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United Launch Alliance’s second-to-last Delta 4-Heavy rocket is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral April 20 with a classified cargo for the U.S. government’s spy satellite agency, a mission that will mark ULA’s first flight of the year, officials announced this week.

ULA and the National Reconnaissance Office, the customer for the national security mission, announced the target launch date Tuesday.

The mission is known as NROL-68, and is expected to loft a large surveillance satellite into geosynchronous orbit, joining a fleet of government-owned spacecraft designed to eavesdrop on the communications of adversaries and foreign powers. But the NRO does not disclose details about its missions, and independent analysts use information about the rocket’s lift capability, trajectory, and similar past launches to predict the purpose of spy satellite missions.

ChatGPT launched a tide wave of interest in AI. For many consumers, AI is finally living up to long overdue expectations. The accomplishments of ChatGPT in a short period of time are phenomenal. But what is yet to come when AI is combined with robotics will change everything.

I have been promoting the advances in robotics for several years. I even called 2022 the year of robotics, partially because of the growing need to overcome shortages in labor and to handle tasks beyond the physical or mental capability of humans, and partially because of the continued advances that AI, accelerated processing, semiconductor, sensors, wireless connectivity, and software technologies are enabling to develop advanced, autonomous machines. Robots are no longer just for the manufacturing floor. They are hazardous material handlers, janitors, personal assistants, food preparers, food deliverers, security guards, and even surgeons that are increasingly autonomous. Essentially, they are AI in the physical world. As a result, robot competitions are heating up from middle schools to Las Vegas.

As seen at CES, robotics technology is advancing rapidly with advances in technology. My favorite examples were the multi-configurable Yarbo outdoor robot and the John Deere See & Spray. Yarbo can be a mower, a leaf blower, or a snow blower. If it could dispose of animal excrement and the annoying neighbor, it would be perfect yard tool. On the other end of the spectrum was the John Deere See & Spray Ultimate, a tractor with up to a 120-foot (36.6m) reach that uses AI/ML to detect weeds smaller than the size of a smart phone camera and spray herbicide accordingly. John Deere also offers self-drive tractors.

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Many businesses struggle with demand forecasting. Whether you run a small business or a large enterprise, the challenge of predicting customer behavior and stock levels never gets easier. Even major organizations like Target and Walmart that are able to afford teams of data scientists have recently reported struggles with excess inventory due to poor demand forecasting.

During this time of global uncertainty, many businesses have adopted a just-in-case mindset. They’ve relied on archaic methods of forecasting, scouring old data and drawing poor conclusions based on past problems.

Optical computing has been gaining wide interest for machine learning applications because of the massive parallelism and bandwidth of optics. Diffractive networks provide one such computing paradigm based on the transformation of the input light as it diffracts through a set of spatially-engineered surfaces, performing computation at the speed of light propagation without requiring any external power apart from the input light beam. Among numerous other applications, diffractive networks have been demonstrated to perform all-optical classification of input objects.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan, have introduced a “time-lapse” scheme to significantly improve the image classification accuracy of diffractive optical networks on complex input objects. The findings are published in the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems.

In this scheme, the object and/or the diffractive network are moved relative to each other during the exposure of the output detectors. Such a “time-lapse” scheme has previously been used to achieve super-resolution imaging, for example, in security cameras, by capturing multiple images of a scene with lateral movements of the camera.

Researchers have captured the signal of neutrinos from a nuclear reactor using a water-filled neutrino detector, a first for such a device.

In a mine in Sudbury, Canada, the SNO+ detector is being readied to search for a so-far-undetected nuclear-decay process. Spotting this rare decay would allow researchers to confirm that the neutrino is its own antiparticle (see Viewpoint: Probing Majorana Neutrinos). But while SNO+ team members prepare for that search, they have made another breakthrough by capturing the interaction with water of antineutrinos from nuclear reactors [1]. The finding offers the possibility of making neutrino detectors from a nontoxic material that is easy to handle and inexpensive to obtain, key factors for use of the technology in auditing the world’s nuclear reactors (see Feature: Neutrino Detectors for National Security).

The SNO+ detector was inherited from the earlier Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment. Today the detector is filled with a liquid that lights up when charged particles pass through it. But in 2018, to calibrate the detector’s components and to characterize its intrinsic radioactive background signal after the experiment’s upgrade, it contained water. The antineutrino signal was observed when, after completing those measurements, the researchers took the opportunity to carry out additional experiments before the liquid was switched out.

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In a new season of Tech Tonic, FT tech journalists Madhumita Murgia and John Thornhill investigate the race to build a quantum computer, the impact they could have on security, innovation and business, and the confounding physics of the quantum world.

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Data management and integration veteran Talend today debuted the winter ‘23 release of its core platform, providing enhanced observability, automation and connectivity for enterprises’ data assets. The update comes over a month after the company announced it is being acquired by Qlik in a transaction set to close in the first half of 2023.

Talend started in 2004 as a data integrator, but gradually expanded to offer Talend Data Fabric, a unified solution that works across any cloud, hybrid or multicloud environment. The solution combines enterprise-grade data discovery, integration, quality (automatic cleaning and profiling) and governance capabilities. It’s is intended to reduce the effort involved in working with data, while providing teams with clean and uncompromised information for decision-making.

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GOOGLE has urged millions to download Chrome’s new security update or risk their data being vulnerable.

On Thursday, Google released a new security update for all desktop versions of its Chrome web browser.

The update targets 10 security issues in the web browser – one of which is rated at the most critical level.