Lifeboat Foundation

Following the path of electronic integrated circuits (EICs), silicon (Si) photonics holds promises to enable photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with high densities, advanced functionality and portability. Although various Si photonics foundries are rapidly developing PIC capabilities—enabling volume production of modulators, photodetectors and most recently lasers—Si PICs have yet to achieve the stringent requirements on laser noise and overall system stability imposed by many applications such as microwave oscillators, atomic physics and precision metrology^9,10,11. Semiconductor lasers must strongly suppress amplified-spontaneous-emission noise to achieve narrow linewidth for these applications¹². They will also require isolation from the rest of the optical system, otherwise the laser source will be sensitive to back-reflections from downstream optical components that are beyond the control of the PIC designer¹³. In many integrated photonic solutions, a bulk optical isolator must be inserted between the laser chip and the rest of the system, significantly increasing the complexity, as well as the cost of assembly and packaging¹⁴.

To enrich the capabilities of Si PICs and avoid multi-chip optical packaging, non-group-IV materials need to be heterogeneously integrated to enable crucial devices, including high-performance lasers, amplifiers and isolators^15,16,17. It has now been widely acknowledged that group III–V materials are required to provide efficient optical gain for semiconductor lasers and amplifiers in Si photonics regardless of the integration architecture, but concerns still remain for a complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) fab to incorporate magnetic materials, which are currently used in industry-standard optical isolators¹⁸.

Fortunately, a synergistic path towards ultralow laser noise and low feedback sensitivity exists—using ultrahigh-quality-factor (Q) cavities for lasers that not only reduce the phase noise but also enhance the feedback tolerance to downstream links. These effects scale with the cavity Q and ultrahigh–Q cavities would thus endow integrated lasers with unprecedented coherence and stability^19,20. The significance is twofold. First, the direct integration of ultralow-noise lasers on Si PICs without the need for optical isolators simplifies PIC fabrication and packaging. Furthermore, this approach does not introduce magnetic materials to a CMOS fab as isolators are not obligatory for such complete PICs.

Great for if you forget but I’m sure they’re gonna make a dystopian movie or few about this. I don’t remember the TV series or maybe it was a movie I saw a trailer for but in it they had a thing similar to TSA where as you go from city to city etc the AI or computer reads your mind and if you had any rebellious or offensive thoughts towards the government they’d arrest you. Scary huh! I myself have joked that if con is the opposite of pro the Congress is the opposite of progress. Haha.

By examining a person’s brain activity, artificial intelligence (AI) can produce a song that matches the genre, rhythm, mood and instrumentation of music that the individual recently heard.

Scientists have previously “reconstructed” other sounds from brain activity, such as human speech, bird song and horse whinnies. However, few studies have attempted to recreate music from brain signals.

Continue reading “Google’s ‘mind-reading’ AI can tell what music you listened to based on your brain signals” »

How a Swedish skier was basically frozen—but lived.

A three-member team spent four years building the low-latency bot which responds faster than the time it takes for an eye to blink.

Shandong, China-based Qibot Robot Company claims to have built the world’s fastest boxer bot. Standing over six feet (1.9 m) tall, the bot is a single-handed robot that can be teleoperated and has a response delay time of just 12 milliseconds, which according to the company, makes it the world’s fastest, the South China Morning Post.

Continue reading “Meet Qibbot: World’s fastest human-controlled fighting bot” »

Matthias G. Fischer et al., 2023/bioRxiv.

A report suggests that our planet is home to 10³¹ viruses, and they are probably the most powerful beings in terms of population. They come in all kinds of shapes and forms, however, some are more bizarre than others.

Scientists have discovered a new way to accomplish fast data transmissions through light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs.

While research has progressed in significantly optimizing light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the modulation characteristics of perovskite LEDs remain unclear.

In recent developments, scientists have discovered a new way to transmit data quickly through LEDs. This could allow homes and offices to use the fast internet through lights instead of setting up a wifi router.

An AI-powered brain implant helps a quadriplegia patient regain sensations and movement for the first time after a diving accident in 2020. Can this implant work for other paralysis patients?

Scientists at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research have re-established the connection between the brain, body, and spinal cord of a person living with quadriplegia (paralysis of all four limbs and trunk) due to a diving accident in 2020.

Continue reading “AI-powered brain implant restores a paralyzed man’s ability to feel and move” »

The day is fast approaching when generative AI won’t only write and create images in a convincingly human-like style, but compose music and sounds that pass for a professional’s work, too. This morning, Meta announced AudioCraft, a framework to generate what it describes as “high-quality,” “realistic” audio and music from short text descriptions, or prompts. It’s not Meta’s first foray into audio generation — the tech giant open sourced an AI-powered music generator, MusicGen, in June — but Meta claims that it’s made advances that vastly improve the quality of AI-generated sounds, such as dogs barking, cars honking and footsteps on a wooden floor.

In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Meta… More.

For a recovering gamer like me, one of the most exciting applications of generative AI is dynamic dialogue. I’m not suggesting AI replace writers — goodness forbid. But as anyone who’s sunk hundreds of hours into an RPG can tell you, scripted NPC interactions get old fast.

There are a few startups prototyping AI tech to dynamically generate dialogue. But one of the more promising is Inworld, launched in 2021 by the founding team of API.AI, which developed tools for speech recognition and natural language understanding until its acquisition by Google in 2016. (API.AI later became Dialogflow, Google’s flagship conversational AI design platform.)

Inworld claims to use “multiple” machine learning models to “mimic the full range of human communication.” That’s promising a lot in the context of games, but the startup makes the case that, by allowing developers to link its dialog-and voice-generating tools to animation and rigging systems within popular game engines, including 3D environments, it can help deliver more lifelike and immersive gaming experiences.