Toggle light / dark theme

An interesting and important twist for researchers studying the replication of the brain and thought processes in computers.


Researchers have discovered that the human brain suppresses the sensory effects of the heartbeat. They believe that this mechanism prevents internal sensations from interfering with the brain’s perception of the external world. This mechanism could also have something to do with anxiety disorders.

Read more

Today, we’re announcing a new series of workshops and an interagency working group to learn more about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence.

There is a lot of excitement about artificial intelligence (AI) and how to create computers capable of intelligent behavior. After years of steady but slow progress on making computers “smarter” at everyday tasks, a series of breakthroughs in the research community and industry have recently spurred momentum and investment in the development of this field.

Today’s AI is confined to narrow, specific tasks, and isn’t anything like the general, adaptable intelligence that humans exhibit. Despite this, AI’s influence on the world is growing. The rate of progress we have seen will have broad implications for fields ranging from healthcare to image- and voice-recognition. In healthcare, the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative and the Cancer Moonshot will rely on AI to find patterns in medical data and, ultimately, to help doctors diagnose diseases and suggest treatments to improve patient care and health outcomes.

Read more

Hmmm; my verdict is out for now because I haven’t seen anything showing me that IBM is a real player in this space.


IBM is bringing quantum computing to a device near you by delivering its IBM Quantum Experience through the IBM Cloud. The platform is part of IBM’s Research Frontiers Institute and could be a data scientist’s newest tool and a data junkie’s dream come true.

The platform is available on any desktop or mobile device. The tech allows users to “run algorithms and experiments on IBM’s quantum processor, work with the individual quantum bits (qubits), and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing,” the press release noted.

The processor itself, which is housed at the T.J. Watson Research Center in New York, is made up of five superconducting qubits.

Read more

I had thought my job was safe from automation—a computer couldn’t possibly replicate the complex creativity of human language in writing or piece together a coherent story. I may have been wrong. Authors beware, because an AI-written novel just made it past the first round of screening for a national literary prize in Japan.

The novel this program co-authored is titled, The Day A Computer Writes A Novel. It was entered into a writing contest for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The contest has been open to non-human applicants in years prior, however, this was the first year the award committee received submissions from an AI. Out of the 1,450 submissions, 11 were at least partially written by a program.

Here’s a except from the novel to give you an idea as to what human contestants were up against:

Read more

More insights around the logical quantum gate for photons discovered by Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ). Being able to leverage this gate enables Qubits in transmission and processing can be more controlled and manipulated through this discovery, and places us closer to a stable Quantum Computing environment.


MPQ scientists take an important step towards a logical quantum gate for photons.

Scientists from all over the world are working on concepts for future quantum computers and their experimental realization. Commonly, a typical quantum computer is considered to be based on a network of quantum particles that serve for storing, encoding and processing quantum information. In analogy to the case of a classical computer a quantum logic gate that assigns output signals to input signals in a deterministic way would be an essential building block. A team around Dr. Stephan Dürr from the Quantum Dynamics Division of Prof. Gerhard Rempe at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics has now demonstrated in an experiment how an important gate operation — the exchange of the binary bit values 0 and 1 — can be realized with single photons. A first light pulse containing one photon only is stored as an excitation in an ultracold cloud of about 100,000 rubidium atoms.

Read more