DARPA May 20, 2019 Under the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program funded by DARPA a team of researchers (Battelle Memorial Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Rice University, industry) is developing high-resolution, bidirectional brain-machine interfaces for use by able-bodied service members. These wearable interfaces could ultimately enable diverse national security applications such as control of active cyber defense systems and swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles, or teaming with computer systems to multitask during complex missions. Throughout the program, the research will benefit from insights provided by independent legal and ethical experts […]
Tag Archives: Emerging technology
12 irreplaceable innovations made possible by NSF
NSF May 22, 2019 Before the internet was commercialized, before your phone was smart, before there was a picture of a black hole, there was an NSF–funded researcher pursuing their curiosity. NSF funded research has laid the foundation for many of the groundbreaking discoveries and game–changing technologies we know today. Here are 12 innovations and discoveries made possible through NSF support…read more.
NIST publishes final green paper on ‘Unleashing American Innovation’
Fedscoop April 24, 2019 The document, “Unleashing American Innovation” details options for enhancing how federally funded inventions move from the laboratory to the marketplace. The options include streamlining federal regulations, encouraging public-private partnerships, engaging with private-sector investors, building a more entrepreneurial workforce and more. The paper does not prescribe policy, but it does offer suggestions for how future policy might be crafted. According to the paper the government invests about $150 billion annually across 300 federal laboratories as well as U.S. universities and private sector R&D institutions. The Lab-to-Market CAP goal aims to get more of the innovations created out […]
‘A Swiss cheese-like material’ that can solve equations
University of Pennsylvania March 21, 2019 Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have introduced a metamaterial platform capable of solving an arbitrary wave as the input function to an equation associated with a prescribed integral operator. The solution of such an equation is generated as a complex-valued output electromagnetic field. They demonstrated their technique at microwave frequencies through solving a generic integral equation and using a set of waveguides as the input and output to the designed metastructures. The research provides a route to develop chip-based analog optical computers and computing elements…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
DARPA Seeks to Make Scalable On-Chip Security Pervasive
DARPA News March 25, 2019 There are no common tools, methods, or solutions for chip-level security currently in wide use. This is largely driven by the economic hurdles and technical trade-offs often associated with secure chip design. To ease the burden of developing secure chips, DARPA developed the Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS) program. AISS aims to automate the process of incorporating scalable defense mechanisms into chip designs, while allowing designers to explore economics versus security trade-offs and maximize design productivity. The objective of the program is to develop a design tool and IP ecosystem – which includes tool […]
Growing Drone Industry Spawns a Growing Antidrone Industry
IEEE Spectrum March 26, 2019 FAA report to address the rogue drones is due to be released in about two months. It’s not technically difficult to detect even a small drone with suitable radar equipment. But the tricky part is distinguishing them from birds, which have about the same radar cross section. The signals recorded by the right radar will register these differences between birds and drones. Once a drone has been spotted flying someplace it shouldn’t be, there are all sorts of ways to neutralize it or take control over the drone and force it to land or fly […]
Magnonic devices can replace electronics without much noise
Phys.org March 4, 2019 Researchers at UC Riverside created a chip that generated spin wave between transmitting and receiving antennae. They showed that the low-frequency noise of magnonic devices is dominated by the random telegraph signal noise rather than 1/f noise. It was also found that the noise level of surface magnons depends strongly on the power level, increasing sharply at the on-set of nonlinear dissipation. The presence of the random telegraph signal noise suggests that the current fluctuations involve random discrete macro events caused by an individual macro-scale fluctuator. The findings may help in developing the next generation of […]
Causal disentanglement is the next frontier in AI
Phys.org February 20, 2019 Complex behaviour emerges from interactions between objects produced by different generating mechanisms. Researchers in Sweden introduce a universal, unsupervised and parameter-free model-oriented approach, based on the seminal concept and the first principles of algorithmic probability, to decompose an observation into its most likely algorithmic generative models. They demonstrated its ability to deconvolve interacting mechanisms regardless of whether the resultant objects are bit strings, space–time evolution diagrams, images or networks. Although this is mostly a conceptual contribution and an algorithmic framework, they have provided numerical evidence evaluating the ability of the methods to extract models from data […]
Can we trust scientific discoveries made using machine learning?
Eurekalert February 15, 2019 According to the researchers at Rice University machine learning field has focused on developing predictive models that allow machine learning to make predictions about future data based on its understanding of data it has studied. A lot of these techniques are designed to always make a prediction. They never come back with ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘I didn’t discover anything,’ because they aren’t made to. People have applied machine learning to genomic data from clinical cohorts to find groups, or clusters, of patients with similar genomic profiles. But there are cases where discoveries aren’t reproducible; the […]
5 Times People Thought a Science Idea Was Crackpot, And Were Proven Spectacularly Wrong
Science Alert February 12, 2019 Robert H. Goddard said “every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realised, it becomes commonplace.” Science has the power to change the world, but it’s not always an easy path to enlightenment. At many junctures throughout history, proponents of revolutionary ideas have come up against criticism and pushback from the establishment. Science is all about experimentation, trial, error, and evidence. It may have taken years, but each of the following five ideas, once considered preposterous or silly, has now been accepted as correct: Continental drift ; Evolution ; Heliocentricity ; […]