DARPA September 7, 2018 Starting in the 1990s, DARPA helped usher in a second wave of AI machine learning technologies that created statistical pattern recognizers from large amounts of data. To address the limitations of the first and second wave AI technologies, DARPA seeks to explore new theories and applications that could make it possible for machines to adapt to changing situations. To better define a path forward DARPA announced a multi-year investment of more than $2 billion in new and existing programs called the “AI Next” campaign. Under AI Next, key areas to be explored may include automating critical DoD […]
Does technology really enhance our decision-making ability?
Phys.org September 6,2018 Recommender systems are artificially intelligent algorithms that use big data to suggest additional products to consumers based on things such as past purchases, demographic information or search history. Researchers at ARL contradict this assumption and even demonstrate that a person’s subjective satisfaction with their decisions are all strongly influenced by their cognitive state and traits. As the Army continues to push for increased modernization of its forces, recommender systems and other forms of AI are expected to play a key role in battlefield decision making, but academic and corporate approaches to designing such systems often fail when […]
Efficient generation of photon pairs from modified carbon nanotubes
Physics News September 6, 2018 Doping SWCNTs is emerging as an effective means for enhancing the emission properties of nanotubes and introducing new functionalities. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory showed that the photon pair emission originates from two successive captures and recombination of excitons at a solitary oxygen dopant state and this type of photon pair emission process can happen at an efficiency as high as 44 percent of the single photon emission. The main limiting factor for the efficiency of this process is exciton-exciton annihilation. This work opens an exciting new path toward carbon nanotube-based lasers and entangled […]
Electromagnetic radiation protection shields developed
Phys.org September 7, 2018 Normally, heavy elements are used as the material for electromagnetic and magnetic shielding, as they efficiently absorb high-energy radiation. Bismuth is the best option in the ratio of the protection efficiency to mass-size parameters. An international team of researchers (Russia, Belarus) studied the dependency of the bismuth film microstructure and functional properties on the production process regimes and the initial electrolyte composition and determined that electrolyte mixing, temperature, and organic additives exert a noticeable influence on the electrode process of the discharge of Bi3+ions in acid perchlorate electrolyte. The research answers the question of how to […]
Multifunctional carbon fibres enable massless energy storage
Physics World September 7, 2018 Carbon fibres’ microstructural designs have been generated to realise a targeted mechanical property. An international team of researchers (Italy, Sweden, France) compared the microstructure and electrochemical performance for two types of commercial carbon fibre, middling mechanical properties and the hardest hitters in terms of structural strength. They found that the intermediate strength carbon fibres were much less organised but still had such high mechanical properties that even smaller crystals might still get good mechanical properties. According to the researchers exploiting the electrochemical properties of carbon fibres could drop device masses by as much as 50%… […]
Physicists implement a version of Maxwell’s famous thought experiment for reducing entropy
Phys.org September 8, 2018 Reduced entropy in a three-dimensional lattice of super-cooled, laser-trapped atoms could help speed progress toward creating quantum computers. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University rearranged a randomly distributed array of atoms into neatly organized blocks, thus performing the function of a “Maxwell’s demon”—a thought experiment from the 1870s that challenged the second law of thermodynamics. The organized blocks of atoms could form the basis for a quantum computer that uses uncharged atoms to encode data and perform calculations… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Quantum optical neural networks
Arxiv August 29, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (MIT, industry partners) has shown that many of the features of neural networks for machine learning can naturally be mapped into the quantum optical domain by introducing the quantum optical neural network (QONN). Through numerical simulation and analysis, they trained the QONN to perform a range of quantum information processing tasks, including newly developed protocols for quantum optical state compression, reinforcement learning, and black-box quantum simulation. The results indicate QONNs are a powerful design tool for quantum optical systems and a promising architecture for next generation quantum processors… read […]
Robot-bat, ‘Robat,’ uses sound to navigate and map a novel environment
Science Daily September 6, 2018 An international team of researchers (Israel, Switzerland) developed ‘Robat’—a fully autonomous bat-like terrestrial robot that relies on echolocation to move through a novel environment while mapping it solely based on sound. Using the echoes reflected from the environment, the Robat delineates the borders of objects it encounters, and classifies them using an artificial neural-network, thus creating a rich map of its environment. Unlike most previous attempts to apply sonar in robotics, they focus on a biological bat-like approach, which relies on a single emitter and two ears, and they apply a biological plausible signal processing […]
The Scientific Prize Network Predicts Who Pushes the Boundaries of Science
Arxiv August 28, 2018 Using comprehensive new data on prizes and prizewinners worldwide and across disciplines, researchers at Northwestern University examine the growth dynamics and interlocking relationships found in the worldwide scientific prize network. They focus on understanding how the knowledge linkages among prizes and scientists’ propensities for prizewinning are related to knowledge pathways across disciplines and stratification within disciplines. They found that despite a proliferation of diverse prizes over time and across the globe, prizes are more concentrated within a relatively small group of scientific elites, and ties within the elites are more clustered, a relatively constrained number of […]
Scientists ‘teleport’ a quantum gate
Science Daily September 5, 2018 Modularity is used in constructing a large-scale quantum processor because of the errors and noise that are inherent in real-world quantum systems. An essential tool for universal quantum computation is the teleportation of an entangling quantum gate. Researchers at Yale University demonstrated the teleportation of a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate, took a crucial step towards implementing robust, error-correctable modules by enacting the gate between two logical qubits, encoding quantum information redundantly. By using such an error-correctable encoding, their teleported gate achieves a process fidelity of 79 per cent. Teleported gates have implications for fault-tolerant quantum computation, […]