Reading Existential Physics

Just started reading ...  good intro .... 

Understanding physics and its practical application is becoming important.  Book about how quantum effects are being applied in computing and cryptography. 

Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions Audible Logo Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

By Sabine Hossenfelder (Author), Gina Daniels (Narrator), Penguin Audio (Publisher)

A contrarian scientist wrestles with the big questions that modern physics raises, and what physics says about the human condition.

Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is ascientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation. On the other hand, the idea that the universe itself is conscious is difficult to rule out entirely. 

According to Sabine Hossenfelder, it is not a coincidence that quantum entanglement and vacuum energy have become the go-to explanations of alternative healers, or that people believe their deceased grandmother is still alive because of quantum mechanics. Science and religion have the same roots, and they still tackle some of the same questions: Where do we come from? Where do we go to? How much can we know? The area of science that is closest to answering these questions is physics. Over the last century, physicists have learned a lot about which spiritual ideas are still compatible with the laws of nature. Not always, though, have they stayed on the scientific side of the debate. 

In this lively, thought-provoking book, Hossenfelder takes on the biggest questions in physics: Does the past still exist? Do particles think? Was the universe made for us? Has physics ruled out free will? Will we ever have a theory of everything? She lays out how far physicists are on the way to answering these questions, where the current limits are, and what questions might well remain unanswerable forever. Her book offers a no-nonsense yet entertaining take on some of the toughest riddles in existence, and will give the listener a solid grasp on what we know—and what we don’t know.

* This audiobook includes a downloadable PDF with key visual figures included in the book. 

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Sabine Hossenfelder (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Pilotless Cargo Carrying Planes

 With Drones everywhere, inevitable.   Emerging Market

The cargo hauling aircraft with no pilots on board

Published  4 days ago

A scaled-down version of the Black Swan at an airfield in Bulgaria

By Michael Dempsey  Reporter  in the BBC

Svilen Rangelov sports an impressive beard. It's eight years' worth of growth he says.   The beard dates back to when he and his younger brother, an aerospace engineer by training, formed Dronamics as Europe's answer to the emerging market for cargo drones.

He agreed with his brother Konstantin that they would shave their beards only after the first flight of the drone they've been building in their native Bulgaria.

At the time he established Dronamics big tech giants like Amazon were experimenting with drone deliveries to domestic addresses. But Mr Rangelov never believed in the concept of personal goods delivered by the drone.

The practical difficulties of flying a drone right up to someone's front door were obvious to Mr Rangelov. "We couldn't buy into the concept of small drones. We took a different approach."

This take on drone delivery will bear fruit when the prototype cargo aircraft takes to the air.  ... ' 

Imagining the AI Cockpit

Something we also imagined for running a large enterprise, rather than just a vehicle.  Show all the most useful data and forward simulations.  

Driving the Future: What Is an AI Cockpit?

Intelligent interiors are transforming transportation.

July 20, 2020 by Katie Burke

From Knight Rider’s KITT to Ironman’s JARVIS, intelligent copilots have been a staple of forward-looking pop culture.

Advancements in AI and high-performance processors are turning these sci-fi concepts into reality. But what, exactly, is an AI cockpit, and how will it change the way we move?

AI is enabling a range of new software-defined, in-vehicle capabilities across the transportation industry. With centralized, high-performance compute, automakers can now build vehicles that become smarter over time.

A vehicle’s cockpit typically requires a collection of electronic control units and switches to perform basic functions, such as powering entertainment or adjusting temperature. Consolidating these components with an AI platform such as NVIDIA DRIVE AGX simplifies the architecture while creating more compute headroom to add new features. In addition, NVIDIA DRIVE IX provides an open and extensible software framework for a software-defined cockpit experience.

Mercedes-Benz released the first such intelligent cockpit, the MBUX AI system, powered by NVIDIA technology, in 2018. The system is currently in more than 20 Mercedes-Benz models, with the second generation debuting in the upcoming S-Class.  ... ' 

Huawei’s 5G RAN Portfolio Beats Ericsson, Nokia and Others

Following,  much more at the link 

Huawei’s 5G RAN portfolio beats Ericsson, Nokia and others, report says  By Sue Marek Jun 25, 2019  in FierceWireless

Chinese vendor Huawei may effectively be banned from buying 5G components from U.S. companies, but that hasn’t stopped the firm from releasing what one analyst firm considers to be the top 5G RAN portfolio in the industry.

In its first competitive assessment of the 5G radio access network (RAN) market, GlobalData ranked Huawei No. 1 over Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and ZTE. The analyst firm evaluated the vendors and their RAN products based upon criteria such as baseband capacity, installation ease, radio unit product line, and technology evolution.  ... '

Dr Mark van Rijmenam, Newsletter

 I get the following future newsletter

 Newsletter Logo,  The f(x) = e^x

 This is my weekly newsletter, with a dose of insights into the exponential future.  in Linkedin

 Weekly newsletter, 6,557 subscribers

 Subscribed    The media metaverse and cloned voices

 Published on December 1, 2022     By Dr Mark van Rijmenam

Strategic futurist and Founder of the Digital Futures Institute - ensuring a thriving digital future for business and society | Global keynote speaker for Fortune 500 | 4x Author - latest: Step into the Metaverse

290 articles    The f(x) = e^x      Issue #194

Good Day! This is my weekly newsletter, with a dose of insights into the future. The topic of this newsletter is the exponential times we live in, hence the title of f(x) = e^x, which is the (natural) exponential function.

You can visit TheDigitalSpeaker.com to book me as a keynote speaker for your next event or hire me as your CEO's future tech coach. I have also published my Trend Prediction for 2022.

My latest article:

The metaverse will revolutionize the media and entertainment industry, offering novel, magical experiences and new revenue opportunities. The immersive internet will enable media and entertainment companies to provide unique, interactive experiences that bring media consumption to another level. It will enable immersive VR or AR content and the use of metaverse technologies such as NFTs to develop new business models.

The future of media and entertainment is exciting, and we are in for a wild ride. Before the end of this decade, we can expect 3D, hyper-realistic virtual and augmented experiences that will blow us away. Before that, the metaverse will enable Massive Interactive Live Events, bring augmented and virtual reality into our living room and create new engagement opportunities using NFTs. The potential is huge, and media & entertainment organisations should step into the metaverse today. Read more here.   .... '  ... 

On How Not to Win a Tech Ware

Thoughtful points, more at the link

From ACM DEPARTMENTS

How Not to Win a Tech War      By Moshe Y. Vardi

Communications of the ACM, January 2023, Vol. 66 No. 1, Page 7   10.1145/3571077

CACM Senior Editor Moshe Y. Vardi

A paradox: for the U.S. to compete with China, the U.S. is using Chinese talent. But let's start from the beginning. In May 2022, I predicted a "tech war" between the U.S. and China. "If computing technology is viewed as strategic technology," I wrote, "then we may have to say goodbye to the research world in which we openly collaborated and openly published." The tech war has come faster than I personally would have predicted.

In early August 2022, the U.S. authorized USD280B in taxpayer money to subsidize American computer-chip companies and invest in technology research for the sake of "keeping America strong and innovative." Following that, in early October 2022, the U.S. imposed limits on semi-conductor exports to China, aimed at limiting China's ability to make advanced semiconductors. The White House issued sweeping restrictions on selling semiconductors and chip-making equipment to China, in an attempt to curb the country's access to critical technologies.

Critics have questioned both legs of this strategy. On one hand, an investment of USD52B is considered relatively small, considering that a single major Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer—TSMC—announced in 2022 new capital investments of more than USD40B. On the other hand, China has been a major market for the U.S. tech industry, and the growing separation between American and Chinese tech markets will also hurt U.S. companies.

But tech wars are ultimately won by innovation, which requires both financial and human capital. The U.S. benefited tremendously by being a magnet for worldwide talent. According to the 2021 Taulbee Surveyb of the Computing Research Association, approximately 65% of doctoral students in computing in North America are international students. My estimate is that this pool of international students is dominated by Chinese students. My own research program has been greatly enriched by my Chinese students. This means the technological competition with China is aided, to a significant degree, by Chinese students. Hence, the opening sentence of this column.

