the project proposal on April 16 and the initial grant of Rs 1,97,88,800 for a period of three years has been approved. “Dhami also said that much of the encouragement for research work in the varsity came from governor K K Paul, who has been motivating universities in the state to pursue research in nano science and nano technology. In fact, even wrappers and packets of chips are an environmental hazard.

DEHRADUN: A project proposed by Kumaun University in Nainital to synthesize graphene from plastic waste to use the material in energy and biomedical applications has received approval for a grant of nearly Rs 2 crore. Confirming that the grant has been approved, vice-chancellor of Kumaun University, H S Dhami, said, “It is a great achievement as the varsity aims at contributing to the society through research work. We received an approval letter for the project proposal on April 16 and the initial grant of Rs 1,97,88,800 for a period of three years has been approved.” The grant has been approved by The National Mission on Himalayan Studies (NMHS), G B Pant Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development (GBPIHED), Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change.

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