The Kurzweil vision.
A Q&A with the top author, computer scientist, futurist, inventor, and Google engineering director.
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Category: computing – Page 845
Good for him.
A new company launched Monday by former NASA chief Dan Goldin aims to deliver a major boost to the field of neural computing.
KnuEdge’s debut comes after 10 years in stealth; formerly it was called Intellisis. Now, along with its launch, it’s introducing two products focused on neural computing: KnuVerse, software that focuses on military-grade voice recognition and authentication, and KnuPath, a processor designed to offer a new architecture for neural computing.
“While at NASA I became fascinated with biology,” said Goldin in an interview last week. “When the time came to leave NASA, I decided the future of technology would be in machine intelligence, and I felt a major thrust had to come from inspiration from the mammalian brain.”
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Change is coming; will you be ready?
I remember many decades ago when folks were trying to learn a new OS that changed businesses, governments/ educational institutions, and households around the world. That OS was called Windows; and hearing the stories as well as watching people try to use a PC and a mouse was interesting then.
Now, the world will again go through a large scale metamorphosis again when more and more QC is evolved and made available over the next 5 to 7 years in the technology mainstream. Change is often necessary and often can be good as well.
You might ask yourself, “What is quantum computing, and how do I get involved?”
Before we begin to explain quantum computing, a brief glimpse of the past is essential to understand how quantum computing came to be.
From our very first laptop to the laptops we have today, it is clear that technology is exponentially advancing faster than our expectations. Phones and computers get thinner and faster, but why? Thanks to the effects of Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors in a dense circuit will double approximately every two years, the amount of “stuff” needed to be put on a board is more densely packed.
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Change is coming; and Microsoft will be there.
With funding from Microsoft, a Purdue research team known as ‘Station Q Purdue’ will research potential methods of quantum computing.
“In order to see if these ideas that (Microsoft) has are realistic, whether they can be experimentally verified and then put to use, (Microsoft) has teamed up with certain experimentalists around the world,” said professor Michael Manfra, the director of Station Q Purdue.
Microsoft’s quantum computing research is done under their own Microsoft Station Q. Station Q Purdue is part of the network of other Station Q research teams that Microsoft has established internationally to study potential methods of quantum computing.
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As Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) Discover 2016 opens tomorrow in the Venetian/Palazzo in Las Vegas, the big question hanging over it is: Quo Vadis HPE? Last month the company surprised the industry with the announcement that it would spin off its huge consulting division, the second time in a year it has split itself in half. What is left is the core hardware division of HPE stripped of almost everything extraneous. It is still one of the largest vendors in the industry, with an aging business with huge revenues but shrinking margins facing major competition from every side. It is also a company with huge potential. This conference will be the forum for HPE to unveil its plans for the future.
theCUBE will be at Discover 2016 starting tomorrow, for three days of wall-to-wall interviews with key executives from HPE, its partners and customers. Watch streaming coverage live and find out what is happening behind the headlines with the probing interviews conducted by the industry experts from SiliconANGLE Media, led by co-CEOs John Furrier and David Vellante. And if you have your own questions, you can post them on the #HPEDiscover CrowdChat that will run parallel to the conference. Furrier in particular monitors CrowdChat and will use questions people post there. If you are at the conference you can watch the replays later to pick up things you missed and get more depth on the trends.
The two spin-offs have left HPE in a strong position financially. It has rid itself of nearly all its debt and is still throwing off huge amounts of cash from its hardware business. However, the IT infrastructure market is changing radically under pricing pressure from the big cloud providers with their hyperscale data centers. In the last 18 months we have seen IBM sell its entire x86-based business to Lenovo Group Ltd. and Dell Inc. announce that it will purchase EMC, both clear responses to this margin pressure. While the hardware market is growing with the new, high-volume computing environments such as social media, Intel-powered servers in particular are rapidly becoming commoditized. One way or another, HPE needs to transform. Intel Inside will not be enough to sustain it as it is today.
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Technology, meet your future beyond AI & Quantum.
While scientists study the possibilities of storing data in DNA, the web magazine Engadget reports that another group of researchers are looking into the possibility of utilizing living cells for next-generation computing.
The latest studies have developed a method of integrating both analog and digital computing into gene-based circuits. This allowed researchers to convert analog chemical reactions into binary output, or the ones and zeros that regular computers understand.
Apart from the obvious applications on general computing, gene-based circuitry can also be helpful to the medical field where it can be programmed to treat various diseases. In fact, clinical trials have been scheduled to use gene circuitry to treat gut diseases within the year. Alfred Bayle.
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Elon Musk is confident that SpaceX will be able to send people to Mars in 2024, with arrival in 2025. This is in line with his long-term vision of colonizing the Red Planet, as he strongly believes it is the next step in ensuring the survival of human civilization.
After saying that the chances of us not being a computer simulation is just one in billions, Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, went on to say that SpaceX will be sending people to Mars by 2024, with arrival planned for 2025.
When asked about what he thinks the government on Mars will be, he playfully joked: “Well I think I was just declared king of Mars a moment ago.”
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It’s not all that easy to call KnuEdge a startup. Created a decade ago by Daniel Goldin, the former head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, KnuEdge is only now coming out of stealth mode. It has already raised $100 million in funding to build a “neural chip” that Goldin says will make data centers more efficient in a hyperscale age.
Goldin, who founded the San Diego, California-based company with the former chief technology officer of NASA, said he believes the company’s brain-like chip will be far more cost and power efficient than current chips based on the computer design popularized by computer architect John von Neumann. In von Neumann machines, memory and processor are separated and linked via a data pathway known as a bus. Over the years, von Neumann machines have gotten faster by sending more and more data at higher speeds across the bus as processor and memory interact. But the speed of a computer is often limited by the capacity of that bus, leading to what some computer scientists to call the “von Neumann bottleneck.” IBM has seen the same problem, and it has a research team working on brain-like data center chips. Both efforts are part of an attempt to deal with the explosion of data driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Goldin’s company is doing something similar to IBM, but only on the surface. Its approach is much different, and it has been secretly funded by unknown angel investors. And Goldin said in an interview with VentureBeat that the company has already generated $20 million in revenue and is actively engaged in hyperscale computing companies and Fortune 500 companies in the aerospace, banking, health care, hospitality, and insurance industries. The mission is a fundamental transformation of the computing world, Goldin said.
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A Russian developer here has created an open source computer vision platform, in collaboration with Facebook and Google, that acts as a teaching machine and enables them “see”.
VisionLabs, a solutions developer in the field of computer vision, data analysis and robotics, and a Skolkovo IT Cluster resident have developed this as a global open-source computer vision project with the support of Facebook and Google, an official said.
VisionLabs integrated two popular libraries for developers — OpenCV and Torch. The joint project with Facebook and Google was launched last year. “The two IT giants became interested in the in-depth study of neural networks and artificial intelligence and hence extended their support,” the official told IANS.
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