But while American universities are still eager to attract Chinese talent, several U.S. actions imply otherwise. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice launched the "China Initiative," reflecting the strategic priority of the U.S. in "countering Chinese national security threats." Yet several prosecution cases under the China Initiative have ended in acquittals. Chinese-origin and Chinese-descent scientists and students studying and working in the U.S. bore and continue to bear the brunt of the suspicion. A September 2022c report by the Asian-American Scholars Forum (AASF) pointed out that feeling the pressure of potential federal investigations since the launch of the China Initiative, Chinese-origin scientists in the U.S. now face higher incentives to leave the U.S. and lower incentives to apply for federal grants. Furthermore, it has recently been reportedd that the number of new Chinese students at U.S. colleges has plummeted from pre-pandemic levels.

A week after the AASF report was published, the U.S. National Academies issued a report entitled "Protecting U.S. Technological Advantage." The main point of that report is that maintaining U.S. global leadership in science and technology requires a greater focus on strengthening innovation, and not solely on restricting access to specific technologies, calling on the U.S. to strive to maximize the amount of work that can be appropriately performed in an open research environment.

The National Academies' report also called on the U.S. to develop policies and programs aimed at developing domestic research talent. But the domestic doctoral talent pipeline has been shriveling for decades. In the mid-1990s, David Goodstein, a CalTech physicist, wrote in a blog: "The best American students have proved their superior abilities by reading the handwriting on the wall and going into other lines of work instead of choosing graduate school … The humming machinery kept right on going, fed by ore imported from across the oceans … Foreign graduate students have, temporarily at least, rescued our way of life."  ... ' 

'Jetson' Robots in Hospitals

What exactly is the Jetson Style?   How will people react? 

ACM TECHNEWS

Jetsons-Style Robots Invading Chicago-Area Hospitals

By Chicago Tribune, December 21, 2022

Hospital staffers hold elevator doors for a Moxi robot.

Moxi robots deliver medication and shuttle supplies and small pieces of equipment across three Chicago-area hospitals. ... ' 

Roughly human in shape, Moxi robots have been deployed in at least three Chicago-area hospitals amid a shortage of medical workers.

Developed by Diligent Robotics and leased by the hospitals via subscription, the robots deliver medication and transport supplies and small pieces of equipment throughout the facilities.

Nurses summon the robot by entering requests into an application on a tablet; when it arrives, they show their badge to a detector so they can open any of Moxi's three drawers to insert items before dispatching the unit on its task.

Moxi uses sensors to navigate and has a single arm to push buttons to open doors.

The concept is to have Moxi give nurses more time to care for patients, rather than having them convey items across the hospital.

From Chicago Tribune

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Scientists Apply ML Method to Help Diagnose Deadly Respiratory Illness

Machine Learning for Healthcare analysis ...'

 Scientists Apply ML Method to Help Diagnose Deadly Respiratory Illness

UC San Diego Today, Emerson Dameron, December 13, 2022

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, the Indian Institute of Technology, and the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) have developed a novel machine learning algorithm to help diagnose pneumonia from chest x-rays. The model features a two-way confirmation system that could complement clinicians and minimize human and computer error. Former IIIT researcher Abhibha Gupta said the three-level optimization model builds on earlier neural architecture search-based frameworks to find the best architecture from a set of candidates for detecting pneumonia. Gupta said this involves implementing the Learning By Teaching framework, which "consists of a teacher and student model that train together in an end-to-end manner to improve their learning abilities."  ... ' 

Process Allows 3D Printing of Microscale Metallic Parts

Aimed at very small parts.

Process Allows 3D Printing of Microscale Metallic Parts

California Institute of Technology

Robert Perkins, November 30, 2022

California Institute of Technology engineers have three-dimensionally (3D)-printed pure multicomponent metals at an order of magnitude smaller than previously achieved. The technique forgoes writing metals directly in favor of printing a hydrogel as a scaffold for metal-impregnated liquid precursors. Light from a low-powered ultraviolet lamp causes liquid polymers to harden, which when patterned can create desired microscopic shapes. The researchers infuse metal salts dissolved in water into the hydrogel scaffolds, then burn away the hydrogel portion to leave the metal intact. The heat causes shrinkage, enabling the researchers to 3D-print metal alloys and multicomponent metallic systems about 40 microns in size. ...'

NIST Revises Guidelines for Digital Identification in Federal Systems

Security of ID from NIST

 NIST Revises Guidelines for Digital Identification in Federal Systems

U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology

December 16, 2022

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has drafted revised federal guidelines that support risk-informed management of Americans' digital identities. The draft publication encompasses technical requirements for establishing and authenticating digital identities of individuals, including employees of government contractors or members of the general public. They cover privacy requirements, factors for cultivating equity and usability of digital identity solutions, and supporting technologies and protocols, with risks faced by individuals accessing services and by service-providing organizations considered in parallel. Updates include a section on biometric information usage for identity proofing; more phishing-resistant authentication methods; and recommendations for sharing/exchanging user identity information between different systems. NIST's Laurie E. Locascio said the guidelines are designed to "get the right services to the right people while preventing fraud, preserving privacy, fostering equity, and delivering high-quality, usable services to all."

Microscale 3D Printer for Multi-Level Anticounterfeiting Labels

Counterfeiting often a big deal in retail.

 Microscale 3D Printer for Multi-Level Anticounterfeiting Labels

University of Hong Kong, December 13, 2022

University of Hong Kong (HKU) engineers designed a microscale three-dimensional (3D) printing method for fabricating anticounterfeiting labels that can encrypt more digital data than two-dimensional labels. HKU's Jihyuk Yang said the researchers used diphenylalanine (FF) as the encryption medium because of its piezoelectrical and optical birefringence properties. HKU's Ji Tae Kim said the methodology integrates with molecular self-assembly to "print multi-segmented 3D FF micro-pixels with programmed crystallinity for high-density data encryption. By utilizing different responses of the amorphous and crystalline segments to polarized light, a tiny single 3D pixel can encrypt a multi-digit binary code consisting of '0' and '1.'"  ... ' 

Facial Recognition Technology Scans Your Ear

 First I have seen of this approach, reasonable.

Facial Recognition Technology Scans Your Ear

UGA Today, Olivia Randall, December 8, 2022

University of Georgia (UGA) scientists have created an ear recognition system that can authenticate individuals with up to 97.25% accuracy. The researchers said ear shapes are unique to an individual, and for the most part they remain unchanged by age. UGA's Thirimachos Bourlai said the ear recognition software operates similarly to facial recognition, capturing and saving multiple ear scans for authentication. The software uses an ear recognition algorithm to assess and ascertain if the scans are suitable for automated matching. The researchers tested the software's tolerance for busy images by evaluating several models, using ear images distorted by noise factors like varying blurriness, brightness, and contrast. ... '

Cyber Sprint for Chemical

NIST Security for the Chemical Sector

Announcement of 100-Day Cyber Sprint for Chemical Sector   By Cyberscoop, October 27, 2022

The sprint comes as the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, among other agencies, are expected to soon announce voluntary cybersecurity performance goals for critical infrastructure.

The chemical industry is the next sector to take up President Biden's 100-day cybersecurity sprint, the administration announced Wednesday, an effort designed to sharpen operators' focus on the most significant risks from a digital attack such as gas leaks and other contaminations.

The sprint also aims to improve information sharing and "analytical coordination" between the public and private sector and encourage chemical manufacturers to deploy threat detection on control systems.

The sprints were first launched as a pilot with the electric sector in April 2021 and followed up with the pipeline, water and railway sectors. Biden's memorandum on improving critical infrastructure control systems codified the exercises and amounted to a rare moment for the White House to acknowledge industrial control cybersecurity.

The fact sheet released by the Biden administration noted that the chemical sector sprint would incorporate lessons learned from previous sprints.

A CISA official told Axios, which first reported the announcement, that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Chemical Sector Coordinating Council will set up new task force to implement the sprint. CISA is the sector risk management agency for the chemical sector.

From Cyberscoop

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Miami gets Robotic Uber Eats

Might provide an interesting example of how people interact with robots providing simple services.  How much might this compete with fast food better than normal delivery services?

