Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: information science

Classic tv will never be the same.

Remember that amazing automatic colorizing algorithm we told you about back in March? It was just put to an interesting test. As a fun “what if?” hobbyist Amir Avni tried the neural network-powered colorizer on a B&W video.

It should be obvious that this isn’t a simple transition. To go from colorizing a still image by learning from thousands of other images online is one thing, to do it 24 times per second, smoothly, is entirely another.

“As a bonus, I took the bot’s algorithm and started testing it on some video-clips,” writes Avni. “Of course the results aren’t perfect since it was trained on photos and not on a batch of photos, but the results are still interesting.”

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A day in the life of an NSA Hacker.

In what Edward Snowden deems “not unprecedented,” hackers calling themselves the Shadow Brokers have collected NSA-created malware from a staging server run by the Equation Group, an internal hacking team. The Shadow Brokers published two chunks of data, one “open” chunk and another encrypted file containing the “best files” that they will sell for at least $1 million. Wikileaks has said they already own the “auction” files and will publish them in “due course.”

They’ve also released images of the file tree containing a script kiddie-like trove of exploits ostensibly created and used by the NSA as well as a page calling out cyber warriors and “Wealthy Elites.” The page also contains links to the two files, both encrypted. You can grab them using BitTorrent here.

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We consider a solution of the Einstein equations for a system comprised of merging black holes and show that the solution contains a term which represents a repulsive force. This repulsive term is proportional to 1/r, where r is the distance from the system, and it is additional to the common Newtonian term which is proportional to 1/r2. This repulsive force acts as an effective dark energy if the total mass of the Universe is decreased.

As seen below, a shape of the gravitational potential is often illustrated by a funnel made of rubber film where a heavy ball (blue) is located in the center. In this model, a fast decrease of the gravitational mass corresponds with a sharp ascent of the ball. The film attached to the ball forms a cone-type hill in the center of the funnel. Light balls (green) on the central cone run away from the center. The central cone expands fast but keeps it exterior slope; this corresponds to long-term repulsive force.

A mechanism of the repulsive force may be applied to a model of the expanding Universe. This may imply that the Big Bang and accelerated expansion of the Universe is not related to current processes in the Universe but to a relic repulsive gravitational force or to a configuration of space-time that originates in the previous cycle of the Universe when at the last stage of a collapse the intensive generation of gravitational waves resulted in sharp decrease of the gravitational mass of the Universe. This process generated a powerful repulsive force that transformed the Big Crunch into the Big Bang. Because the repulsive acceleration decreases with time, the current Universe expands with lower acceleration. Decreasing acceleration of the Universe can be verified by observations. Gravitational waves caused by the compression of the Universe may not disappear at the stage of expansion and form the relic gravitational radiation.

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While existing methods like cold, flash and cloud storage are trying to remake themselves in the age of Big Data, there are also a number of alternative methods being developed that suggest looking outside of traditional methods could be our best bet for storing and managing such unprecedented amounts of data.

Here are three methods to look out for:

We are about to witness a data storage breakthrough in which digital information could be embedded into the primary fabric of our being: the double helix of DNA. As a storage system, DNA is both compact and durable, with a single gram of DNA able to store almost a zettabyte of digital data. Now that scientists can successfully create synthetic DNA, it follows that we will be able to control what information gets stored on those strands.

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I already voiced my concerns of this technology in the hands of criminals and terrorists. If we can have it so can others. Only when QC and a Quantum net is in place will we be truly protected with bots.

Cybersecurity could soon be another place where bots become invaluable for experts. DARPA recently organized The Cyber Grand Challenge, where computer algorithms showed how easy it is to clean up vulnerabilities in code written by humans. ( DARPA )

The Cyber Grand Challenge took place under DARPA patronage, and it is good to see how preoccupied the U.S. Department of Defense is with cybersecurity.

The event pitted computers against each other in an attempt to uncover which one can best fulfill the tasks of human cybersecurity researchers, that is, discovering a bug in a software program and fixing it.

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Quantum computing remains mysterious and elusive to many, but USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers might have taken us one step closer to bring such super-powered devices to practical reality. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Information Sciences Institute is home to the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC), a super-cooled, magnetically shielded facility specially built to house the first commercially available quantum optimization processors — devices so advanced that there are currently only two in use outside the Canadian company D-Wave Systems Inc., where they were built: The first one went to USC and Lockheed Martin, and the second to NASA and Google.

Quantum computers encode data in quantum bits, or “qubits,” which have the capability of representing the two digits of one and zero at the same time — as opposed to traditional bits, which can encode distinctly either a one or a zero. This property, called superposition, along with the ability of quantum states to “interfere” (cancel or reinforce each other like waves in a pond) and “tunnel” through energy barriers, is what may one day allow quantum processors to ultimately perform optimization calculations much faster than is possible using traditional processors. Optimization problems can take many forms, and quantum processors have been theorized to be useful for a variety of machine learning and big data problems like stock portfolio optimization, image recognition and classification, and detecting anomalies. Yet, exactly because of the exotic way in which quantum computers process information, they are highly sensitive to errors of different kinds.

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Sustainable Development Goals_E_Final sizes

“A new United Nations report has found that e-government is an effective tool for facilitating integrated policies and public service by promoting accountable and transparent institutions, such as through open data and participatory decision-making …”

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Quantum computers promise speedy solutions to some difficult problems, but building large-scale, general-purpose quantum devices is a problem fraught with technical challenges.

To date, many research groups have created small but functional computers. By combining a handful of atoms, electrons or superconducting junctions, researchers now regularly demonstrate quantum effects and run simple —small programs dedicated to solving particular problems.

But these laboratory devices are often hard-wired to run one program or limited to fixed patterns of interactions between the quantum constituents. Making a quantum computer that can run arbitrary algorithms requires the right kind of physical system and a suite of programming tools. Atomic , confined by fields from nearby electrodes, are among the most promising platforms for meeting these needs.

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