MIT News January 11, 2022 MIT scientists discuss the future of AI with applications across many sectors, as a tool that can be both beneficial and harmful. They said some new capabilities that could be enabled by AI: an automated personal assistant that could monitor your sleep phases and wake you at the optimal time, as well as on-body sensors that monitor everything from your posture to your digestive system. Intelligent assistance can help empower and augment our lives. But these intriguing possibilities should only be pursued if we can simultaneously resolve the challenges that these technologies bring…read more.
Author Archives: Hema Viswanath
Researcher develops new tool for understanding hard computational problems that appear intractable
Phys.org January 10, 2022 The problem of optimizing over random structures emerges in many areas of science and engineering, ranging from statistical physics to machine learning and artificial intelligence. For many such structures, finding optimal solutions by means of fast algorithms is not known and often believed impossible to solve. At the same time, the formal hardness of these problems in the form of the complexity-theoretic NP-hardness is lacking. Researchers at MIT describe a new approach for algorithmic intractability in random structures, which is based on the topological disconnectivity property of the set of pairwise distances of near-optimal solutions, called […]
Scientific Integrity Task Force releases “Protecting the Integrity of Government Science” report
Phys.org January 11, 2022 To affirm that evidence-based decision-making—informed by vigorous science and unimpeded by political interference—would be a pillar of his administration President Biden directed ambitious actions to implement that goal, including the creation of an interagency Scientific Integrity Task Force which included 48 scientists, statisticians, engineers, lawyers, and policymakers with a diversity of experiences from 29 federal agencies. It received input from hundreds of outside experts from academia, the nonprofit sector, industry, and the public. The group found that although federal agency science is generally sound—that is, reported violations of scientific integrity policies are small in number compared […]
Scientists call for a moratorium on climate change research until governments take real action
Phys.org January 11, 2022 There is an unwritten social contract between science and society. Public investment in science is intended to improve understanding about our world and support beneficial societal outcomes. According to the authors the contract is broken. Science demonstrates why this is occurring, that it is getting worse, the implications for human well-being and social-ecological systems and substantiates action. Governments agree that the science is settled. The tragedy of climate change science is that at the same time as compelling evidence is gathered, fresh warnings issued, and novel methodologies developed, indicators of adverse global change rise year upon […]
Scientists reduce all-solid-state battery resistance by heating
Science Daily January 7, 2022 The interface between the positive electrode and solid electrolyte in an all-solid state battery shows a large electrical resistance, and the resistance increases when the electrode surface is exposed to air, degrading the battery capacity and performance. Researchers in Japan demonstrated that drastic reduction of the resistance is achievable by annealing the entire battery cell. Exposing the LiCoO2 positive electrode surface to H2O vapor increases the resistance by more than 10 times (to greater than 136 Ω cm2). The magnitude can be reduced to the initial value (10.3 Ω cm2) by annealing the sample in […]
Why Discovering ‘Nothing’ in Science Can Be So Incredibly Important
Science Alert January 9, 2022 What we don’t usually hear about is the years of back-breaking, painstaking hard work that delivers inconclusive results, appearing to provide no evidence for the questions scientists ask. Yet without non-detections – what we call the null result – the progress of science would often be slowed and stymied. Null results drive us forward. They keep us from repeating the same errors and shape the direction of future studies. Often, however, null results don’t make it to scientific publications. This not only generates significant inefficiencies in the way science is done, but it’s also an indicator […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of January 7, 2022
01. Changing the properties of ferroelectric materials by vacating a single oxygen atom 02. Experimental quantum teleportation of propagating microwaves 03. The first topological acoustic transistor 04. A-list candidate for fault-free quantum computing delivers surprise 05. Minimizing laser phase noise with machine learning 06. Revitalizing batteries by bringing ‘dead’ lithium back to life 07. Safer carbon capture and storage 08. Self-Detoxifying Wearable Filter for Development of Next Generation NBC Protective Gear 09. Suiting up with Al-Mg-Si: New protective coating for steel in ships and marine and coastal facilities 10. Ultrafast imaging of terahertz electric waveforms using quantum dots And others… […]
Changing the properties of ferroelectric materials by vacating a single oxygen atom
Phys.org January 3, 2022 In ferroelectric materials, a slight shift of the atoms causes significant changes in the electric field and in the contraction or expansion of the material. An international team of researchers (Israel, USA – UCLA) succeeded in deciphering the atomic structure and electric field deployment in domain walls at the atomic scale. They corroborate the assumption that domain walls allow for the existence of a two-dimensional border between domains as a result of partial oxygen vacancy in areas that are common to two domains, thus enabling greater flexibility in the deployment of the local electric field. They […]
Deep Learning Can’t be Trusted Brain Modelling Pioneer Says
IEEE Spectrum December 30, 2021 The inability of a typical deep learning program to perform well on more than one task severely limits application of the technology to specific tasks in rigidly controlled environments. It has been claimed that deep learning is untrustworthy because it can experience catastrophic forgetting. It might therefore be risky to use deep learning on any life-or-death application, such as a medical one. In his new book Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind, Professor Stephen Grossberg of Boston University describes an alternative model for both biological and artificial intelligence based on cognitive […]
Experimental quantum teleportation of propagating microwaves
Phys.org January 4, 2022 Recent breakthroughs in quantum computation with superconducting circuits trigger a demand for quantum communication channels between spatially separated superconducting processors operating at microwave frequencies. An international team of researchers (Germany, Austria) demonstrated the unconditional quantum teleportation of propagating coherent microwave states by exploiting two-mode squeezing and analog feedforward over a macroscopic distance of d = 0.42 m. They achieved a teleportation fidelity of F = 0.689 ± 0.004, exceeding the asymptotic no-cloning threshold. Thus, the quantum nature of the teleported states is preserved, opening the avenue toward unconditional security in microwave quantum communication. As their principal teleportation […]