Uber Eats Launches Robot Delivery Service in Miami

CNN, Catherine Thorbecke, December 15, 2022

Ride-hailing company Uber Eats has launched a robot food delivery service in Miami via a partnership with robotics firm Cartken. Cartken's website says its six-wheeled robots feature sensors and cameras to evade collisions and select routes with the fewest hazards. Uber Eats will notify customers when their food is en route, then instruct them to meet the remotely supervised robot on the sidewalk. They can unlock the vehicle with their phone and retrieve their order from a secure compartment. The food delivery option initially will be available in Miami-Dade County's Dadeland region, with further expansion in the county and additional cities planned for next year. ... ' 

Beyond Tabula Rasa: Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning

Intriguing, Agents learning from 'tabula rasa', from scratch. Makes me think of agent models we used to gather data and feed it to a process ... towards reinforcing movement towards an intelligence goal?   thinking this.  

In the Google AI Blog

 Beyond Tabula Rasa: Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning

Posted by Rishabh Agarwal, Senior Research Scientist, and Max Schwarzer, Student Researcher, Google Research, Brain Team

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning that focuses on training intelligent agents using related experiences so they can learn to solve decision making tasks, such as playing video games, flying stratospheric balloons, and designing hardware chips. Due to the generality of RL, the prevalent trend in RL research is to develop agents that can efficiently learn tabula rasa, that is, from scratch without using previously learned knowledge about the problem. However, in practice, tabula rasa RL systems are typically the exception rather than the norm for solving large-scale RL problems. Large-scale RL systems, such as OpenAI Five, which achieves human-level performance on Dota 2, undergo multiple design changes (e.g., algorithmic or architectural changes) during their developmental cycle. This modification process can last months and necessitates incorporating such changes without re-training from scratch, which would be prohibitively expensive.  .... 

Flying Snakes to Help Design Robots

Always interested in examples of biomimicry ... here an unusual direction.

 Flying Snakes Help Scientists Design Robots

AIP Publishing, December 13, 2022

Researchers at the University of Virginia (UVA) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University modeled the dynamics of flying snakes, in order to design robots that can replicate their gliding motion. Flying snakes undulate side-to-side as they glide from the tops of trees to the ground; the researchers analyzed the reptiles' lift production mechanism using a computational model based on data from high-speed video. The model includes the cross-sectional shape of the snake's body, through which the researchers learned leading edge vortices last longer at the curves in the body before being shed. The researchers hope such insights will improve their understanding of gliding motion, leading to a more optimal design for gliding snake robots.  ... '

Largest Satellite Launched

See the picture at the link.  Yes, I am worried, will kids in the future be able to see the night sky?  See the pic at the link.

The largest commercial communications array ever has just launched. Expect to see it – it’s huge and bright

The problem is, it might outshine all stars and planets.

On the weekend SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched a giant satellite into space.

Called BlueWalker 3, it’s a prototype by American company AST SpaceMobile, which is to create a space-based mobile broadband network. This is only one of multiple satellites planned for the SpaceMobile constellation – some even bigger than BlueWalker 3.

“The reason why our satellite is large is because in order to communicate with a low-power, low internal strength phone, you just need a large antenna on one side with a lot of power, and so that’s a critical part of our infrastructure,” AST SpaceMobile Chief Strategy Officer Scott Wisniewski told Space.com.

“We think that’s really important for communicating directly with regular handsets, with no change to the handset, with no extra burdens on the user.”

Although this is potentially exciting for those who need that connectivity, astronomers are concerned about just how big and bright this satellite will be.  ... ' 

AI learns to write computer code in ‘stunning’ advance

I learned to write computer code in ‘stunning’ advance

DeepMind’s AlphaCode outperforms many human programmers in tricky software challenges

By Matthew Hutson

Conceptual illustration of code on vertical stacks

Snippets of code in white come from the AlphaCode artificial intelligence system, whereas the purple code snippets were written by humans trying to solve similar problems.   DEEPMIND

Software runs the world. It controls smartphones, nuclear weapons, and car engines. But there’s a global shortage of programmers. Wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could explain what they want a program to do, and a computer could translate that into lines of code?

A new artificial intelligence (AI) system called AlphaCode is bringing humanity one step closer to that vision, according to a new study. Researchers say the system—from the research lab DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company)—might one day assist experienced coders, but probably cannot replace them.

“It’s very impressive, the performance they’re able to achieve on some pretty challenging problems,” says Armando Solar-Lezama, head of the computer assisted programming group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

AlphaCode goes beyond the previous standard-bearer in AI code writing: Codex, a system released in 2021 by the nonprofit research lab OpenAI. The lab had already developed GPT-3, a “large language model” that is adept at imitating and interpreting human text after being trained on billions of words from digital books, Wikipedia articles, and other pages of internet text. By fine-tuning GPT-3 on more than 100 gigabytes of code from Github, an online software repository, OpenAI came up with Codex. The software can write code when prompted with an everyday description of what it’s supposed to do—for instance counting the vowels in a string of text. But it performs poorly when tasked with tricky problems.

AlphaCode’s creators focused on solving those difficult problems. Like the Codex researchers, they started by feeding a large language model many gigabytes of code from GitHub, just to familiarize it with coding syntax and conventions. Then, they trained it to translate problem descriptions into code, using thousands of problems collected from programming competitions. For example, a problem might ask for a program to determine the number of binary strings (sequences of zeroes and ones) of length n that don’t have any consecutive zeroes.

When presented with a fresh problem, AlphaCode generates candidate code solutions (in Python or C++) and filters out the bad ones. But whereas researchers had previously used models like Codex to generate tens or hundreds of candidates, DeepMind had AlphaCode generate up to more than 1 million. ... ' 

Vint Cerf on the Internet

Vint Cerf comments on the direction of the Internet

Vint Cerf Helped Create the Internet on the Back of an Envelope. Now He's Calling for More Critical Thinking About How We Use It

The Wall Street Journal, Emily Bobrow, December 16, 2022

Google Chief Internet Evangelist and 2004 ACM A.M. Turing Award co-recipient Vint Cerf helped invent the Internet but acknowledges its downsides, including its use for spreading misinformation and disinformation. Cerf says addressing this "propagation problem" requires Google and similar companies to better "understand how these mechanisms influence the way people behave." He observes that although commercialization has broadened the Internet's scope, feedback algorithms appear to be directing people toward "more divisive and extreme stuff." Cerf urges more critical thinking to rein in the Internet's sociological and psychological effects, while businesses must make better efforts to contain online trolling, lying, bullying, and surveillance.

Full Article May Require Paid Registration  ... 

Improving CX with AI: 3 Standout Areas

 Useful examination of Customer Experience (CX) enhanced with AI

Improving CX with AI: 3 Standout Areas

Yishay Carmiel -December 19, 202202 views

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a transformative technology in CX. According to Gartner, 91.5% of leading businesses invest in AI on an ongoing basis to boost their customer relations. As a result, customer satisfaction is expected to grow by 25% by 2023 in organizations that use AI. From automation to assistive technology, it’s clear that AI applied to CX improves outcomes and cuts costs.

Where should AI be applied to add the most value? Beyond analyzing troves of data and augmenting the work of humans, AI can help businesses make improvements to customer experience through synthesis – the automatic generation of new content (documents, media and even real-time avatars such as Meta’s Metaverse). And until recently, this area has been largely untapped. Here are 3 areas where enterprises can leverage AI to improve CX.

Conversation

AI has the power to enhance the way we communicate with one another. While we often think of applications of AI and natural language processing (NLP) in written form, speech is becoming a bigger piece of the pie. While text-to-speech and translation apps were a step in the right direction, the evolution of speech-to-speech is going to change communication as we know it. With the ability to support various accents, languages, dialects, and non-verbal queues, the barriers of location and understanding will be significantly lowered.

This will be a particularly important use case for call centers. Heavily accented speakers may struggle to find employment and perform at their job. AI enables enterprises to customize the tone of speech used by their agents in real-time to maximize the understanding between caller and agent. The benefits of AI in this scenario are significant: agents have more tools and opportunities to succeed in their roles, callers have a better overall experience, and operators can expand their operations at the rate that the market demands.

