Jürgen Schmidhuber is the most important A.I. engineer and thinker you don’t know about.
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Category: innovation – Page 198
Cannot wait to get my AR Contacts.
(Tech Xplore)—Can we look at a future smart contact lens for those with eye problems? The iris, a key part of our eyes, modulates the amount of light reaching the retina, said researchers, and an estimated 200,000 individuals worldwide suffer from iris deficiencies.
These deficiencies bring discomfort and extreme photosensitivity, such as aniridia and leiomyoma.
Some early results in addressing these deficiencies were presented at IEEE’s International Electron Devices Meeting this month. IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is a forum for reporting breakthroughs in semiconductor and electronic device areas.
At Quora, I occasionally role play, “Ask the expert” under the pen name, Ellery. Today, I was asked “Is it too late to get into Bitcoin and the Blockchain”.
A few other Bitcoin enthusiasts interpreted the question to mean “Is it too late to invest in Bitcoin”. But, I took to to mean “Is it too late to develop the next big application—or create a successful startup?”. This is my answer. [co-published at Quora]…
The question is a lot like asking if it is too late to get into the television craze—back in the early 1930s. My dad played a small role in this saga. He was an apprentice to Vladamir Zworykin, inventor of the cathode ray tube oscilloscope. (From 1940 until the early 2000s, televisions and computer monitors were based on the oscilloscope). So—for me—there is fun in this very accurate analogy…
John Logie Baird demonstrated his crude mechanical Televisor in 1926. For the next 8 years, hobbyist TV sets were mechanical. Viewers peeked through slots on a spinning cylinder or at an image created from edge-lit spinning platters. The legendary Howdy Doody, Lucille Ball and Ed Sullivan were still decades away.
But the Televisor was not quite a TV. Like the oscilloscope and the zoetrope, it was a technology precursor. Filo T. Farnsworth is the Satoshi Nakamoto of television. He is credited with inventing TV [photo below]. Yet, he did not demonstrate the modern ‘cathode ray’ television until 1934. The first broadcast by NBC was in July 1936, ten years years after the original Baird invention. (Compare this to Bitcoin and the blockchain, which are only 7 years old).
Most early TV set brands died during the first 10 years of production: Who remembers Dumont, Andrea and Cossor? No one! These brands are just a footnote to history! Bear in mind that this was all before anyone had heard of Lucille Ball, The Tonight Show or the Honeymooners. In the late 1950s, Rod Serling formed Cayuga Productions to film the Twilight Zone in New York. Hollywood had few studios for dramatic television production, and the west coast lacked an infrastructure for weekly episode distribution.
Filo T. Farnsworth demonstrates an advanced television receiver
Through the 1950s (25 years after TV was demonstrated), there was no DVR, DVD or even video tape. Viewers at home watched live broadcasts at the same time as the studio audience.
The short answer to your question: No. Absolutely not! It’s not too late to get into Bitcoin and the blockchain. Not too late, at all. That ship is just pulling into the dock and seats are mostly empty. The big beneficiaries of blockchain technology (it’s application, consulting, investing or savings) have not yet formed their first ventures. In fact, many of the big players of tomorrow have not yet been born.
Philip Raymond is a Lifeboat columnist and contributor to Quora. He is also co-chair of Cryptocurrency Standards Association and editor at A Wild Duck.
” … discuss using drones to leapfrog infrastructure, and save lives by doing it in less than 15 minutes.”
Intel is making a huge push into AI and deep learning, and intends to build custom variants of its Xeon Phi hardware to compete in these markets. Several months ago, the Santa Clara corporation bought Nervana, an AI startup, and this new announcement is seen as building on that momentum. AI and deep learning have become huge focuses of major companies in the past few years — Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, and a number of smaller firms are all jockeying for position, chasing breakthroughs, and building their own custom silicon solutions.
The upcoming Knights Mill is still pretty hazy, but Intel has stated that the chip will be up to 4x faster than existing Knights Landing hardware. Right now, the company is working on three separate forays into the AI / deep learning market. First up, there’s Lake Crest. This product is based on Nervana technology that existed prior to the Intel purchase. Nervana was working on an HBM-equipped chip with up to 32GB of memory, and that’s the product Intel is talking about rolling out to the wider market in the first half of 2017. Lake Crest will be followed by Knights Crest, a chip that takes Nervana’s technology and implements it side-by-side along with Intel Xeon processors.
“The technology innovations from Nervana will be optimized specifically for neural networks to deliver the highest performance for deep learning, as well as unprecedented compute density with high-bandwidth interconnect for seamless model parallelism,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich wrote in a recent blog post. “We expect Nervana’s technologies to produce a breakthrough 100-fold increase in performance in the next three years to train complex neural networks, enabling data scientists to solve their biggest AI challenges faster.”
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Harsh environment, less rain, and lack of infrastructure are among the many problems African countries face. Water scarcity and the lack of drinkable water, however, is a grave problem among all. It makes people use water from contaminated bodies which is the sole reason of water borne diseases like, diarrhea and typhoid.
Hundreds of organizations around the globe have taken this issue head-on. And Google, one of the most innovative companies of the planet, is in the league, too.
Google has launched multiple projects including Project Makani and Project Loon to resolve the power outages and connectivity issues in areas where they are most needed. Since the power and connectivity issues are already being worked upon, Google took another step to help these countries fight the water scarcity problem.
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In Brief:
- A drug already in use to treat chronic diseases like Multiple Sclerosis has been discovered to also effectively restore nerve function.
- The Department of Defense also has shown confidence in the drug by giving a million dollars to help fund research.
A new study led by the University of Rochester Medical Center suggests that a currently available drug may have properties that allow it to be used for the treatment of traumatic nerve injuries sustained in car accidents, sports injuries, or in combat.
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As I have stated many times; anyone not adding QC to their 5 yr roadmaps is not planning well.
Scientists are getting closer to a breakthrough in quantum technology — one where the transfer of information via quantum principles makes the process almost instantaneous.
Scientists from the Polytechnique Montreal and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) have brought the world closer to a time when information can now be transferred instantaneously.
According to Science Daily, a paper published in Physical Review Letters has documented the creation of a qubit in zinc selenide that makes it possible to produce an interface between quantum physics and the transfer of information at the speed of light.