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Category: information science – Page 332

ComNav releases Quantum algorithm for its OEM boards

BTW — make sure you view that reference whitepaper on the new quantum algorithms on OEM boards.

ComNav Technologies has released its new generation Quantum algorithm to international market. The Quantum algorithm can be easily achieved through a firmware upgrade (version 2.5.2 and above), and suits all ComNav OEM boards and OEM-based receivers.

An upgrade to ComNav’s Quan algorithm, the Quantum algorithm dramatically improves the stability and reliability of RTK positioning in complex environments, as well as providing a DP-filter enhancement for the ComNav GNSS products.

An AI Watched 600 Hours of TV and Started to Accurately Predict What Happens Next

MIT researchers have created an algorithm that hopes to understand human visual social cues and predict what would happen next. Giving AI the ability to understand and predict human social interaction could one day pave the way to efficient home assistant systems as well as intelligent security cameras that can call an ambulance or the police ahead of time.

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created an algorithm that utilizes deep learning, which enables artificial intelligence (AI) to use patterns of human interaction to predict what will happen next. Researchers fed the program with videos featuring human social interactions and tested it to see if it “learned” well enough to be able to predict them.

The researchers’ weapons of choice? 600 hours of Youtube videos and sitcoms, including The Office, Desperate Housewives, and Scrubs. While this lineup may seem questionable, MIT doctoral candidate and project researcher Carl Vondrick reasons out that accessibility and realism were part of the criteria.

Manufacturer of explosives trace detection acquiring Flyboard Air creator which has envisions many flying platforms

The Zapata technology platform is the safest, easiest, lightest, most maneuverable, and least expensive personal aviation system ever created.

Capable of being operated with only 20 hours of flight training, or in fully autonomous mode with GPS guidance, ZAPATA’s proprietary balance methodology and algorithms are truly disruptive.

ZAPATA’s technology and innovative products will unlock hundreds of applications across multiple industry sectors, from military and rescue to entertainment and recreation.

World’s most powerful quantum computer now online at USC

Good for USC.

Following a recent upgrade, the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC) based at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is now the leader in quantum processing capacity.

With the upgrade — to 1,098 qubits from 512 — the D-Wave 2X™ processor is enabling QCC researchers to continue their efforts to close the gap between academic research in quantum computation and real-world critical problems.

The new processor will be used to study how and whether quantum effects can speed up the solution of tough optimization, machine learning and sampling problems. Machine-learning algorithms are widely used in artificial intelligence tasks.

Dropbox open-sources Lepton, a compression algorithm that cuts JPEG file size

Cloud syncing and sharing software company Dropbox today announced that it has released an image compression algorithm called Lepton under an Apache open source license on GitHub.

Lepton can both compress and decompress files, and for the latter, it can work while streaming — that is, files can be expanded back into full size as they are being sent over the network. So Lepton is important for user experience, given how it can more quickly transfer data and show content. But at the same time, it has an impact on the data center infrastructure where files often end up.

“We have used Lepton to encode 16 billion images saved to Dropbox, and are rapidly recoding our older images. Lepton has already saved Dropbox multiple petabytes of space,” Dropbox software systems architect Daniel Reiter Horn wrote in a blog post.

Columbia Engineering Researchers Use Acoustic Voxels to Embed Sound with Data

Columbia Engineering Professor Changxi Zheng’s new approach could lead to better tagging and coding, leveraging 3D printing of complex geometries.

New York — July 18, 2016 — Columbia Engineering researchers, working with colleagues at Disney Research and MIT, have developed a new method to control sound waves, using a computational approach to inversely design acoustic filters that can fit within an arbitrary 3D shape while achieving target sound filtering properties. Led by Computer Science Professor Changxi Zheng, the team designed acoustic voxels, small, hollow, cube-shaped chambers through which sound enters and exits, as a modular system. Like Legos, the voxels can be connected to form an infinitely adjustable, complex structure. Because of their internal chambers, they can modify the acoustic filtering property of the structure—changing their number and size or how they connect alters the acoustic result.

“In the past, people have explored computational design of specific products, like a certain type of muffler or a particular shape of trumpet,” says Zheng, whose team is presenting their paper, “Acoustic Voxels: Computational Optimization of Modular Acoustic Filters,” at SIGGRAPH 2016 on July 27. “The general approach to manipulating sound waves has been to computationally design chamber shapes. Our algorithm enables new designs of noise mufflers, hearing aids, wind instruments, and more — we can now make them in any shape we want, even a 3D-printed toy hippopotamus that sounds like a trumpet.” VIDEO: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/lego/

Can we find a quantum-resistant algorithm before it’s too late?

The warning from QuintessenceLabs’ CTO John Leisoboer is stark. “When sufficiently powerful quantum computers become generally available,” he says, “it’s guaranteed to break all existing cryptographic systems that we know of.”

In other words, he adds, “Everything that we’re doing today will be broken.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Google’s Chrome security software engineer Matt Braithwaite who wrote in a blog post earlier this month that “a hypothetical, future quantum computer would be able to retrospectively decrypt any internet communication that was recorded today”.

Primitive Quantum Computers Are Already Outperforming Current Machines

A team has used simple quantum processors to run “quantum walk” algorithms, showing that even primitive quantum computers can outperform the classical variety in certain scenarios—and suggesting that the age of quantum computing may be closer than we imagined.

By now, most readers of Futurism are probably pretty well acquainted with the concept (and fantastic promise) of quantum computing.

For those who aren’t, the idea is fairly (!) simple: Quantum computers exploit three very unusual features that operate at the quantum scale—that electrons can be both particles and waves, that objects can be in many places at once, and they can maintain an instantaneous connection even when separated by vast distances (a property called “entanglement”).