Content Creation

We now have algorithms that can read and write. As NLP becomes more mainstream, almost all financial news is now written by machines—Bloomberg Terminal, SEC filings, and even tweets. To take it a step further, algorithms can now be tasked with content writing, too. The algorithm reads an article, decides what’s important, and when and where to post it to get pertinent information out quickly and accurately. Taking twenty minutes vs. two-minutes to distill important information makes a huge difference.

It’s not just writing, either. With advances in well-known systems like DALL-E and stable diffusion, machines can now be tasked with artistry and video, too. While this is a fun use case, businesses are starting to realize the value. In fact, Microsoft recently launched its new Designer app, which will use AI-image generation to help users overcome writer’s block. Users can simply type in a prompt and generate a creative asset within their document, all thanks to generative AI. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has stunned the world with its ability to write insightful prose and even poems.

Personalization

From marketing and advertising to customer success and patient outcomes, AI has made it possible to create highly personalized experiences for customers and end-users alike. Much like the previously mentioned speech-to-speech technology and components of generative AI, advances in NLP have made it possible to distill the most contextually relevant information and act on it.  .... ,    

WiFi Signal Identifying Breathing Issues

 Novel use. 

An algorithm can use WiFi signal changes to help identify breathing issues

NIST says it works with existing routers and devices., Kris Holt|@krisholt|December 20, 2022 2:10 PM

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have developed a way to monitor breathing based on tiny changes in WiFi signals. They say their BreatheSmart deep-learning algorithm could help detect if someone in the household is having breathing issues.

WiFi signals are almost ubiquitous. They bounce off of and pass through surfaces as they try to link devices with routers. But any movement will alter the signal's path, including how the body moves as we breathe, which can change if we have any issues. For instance, your chest will move differently if you're coughing.

Other researchers have explored the use of WiFi signals to detect people and movements, but their approaches required dedicated sensing devices and their studies provided limited data. A few years ago, a company called Origin Wireless developed an algorithm that works with a WiFi mesh network. Similarly, NIST says BreatheSmart works with routers and devices that are already available on the market. It only requires a single router and connected device....  ' 

The scientists changed the firmware on a router so that it would check "channel state information,” or CSI, more frequently. CSI refers to the signals that are sent from a device, such as a phone or laptop, to the router. CSI signals are consistent and the router understands what they should look like, but deviations in the environment, such as the signal being affected by surfaces or movement, modify the signals. The researchers got the router to request these CSI signals up to 10 times per second to gain a better sense of how the signal was being modified.

The team simulated several breathing conditions with a manikin and monitored changes in CSI signals with an off-the-shelf router and receiving device. To make sense of the data they collected, NIST research associate Susanna Mosleh developed the algorithm. In a paper, the researchers noted that BreatheSmart correctly identified the simulated breathing conditions 99.54 percent of the time.   ... ' 

Robots Learn Human Trick

Quite interesting piece, surely they should learn from us.

Robot Learns Human Trick for Not Falling Over Humanoid limbs are useful for more than just manipulation

By Evan Ackerman in IEEE,  Image:   A black and white humanoid robot with a malfunctioning leg supports itself with one arm against a wall

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

Humanoid robots are a lot more capable than they used to be, but for most of them, falling over is still borderline catastrophic. Understandably, the focus has been on getting humanoid robots to succeed at things as opposed to getting robots to tolerate (or recover from) failing at things, but sometimes, failure is inevitable because stuff happens that’s outside your control. Earthquakes, accidentally clumsy grad students, tornadoes, deliberately malicious grad students—the list goes on.

When humans lose their balance, the go-to strategy is a highly effective one: use whatever happens to be nearby to keep from falling over. While for humans this approach is instinctive, it’s a hard problem for robots, involving perception, semantic understanding, motion planning, and careful force control, all executed under aggressive time constraints. In a paper published earlier this year in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, researchers at Inria in France show some early work getting a TALOS humanoid robot to use a nearby wall to successfully keep itself from taking a tumble.   ... ' 

Engineers improve electrochemical sensing by Incorporating Machine Learning

Another sensing them,  note integration with machine learning. 

Engineers improve electrochemical sensing by incorporating machine learning  by Mary Fetzer, Pennsylvania State University

Graphical abstract. Credit: Analytica Chimica Acta (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.aca.2022.340447

Combining machine learning with multimodal electrochemical sensing can significantly improve the analytical performance of biosensors, according to new findings from a Penn State research team. These improvements may benefit noninvasive health monitoring, such as testing that involves saliva or sweat. The findings were published this month in Analytica Chimica Acta.

The researchers developed a novel analytical platform that enabled them to selectively measure multiple biomolecules using a single sensor, saving space and reducing complexity as compared to the usual route of using multi-sensor systems.

In particular, they showed that their sensor can simultaneously detect small quantities of uric acid and tyrosine—two important biomarkers associated with kidney and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, metabolic disorders, and neuropsychiatric and eating disorders—in sweat and saliva, making the developed method suitable for personalized health monitoring and intervention.

Many biomarkers have similar molecular structures or overlapping electrochemical signatures, making it difficult to detect them simultaneously. Leveraging machine learning for measuring multiple biomarkers can improve the accuracy and reliability of diagnostics and as a result improve patient outcomes, according to the researchers. Further, sensing using the same device saves resources and biological sample volumes needed for tests, which is critical with clinical samples with scarce amounts.

"We developed a new approach to improve the performance of electrochemical biosensors by combining machine learning with multimodal measurement," said Aida Ebrahimi, Thomas and Sheila Roell Early Career Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and assistant professor of biomedical engineering.

"Using our optimized machine learning architecture, we could detect biomolecules in amounts 100 times lower than what conventional sensing methods can do."

The researchers' methodology features a hardware/software system that enables them to automatically gather and process information based on a machine learning model that is trained to identify biomolecules in biological fluids such as saliva and sweat, which are common choices for noninvasive health monitoring.

"The machine learning-powered electrochemical diagnostic approach presented in this paper may find broader application in multiplexed biochemical sensing," said Vinay Kammarchedu, 2022-23 Milton and Albertha Langdon Memorial Graduate Fellow in Electrical Engineering at Penn State and first author on the paper.  .... ' 

Mars Has Year Round Energy

Surprising?

Mars has enough wind to power bases near the poles all year round

An analysis of the wind energy available on Mars finds that one well-placed turbine could enable a group of six people to live near the poles all year round

Newscientist, SPACE 19 December 2022    By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

Dark dunes surrounding Mars's northern polar cap  ... 

NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Wind turbines on Mars could theoretically provide enough energy for scientists to safely explore outer regions of the planet during crewed missions.

Solar energy might be sufficient for investigating Mars near the equator, but to live nearer the poles all year round, other power sources are needed. In combination with solar power, well-placed wind turbines could supply enough energy for a group of six people to live and work on Mars all year round, without the radiation risks associated with nuclear energy, says Victoria Hartwick at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

“It’s really exciting that by combining potential wind power with other sources of energy, we open up large parts of the planet to exploration and to these really scientifically interesting zones that the [scientific] community may have previously discredited because of energy requirements,” she says.  ... ' 

Sears Hometown

Was informed of this some time ago and the name Sears struck me, in the day had consulted with Sears and often shopped there.  Used to have the best prices.  Knew of Sears Holdings, which at this time primarily was involved with former store real estate.    Gone now it seems. 

RIP Sears Hometown

Dec 15, 2022 by George Anderson

Put a fork in it. Sears Hometown is truly done.

The company, made up of franchisees currently operating about 100 small stores selling appliances, hardware, tools, and lawn and garden equipment, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday.

“What is happening here is this company is going out of business,” Mark Minuti, an attorney for Sears Hometown, said yesterday at the first bankruptcy hearing, according to Bloomberg. “Make no mistake about it: this is a sad day for our company.”

The ending of Sears Hometown marks another disappointing and demoralizing chapter in the larger story of Sears under the control of Eddie Lampert.

Sears Hometown, which was spun off by Sears Holdings in 2012, had around 1,250 stores operating in 2014 under the banners Sears Hometown Stores, Sears Home Appliance Showrooms, Sears Appliance & Hardware Stores and Sears Outlet Stores.

CNN reports that Sears Hometown had around 700 stores operating three years ago.

