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Category: internet – Page 249

Artificial Intelligence and India

The competition between the United States and China on artificial intelligence is heating up recently. In the coming AI Race, can India with an abundance of engineering talent really catch up with the US and China?

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, and The Internet of Things (IoT) are one of the rapidly advancing technological developments. The rate of progress in the field of these is amazingly rapid. From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence is changing our daily life in many ways.

India is on course to become the third-largest economy in the world (by GDP) within the next few years according to MIT Technology Review. Indian government released a report on artificial intelligence in 2018 that calls for the country to boost investment and focus on deploying the technology in manufacturing, health care, agriculture, education, and public utilities. Currently, around 400 new companies in India have put resources into work including artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The internet’s second revolution | The Economist

The second half of humanity is joining the internet. People in countries like India will change the internet, and it will change them. Read more from The Economist here: https://econ.st/2zVWeQQ

Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: https://econ.st/2xvTKdy

L.O. Two simple letters that marked one of the biggest changes in human history. In 1969 programmers were trying to type “login”.

50 years later and half the world is now online. But that half is primarily from the rich world. How will the second half of humanity coming online change the internet and how will the internet change them?

India’s internet penetration was pretty low until very recently with the launch of a new mobile network called Reliance Jio, with incredibly cheap phones and incredibly cheap data prices. Reliance Jio launched aggressively in 2016 offering subsidised handsets and free data to hook people in. India went from being a relatively expensive place to consume data to being the cheapest in the world. Prices crashed by 94%

Newer users in the developing world are browsing the internet in much the same way as people in the developed world.

Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

This assumes information transfer between humans is frictionless, which it is not. At least not currently. We could easily address this, but no one is listening:-) QED.

Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information, according to a new study. Indeed, no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code.

“This is pretty solid stuff,” says Bart de Boer, an evolutionary linguist who studies speech production at the Free University of Brussels, but was not involved in the work. Language lovers have long suspected that information-heavy languages—those that pack more information about tense, gender, and speaker into smaller units, for example—move slowly to make up for their density of information, he says, whereas information-light languages such as Italian can gallop along at a much faster pace. But until now, no one had the data to prove it.

Scientists started with written texts from 17 languages, including English, Italian, Japanese, and Vietnamese. They calculated the information density of each language in bits—the same unit that describes how quickly your cellphone, laptop, or computer modem transmits information. They found that Japanese, which has only 643 syllables, had an information density of about 5 bits per syllable, whereas English, with its 6949 syllables, had a density of just over 7 bits per syllable. Vietnamese, with its complex system of six tones (each of which can further differentiate a syllable), topped the charts at 8 bits per syllable.

How the United States Is Developing Post-Quantum Cryptography

When practical quantum computing finally arrives, it will have the power to crack the standard digital codes that safeguard online privacy and security for governments, corporations, and virtually everyone who uses the Internet. That’s why a U.S. government agency has challenged researchers to develop a new generation of quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms.

Many experts don ’t expect a quantum computer capable of performing the complex calculations required to crack modern cryptography standards to become a reality within the next 10 years. But the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wants to stay ahead by getting new cryptographic standards ready by 2022. The agency is overseeing the second phase of its Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process to narrow down the best candidates for quantum-resistant algorithms that can replace modern cryptography.

“Currently intractable computational problems that protect widely-deployed cryptosystems, such as RSA and Elliptic Curve-based schemes, are expected to become solvable,” says Rafael Misoczki, a cryptographer at the Intel Corporation and a member of two teams (named Bike and Classic McEliece) involved in the NIST process. “This means that quantum computers have the potential to eventually break most secure communications on the planet.”

How America’s First Digitally Operated Reactor Could Push Nuclear Technology Forward

“We can send signals to areas, such as schools in developing countries, that do not have the luxury of their own nuclear reactor facility and the associated educational infrastructure.” said Seungjin Kim, head of the Purdue’s School of Nuclear Engineering, in a July announcement. “As long as they have internet and this partnership with Purdue, they can see and study how the reactor works.”

PUR-1’s completion comes amidst a hunt for the next generation of nuclear tech. There are traveling wave reactors, which would hypothetically consume today’s nuclear waste and has garnered the interest of investors like Bill Gates. Then there are thorium reactors, which would would use less uranium and produce far less waste in the first place and has been promoted by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Neither technology has been put into civilian practice yet.

