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Category: information science – Page 296

Interestingly, Seager, who studies bio signatures in exoplanet atmospheres, has suggested that two inhabited planets could reasonably turn up during the next decade, based on her modified version of the Drake equation, Space.com notes. Her equation focuses on the search for planets with biosignature gases — gases produced by life that can accumulate in a planet atmosphere to levels that can be detected with remote space telescopes.

Artist’s concept of exoplanet Kepler-452b, the first near-Earth-size world to be found in the habitable zone of a star similar to our Sun. (credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

NASA will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. EST Wednesday, Feb. 22, to present new findings on exoplanets — planets that orbit stars other than our sun. As of Feb. 21, NASA has discovered and confirmed 3,440 exoplanets.

The briefing participants are Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington; Michael Gillon, astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium; Sean Carey, manager of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC, Pasadena, California; Nikole Lewis, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Details of the findings are embargoed by the journal Nature until 1 p.m.

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It wasn’t that long ago that building and training neural networks was strictly for seasoned computer scientists and grad students. That began to change with the release of a number of open-source machine learning frameworks like Theano, Spark ML, Microsoft’s CNTK, and Google’s TensorFlow. Among them, TensorFlow stands out for its powerful, yet accessible, functionality, coupled with the stunning growth of its user base. With this week’s release of TensorFlow 1.0, Google has pushed the frontiers of machine learning further in a number of directions.

TensorFlow isn’t just for neural networks anymore

In an effort to make TensorFlow a more-general machine learning framework, Google has added both built-in Estimator functionality, and support for a number of more traditional machine learning algorithms including K-means, SVM (Support Vector Machines), and Random Forest. While there are certainly other frameworks like SparkML that support those tools, having a solution that can combine them with neural networks makes TensorFlow a great option for hybrid problems.

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Cybercrime & Cybersecurity 0 20

There is a reason why they’re not in the private sector developing QC. Noticed all represented no one developing and delivering QC commercially. There is a reason why folks like this become nay sayers as it is hard when you’re not able to deliver and not hireable by the private sector to deliver QC. With such a huge demand for QC experts and in security; you have to wonder why these folks have not been employed in a QC Tech company especially when you see tech grabbing every professor they can to develop QC and especially cyber security. Also, I still never saw any bases or details scientifically for their argument why specifically where and how QC will not block hacking just a bunch of professors throwing out words and high level speculations.

SAN FRANCISCO—Cryptographers said at the RSA Conference Tuesday they’re skeptical that advances in quantum computing and artificial intelligence will profoundly transform computer security.

“I’m skeptical there will be much of an impact,” Ron Rivest, a MIT professor and inventor of several symmetric key encryption algorithms, said early at the annual Cryptographers’ Panel here.

Susan Landau, a professor who specializes in cybersecurity policy and computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said that while artificial intelligence can be helpful when it comes to processing lots of data effectively, she doesn’t think it will be useful in fingering out series attacks or anomalous situations.

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This article does try to highlight what and where we are going with the merge of bio and technology. However, what has been shown to date is all very invasive as Quantum Biology has remained a gap in this development work until recently. Thanks to DARPA and others in the private sector who are working on technologies that leverages Quantum Biology principles to develop new integrated Biosystem technologies; we will see amazing work in cell circuitry and connectivity in areas of bio-security, BMI, prosthetics, immunology, anti-disease, reverse aging, etc.

These might sound like outlandish predictions, but DARPA’s Sanchez said it’s not as crazy as it might have sounded several years ago.

“Advancement of A.I. is making machines more powerful in the way they can understand everything from scientific papers to interpreting them and helping us solve big problems,” said Sanchez. “Another aspect to consider is our society [is] embracing things like wearables that… allow algorithms to analyze our physiology. Great examples of that are being able to monitor your sleep patterns and provide feedback on if you should change the time you go to bed or wake up in the morning.”

Sanchez said we’re at the point where wearables could easily be made to communicate with smart thermostats so heat could be turned up or the AC turned on automatically, depending on the user’s needs.