A 2020 Wall Street Journal article found Sears Hometown franchisees complaining about being squeezed by Sears. They reported having trouble getting the inventory they needed and then being penalized if they matched prices for products sold on sears.com. Tom Coulter, a franchisee in Vermont, told the Journal that his store went from being profitable to losing money in four years as a result.

Transformco, controlled by Mr. Lampert, reacquired Sears Hometown in 2019 as part of Sears’ bankruptcy. There are currently about 15 Sears stores remaining, with the last full line store in Maryland slated to close in January.

There is little debate that the end of Sears Hometown, and the all but predetermined ends of Sears and Kmart, are the doing of Mr. Lampert, who for years issued annual missives arguing that retail industry watchers and others were simply not bright enough to understand his grand plan for creating a retailing powerhouse.  ... ' 

Thoughts on Remote Factory Supply Chain Work

 Thought is not new,   a step towards the Metaverse?   Increases in security concerns an issue,  it canbe done, but will it be?   Most supply chains are remotely automated to some degree today. 

Will the next industrial revolution bring the factory floor home?

By Robert J. Bowman,  in  SupplyChainBrain.     December 19, 2022  

The COVID-19 pandemic sent millions of office workers to the shelter of their homes. And while we’re well past lockdown status (at least in this country), many have yet to return to the traditional workplace, full- or even part-time.

We quickly learned during the crisis that most office and administrative tasks could be performed from home — never mind the kids, pets, laundry and battles to carve out private workspaces amid the bustle. In the process, we sacrificed certain positive byproducts of an office environment, such as social interaction and the building of a solid corporate culture. But the job was still getting done.

What couldn’t be brought home during the pandemic was, to no one’s surprise, factory work. There’s simply no substitute for having people present on the production line (notwithstanding a growing dependence on automation to pare their numbers). Now, however, even that assumption about work practices is being challenged.

Jerry Foster, chief technology officer and founder of Plex, maker of a “smart” manufacturing software platform, see the potential for a shift of at least some factory duties to the home. The number of people working from home tripled between 2019 and 2021, he notes, from 5.7% to 17.9%, although approximately 60% of all work, including most manufacturing jobs, couldn’t be done remotely.

Until now. The key to the dream of remote manufacturing, Foster says, lies in virtual and augmented reality, which effectively puts the worker on the assembly line for all purposes short of physically touching the goods.

In fact, the first building block in making that possible — cloud computing — has been with us for a number of years. But VR and AR are the final elements that will, in Foster’s opinion, transform the very nature and practice of manufacturing.  .... ' 

Thoughts on ChatGPT

Diving deeper into this, definitely worth a look.

As Google weighs in on ChatGPT, You.com enters the AI chat

By Sharon Goldman  @sharongoldman, December 15, 2022 in VentureBeat

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

One of the biggest topics underlying the hype bonanza since OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT two weeks ago has been: What does this mean for Google search? 

But it was only on Tuesday evening that Google appeared to finally weigh in on the topic: CNBC reported that employees raised concerns at a recent all-hands meeting that the company was losing its competitive edge in artificial intelligence (AI) given ChatGPT’s quick rise. 

Using AI to power no-code platforms and streamline work - Low-Code/No-Code Summit

“Is this a missed opportunity for Google, considering we’ve had Lamda for a while?” read one top-rated question. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Jeff Dean, the long-time head of Google’s AI division, responded to the question by saying that the company has similar capabilities in its LaMDA model, but that Google has more “reputational risk” in providing wrong information and therefore is moving “more conservatively than a small startup.”

ChatGPT, of course, has been heavily criticized for its ability to make up facts while making them sound plausible, and even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted the risks last weekend. 

Learn the critical role of AI & ML in cybersecurity and industry specific case studies. Watch on-demand sessions today.

You.com opens up search platform to generative apps

Meanwhile, You.com, the search engine startup founded in 2020 with a moonshot bid to take on Google, announced today that it has opened its search platform to allow external developers and organizations to build their own apps for the search results page. 

This includes generative AI apps, it says, that have never been seen inside traditional search engines, using generative AI technology that enables users to generate text (YouWrite), code (YouCode), or images (YouImagine) from plain English — all within the search results page. 

“Whenever someone says Reddit is the new search, or TikTok is the new search, or ChatGPT is the new search, we are usually the first to actually incorporate those features,” Richard Socher, cofounder and CEO of You.com, told VentureBeat. “ChatGPT is coming from large language models — we were actually the first search engine that uses large language models to generate code insights or to generate natural language or new images inside the search results.”  ... ' 

AI Goal is not Intelligence?

Some thoughts ...

AI's true goal may no longer be intelligence  in ZDNet, Excerpts

Some scholars of AI warn that the present technologies may never add up to "true" intelligence or "human" intelligence. But much of the world may not care about that.

Written by Tiernan Ray, Contributing Writer on Oct. 28, 2022

AI has been rapidly finding industrial applications, such as the use of large language models to automate enterprise IT. Those applications may make the question of actual intelligence moot.

The British mathematician Alan Turing wrote in 1950, "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" His inquiry framed the discussion for decades of artificial intelligence research.

For a couple of generations of scientists contemplating AI, the question of whether "true" or "human" intelligence could be achieved was always an important part of the work. 

The emergence of something called industrial AI in recent years may signal an end to such lofty preoccupations. AI has more capability today than at any time in the 66 years since the term AI was first coined by computer scientist John McCarthy. As a result, the industrialization of AI is shifting the focus from intelligence to achievement.

Also: OpenAI's Dall•E 2 may mean we never need stock photos again

Those achievements are remarkable. They include a system that can predict protein folding, AlphaFold, from Google's DeepMind unit, and the text generation program GPT-3 from startup OpenAI. Both of those programs hold tremendous industrial promise irrespective of whether anyone calls them intelligent. 

Among other things, AlphaFold holds the promise of designing novel forms of proteins, a prospect that has electrified the biology community. GPT-3 is rapidly finding its place as a system that can automate business tasks, such as responding to employee or customer queries in writing without human intervention.

That practical success, driven by a prolific semiconductor field, led by chipmaker Nvidia, seems like it might outstrip the old preoccupation with intelligence. 

In no corner of industrial AI does anyone seem to care whether such programs are going to achieve intelligence. It is as if, in the face of practical achievements that demonstrate obvious worth, the old question, "But is it intelligent?" ceases to matter.   ... ' 

Europe, Germany, Gets first Exascale Super Computer

Europe get a big computing push.   See here for more about the specs of Exascale computing.

EUROPE GETS AN EXASCALE SUPERCOMPUTER    

Germany will host JUPITER, Europe’s entry into the exascale realm     in Spectrum IEEE

The existing supercomputing resources at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, shown here, will soon be augmented by JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. SASCHA KREKLAU/FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM JÜLICH

FRONTIER, THE WORLD’S FIRST exascale supercomputer—or at least the first one that’s been made public—is coming online soon for general scientific use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Another such machine, Aurora, is seemingly on track to be completed any day at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Now Europe’s getting up to speed. Through a €500 million pan-European effort, an exascale supercomputer called JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) will be installed sometime in 2023 at the Forschungszentrum Jülich, in Germany.

Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Center, likens the addition of JUPITER, and the expanding supercomputing infrastructure in Europe more broadly, to the construction of an astonishing new telescope. “We will resolve the world much better,” he says. The European Union–backed high-performance computing arm, EuroHPC JU, is underwriting half the cost of the new exascale machine. The rest comes from German federal and state sources.

Exascale supercomputers can, by definition, surpass an exaflop—more than a quintillion floating-point operations per second. Doing so requires enormous machines. JUPITER will reside in a cavernous new building housing several shipping-container-size water-cooled enclosures. Each of these enclosures will hold a collection of closet-size racks, and each rack will support many individual processing nodes.

How many nodes will there be? The numbers for JUPITER aren’t yet set, but you can get some idea from JUWELS (shorthand for Jülich Wizard for European Leadership Science), a recently upgraded system currently ranking 12th on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. JUPITER will sit close by but in a separate building from JUWELS, which boasts more than 3,500 computing nodes all told.   ... ' 

Mobile Augmented Reality Talent Sources

Agree, this is not common, perhaps in the game space?   Appreciate the lack of connective knowledge.   We spent some time at this in two very different domains.  (Defense and Packaged Goods) 

The talent Needed to adopt mobile AR in industry    in ChiefLeaningOfficer

Chief Learning Officer Network by Elizabeth Loutfi / December 12, 2022

Over the past two decades, mobile and augmented reality technologies have been introduced into the design, assembly, maintenance, quality and logistics sectors to assist job performance.

