Is there nothing sacred for goodness sakes anymore! The robots are replacing the University Research Teams. Personally, I will be shocked if it will indeed (on a massive scale) take over all experimental innovation activities in research.
At this past weekend’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, scientists also heard broader warnings about the threats to American workers posed by computerized automation.
Alright my neuro research & deep-mind learning friends out their; you may wish to read this find; especially as we continue our mapping and mimicking brain functions in systems as well as look at brain enhancement technologies as this is good to know as we try to boost innovation via technologies.
The most creative individuals have more nerve connections between the right and left sides of their brains, reveal researchers in the United States who analyzed connections in 68 different brain regions.
Long believed to be key in fostering imagination and intuition, as well as artistic awareness, and visual and auditive approaches, the right hemisphere isn’t the only part of the brain with a role to play in determining creativity, according to new research from Duke University.
In reality, it is the ability of the brain—a veritable information superhighway comprising a complex network of wired connections—to increase connections between neurons on the two sides of the brain that could set highly creative people apart, the study concludes.
What’s the ground truth on artificial intelligence (AI)? In this video, John Launchbury, the Director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), attempts to demystify AI–what it can do, what it can’t do, and where it is headed. Through a discussion of the “three waves of AI” and the capabilities required for AI to reach its full potential, John provides analytical context to help understand the roles AI already has played, does play now, and could play in the future.
Download the slides at: http://www.darpa.mil/about-us/darpa-perspective-on-ai
“Launched in 2007, the Fuller Challenge has defined an emerging field of practice: the whole systems approach to understanding and intervening in complex and interrelated crises for wide-scale social and environmental impact. The entry criteria have established a new framework through which to identify and measure effective, enduring solutions to global sustainability’s most entrenched challenges. The rigorous selection process has set a unique standard, gaining renown as “Socially-Responsible Design’s Highest Award.”
The Fuller Challenge attracts bold, visionary, tangible initiatives focused on a well-defined need of critical importance. Winning solutions are regionally specific yet globally applicable and present a truly comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated approach to solving the world’s complex problems.”
Deadline is March 31, 2017
MIT has never stood stand still in the presence of change and opportunity. Their Media Lab Currency Initiative is at the forefront of Blockchain and Bitcoin research. With the fracture of the founding core team, MIT stands to become the universal hub for research and 
development.
The initiative now has a team of 22 people and at least
seven ongoing research projects, and it nurtures three startups that use cryptocurrencies and the underlying technology in a variety of ways. Blockchain research now sits alongside transparent robots that eat real-world fish, solar nebula research, and other imaginative, futuristic projects in progress at the university.
The initiative has already funded the work of bitcoin protocol developers and has supported research, going far beyond bitcoin—even partnering with Ripple Labs and developing enterprise data projects.
Now, the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative is working on 3 big Blockchain ideas:
The DCI is led by former White House advisor and research director Neha Narula. Read about the three BIG blockchain projects at CoinDesk.
Philip Raymond co-chairs Crypsa & Bitcoin Event, columnist & board member at Lifeboat, editor
at WildDuck and will deliver the keynote address at Digital Currency Summit in Johannesburg.
At the heart of Bitcoin or any Blockchain ledger is a distributed consensus mechanism. It’s a lot like voting. A large and diverse deliberative community validates each, individual user transaction, ownership stake or vote.
But a distributed consensus mechanism is only effective and faithful if the community is impartial. To be impartial, voters must be fairly separated. That is, there must be no collusion enabled by concentration or hidden collaboration. They must be separated from the buyer and seller; they must be separated from the big stakeholders; and they must be separated from each other. Without believable and measurable separation, all sorts of problems ensue. 
One problem that has made news in the Bitcoin word is the geographical concentration of miners and mining pools.
A distributed or decentralized transaction validation is typically achieved based on Proof-of-Work (POW) or Proof-of-Stake (POS). [explain]. But in practice, these methodologies exhibit subtle problems…
The problem is that Proof-of-Work can waste an enormous amount of energy and both techniques result in a concentration of power (either by geography or by special interest) — rather than a fair, distributed consensus.
In a quasi-formal paper, C.V. Alkan describes a fresh approach to Blockchain consensus. that he calls Distributed Objective Consensus. As you try to absorb his mechanism, you encounter concepts of Sybil attacks, minting inequality, the “nothing-at-stake” 
problem, punishment schemes and heartbeat transactions. Could Alkan’s distributed consensus mechanism be too complex for the public to understand or use?…
While I have a concern that time stamps and parent-child schemes may degrade user anonymity, the complexity doesn’t concern me. Alkan’s paper is a technical proposal for magic under the covers. Properly implemented, a buyer and seller (and even a miner) needn’t fully understand the science. The user interface to their wallet or financial statement would certainly be shielded from the underlying mechanics.
