Lifeboat Foundation

FP Trending Sep 02, 2020 12:48:13 IST

SpaceX postponed the launch date of its next batch of Starlink satellites to 3 September. The space firm was going to loft the 60 satellites aboard the Falcon 9 rocket yesterday morning.

The official handle of Elon Musk’s company tweeted about the delay, saying the team will be utilising the extra time to review data. Now the launch from Launch Complex 39A has been set at 6.16 pm IST (8.46 am EDT) on 3 September.

Continue reading “SpaceX once again postpones the launch of its 60 Starlink satellites; now scheduled for 3 September” »

Adapting the Intelligence Community

As machines become the primary collectors, analysts, consumers, and targets of intelligence, the entire U.S. intelligence community will need to evolve. This evolution must start with enormous investments in AI and autonomization technology as well as changes to concepts of operations that enable agencies to both process huge volumes of data and channel the resulting intelligence directly to autonomous machines. As practically everything becomes connected via networks that produce some form of electromagnetic signature or data, signals intelligence in particular will need to be a locus of AI evolution. So will geospatial intelligence. As satellites and other sensors proliferate, everything on earth will soon be visible at all times from above, a state that the federal research and development center Aerospace has called the “GEOINT Singularity.” To keep up with all this data, geospatial intelligence, like signals intelligence, will need to radically enhance its AI capabilities.

The U.S. intelligence community is currently split up into different functions that collect and analyze discrete types of intelligence, such as signals or geospatial intelligence. The RIA may force the intelligence community to reassess whether these divisions still make sense. Electromagnetic information is electromagnetic information, whether it comes from a satellite or an Internet of Things device. The distinction in origin matters little if no human ever looks at the raw data, and an AI system can recognize patterns in all of the data at once. The division between civilian and military intelligence will be similarly eroded, since civilian infrastructure, such as telecommunications systems, will be just as valuable to military objectives as military communications systems. Given these realities, separating intelligence functions may impede rather than aid intelligence operations.

Continue reading “The Coming Revolution in Intelligence Affairs” »

Min-Liang Tan, chief executive of gaming company Razer, said that the Covid-19 pandemic is driving the internet to the next stage of its evolution – something called the ‘Metaverse’ where cyberspace becomes more of an interactive 3D space with commerce and networking alongside content, much like the worlds in popular games such as Fortnite and Roblox.

The metaverse concept was brought to life by the 2018 sci-fi movie Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Continue reading “Razer CEO says Covid-19 has accelerated path to the ‘Metaverse’, where content, commerce and networking exist in true virtual world” »

In this video, Elon Musk demonstrates a prototype brain–computer interface chip – implanted in a pig – that his company, Neuralink, has been working on. The device could one day be used by humans to augment their abilities.

Founded in 2016, the Neuralink Corporation remained highly secretive about its work until July 2019, when Musk presented his concept at the California Academy of Sciences. It emerged that he planned to create brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) not only for diseased or injured patients, but also healthy individuals who might wish to enhance themselves.

Yesterday, in a livestream event on YouTube, Musk unveiled a pig called Gertrude with a coin-sized chip in her brain. Simpler and smaller than the original revealed last year, the read/write link device can nevertheless pack 1,024 channels with megabit wireless data rate and all-day battery life. This latest prototype – version 0.9 – has now been approved as an FDA breakthrough device, allowing it to be used in limited human trials under the US federal guidelines for testing medical devices. The chip is removable, Musk explained, as he showed another pig called Dorothy, who no longer had the implant and was healthy, happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig.

This is a working proof of concept of the NeuralLace. It can detect limb motion and smell sensation via neural implants in the brain. So far it’s only been tested in pigs, but an early usecase might be a digital replacement for spinal cord injuries. But the real future goal about is getting to implant an internet enabled AI into your brain.

Elon Musk showed off Neuralink’s new implantable brain chip and demonstrated it working in real time on a pig.

Continue reading “Neuralink: Elon Musk’s entire brain chip presentation in 14 minutes (supercut)” »

DARPA announces a new type of cryptography to protect the Big Tech firm profits from the dawn of quantum computers and allow backdoor access into 3 trillion internet-connected devices.

by Raul Diego

Continue reading “DARPA Launches Project CHARIOT in Bid to Shield Big Tech Profits” »

Artificial intelligence applications are popping up everywhere these days, from our Internet browsing to smart homes and self-driving cars. Now a group of researchers is launching a new AI-led study that will collect data from recently released prisoners. The ultimate goal of the project is to identify – and, ostensibly, one day eliminate – the psychological and physiological triggers that cause recidivism among parolees.

According to project-leads Marcus Rogers and Umit Karabiyik, the resulting data will assist them in conducting a forensic psychological analysis. While the monitoring will be gauged in intervals – not real-time – they believe it will help build a profile of the risky behaviors and stressful triggers that recent parolees face when returning to the outside world.

Scientists at University College London have achieved a data transmission rate of 178 terabits per second (tbps) – a speed at which you could download the entire Netflix library in less than a second.

The breakthrough involved a collaboration between University College London (UCL) and two companies, Xtera and KDDI Research. The technology used a much wider range of colours of light, or wavelengths, than is typically found in optical fibre. Most of today’s infrastructure has a limited spectrum bandwidth of 4.5THz, with 9THz commercial systems entering the market. The researchers in this study, however, used a bandwidth of 16.8THz.

The hyperfast speed – around three million times faster than conventional broadband – was made possible by combining different “amplifier” technologies to boost signals over this wider bandwidth, and then maximised by developing new Geometric Shaping (GS) constellations. The latter are signal combinations that make best use of the phase, brightness and polarisation properties of light, manipulating the properties of each individual wavelength.