Mobile AR technology is used to assist training and support job performance during a task. For example, mobile AR was used in training technicians’ maintenance and assembly skills, such as a worker using AR on a tablet to perform tasks with a piece of a machine.

Meanwhile, mobile AR can also support mobile workers in completing job tasks by accessing and processing information during their work and with the minimum help from others. For instance, according to a study on AR in warehouse operations, warehouse workers reduced errors in operations such as receiving, storing, picking and shipping with AR on wearable devices.

Additionally, many pilot studies and field tests revealed the positive results that mobile AR brought to companies and organizations, such as improved job performance, reduced time on tasks and errors, and increased confidence. However, the talent required for learning and development professionals to successfully adopt mobile AR in the workplace remains unknown. 

This article presents four emerging findings from a recent study about the talent learning and development professionals needed to adopt mobile AR in the industry. The participants came from North American companies and organizations, representing industries such as supply chain, biomedical, utility, electronics engineering, manufacturing and AR consulting services.

Instructional design knowledge and skills

Instructional design knowledge and skills are usually required when developing training programs in different modalities, such as face-to-face, online or blended. When adopting mobile AR technology to drive job performance, both industry and consulting service participants recognized the importance of “good instructional designs and learning development capability.”  

Furthermore, instructional design knowledge and skills are interpreted in two types: The first type refers to the ability of developing the content to design effective learning or job performance with AR. A CEO from an AR consulting service suggested that it was necessary “to identify a clear performance objective and to break down” based on the criterion to avoid creating a “lot of content, a lot of media and stuff, and then it’s not well received.” 

The second type refers to the ability of understanding needs and business problems. A learning director from the supply chain industry commented that “most of the consultants are coming to us with technology without understanding the problem.” He viewed that “technology should be the enabler. It should not be the driver of the solution.”

Mobile AR technical skills

Mobile AR technical skills refers to the ability to use a tool or a system to develop AR content and deploy it to end users. It is similar to a content development tool or learning management system in the e-learning industry.

The views about mobile AR technical skills were very mixed. A project manager from an electronics engineering and manufacturing industry thought the current AR tool was very powerful but complex. She suggested spending time learning the AR tool. However, several participants from the industry and AR consulting services viewed the current AR tools as easy to use, just like developing PowerPoint.

Overall, participants agreed that the better the AR authoring tool, the less L&D professionals should worry about AR technical skills. More attention should be focused on design, such as whether to develop content for learning or supporting job performance.   ... 

Generative AI and Games

Intriguing approach .

The Generative AI Revolution in Games

Excerpt from James Gwertzman and Jack Soslow   in a16z.com,  Andreessen Horowitz

AI, machine & deep learning  gaming, social, and new media  Generative AI  machine learning

To understand how radically gaming is about to be transformed by Generative AI, look no further than this recent Twitter post by @emmanuel_2m. In this post he explores using Stable Diffusion + Dreambooth, popular 2D Generative AI models, to generate images of potions for a hypothetical game.

What’s transformative about this work is not just that it saves time and money while also delivering quality – thus smashing the classic “you can only have two of cost, quality, or speed” triangle. Artists are now creating high-quality images in a matter of hours that would otherwise take weeks to generate by hand. What’s truly transformative is that:

This creative power is now available to anyone who can learn a few simple tools.

These tools can create an endless number of variations in a highly iterative way.

Once trained, the process is real-time – results are available near instantaneously.

There hasn’t been a technology this revolutionary for gaming since real-time 3D. Spend any time at all talking to game creators, and the sense of excitement and wonder is palpable. So where is this technology going? And how will it transform gaming? First, though, let’s review what is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a category of machine learning where computers can generate original new content in response to prompts from the user. Today text and images are the most mature applications of this technology, but there is work underway in virtually every creative domain, from animation, to sound effects, to music, to even creating virtual characters with fully fleshed out personalities.

AI is nothing new in games, of course. Even early games, like Atari’s Pong, had computer-controlled opponents to challenge the player. These virtual foes, however, were not running AI as we know it today. They were simply scripted procedures crafted by game designers. They simulated an artificially intelligent opponent, but they couldn’t learn, and they were only as good as the programmers who built them.

What’s different now is the amount of computing power available, thanks to faster microprocessors and the cloud. With this power, it’s possible to build large neural networks that can identify patterns and representations in highly complex domains.

This blog post has two parts:

Part I consists of our observations and predictions for the field of Generative AI for games. ... ' 

New AI Speeds Computer Graphics by Up to 5x

New AI Speeds Computer Graphics by Up to 5x

By IEEE Spectrum, December 1, 2022

Examples of two-dimensional images rendered in three dimensions.

Nvidia Instant NeRF uses neural rendering to generate 3D visuals from 2D images.

On September 20, Nvidia's vice president of applied deep learning, Bryan Catanzaro, went to Twitter with a bold claim: In certain GPU-heavy games, like the classic first-person platformer Portal, seven out of eight pixels on the screen are generated by a new machine-learning algorithm. That's enough, he said, to accelerate rendering by up to 5 times.

This impressive feat is currently limited to a few dozen 3D games, but it's a hint at the gains that neural rendering will soon deliver. The technique will unlock new potential in everyday consumer electronics.

Catanzaro's claim is made by possible by DLSS 3, the latest version of Nvidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). It combines AI-powered image upscaling with a new feature exclusive to DLSS 3: optical multiframe generation. Sequential frames are combined with an optical flow field used to predict changes between frames. DLSS 3 then slots unique, AI-generated frames between traditionally rendered frames.

"When you're playing with DLSS super resolution on performance mode in 4K, seven out of every eight pixels are being run through a neural network," says Catanzaro. "I think that's one of the reasons why you see such a great speedup. In that mode, in games that are GPU-heavy like Portal RTX […] seven out of every eight pixels are being generated by AI, and as a result we're 530% faster."

From IEEE Spectrum   

Trust in Online Content Moderation Depends on Moderator

See also previous note about this topic

Fairly obvious if the background of moderators is accurately provided. 

By Cornell Chronicle, November 3, 2022

A human and an artificial intelligence providing content moderation. 

Nearly 400 study participants were asked to log in at least twice a day for two days, and were randomly assigned to one of six experiment conditions, varying both the type of content moderation system and the type of harassment comment they saw.

Credit: Analytics India Magazine

An interdisciplinary research team at Cornell University found that an individual's trust in online content moderation systems and decisions depend on whether the moderator is human or artificial intelligence (AI) and the type of harassing content.

The study involved a custom social media site and a simulation engine that uses preprogrammed bots to mimic the behavior of other users.  Almost 400 participants were asked to beta test a new social media platform and randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions that differed based on the type of content moderation system and harassing content.

With inherently ambiguous content, the researchers found that AI moderators were more likely to be questioned by users. However, trust in all types of moderation was about the same when clearly harassing comments were involved.

From Cornell Chronicle   View Full Article

Fake News, Echo Chambers & Polarization: How Bad Is Social Media?

Sabrine Hossenfelder does a good job in covering a number of research papers on this important topic, and analyzes them.    A fairly balanced look as I see it.   Including references to a number of studies that have been made in the US and elsewhere.   Link to her YouTube is right below.   I am reading her new book: 'Existential Physics', available most anywhere and in libraries.

Link to the Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDqESkPiV4E

Does fake news spread better than true news? Do bots spread fake news? What can we do against fake news? Does social media increase political polarization? Is it true that we all live in political echo chambers? In this video, we look at what scientific studies have found and what we can learn from that.

👉 Transcript and References on Patreon ➜ https://www.patreon.com/Sabine

💌 Sign up for my weekly science newsletter. It's free!  ➜ https://sabinehossenfelder.com/newsle...

📖 Check out my new book "Existential Physics" ➜ http://existentialphysics.com/

🔗 Join this channel to get access to perks ➜ 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yN...