Continue reading “DARPA: We’re on cusp of merging human and machine” | >

“This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go,” said professor Jonathan Albright.”

“Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle — a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas.”

There’s a new automated propaganda machine driving global politics. How it works and what it will mean for the future of democracy.

Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath illustration by Cody Fitzgerald.

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Early probes are one thing, but can we build a continuing presence among the stars, human or robotic? An evolutionary treatment of starflight sees it growing from a steadily expanding presence right here in our Solar System, the kind of infrastructure Alex Tolley examines in the essay below. How we get to a system-wide infrastructure is the challenge, one analyzed by a paper that sees artificial intelligence and 3D printing as key drivers leading to a rapidly expanding space economy. The subject is a natural for Tolley, who is co-author (with Brian McConnell) of A Design for a Reusable Water-Based Spacecraft Known as the Spacecoach (Springer, 2016). An ingenious solution to cheap transportation among the planets, the Spacecoach could readily be part of the equation as we bring assets available off-planet into our economy and deploy them for even deeper explorations. Alex is a lecturer in biology at the University of California, and has been a Centauri Dreams regular for as long as I can remember, one whose insights are often a touchstone for my own thinking.

By Alex Tolley

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Nice research paper on Quantum Neural Networks for BMI related technologies. This is not a new article and more of a study published in 2014. Quantum Bio will change BMI.

Another version of this topic.

A novel neural information processing architecture inspired by quantum mechanics and incorporating the well-known Schrodinger wave equation is proposed in this paper. The proposed architecture referred to as recurrent quantum neural network (RQNN) can characterize a nonstationary stochastic signal as time-varying wave packets. A robust unsupervised learning algorithm enables the RQNN to effectively capture the statistical behavior of the input signal and facilitates the estimation of signal embedded in noise with unknown characteristics.

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Everyone knows prevention is better than a cure, and that’s as true for law enforcement as it is for medicine. But there’s little evidence that a growing trend towards “predictive policing” is the answer, and it could even bake in racial bias.

Police departments faced with tight budgets are increasingly turning to machine learning-enabled software that can sift through crime data to help predict where crimes are likely to occur and who might commit them.

Using statistics in law enforcement is nothing new. A statistical system for tracking crime called Compstat was pioneered in New York in 1994 and quickly became popular elsewhere. Since then, crime has fallen 75 percent in New York, which has been credited by some to the technology. But while Compstat simply helped identify historical hotspots, “predictive policing” uses intelligent algorithms to forecast tomorrow’s hotspots and offenders.

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SWARM still only restricts itself to sample sets/ group representation of the population. And, when we place AI in this mix; I get concerned still where daily lives are impacted by decisions coming out from this model. For example, I would hate to see laws and policies rely on SWARM data reasoning as Laws and Policies often have special exceptions that Judges and Policy makers must still have the ability to call not AI with SWARM.

US intelligence is investing millions of dollars in a global research effort to boost analytical thinking by unlocking the reason in crowds.

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Bohr’s atomic model was utterly revolutionary when it was presented in 1913 but, although it is still taught in schools, it became obsolete decades ago. However, its creator also developed a much wider-ranging and less known quantum theory, the principles of which changed over time. Researchers at the University of Barcelona have now analysed the development in the Danish physicist’s thought — a real example of how scientific theories are shaped.

Most schools still teach the atomic model, in which electrons orbit around the nucleus like the planets do around the sun. The model was proposed more than a century ago by Danish physicist Niels Bohr based on Rutherford’s first model, the principles of classical mechanics and emerging ideas about ‘quantisation’ (equations to apply initial quantum hypotheses to classical physical systems) advanced by Max Planck and Albert Einstein.

As Blai Pié i Valls, a physicist at the University of Barcelona, explains: “Bohr published his model in 1913 and, although it was revolutionary, it was a proposal that did little to explain highly varied experimental results, so between 1918 and 1923 he established a much more wide-ranging, well-informed theory which incorporated his previous model.”

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