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Garage startup (credit: Chase Dittmer)

By Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, University of Western Australia

Pharmaceutical companies typically develop new drugs with thousands of staff and budgets that run into the billions of dollars. One estimate puts the cost of bringing a new drug to market at $2.6 billion with others suggesting that it could be double that cost at $5 billion.

One man, Professor Atul Butte, director of the University of California Institute of Computational Health Sciences, believes that like other Silicon Valley startups, almost anyone can bring a drug to market from their garage with just a computer, the internet, and freely available data.

In a talk given at the Science on the Swan conference held in Perth this week, Professor Butte outlined the process for an audience of local and international scientists and medics.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have developed a set of algorithms that will help teach computers to process and understand human languages.

Whilst mastering is easy for humans, it is something that computers have not yet been able to achieve. Humans understand language through a variety of ways for example this might be through looking up it in a dictionary, or by associating it with words in the same sentence in a meaningful way.

The algorithms will enable a to act in much the same way as a human would when encountered with an unknown word. When the computer encounters a word it doesn’t recognise or understand, the algorithms mean it will look up the word in a dictionary (such as the WordNet), and tries to guess what other words should appear with this unknown word in the text.

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So, I did get my acceptance to the IBM Quantum experience this morning. ANd, as part of their disclaimer they did state it was only a preview version which was good; and noted that there maybe bugs/ glitches and to notate them. So kudos to IBM for properly managing expectations.


IBM’s Zurich Laboratory has made its five-bit quantum computer available to researchers through a cloud service.

The researchers at IBM have created a quantum processor, made up of five superconducting quantum bits (qubits).

IBM said users will be able to access the technology with a desktop or mobile device through a cloud-enabled quantum computing platform.

My verdict will continue to be out on this version. Unless we truly see a QC environment where the full testing of Cryptography, infrastructure, etc. is tested then at best we’re only looking at a pseudo version of QC. Real QC is reached when the infrastructure fully can take advantage of QC not just one server or one platform means we have arrived on QC. So, I caution folks from over-hyping things because the backlash will be extremely costly and detrimental to many.


IBM has taken its quantum computing technology to the cloud to enable users to run experiments on an IBM quantum processor.

Big Blue has come a long way, baby. IBM announced it is making quantum computing available on the IBM Cloud to accelerate innovation in the field and find new applications for the technology.

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Here is the impact of today’s IBM QC announcement & if proven real then the following will certainly be fasttracked:

1. IBM is now ahead of everyone in QC

2. China & Russia are now going to heat up their own QC efforts.

3. Google and Microsoft will accelerate their efforts to showcase QC in many areas of IoT including AI.

4. Apple will now need to join the QC revolution or face a future of non-existence in the long run because devices, networks & platforms, communications, etc. will now be quick to make the transition.

A team of researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has released a paper outlining the probability for each of the three leading theories explaining how the phantom “Planet Nine” could have ended up in its current theorized orbit.

The existence of Planet Nine is predicated on a series of computer simulations ran by a pair of Caltech scientists to explain the trajectory of six Kuiper Belt objects, which may have been sent in to highly eccentric orbits after an encounter with a huge body roughly 10 times the mass of Earth.

The researchers asserted that the planet takes between 10 — 20 thousand years to traverse a single, highly-elliptical orbit, ranging between 40 and 140 billion miles from the Sun.

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