For now, the digital nuclear plant is here. While it likely won’t revolutionize the industry as the other two technologies could, digitization might make plants run more efficiently and drive a low risk of accident even lower.

New technology allows software components to be isolated from each other with little computation

Safeguarding passwords, credit card numbers or cryptographic keys in computer programs will require less computational work in the future. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken have come up with a new technology called ERIM to isolate software components from each other. This allows sensitive data to be protected from hackers when the data is processed by online services, for example. The new method has three to five times less computational overhead than the previous best isolation technology, making it more practical for online services to use the technology. This was reason enough for USENIX, a US-American computing systems association, and Facebook to award their 2019 Internet Defense Prize to the researchers.

Computer programs are like a fortress. Just as a fortress is protected by thick walls, moats and iron gates, firewalls and other security technologies prevent cyber criminals from maliciously exploiting apps. And just as one poorly guarded gate or a supposedly secret escape tunnel may allow besiegers to capture a castle, all hackers need is a small security gap to gain access to all components of a software. In the worst case, they can then get their hands on the data that grants them access to or even allow them to make credit card payments. For example, the Heartbleed bug in the widely used OpenSSL encryption software made user names and passwords of various and programs vulnerable to hackers.

Entanglement sent over 50 km of optical fiber

The quantum internet promises absolutely tap-proof communication and powerful distributed sensor networks for new science and technology. However, because quantum information cannot be copied, it is not possible to send this information over a classical network. Quantum information must be transmitted by quantum particles, and special interfaces are required for this. The Innsbruck-based experimental physicist Ben Lanyon, who was awarded the Austrian START Prize in 2015 for his research, is investigating these important intersections of a future quantum Internet.

Now his team at the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck and at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has achieved a record for the transfer of quantum entanglement between matter and light. For the first time, a distance of 50 kilometers was covered using fiber optic cables. “This is two orders of magnitude further than was previously possible and is a practical distance to start building inter-city quantum networks,” says Ben Lanyon.

Researchers develop low-power, low-cost network for 5G connectivity

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a cheaper and more efficient method for Internet-of-Things devices to receive high-speed wireless connectivity.

With 75 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices expected to be in place by 2025, a growing strain will be placed on requirements of wireless networks. Contemporary WiFi and won’t be enough to support the influx of IoT devices, the researchers highlighted in their new study.

Millimeter wave (mmWave), a that offers multi-gigahertz of unlicensed bandwidth—more than 200 times that allocated to today’s WiFi and cellular networks, can be used to address the looming issue. In fact, 5G networks are going to be powered by mmWave technology. However, the hardware required to use mmWave is expensive and power-hungry, which are significant deterrents to it being deployed in many IoT applications.

Using Wi-Fi-like sonar to measure speed and distance of indoor movement

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a technique for measuring speed and distance in indoor environments, which could be used to improve navigation technologies for robots, drones—or pedestrians trying to find their way around an airport. The technique uses a novel combination of Wi-Fi signals and accelerometer technology to track devices in near-real time.

“We call our approach Wi-Fi-assisted Inertial Odometry (WIO),” says Raghav Venkatnarayan, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at NC State. “WIO uses Wi-Fi as a velocity sensor to accurately track how far something has moved. Think of it as sonar, but using radio waves, rather than sound waves.”

Many devices, such as smartphones, incorporate technology called inertial measurement units (IMUs) to calculate how far a has moved. However, IMUs suffer from large drift errors, meaning that even minor inaccuracies can quickly become exaggerated.

OpenAI Said Its Code Was Risky. Two Grads Re-Created It Anyway

In February, an artificial intelligence lab cofounded by Elon Musk informed the world that its latest breakthrough was too risky to release to the public. OpenAI claimed it had made language software so fluent at generating text that it might be adapted to crank out fake news or spam.

On Thursday, two recent master’s graduates in computer science released what they say is a re-creation of OpenAI’s withheld software onto the internet for anyone to download and use.

Aaron Gokaslan, 23, and Vanya Cohen, 24, say they aren’t out to cause havoc and don’t believe such software poses much risk to society yet. The pair say their release was intended to show that you don’t have to be an elite lab rich in dollars and PhDs to create this kind of software: They used an estimated $50,000 worth of free cloud computing from Google, which hands out credits to academic institutions. And they argue that setting their creation free can help others explore and prepare for future advances—good or bad.

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