Mo’ Amazon, Science, Space, and Crypto Futures!
Technology Trends, Nov 30, 2017
With engineering, I view this year’s failure as next year’s opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly. –Gordon Moore
Tech News that Matters
HP’s Meg Whitman is stepping down.
Elon Musk’s Tesla is facing financial challenges, and it looks like regulators are going to cut the tax credit of $7500 per vehicle.
Airbus’s modular plane looks amazing:
YouTube has created it’s own version of Stories in a video format called ‘Reels’. It’s just released, and available to creators with 10,000 subscribers or more.
SnapChat just went through a major redesign to, “separate the social from the media”.
Amazon
If they weren’t impressive enough, we’re in awe of what the AWS team is accomplishing. Yesterday, the AWS team unveiled a litany of new products, including:
Their AI services called Amazon Comprehend, that analyzes sentiment in phrases and text.
Their AWS graph database service called Amazon Neptune, which is designed to make computing more efficient as well as offer a backup feature for DynamoDB.
They debuted AWS Fargate to help customers run containers w/o worrying about infrastructure.
AWS DeepLens was released which allows developers to use ML to take better photos.
They added AWS support for Kubernetes which runs on top of their Elastic Container Service.
Whew! As if that wasn’t enough, we’re not finished… Amazon is still going!
They’re dominating the Hot Dog / Not a Hot Dog space with their new Rekognition tool for developers.
They just announced Alexa for Business, which will be a marketplace for business apps that integrate with Alexa.
They just released their new Silk web browser for all of their hardware devices.
But does Amazon still have some internal cultural challenges to fix? Yes. Just like every company. They’re working internally to hire and promote more female leaders, as only two out of 38 execs at the VP level or higher are women.
Software & Hardware
Researchers from Harvard University have:
…developed a specialized quantum computer, known as a quantum simulator, which could be used to shed new light on a host of complex quantum processes, from the connection between quantum mechanics and material properties to investigating new phases of matter and solving complex real-world optimization problems.
Working in a Harvard Physics Department lab, a team of researchers led by Harvard Professors Mikhail Lukin and Markus Greiner and MIT Professor Vladan Vuletic has developed a special type of quantum computer, known as a quantum simulator, which is programmed by capturing super-cooled rubidium atoms with lasers and arranging them in a specific order, then allowing quantum mechanics to do the necessary calculations.
The system could be used to shed new light on a host of complex quantum processes, from the connection between quantum mechanics and material properties to investigating new phases of matter and solving complex real-world optimization problems. The system is described in a November 30 paper published in Nature.
The combination of the system’s large size and high degree of quantum coherence make it a particularly important achievement, researchers say. With over 50 coherent qubits, this is one of the largest quantum systems ever created with individual assembly and measurement.
In the same issue of Nature, a team from the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland describes a similarly sized system of cold charged ions, also controlled with lasers. Taken together, these complementary advances constitute a major step towards realization of large-scale quantum machines.
“Everything happens in a small vacuum chamber where we have a very dilute vapor of atoms which are cooled close to absolute zero,” Lukin said. “When we focus about one hundred laser beams through this cloud, each of them acts like a trap. The beams are so tightly focused, they can either grab one atom or zero, they can’t grab two. And that’s when the fun starts.”
We have a feeling that the folks at Rigetti Computing have already done this in secret. That’s just wild speculation though.
ML & AI
A team at the University of California in conjunction with Adobe research is using natural language processing and neural networks to help create adaptive algorithms to cater to people’s preferences. When the machines are being trained to better serve us, we don’t mind. Full speed ahead USC and Adobe! It’s only when the machines get weaponized that we start to worry :)
The Georgia Institute of Technology is moving wearable computing and interfaces forward:
“With the whirl of a thumb, researchers have created technology that allows people to trace letters and numbers on their fingers and see the figures appear on a nearby computer screen. The system is triggered by a thumb ring outfitted with a gyroscope and tiny microphone. As wearers strum their thumb across the fingers, the hardware detects the movement.” –GIT and Science Daily
We’re one more step closer to the Minority Report style computing. Now let’s just avoid everything else about that movie.
VR & AR
MIT is hustling to create better VR remote control of machinery:
Many manufacturing jobs require a physical presence to operate machinery. But what if such jobs could be done remotely? Researchers have now presented a virtual-reality (VR) system that lets you teleoperate a robot using an Oculus Rift headset. –MIT
Space
The Universe is stranger than we can suppose. Did you know that science’s one free miracle, the big bang… isn’t something agreed upon by all scientists? Just like all things approaching the Truth, this theory has all kinds of flaws, and more physicists are starting to point them out. We live in wild times. From Science Daily and Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation:
Although for five decades, the Big Bang theory has been the best known and most accepted explanation for the beginning and evolution of the Universe, it is hardly a consensus among scientists.
Brazilian physicist Juliano Cesar Silva Neves part of a group of researchers who dare to imagine a different origin. In a study recently published in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation, Neves suggests the elimination of a key aspect of the standard cosmological model: the need for a spacetime singularity known as the Big Bang.
In raising this possibility, Neves challenges the idea that time had a beginning and reintroduces the possibility that the current expansion was preceded by contraction. “I believe the Big Bang never happened,” the physician said, who Works as a researcher at the University of Campinas’s Mathematics, Statistics & Scientific Computation Institute (IMECC-UNICAMP) in Sao Paulo State, Brazil.
For Neves, the fast spacetime expansion stage does not exclude the possibility of a prior contraction phase. Moreover, the switch from contraction to expansion may not have destroyed all traces of the preceding phase.
The article, which reflects the work developed under the Thematic Project “Physics and geometry of spacetime,” considers the solutions to the general relativity equations that describe the geometry of the cosmos and then proposes the introduction of a “scale factor” that makes the rate at which the Universe is expanding depend not only on time but also on cosmological scale.
“In order to measure the rate at which the Universe is expanding with the standard cosmology, the model in which there’s a Big Bang, a mathematical function is used that depends only on cosmological time,” said Neves, who elaborated the idea with Alberto Vazques Saa, a Full Professor at IMECC-UNICAMP and also the supervisor for Neves’ postdoctoral project, funded by the Sao Paulo Research Foundation — FAPESP.”
–From Science Daily and Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation
Cryptocurrencies
Nasdaq announced futures for Bitcoin are coming in June 2018, and the price is skyrocketing. Congrats to all those who have held for the long term.
That’s it for today’s edition of Tech Trends. Want more goodness like this? Make sure you’re subscribed to The Mission’s daily newsletter!
