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Category: innovation – Page 131

An intriguing message has landed on social media from the official Gran Turismo account and the account of Sony AI teasing what’s referred to as a “Gaming Flagship” and “breakthrough project” in AI. The companies, both subsidiary arms of the wider Sony brand, jointly revealed that they’re set to announce the project on Wednesday February 9.

Along with the announcement, Sony AI posted a short, 25-second teaser video. The clip featured something similar to the light traces we’ve been seeing in the Gran Turismo “Find Your Line” video series, as well as short glimpses of double-World Tour champions Igor Fraga and Takuma Miyazono, along with World Tour finalist Emily Jones.

It ends looking in on Polyphony Digital’s main studio in Tokyo, from where Kazunori Yamauchi has recently been presenting GT7 preview videos and the recent Q&A.

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Japanese researcher Sagawa Masato has won this year’s Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for developing the world’s “strongest” permanent magnet.

The winner of the sixth edition of the British prize was announced online on Tuesday. It had been held every other year since 2013, but became an annual event, starting this year, to keep up with the pace of scientific and technological advances.

Sagawa invented the neodymium-iron-boron magnet, which is said to be the world’s most powerful permanent magnet. The breakthrough led to the development of small and high-performance motors. This has enabled higher-performance products in various fields, such as wind power, electric vehicles and home electrical appliances.

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The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox.

Diver-X announced that it’s pulling the plug on HalfDive, announcing that all backers would not be charged for funds collected.

The company mentions three major concerns, which essentially boil down to its niche appeal, inability to reduce costs by producing major components in-house, and resultant cash flow issues due to scalability issues. You can read the full text in the company’s blog post.

“We were faced with the brutal reality that no matter how optimized and multifunctional our device may be for use in sleeping-posture, it is only a replacement of existing VR devices and not yet an interface that brings innovative experiences,” Diver-X says.

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Artificial intelligence is getting smarter by leaps and bounds — within this century, research suggests, a computer AI could be as “smart” as a human being. And then, says Nick Bostrom, it will overtake us: “Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.” A philosopher and technologist, Bostrom asks us to think hard about the world we’re building right now, driven by thinking machines. Will our smart machines help to preserve humanity and our values — or will they have values of their own?

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.
Find closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at http://www.ted.com/translate.

Follow TED news on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tednews.
Like TED on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TED

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Four different measurement tools

Intrigued by the idea that the stone camels might constitute an artistic breakthrough, the aforementioned team of archaeologists — once again headed by Charloux, alongside archeologist Maria Guagnin — tried to see if they could assess their age not through stylistic comparisons but a “technological study” that yielded absolute results, using a variety of measurement tools to determine them.

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In October 2017, the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua passed through our solar system, leaving many questions in its wake. Not only was it the first object of its kind ever observed, but the limited data astronomers obtained as it shot out of our solar system left them all scratching their heads. Even today, almost five years after this interstellar visitor made its flyby, scientists are still uncertain about its true nature and origins. In the end, the only way to get real answers from ‘Oumuamua is to catch up with it.

Interestingly enough, there are many proposals on the table for missions that could do just that. Consider Project Lyra, a proposal by the Institute for Interstellar Studies (i4is), which would rely on advanced propulsions technology to rendezvous with interstellar objects (ISOs) and study them. According to their latest study, if their mission concept launched in 2028 and performed a complex Jupiter Oberth maneuver (JOM), it would be able to catch up to ‘Oumuamua in 26 years.

On October 30th, 2017, less than two weeks after ‘Oumuamua was detected, the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) inaugurated Project Lyra. The purpose of this concept study was to determine if a mission to rendezvous with ‘Oumuamua was feasible using current or near-term technologies. Since then, the i4is team has conducted studies that considered catching up with the ISO using nuclear-thermal propulsion (NTP) and a laser sailcraft, similar to Breakthrough Starshot—an interstellar mission concept for reaching Alpha Centauri in 20 years.

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This article was originally published by Christopher Carey on Cities Today, the leading news platform on urban mobility and innovation, reaching an international audience of city leaders. For the latest updates, follow Cities Today on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, or sign up for Cities Today News.

UK start-up Urban-Air Port (UAP) has announced plans to establish 200 hubs for flying taxis and cargo drones across 65 cities globally over the next five years.

The firm is set to launch its first ‘vertiport’, dubbed the “worlds smallest airport”, in Coventry in April, and says a “significant investment” from Hyundai Motor Group’s urban air division Supernal will enable expansion to further sites.

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Samsung, the world’s biggest memory chip maker, has announced that it has become the first in the world to demonstrate the MRAM (Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory) technology for in-memory computing. The company’s paper on its innovation, titled ‘A crossbar array of magnetoresistive memory devices for in-memory computing,’ was published by Nature on its website, and its print edition is coming next.

The research was a collaboration between SAIT (Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology), Samsung Foundry, and Samsung Semiconductor R&D. Dr. Seungchul Jung (Staff Researcher at SAIT), Dr. Donhee Ham (Fellow of SAIT and Professor of Harvard University), and Dr. Sang Joon Kim (Vice President of Technology at SAIT) worked on the research.

Usually, data is stored in memory chips (DRAM) and processed by a CPU or an AP (Application Processor). However, data storage and computing happen on the same chip with in-memory computing. Since there is no need to transfer data from memory to the processor and vice versa, a lot of time is saved. Data processing inside the memory happens in a highly parallel manner, resulting in substantial power savings. Samsung claims that MRAM technology will be great for things like AI processing.

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