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Category: computing – Page 650

Q-CTRL, an Australian-based quantum computing software company that makes “quantum firmware,” on Tuesday announced a $15 million series A funding round led by Square Peg Capital. Sierra Ventures also participated in the round, joining existing investors Horizons Ventures, Main Sequence Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.

The primary purpose of the round, says founder and CEO Michael Biercuk, is to expand and grow the company. It currently has 25 employees and aims to double that number in the next 12 to 18 months. It’s also opening an office in Los Angeles where it hopes to add more employees and will expand its product offerings in the field of quantum sensing.

Biercuk is a professor at the University of Sydney and has been conducting research in quantum computing for over a decade. He’s particularly interested in combining the principles of control engineering to quantum computing and other systems such as quantum sensing.

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As hardware makers continue to work on ways of making wide-scale quantum computing a reality, a startup out of Australia that is building software to help reduce noise and errors on quantum computing machines has raised a round of funding to fuel its U.S. expansion.

Q-CTRL is designing firmware for computers and other machines (such as quantum sensors) that perform quantum calculations, firmware to identify the potential for errors to make the machines more resistant and able to stay working for longer (the Q in its name is a reference to qubits, the basic building block of quantum computing).

The startup is today announcing that it has raised $15 million, money that it plans to use to double its team (currently numbering 25) and set up shop on the West Coast, specifically Los Angeles.

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Technology entrepreneurs delight in disrupting established industries, from textiles to healthcare to agriculture.

Changes in automotive manufacturing have been tougher to sell because no matter how many computers are put under the hood, the cars themselves “are still being built on 100-year-old concepts,” Daniel Barel, CEO of Israeli automotive startup REE, tells ISRAEL21c.

REE aims to bring the vehicle’s very design into the 21st century. Gone is the engine in front and the traditional mechanics around steering columns, suspension, transmission and more.

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Researchers are blurring the distinction between brain and machine, designing nanoelectronics that look, interact, and feel like real neurons. Camouflaged in the brain, this neurotechnology could offer a better way to treat neurodenerative diseases or control prosthetics, interface with computers or even enhance cognitive abilities.

Electrodes implanted in the brain help alleviate symptoms like the intrusive tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease but current probes face limitations due to their size and inflexibility. In a recent paper titled “Precision Electronic Medicine,” published in Nature Biotechnology, Shaun Patel, a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and Charles M. Lieber, the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, argue that neurotechnology is on the cusp of a major renaissance. Throughout history, scientists have blurred discipline lines to tackle problems larger than their individual fields.

“The next frontier is really the merging of human cognition with machines,” says Patel. “Everything manifests in the brain fundamentally. All your thoughts, your perceptions, any type of disease.” He and Lieber see mesh electronics as the foundation for these machines, a way to design personalized electronic treatment for just about anything related to the brain. “Today, research focused at the interface between the nervous system and electronics is not only leading to advances in fundamental neuroscience, but also unlocking the potential of implants capable of cellular-level therapeutic targeting,” write the authors in their paper.

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This assumes information transfer between humans is frictionless, which it is not. At least not currently. We could easily address this, but no one is listening:-) QED.

Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information, according to a new study. Indeed, no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code.

“This is pretty solid stuff,” says Bart de Boer, an evolutionary linguist who studies speech production at the Free University of Brussels, but was not involved in the work. Language lovers have long suspected that information-heavy languages—those that pack more information about tense, gender, and speaker into smaller units, for example—move slowly to make up for their density of information, he says, whereas information-light languages such as Italian can gallop along at a much faster pace. But until now, no one had the data to prove it.

Scientists started with written texts from 17 languages, including English, Italian, Japanese, and Vietnamese. They calculated the information density of each language in bits—the same unit that describes how quickly your cellphone, laptop, or computer modem transmits information. They found that Japanese, which has only 643 syllables, had an information density of about 5 bits per syllable, whereas English, with its 6949 syllables, had a density of just over 7 bits per syllable. Vietnamese, with its complex system of six tones (each of which can further differentiate a syllable), topped the charts at 8 bits per syllable.

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An exotic physical phenomenon, involving optical waves, synthetic magnetic fields, and time reversal, has been directly observed for the first time, following decades of attempts. The new finding could lead to realizations of what are known as topological phases, and eventually to advances toward fault-tolerant quantum computers, the researchers say.

The new finding involves the non-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm Effect and is published in the journal Science by MIT graduate student Yi Yang, MIT visiting scholar Chao Peng (a professor at Peking University), MIT graduate student Di Zhu, Professor Hrvoje Buljan at University of Zagreb in Croatia, Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics John Joannopoulos at MIT, Professor Bo Zhen at the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT professor of physics Marin Soljačić.

The finding relates to gauge fields, which describe transformations that particles undergo. Gauge fields fall into two classes, known as Abelian and non-Abelian. The Aharonov-Bohm Effect, named after the theorists who predicted it in 1959, confirmed that gauge fields — beyond being a pure mathematical aid — have physical consequences.

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A talk by Dave Bacon during the Industry session of the 14th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography (TQC 2019), Day 3. TQC 2019 was hosted June 3–5, 2019 by the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science at the University of Maryland (QuICS). More information about TQC can be found at https://www.tqcconference.org.

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Microsoft’s patent filing recently made public has juiced up curiosity over what Microsoft might debut sooner or later as its own version of a folding computing device.

MSPoweruser took the view that “Microsoft is trying hard to bring its first foldable to the market, like every other big tech companies.” It’s apparent now that “the Redmond giant has filed yet another for its much-awaited foldable Windows 10 device.”

The patent “Multi-Sided Electromagnetic Coil Access Assembly” was filed in February last year but only recently made public. It is particularly drawing interest because, as TechRadar said, what would make this foldable idea work would be “a multi-sided electromagnetic coil for wireless charging.”

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