Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: business – Page 207

Where Computing Is Headed—Beyond Quantum

To address the challenge, some startups are making chips focused on specific software tasks. Others are pushing further, finding processing and storage solutions in new materials, including synthetic DNA.

Quantum computing is the best-known of these new methods. Startups as well as tech giants including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and International Business Machines Corp. are developing quantum computers, which harness the properties of quantum physics to sort through a vast number of possibilities in nearly real time. The advent of quantum computing has paved the way for other experimental techniques, startup executives say.

The market for new computing technology comes as advancements in traditional chip making are hitting a physical limit under Moore’s Law, the idea that every two years or so, the number of transistors in a chip doubles.

At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence, easier access to huge troves of data and the continuing digitization of business processes are putting new demands on corporate and scientific computing.

Samsung’s ‘artificial human’ project definitely looks like a digital avatar

On Friday we wrote about Samsung’s mysterious “artificial human” project Neon, speculating that the company was building realistic human avatars that could be used for entertainment and business purposes, acting as guides, receptionists, and more.

Now, a tweet from the project’s lead and some leaked videos pretty much confirm this — although they don’t give us nearly enough information to judge how impressive Neon is.

The lead of Neon, computer-human interaction researcher Pranav Mistry, tweeted the image below, apparently showing one of the project’s avatars. Mistry says the company’s “Core R3” technology can now “autonomously create new expressions, new movements, new dialog (even in Hindi), completely different from the original captured data.”

OneWeb joins the satellite Internet gold rush this week

It’s a model the company believes makes sense because the right answer for getting regulatory approval and delivering service in the United States or the Philippines or Indonesia will vary, Steckel said. “We’re going to be doing business with partners around the world,” Steckel said. “Our style is not confrontational. We’re using a different model. It’s a big world.”

OneWeb plans to offer its first customer demonstrations by the end of 2020 and provide full commercial global services in 2021.

Rocket startup Astra emerges from stealth, aims to launch for as little as $1M per flight

There’s yet another new rocket launch startup throwing its hat in the ring — Astra, an Alameda-based company that’s actually been operating in stealth mode (though relatively openly, often referred to as “Stealth Space Company”) for the past three years developing and testing its launch vehicle. Astra revealed its business model and progress to date in a new feature article with Bloomberg Businessweek, detailing how it plans to use mass production to deliver rockets quickly and cheaply for small satellite orbital delivery. Astra revealed it has raised more than $100 million from investors, including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Airbus Ventures, Canann Partners and Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff, to name a few, and it has big ambitions in terms of cost and capabilities.

Astra’s rockets are smaller than most existing launch vehicles in operation, designed to delivery up to 450 lbs of cargo to space, but with the specific mandate of doing so quickly and responsively. The company is a finalist (and the only remaining one) on DARPA’s Launch Challenge, the terms of which mandate that the winning company deploy two rockets from two different locations within a few weeks of each other. Astra is still in the running, while its erstwhile competitors have dropped out, with Virgin Orbit having voluntarily withdrawn and Vector Launch having gone out of business.

The DARPA challenge, which includes an award of $12 million for the winner, represents a growing trend in terms of defense customer needs: Fast turnaround and responsive operations for small satellite delivery. In an industry where the process of securing a launch service provider to actually flying a payload has typically taken at least six months in the best-case scenario, there’s a growing need for quicker timelines in the interest of building more redundancy and resilience into defense and reconnaissance space operations through use of networks of small satellites, versus single large geostationary satellites that are expensive to launch and more time-consuming to task.

Genomics and BioPharma Pioneer!! — Dr. William Haseltine — Biologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, now focusing on the issues of healthcare costs, dementia care, and aging — ideaXme — Ira Pastor

Delivering More 5G Data With Less Hardware

Business districts may be bustling in the daytime, but they can often be near-deserted in the evenings. These fluctuations in population density pose a challenge to the emergence of 5G networks, which will require more hardware than ever before to relay massive amounts of data. Here’s the rub: To ensure reliable service, mobile networks must either invest in and deploy many more hardware units–or find ways to let the hardware move with the crowds.

One group of researchers is proposing a creative solution: installing small radio units on cars and crowdsourcing the task of data transmission when the vehicles are not in use. That approach relies on the fact that more cars tend to be parked in highly populated areas.

The most common network model that service providers are considering for 5G networks involves C-RAN architecture. Central units coordinate the transmission of data; the data is disseminated through distribution units and is further processed and transmitted by fleets of radio units. Those units convert the information to usable formats for mobile users.

RealityEngines.AI Launches World’s First Autonomous Cloud AI Service

San Francisco startup RealityEngines. AI has turned off stealth mode and today launched its completely autonomous cloud AI service. It’s all very tedious to the common reader IMO — enterprise-level business stuff — but the technology itself and how it could shape our future in both data and perceived reality should be at least mildly considered.

Here’s how RealityEngines. AI works: using a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technique called BANANAS, when a user points their data (through an API) to RealityEngines. AI and selects a use case (churn predictions, fraud detection, sales lead forecasting, security threat detection, cloud spend optimization, et al.), the data is attacked by the NAS to create cutting-edge models then refined by a generative adversarial network (GAN) in order to augment sparse or noisy data with synthetic data to further enhance the data modeling. Now that, is bananas.

It’s a democratization of AI that will not only create a service that allows anyone to create AI models without having to hire a team of developers, but it makes that service accessible to any business that feels it needs it and might not even have enough data. The synthetic data technology can help companies create AI models with a moderate amount of data.

Taiwan Is Opening A Giant AI-Focused Business Park

Taiwan has been the world’s hardware hub for decades, so the shift toward AI makes the most of the existing inexpensive engineering talent. A refocus on AI, however, reduces reliance on hardware, which can easily be made somewhere else, such as China, at lower costs. Multinational tech companies have already shown interest in tapping Taiwan’s talent in software, including AI.

To move things along further, the government of Hsinchu County, near Taipei, will open a 126,000-square-meter (about 1.3 million square feet) AI business park near one of Taiwan’s major all-purpose high-tech zones and two top universities.

“[The park] will not just help [promote] industry-academia cooperation, but also let AI-oriented startups and companies have a demo space to verify AI product services,” says Shirley Tsai, a research manager with IDC Taiwan’s enterprise solution group. “It will be helpful as well to attract the companies who are interested in the AI field and then accelerating the AI ecosystem.”