The two browser games I mentioned are "Go Viral" https://www.goviralgame.com

And "Get Bad News" https://www.getbadnews.com/

00:00 Intro

01:30 Fake News 

09:38 Information Literature

10:16 Echo Chambers

13:15 Polarization

16:38 Summary

17:19 MEL Science: Experiments By Subscription

#science

More on Tiny Robotics

 Still hard, but advancing. 

Minuscule Sensing Suite Is a Big Step Toward Robotic Gnats Tiny flying robots need even tinier flying sensors    By Evan Ackerman   in IEEE Spectrum

Picture: An accelerometer, camera, and microprocessor make up the hardware of a sensing and autonomy system for tiny flying robots.   Picture caption:  Sawyer B.  Fuller  

In the late 1980s, Rod Brooks and Anita Flynn published a paper in The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society with the amazing title of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: A Robotic Invasion of the Solar System. The paper explored the idea that instead of sending one big and complicated and extremely expensive robot to explore (say) the surface of Mars, you could instead send a whole bunch of little and simple and extremely cheap robots, while still accomplishing mission goals. The abstract of the paper concludes: “We suggest that within a few years it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots.”

That was 1989, and we’re still nowhere near millions of tiny robots. Some things are just really hard to scale down, and building robots that are the size of bees or flies or even gnats requires advances in (among other things) sensing for autonomy as well as appropriate power systems. But progress is being made, and Sawyer Fuller, assistant professor at the University of Washington (who knows a thing or four about insect-scale flying robots), has a new article in  Science Robotics that shows how it’s possible to put together the necessary sensing hardware to enable stable, autonomous flight for flying robots smaller than a grain of rice.

For a tiny flying robot to be autonomous (or for any flying robot to be autonomous, really) it needs to be able to maintain its own stability, using sensors to keep track of where it is and make sure that it doesn’t go anywhere that it doesn’t want to go. This is especially tricky for small-scale flying robots, because they can be pushed around by air currents or turbulence that larger robots can simply ignore. But it turns out that being tiny also has some advantages: Because the drag of the air itself becomes more dominant the smaller an aircraft gets, an onboard gyroscope becomes irrelevant, and you just need an accelerometer. Tie that to an optic flow camera to track motion, along with a microcontroller to do the computation, and you have everything you need.  ... ' 

Water Worlds?

The breadth of planet types is beginning to be seen ... 

Scientists may have found the first water worlds?

Density suggests these "super-Earths" are more like giant, hot Europas.

JOHN TIMMER - 12/15/2022  in ArsTechnica

Two planets that were originally discovered by the Kepler mission may not be what we thought they were. Based on an initial characterization, it was thought these planets were rocky bodies a bit larger than Earth. But continued observation has produced data that indicates the planets are much less dense than we originally thought. And the only realistic way to get the sort of densities they now seem to have is for a substantial amount of their volume to be occupied by water or a similar fluid.

We do have bodies like this in our Solar System—most notably the moon Europa, which has a rocky core surrounded by a watery shell capped by ice. But these new planets are much closer to their host star, which means their surfaces are probably a blurry boundary between a vast ocean and a steam-filled atmosphere. .... '

RIP Passwords Again?

Security advances. 

 RIP Passwords? Passkey support rolls out to Chrome stable

With a huge list of caveats, initial Google passkey support is here.

RON AMADEO

Passkeys are here to (try to) kill the password. Following Google's beta rollout of the feature in October, passkeys are now hitting Chrome stable M108. "Passkey" is built on industry standards and backed by all the big platform vendors—Google, Apple, Microsoft—along with the FIDO Alliance. Google's latest blog says: "With the latest version of Chrome, we're enabling passkeys on Windows 11, macOS, and Android." The Google Password Manager on Android is ready to sync all your passkeys to the cloud, and if you can meet all the hardware requirements and find a supporting service, you can now sign-in to something with a passkey.

Passkeys are the next step in evolution of password managers. Today password managers are a bit of a hack—the password text box was originally meant for a human to manually type text into, and you were expected to remember your password. Then, password managers started automating that typing and memorization, making it convenient to use longer, more secure passwords. Today, the right way to deal with a password field is to have your password manager generate a string of random, unmemorable junk characters to stick in the password field. The passkey gets rid of that legacy text box interface and instead stores a secret, passes that secret to a website, and if it matches, you're logged in. Instead of passing a randomly generated string of text, passkeys use the "WebAuthn" standard to generate a public-private keypair, just like SSH.  ... ' 

Hololens Use Example in Healthcare

 An example that as recently described to me in more detail. 

HoloLens Headsets Connect Patients, Metropolitan Doctors

By ABC News (Australia), October 31, 2022

HoloLens allows a nurse to pinpoint areas of concern to a specialist.

Microsoft HoloLens mixed-reality holographic headsets are connecting remote patients in Australia with metropolitan physicians.

The Bairnsdale Regional Health Service tested the technology in the Victorian town of Dargo, linking patients to specialists in Melbourne via a holographic consulting room.  Nurses don the headsets and are directed by doctors to examine patients, who can evaluate them with greater thoroughness than they can in standard telehealth sessions.

Said Bairnsdale Regional Health Service's Robyn Hales, "If we can get patients that utilize [HoloLens] on a really regular basis, decrease people's travel, decrease ambulances needing to go out and collect patients, that provides really timely care, which is a significant cost saver."

From ABC News (Australia)     

View Full Article

Overture Maps Emerge to Compete with Google

 Nice to see Competitive Geographical mapping, been using Google for some time.   Google has done a great job,  but want to see yet more creative things.   Open Source I see.   Note the number of participants. 

Linux, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft want to break the Google Maps monopoly

Overture Maps Foundation wants to end the oppressive rule of the Google Maps API.   By Ron Amadeo - 12/16/2022, 

Google Maps is getting some competition. The Linux Foundation has announced Overture Maps, a "new collaborative effort to develop interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide." It's an open source mapping effort that includes a list of heavy hitters: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom, with the foundation adding that the project is "open to all communities with a common interest in building open map data."

The Linux Foundation has a press release about the project and a new website for the Overture Maps Foundation. The press release outlined the scope of the project, which aims to deliver:

Collaborative Map Building: Overture aims to incorporate data from multiple sources including Overture Members, civic organizations, and open data sources.

Global Entity Reference System: Overture will simplify interoperability with a system that links entities from different data sets to the same real-world entities.

Quality Assurance Processes: Overture data will undergo validation to detect map errors, breakage, and vandalism to help ensure that map data can be used in production systems.

Structured Data Schema: Overture will define and drive adoption of a common, structured, and documented data schema to create an easy-to-use ecosystem of map data.

If you're saying, "Wait! isn't there already an open source map community out there?"  There is, and it's called "OpenStreetMap," the Wikipedia of maps that anyone can edit. The Overture press release says, "The project will seek to integrate with existing open map data from projects such as OpenStreetMap and city planning departments, along with new map data contributed by members and built using computer vision and AI/ML techniques to create a living digital record of the physical world."

Blockchain Fails to Gain Traction in the Enterprise

More on Enterprise Blockchain, Maersk

Blockchain Fails to Gain Traction in the Enterprise

The Wall Street Journal

Isabelle Bousquette, December 15, 2022

Blockchain technology's widespread enterprise adoption has failed to materialize, with a project by Danish shipping company A.P. Moller-Maersk and IBM's TradeLens to create a shipment-tracking platform the latest to be discontinued. Blockchain's complexity, the time needed to get a blockchain running, and problems recruiting participants have stymied major initiatives. IBM's Kathryn Guarini said blockchain demands changes to technology and business models that are difficult to drive forward, adding that enterprise blockchain has taken longer to bring change to business than originally predicted. Some experts maintain smaller projects involving fewer participants, with definite returns on investment and no sector-wide transformative ambitions, could reap greater success.

Full Article

US-China Chip War Continues

 A Space I am watching, regards the players and supply chain.  Point me to other relevant information.

US-China chip war: How the technology dispute is playing out    By Suranjana Tewari and Jonathan Josephs  BBC News  (excerpt) 

The US is rapidly ramping up efforts to try to hobble China's progress in the semiconductor industry - vital for everything from smartphones to weapons of war.

