Lifeboat Foundation

Seeking to “push the limits of what humans can do,” researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a wearable robotic limb that transforms drummers into three-armed cyborgs.

The remarkable thing about this wearable arm, developed at GT’s Center for Music Technology, is that it’s doing a lot more than just mirroring the movements of the drummer. It’s a “smart arm” that’s actually responding to the music, and performing in a way that compliments what the human player is doing.

The two-foot long arm monitors the music in the room, so it can improvise based on the beat and rhythm. If the drummer is playing slowly, for example, the arm will mirror the tempo.

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Proving Quantum

New research demonstrates that particles at the quantum level can in fact be seen as behaving something like billiard balls rolling along a table, and not merely as the probabilistic smears that the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests. But there’s a catch — the tracks the particles follow do not always behave as one would expect from “realistic” trajectories, but often in a fashion that has been termed “surrealistic.”

In a new version of an old experiment, CIFAR Senior Fellow Aephraim Steinberg (University of Toronto) and colleagues tracked the trajectories of photons as the particles traced a path through one of two slits and onto a screen. But the researchers went further, and observed the “nonlocal” influence of another photon that the first photon had been entangled with.

Continue reading “Researchers demonstrate ‘quantum surrealism’” »

More news on Qubits that are surprisingly intrinsically resilient to noise.

While a classical bit found in conventional electronics exists only in binary 1 or 0 states, the more resourceful quantum bit, or ‘qubit’ is represented by a vector, pointing to a simultaneous combination of the 1 and 0 states. To fully implement a qubit, it is necessary to control the direction of this qubit’s vector, which is generally done using fine-tuned and noise-isolated procedures.

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering and the University of Konstanz have demonstrated the ability to generate a quantum logic operation, or rotation of the qubit, that — surprisingly — is intrinsically resilient to noise as well as to variations in the strength or duration of the control. Their achievement is based on a geometric concept known as the Berry phase and is implemented through entirely optical means within a single electronic spin in diamond.

Continue reading “Moving electrons around loops with light: A quantum device based on geometry” »

Measuring entanglement — the amount of entanglement between states corresponds to the distance between two points on a Bloch sphere.

To do this, the scientists turned the difficult analytical problem into an easy geometrical one. They showed that, in many cases, the amount of entanglement between states corresponds to the distance between two points on a Bloch sphere, which is basically a normal 3D sphere that physicists use to model quantum states.

As the scientists explain, the traditionally difficult part of the math problem is that it requires finding the optimal decomposition of mixed states into pure states. The geometrical approach completely eliminates this requirement by reducing the many possible ways that states could decompose down to a single point on the sphere at which there is zero entanglement. The approach requires that there be only one such point, or “root,” of zero entanglement, prompting the physicists to describe the method as “one root to rule them all.”

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(Phys.org)—Researchers have designed and implemented an algorithm that solves computing problems using a strategy inspired by the way that an amoeba branches out to obtain resources. The new algorithm, called AmoebaSAT, can solve the satisfiability (SAT) problem—a difficult optimization problem with many practical applications—using orders of magnitude fewer steps than the number of steps required by one of the fastest conventional algorithms.

The researchers predict that the amoeba-inspired computing system may offer several benefits, such as high efficiency, miniaturization, and low energy consumption, that could lead to a new computing paradigm for nanoscale high-speed problem solving.

Led by Masashi Aono, Associate Principal Investigator at the Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and at PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency, the researchers have published a paper on the amoeba-inspired system in a recent issue of Nanotechnology.

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Overview.

What is the MMTP? The MMTP is an ambitious project, designed to radically speed up the rate of progress in the field of regenerative medicine and aging research.

The project is the brainchild of our parent organisation, The International Longevity Alliance, a nonprofit foundation for science advocacy and research. The testing and discovery of compounds and treatments to delay or stop the processes of aging is a slow affair, with very few high quality, high impact studies conducted each year.

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HYDERABAD: Telangana police and Assam police nabbed an online fraudster in Guwahati on Thursday, even as the culprit tried to open fire at the police party.

A team of Cyberabad Cyber wing police had been camping in Guwahati for the last two days to nab one Vipul, wanted in a Rs 76-lakh online fraud case. He would send emails promising to get contracts in corporate companies, but after collecting money he would cheat the aspirants. The Cyberabad police party called Vipul on the pretext of some business deal to trap him. Crime wing officials and Assam police were waiting in a car for Vipul, who arrived in a Scorpio car.

However, Vipul got alert after seeing the police party and sped away from the location. On seeing the culprit slipping from the location, police chased his car.

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#sweet!

Electrons which act like slow-pouring honey have been observed for the first time in graphene, prompting a new approach to fundamental physics.

Electrons are known to move through metals like bullets being reflected only by imperfections, but in graphene they move like in a very viscous liquid, University of Manchester researchers have found.

Continue reading “Scientists discover electrons moving like honey in graphene” »

Fujitsu Laboratories today announced that it has developed deep learning technology that can analyze time-series data with a high degree of accuracy. Demonstrating promise for Internet-of-Things applications, time-series data can also be subject to severe volatility, making it difficult for people to discern patterns in the data. Deep learning technology, which is attracting attention as a breakthrough in the advance of artificial intelligence, has achieved extremely high recognition accuracy with images and speech, but the types of data to which it can be applied is still limited. In particular, it has been difficult to accurately and automatically classify volatile time-series data–such as that taken from IoT devices–of which people have difficulty discerning patterns.

Now Fujitsu Laboratories has developed an approach to deep learning that uses advanced mathematical techniques to extract geometric features from time-series data, enabling highly accurate classification of volatile time-series. In benchmark tests held at UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository that classified time-series data captured from gyroscopes in wearable devices, the new technology was found to achieve roughly 85% accuracy, about a 25% improvement over existing technology. This technology will be used in Fujitsu’s Human Centric AI Zinrai artificial intelligence technology. Details of this technology will be presented at the Fujitsu North America Technology Forum (NAFT 2016), which will be held on Tuesday, February 16, in Santa Clara, California.

Background

Continue reading “Fujitsu develops new deep learning technology to analyze time-series data with high precision” »