Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: information science

Post-quantum cryptography discussion in Tacoma WA on May 5th discussing hacking by QC hackers and leveraging Cryptography algorithms to offset the attacks; may be of interest to sit in and even join in the debates. I will try attend if I can because it would be interesting to see the arguments raised and see the responses.

The University of Washington Tacoma Institute of Technology will present a discussion about the esoteric field of post-quantum cryptography at the Northwest Cybersecurity Symposium on May 5.

“I’ve been researching post-quantum cryptography for years, finding ways to protect against a threat that doesn’t yet exist,” said Anderson Nascimento, assistant professor of computer science at the institute, in a release.

Post-quantum cryptography refers to encryption that would be secure against an attack by a quantum computer — a kind of supercomputer using quantum mechanics, which, so far, exists only in theory.

Read more

“[Using DNA,] you could fit all the knowledge in the whole world inside the trunk of your car,” Twist Bioscience CEO Emily Leproust told TechCrunch.

Twist Bioscience, a startup making and using synthetic DNA to store digital data, just struck a contract with Microsoft and the University of Washington to encode vast amounts of information on synthetic genes.

Big data means business and the company able to gather a lot of it is very valuable to investors and stockholders. But that data needs to be stored somewhere and can cost a lot for the upkeep.

Digital data stored on media also has a finite shelf life. But researchers have discovered new ways to stuff digital information over the last few years – including in our DNA, which can last thousands of years intact.

Read more

Supercomputer facing problems?

In the world of High Performance Computing (HPC), supercomputers represent the peak of capability, with performance measured in petaFLOPs (1015 operations per second). They play a key role in climate research, drug research, oil and gas exploration, cryptanalysis, and nuclear weapons development. But after decades of steady improvement, changes are coming as old technologies start to run into fundamental problems.

When you’re talking about supercomputers, a good place to start is the TOP500 list. Published twice a year, it ranks the world’s fastest machines based on their performance on the Linpack benchmark, which solves a dense system of linear equations using double precision (64 bit) arithmetic.

Looking down the list, you soon run into some numbers that boggle the mind. The Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2), a system deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, is the number one system as of November 2015, a position it’s held since 2013. Running Linpack, it clocks in at 33.86 x 1015 floating point operations per second (33.86 PFLOPS).

Read more

Good article overall highlighting the gaps in AI talent. I do know that some of the best AI SMEs in the US all have worked somewhere in their careers at the US National Labs because many us had to build “real time” systems that leveraged complex algorithms to self-monitor conditions and react independently under certain conditions arise and in some cases we leveraged the super computer to prove theories as well. I suggest locate where some of these folks exist because you will find your talent pool.

Artificial Intelligence is the field where jobs continue to grow, provided you have the desired skill sets

Diksha Gupta, Techgig.com

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the buzzword in almost all industries. Decision-makers want to make use of massive data they get from various sources. This is where data analytics and artificial intelligence come into play.

Read more

Nice; taking design and manufacturing to new levels.

Advanced materials are increasingly embodying counterintuitive properties, such as extreme strength and super lightness, while additive manufacturing and other new technologies are vastly improving the ability to fashion these novel materials into shapes that would previously have been extremely costly or even impossible to create. Generating new designs that fully exploit these properties, however, has proven extremely challenging. Conventional design technologies, representations, and algorithms are inherently constrained by outdated presumptions about material properties and manufacturing methods. As a result, today’s design technologies are simply not able to bring to fruition the enormous level of physical detail and complexity made possible with cutting-edge manufacturing capabilities and materials.

To address this mismatch, DARPA today announced its TRAnsformative DESign (TRADES) program. TRADES is a fundamental research effort to develop new mathematics and algorithms that can more fully take advantage of the almost boundless design space that has been enabled by new materials and fabrication methods.

“The structural and functional complexities introduced by today’s advanced materials and manufacturing methods have exceeded our capacity to simultaneously optimize all the variables involved,” said Jan Vandenbrande, DARPA program manager. “We have reached the fundamental limits of what our computer-aided design tools and processes can handle, and need revolutionary new tools that can take requirements from a human designer and propose radically new concepts, shapes and structures that would likely never be conceived by even our best design programs today, much less by a human alone.”

Read more

A team of computer scientists from the University of Southern California (USC) have been successful in developing a new method to alleviate wildlife poaching. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the project that has created a model for ‘green security games’.

This model is based on game theory to safeguard wildlife from poachers. Game theory involves predicting the actions of enemy using mathematical equations and subsequently formulating the best possible restrain moves. This model will enable more efficient patrolling of parks and wildlife by park rangers.

An artificial intelligence (AI) application, known as Protection Assistant for Wildlife Sanctuary (PAWS) was developed by Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at USC and Milind Tambe, a professor of computer science and systems engineering at USC, in 2013. The team has since then spent a couple of years to test the effectiveness of the application in Uganda and Malaysia.

Read more

What the bleep is an exocortex and why should we care?

Ray Kurzweil

An exocortex can be accurately described as an external neocortex. Many people may have heard of the exocortex from Ray Kurzweil. The idea of an exocortex is actually a bit older than Ray Kurzweil’s description. As We May Think was the title of an essay by Vannevar Bush the famed inventor and in that essay he describes a machine which may be used to record the collective memory of mankind. It is the first known exocortex concept that I could find and he called this device the Memex.

The Memex would allow anyone to store all of the books and knowledge they gathered in their lifetime in a personal knowledge base. Unfortunately we still do not have a Memex device which allows us to store our own memories even though there are many centralized organizations which collect vast amounts of big data on our lives to put in central databases. Google could be said to be building an exocortex today but this exocortex is centralized and while we can use it as an external memory it conveniently has the feature (or bug) that allows our individual memories or thoughts to be searched. Maybe it’s time to build a decentralized exocortex which can allow the individual to own their own thoughts, own their own search, own their content, their data, and their digital selves?

Read more

Interesting — data compression algorithm can be applied to detect Quantum Entanglement.

The next time you archive some files and compress them, you might think about the process a little differently. Researchers at the National University of Singapore have discovered a common compression algorithm can be used to detect quantum entanglement. What makes this discovery so interesting is that it does not rely on heavily on an assumption that the measured particles are independent and identically distributed.

If you measure the property of a particle and then measure the same property of another particle, in classical mechanics there is no reason for them to match but pure chance. In quantum mechanics though, the two particles can be entangled, such that the results will match each other. This follows from Bell’s theorem, which is applied to test if particles are in fact entangled. The catch is that the theorem is derived for testing pairs of particles, but many pairs have to be measured and the probabilities they are entangled calculated. This is where the researchers’ discovery comes into play because instead of calculating probabilities, the measurements can be fed into the open-source Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) to get their normalized compression difference. Compression algorithms work by finding patterns in data and encoding them more efficiently, and in this case they also find correlations from quantum entanglement.

Read more

Using a weird phenomenon in which particles of light seem to travel at faster-than-light speeds, scientists have shown that waves of light can seem to travel backward in time.

The new experiment also shows other bizarre effects of light, such as pairs of images forming and annihilating each other.

Taken together, the results finally prove a century-old prediction made by British scientist and polymath Lord Rayleigh. The phenomenon, called time reversal, could allow researchers to develop ultra-high-speed cameras that can peer around corners and see through walls. [In Images: The World’s 11 Most Beautiful Equations].

Read more