IEEE Spectrum January 3, 2020 Spectrum’s editors make every effort to bring the coming year’s important technologies to your attention. Some they get right, others less so. The software pioneer Alan Kay has said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, and that’s what we’ve been busy doing. The public understands that we’re creating the future, but they think that we know what we’re doing and that there’s a master plan in there somewhere. However, the world evolves haphazardly, bumbling along in unforeseen directions. Some seemingly great inventions just don’t take hold, while overlooked innovations […]
Tag Archives: Science without border
Physics in the 2020s: what will happen over the decade ahead
Physics World December 31, 2019 Many of the successes in physics over the last decade were honoured by Physics World through our annual Breakthrough of the Year . According to Physics World there will be plenty of downs as well as ups over the next 10 years. Physicists discoveries have transformed everyday life, not least in how we communicate. Powered by developments in semiconductor physics and optics, smartphones continue to be ever lighter, faster and more powerful over the next decade; Quantum computing and communication will become mainstream; Physics experiments will generate ever more data and analysing that information using artificial […]
An engine for game-changing innovation
MIT News December 13, 2019 In 2016, MIT launched The Engine as a new way to fund and support Boston-area entrepreneurs who are using transformative technologies to address the world’s most pressing problems. A core tenet of The Engine’s mission is to turn technical pioneers into leaders. Its emphasis on community and networking is also reflected in the Tough Tech Summit it hosts each year. The Engine provides “patient” funding, mentoring, work and lab space, specialized equipment, and an extensive network to entrepreneurs working on transformative technologies. In the three years since its inception, The Engine has invested in 20 […]
Understanding the essentials of global innovation
Eurekalert August 19, 2019 Relevant for both academics and practitioners, the book, Managing innovation: Internationalization of Innovation explores a diverse view on the international innovation process. It presents main research milestones on the internationalization of innovation and discusses current phenomena like lean and global innovation, with case studies from China, Germany, India and Russia. The book also provides readers with a unique insight into this interesting industry by giving a structured overview of mobile technologies…read more.
China has started a grand experiment in AI education. It could reshape how the world learns.
MIT Technology Review August 2, 2019 According to one estimate, China led the way investing over $1 billion globally last year in AI education. Tech giants, startups, and education incumbents have all jumped in. Tens of millions of students now use some form of AI to learn. Three things have fueled China’s AI education boom. The first is tax breaks and other incentives for AI ventures, academic competition in China is fierce and Chinese entrepreneurs have masses of data at their disposal to train and refine their algorithms. Squirrel, one of the largest AI education companies in China, also opened […]
Geoscience data group urges all scientific disciplines to make data open and accessible
EurekAlert June 4, 2019 According to a team of researchers in the US (AGU, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brandeis University, Columbia University, University of Virginia, industry) scientists don’t share data for many reasons. Those who create data rarely receive credit, and when they do, recognition is often limited to citations. Scant support is available for curating data. These issues span all disciplines, but conversations are disconnected. That’s why more than 100 repositories, communities, societies, institutions, infrastructures, individuals and publishers (including Springer Nature, the publishers of Nature) have signed up since last November to the Enabling FAIR Data Project’s Commitment Statement in […]
Gravitational waves leave a detectable mark, physicists say
Science Daily May 9, 2019 Physicists have long known that gravitational waves leave a memory on the particles along their path and have identified five such memories. An international team of researchers (USA – Cornell University, Ireland, the Netherlands) has identified three more observables that show the effects of gravitational waves in a flat region in spacetime that experiences a burst of gravitational waves, after which it returns to be a flat region. Each new observable provides different ways of confirming the theory of general relativity and offers insight into the intrinsic properties of gravitational waves…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Forecasting contagious ideas: ‘Infectivity’ models accurately predict tweet lifespan
Science Daily April 17, 2019 Models of contagion dynamics, originally developed for infectious diseases, have proven relevant to the study of information, news, and political opinions in online social systems. An international team of researchers (UK, USA – University of North Carolina) used about one month of Twitter data — comprising over 12 million tweets and more than 1.5 million retweets — and estimated each tweet’s infectivity based on the network dynamics of the first 50 retweets associated with it. They tested the ability of the infectivity-based model to predict the virality of retweet cascades and compared its performance to […]
Global Funding Forecast Predicts Growth of R&D Spending Worldwide
R&D Magazine March 12, 2019 The Global R&D Funding Forecast is created based on proprietary reader surveys, current technology and economic reports and in-depth reporting. According to this year’s study, the global trend in R&D spending continues to grow worldwide, reflecting a surge to $240 billion in the Information & Technology sector. As in previous years, the growth in global R&D investments is being driven by spending in Asian countries, in particular China, which exceeds $500 billion in spending accounting for a 22 percent global share in investments. The United States will increase its R&D spending by $15.3 billion in […]
Einstein ‘puzzle’ solved as missing page emerges
Phys.org. March 6, 2019 The handwritten page, part of an eight-page appendix to a 1930 paper on the Nobel winner’s efforts towards a unified field theory, was discovered among the 110-page trove the university’s Albert Einstein archives received some two weeks ago. This article was one of many in Einstein’s attempts to unify the forces of nature into one, single theory and he devoted the last 30 years of his life to this effort. The eight-page appendix of the 1930 unified theory paper had never been published, though researchers had copies, this one page was missing in the copies…read more.