Put another way: You would not expect a user to understand the mechanism any more than an airline passenger understands the combustion process inside a jet engine. They only want to know:
• Does it work? • Is it safe? • Is it cost effective? • Will I get there on time?
So will Alkan’s Decentralized Objective Consensus solve the resource and concentration problems that creep into POW and POS? Perhaps. At first glance, his technical presentation appears promising. I will return to explore the impact on privacy and anonymity, which is my personal hot button. It is a critical component for long term success of any coin transaction system built on distributed consensus. That is, forensic access and analysis of a wallet or transaction audit trail must be impossible without the consent and participation of at least one party to a transaction.
Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA and The Bitcoin Event. He is a Lifeboat board member, editor
at AWildDuck and will deliver the keynote address at Digital Currency Summit in Johannesburg.
Posted in innovation, space travel
A revolutionary new concept for a fusion powered rocket could not only deliver an orbiter to Pluto but a lander too!
This video represents a research study with…in the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. NIAC is a visionary and far-reaching aerospace program, one that has the potential to create breakthrough technologies for possible future space missions. However, such early stage technology development may never become actual NASA missions. For more information about NIAC, visit: www.nasa.gov/niac.
Posted in food, innovation
For fellow innovators and private scientists who dream and believe in your dream.
Rule 3: Their Ideas Look Like Failure In The Beginning
When innovators share what they’re working on early in the process, they open the floodgates to premature criticism. This is only natural considering that innovation stems from a singular vision that no one else sees yet.
Seasoned innovators have learned through experience to be wary of upfront collaboration. It’s difficult to explain motives around an intangible concept, especially considering that, by definition, they can’t point to others who are doing the same thing.
Research can seem bland to us laypersons. But, Marko Vukolić shares many of my research interests and he exceeds my academic credentials (with just enough overlap for me to understand his work). So, in my opinion, his writing is anything but bland…
Vukolić started his career as a post-doc intern at IBM in Zurich Switzerland. After a teaching stint as assistant professor at Eurecom and visiting professor at ETH Zurich, he rejoined the IBM research staff in both cloud computing infrastructure and the Blockchain Group.*
As a researcher and academic, Vukolić is a rising star in consensus-based mechanisms and low latency replicated state machines. At Institut Mines-Télécom in Paris, he wrote papers and participated in research projects on fault tolerance, scalability, cloud computing and distributed trust mechanisms.
Now, at IBM Zurich, Vukolić has published a superior analysis addressing the first and biggest elephant in the Bitcoin ballroom, Each elephant addresses an urgent need:
Regarding the first elephant, scalability, Bitcoin urgently needs to grow its Blockchain dynamics into something that is living and manageable. To that end, Vukolić refers to a transaction bookkeeping mechanism that works as a “fabric”. That is, it does not require every miner to access the history-of-the-world and append each transaction onto the same chain in serial fashion. Rather than growing an ever bigger blockchain—with ever bigger computers—we need a more 3D approach that uses relational databases in a multi-threaded, transactional environment, while still preserving the distributed, p2p trust mechanisms of the original blockchain.
While clearly technical, it is a good read, even for lay enthusiasts. It directly relates to one of the elephants in the room.
I have pasted Marko’s Abstract below. The full paper is 10½ pages (14 with references).
Bitcoin cryptocurrency demonstrated the utility of global consensus across thousands of nodes, changing the world of digital transactions forever. In the early days of Bitcoin, the performance of its probabilistic proof-of-work (PoW) based consensus fabric, also known as blockchain, was not a major issue. Bitcoin became a success story, despite its consensus latencies on the order of an hour and the theoretical peak throughput of only up to 7 transactions per second.
The situation today is radically different and the poor performance scalability of early PoW blockchains no longer makes sense. Specifically, the trend of modern cryptocurrency platforms, such as Ethereum, is to support execution of arbitrary distributed applications on blockchain fabric, needing much better performance. This approach, however, makes cryptocurrency platforms step away from their original purpose and enter the domain of database-replication protocols, notably, the classical state-machine replication, and in particular its Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) variants.
In this paper, we contrast PoW-based blockchains to those based on BFT state machine replication, focusing on their scalability limits. We also discuss recent proposals to overcoming these scalability limits and outline key outstanding open problems in the quest for the “ultimate” blockchain fabric(s). Keywords: Bitcoin, blockchain, Byzantine fault tolerance, consensus, proof-of-work, scalability, state machine replication
* Like Marko, Blockchains, Cloud computing, and Privacy are, also my primary reserach interests, (GMTA!). But, I cede the rigorous, academic credentials to Marko.
† BFT = Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocols
Related—and recently in the news:
Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA and The Bitcoin Event. A columnist & board member at Lifeboat Foundation
he edits AWildDuck. He will deliver the keynote address at Digital Currency Summit in Johannesburg.