In October, Washington announced some of the broadest export controls yet - requiring licences for companies exporting chips to China using US tools or software, no matter where they're made in the world.  Washington's measures also prevent US citizens and green card holders from working for certain Chinese chip companies. Green card holders are US permanent residents who have the right to work in the country.

It is cutting off a key pipeline of American talent to China which will affect the development of high-end semiconductors.

Why is the US doing this?

Advanced chips are used to power supercomputers, artificial intelligence and military hardware.  The US says China's use of the technology poses a threat to its own national security.

Alan Estevez, undersecretary at the US Commerce Department announced the rules, saying his intention was to ensure the US was doing everything it could to prevent "sensitive technologies with military applications" from being acquired by China.  "The threat environment is always changing and we are updating our policies today to make sure we're addressing the challenges," he said.

Meanwhile, China has called the controls "technology terrorism".

Countries in Asia that produce chips - such as Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea - have raised concerns about how this bitter battle is affecting the global supply chain.

And there were three significant developments in the chip conflict over the past week.

More Chinese firms on 'entity list'

The Biden administration has added 36 more Chinese companies, including major chipmaker YMTC to Washington's "entity list".

It means American companies will need government permission to sell certain technologies to them, and that permission is difficult to secure.   The US restrictions have broad implications. Last week, UK-based computer chip designer Arm confirmed that it was not selling its most advanced designs to Chinese firms including tech giant Alibaba because of US and UK controls.

Arm said it was "committed to adhering to all applicable export laws and regulations in the jurisdictions in which it operates."  .... ' 

Every Company Uses Software, but are they a Software Company?

Even more so now that we have things like ChatGPT,   but we still need to understand increasingly deeper context when using the algorithms involved.   Caution is needed all around.  

Every company is a software company: Six ‘must dos’ to succeed

December 13, 2022 | Article  in McKinsey    By  Chandra Gnanasambandam, Janaki Palaniappan, and Jeremy Schneider

As software transforms every industry, leaders must turn to a new playbook.

Marc Andreessen’s observation from more than ten years ago that “software is eating the world”1 needs an update: software is the world. The software industry continues to grow at a massive clip. More and more traditional companies are realizing that to compete and grow in a digital world, they must look, think, and act like software companies themselves.

Per McKinsey research from June 2022, nearly 70 percent of the top economic performers, compared with just half of their peers, are using their own software to differentiate themselves from their competitors.2 Fully one-third of those top performers monetize software directly.

The pressure to evolve is building thanks to three fundamental shifts. First, the accelerated adoption of digital products is driving an effort to embed software in the product and purchase experience through everything from personalization to seamless omnichannel delivery. Second, more of the value in more products and services from more industries is coming from software. For example, the average industrial company expects its share of revenue from software to double over the next three years. Finally, the growth of cloud computing, platform as a service, low- and no-code tools, and AI-based programming assistance are putting unprecedented power into the hands of billions of workers.

Yet while companies might already accept the importance of software (research shows that nearly two-thirds of companies have invested in software as a service or modern commercial software), they still tend to look at software as a capability that they can bolt onto their existing business. That just doesn’t work. Becoming a software business requires foundational change with different skill sets, practices, leadership, and organizational structures.

Three ‘switch to software’ models

It is hard to become a software company—less than 7 percent of all software revenue in the world accrues to nontech companies.3 But models for successful transformation do exist (see sidebar, “Three ‘switch to software’ models”). To understand what works, we analyzed more than 20 software transformations and spoke with a dozen senior executives who have led successful software transitions. The result: six principles that are at the core of any successful effort to become a software company.  ... 

Playing with Chat GPT: A Future of Delivering Knowledge?

The end of journalism, or the ability to tell the difference?    Continuing toimprove.   But will some of us will still be needed to point out the key details?  Experimenting there too... 

ChatGPT shrugged

Natasha Lomas@riptari / 6:44 PM EST•December 5, 2022

ChatGPT is a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that’s designed to help people communicate with computers in a more natural and intuitive way — using natural language processing (NLP) technology. But what’s behind the development of ChatGPT and how can the tech be used to help humanity? These are some of the questions that we will explore in this article…

That rather bland lede, which we’ve slightly edited, was generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT in response to a prompt by this (human) reporter. TechCrunch kicked off a conversation with the large language model by asking it to explain its function and purpose. We wanted to see if we could use the chatbot-style Q&A format it’s most recently been embedded into to probe the tech and get AI to articulate some of its limitations.

“ChatGPT is a natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI. It is designed to generate human-like responses to text input, allowing users to engage in natural, conversational interactions with the model,” the AI responded to our ice breaker. “ChatGPT works by using machine learning algorithms to analyze and understand the meaning of text input, and then generating a response based on that input. The model is trained on large amounts of text data, allowing it to learn the patterns and structures of natural language.”

Additionally, the bot told us its approach allows it to generate responses that are “relevant, coherent, and appropriate” to the context of the conversation. (With more probing, it went on to heavily caveat that claim — writing later: “It is important to note that my responses are not guaranteed to be perfect or always correct, and there may be cases where my responses may not be relevant, coherent, or appropriate.”)

ChatGPT further described its mission as being “intended to help humanity by providing a more natural and efficient way to interact with artificial intelligence” — expanding on its claimed purpose thusly:

By allowing users to communicate with AI in a more human-like way, ChatGPT can help to make AI more accessible and useful for a wider range of applications. This can help to improve the efficiency and accuracy of tasks that rely on natural language processing, such as language translation, text summarization, and information retrieval. Additionally, by providing a more intuitive and human-like interface for AI, ChatGPT can help to make AI more approachable and less intimidating to users who are less familiar with technology. Overall, ChatGPT is intended to help humanity by improving the usability and effectiveness of AI.  ... ' 

Launching a Lunar Flashlight

 Looking for ice and other components of a longer stay on other worlds. 

NASA’s Lunar Flashlight Launches to Shine a Light on Lunar Ice

By Ryan Whitwam on December 14, 2022  in ExtremeTech

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted into space in the wee hours of Dec. 11. Its main cargo was the HAKUTO-R lunar lander from Japan’s Ispace, but NASA had a fascinating little ride-along payload on the rocket, too. The agency’s Lunar Flashlight mission is now en route to the moon, where it will search for water in regions that haven’t seen sunlight for billions of years.

The Lunar Flashlight is a compact 6U CubeSat, sporting mostly off-the-shelf hardware like a conventional lithium-ion battery and HaWK solar panels. There’s also a flashlight of sorts, as the name implies. It’s actually an infrared spectrometer that emits light in four different wavelengths. We already know there is frozen water on the moon, but the Lunar Flashlight aims to create a more accurate map of its distribution. It will scan the shadowy depths of craters where sunlight has never reached, mostly in the higher latitudes.

When shined on the lunar surface, the infrared lasers will bounce back after striking regolith. However, water ice will absorb light and give away its presence. Locating an accessible supply of ice on the moon could be a boon to future missions, which could use lunar water to make fuel for a return trip to Earth or a trip to the outer solar system.

The Lunar Flashlight is currently meandering its way to the moon, but it’s not using standard hydrazine fuel, which is highly toxic. Instead, NASA is testing the Advanced Spacecraft Energetic Non-Toxic (ASCENT) monopropellant. The Lunar Flashlight should reach the moon in about four months, and when there, it will use its green engine to enter a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO), making it just the second spacecraft to do so. The first was NASA’s Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) mission, which proved this novel orbit was workable earlier this year.  ,,, ' 

Researchers Develop Virtual Molecular Library of Thousands of 'Command Sentences' for Cells

Cellular 'Command Sentences'.

Researchers Develop Virtual Molecular Library of Thousands of 'Command Sentences' for Cells

News-Medical Life Sciences, Emily Henderson,  December 8, 2022

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and IBM Research have compiled a virtual molecular database of thousands of cellular "command sentences." The researchers based the sentences on combinations of molecular "words" that directed engineered CAR-T immune cells to hunt down and destroy cancer cells. USCF's Wendell Lim and Kyle Daniels concentrated on the part of a receptor within the cell containing amino acid strings, each of which functions as a command "word." Stringing the words into a "sentence" influences the commands the cell will follow. Daniels and the IBM researchers applied novel machine learning to the data to produce new receptor sentences to boost the CART-T cells' effectiveness.

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