Overview
This is the third article in a series of posts documenting how a team of six interns used IBM Watson to program robots to play poker.
In the previous article, we introduced the Watson services that are available to developers and how to interact with them with Watson Developer Cloud. In this article, we’ll show how we used the Speech-to-Text service to extract speech from audio.
“There’s a high-stakes race under way in Silicon Valley to develop software that makes it easy to weave artificial intelligence technology into almost everything, and Google has sprinted into the lead.”
I wonder, if NASA and/or SpaceX goes to Mars in the 2030’s as planned, by the time the 2050’s roll around a manned attempt to Ceres or Jupiter trojans might be attempted or perhaps an unmanned vehicle made on Mars beats this sail.
Japan’s space agency has its sights on unexplored asteroids as far away as Jupiter, a project that at one level draws on centuries of sail science.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency this month unveiled a huge prototype solar sail designed to power a JAXA probe as it explores asteroids that circle the sun on roughly the same orbit as Jupiter. The sail measures 2,500 sq. meters and is made up of thousands of ultraslim solar panels.
“The fascination of the universe lies in its countless unknowns, and our research is a challenge to reveal the mysteries with our own hands,” said Jun Matsumoto, a JAXA researcher who designed the kite-like sail.
Luv this.
The University of Bristol’s Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre (QTEC) is looking to recruit its first cohort of Enterprise Fellows that will be the next generation of quantum technology entrepreneurs.
Merging training in systems thinking, quantum engineering and entrepreneurship, QTEC will provide the necessary skills for budding innovators to develop their own business ideas and for them to branch out into the emerging field of quantum technologies.
The Centre, which is the first of its kind in the world, was funded as part of the UK’s £270 million investment into quantum technologies. These technologies exploit the laws of quantum mechanics to create practical and useful technologies that will outperform their classical rivals and that have the potential to transform artificial intelligence, healthcare, energy, finance, cyber security and the internet.
Nice and a big deal.
[Via Satellite 07-21-2016] Space Systems Loral (SSL) has received $20.7 million from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to design and build robotic arm flight hardware for the first phase of the agency’s Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program. SSL is receiving the funds through MDA US Systems, a division of MDA that SSL manages, and is working with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), which is the prime contractor managing the program.
The contract calls for two complete robotic arm systems capable of capturing and berthing with satellites that were not previously designed for docking. The robotic arms would each have multiple joints enabling dexterous movement, with the ability to carry and use multiple generic and mission-specific tools. Building on contracts SSL received in both 2012 and 2013 for prior DARPA research into space robotics, the total contract value awarded now stands at more than $40 million. The contract could grow further if all remaining options are exercised.
The goal of the RSGS program is to cooperatively inspect, capture, reposition, repair, and upgrade geosynchronous spacecraft. DARPA plans to take the hardware and software developed through RSGS and integrate it into a commercially owned and operated servicing vehicle to provide on-demand servicing in space.
Tech now really moving into the clouds.
Although the world is increasingly connected through the internet, there are still four billion people or 60% of the world’s population who do not have such access. 1.6 billion of those people live in remote locations and do not have access to mobile broadband networks. Facebook Connectivity Lab just announced the first full-scale test flight of Aquila, a solar-powered airplane that can be used to bring affordable internet to isolated areas.
Aquila is a high-altitude, long-endurance, unmanned solar-powered airplane. It has a wingspan bigger than a Boeing 737 airplane but weighs hundreds of times less due to its carbon fiber frame. Many of the team members who contributed to the craft had previous experience at at NASA, Boeing, DARPA, Northrop Grumman, and the British Royal Air Force.
Good for USC.
Following a recent upgrade, the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC) based at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is now the leader in quantum processing capacity.
With the upgrade — to 1,098 qubits from 512 — the D-Wave 2X™ processor is enabling QCC researchers to continue their efforts to close the gap between academic research in quantum computation and real-world critical problems.
The new processor will be used to study how and whether quantum effects can speed up the solution of tough optimization, machine learning and sampling problems. Machine-learning algorithms are widely used in artificial intelligence tasks.
Google announced on Wednesday that it has been using a DeepMind-built AI system to control certain parts of its power-hungry data centres over the last few months as it looks to make its vast server farms more environmentally friendly.
Last year, a Greenpeace report predicted that the electricity consumption of data centres is set to account for 12% of global electricity consumption by 2017 and companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have some of the biggest data centres in the world.
Google said it has been able to reduce the energy consumption of its data centre cooling units — used to stop Google’s self-built servers from overheating — by as much as 40% with the help of a DeepMind AI system.
