Catching Counterfeits with AI

Worked on counterfeit identification for CPG Products,would have helped to be be to quick scan products and packaging.

Catching the Fakes

By Neil Savage    Communications of the ACM, May 2021, Vol. 64 No. 5, Pages 13-14    10.1145/3453696

Counterfeiting is a big business. Nearly $509 billion of fake and pirated products were sold internationally in 2016. In that year, the latest for which data was available, counterfeit goods made up 3.3% of international trade, up from 2.5% three years earlier, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

That figure, which does not include domestic trade in fakes, not only means companies are losing revenue and consumers are not getting their money's worth; counterfeiting also helps fund organized crime. It exploits low-wage laborers. Because it skirts safety regulations, makers of counterfeits could use toxic materials or produce unsafe products.

Now, companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help them identify counterfeit products and stanch the flow of faux goods.

Amazon, for instance, launched Project Zero in 2019. Makers of products provide the company with data about their logos, trademarks, and other features, and Amazon's machine learning algorithm scans listings on the company's website and automatically removes those it deems fake.

Other companies have rolled out tools to allow retailers to identify fakes using smartphones with scanning attachments.

"Counterfeit goods are among the leading causes of a lot of bad things," says Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, a professor of computer science at New York University and co-founder and chief scientist at Entrupy, a New York-based company founded in 2012 that uses AI to verify the authenticity of luxury goods.

The company's system works with microscopic images of the goods in question, looking for features that are common to an authentic product but not to a fake. Those features could be in the texture of the material, the stitching, a zipper, or the way a logo has been stamped into an item. The leather of a luxury handbag, for instance, will have what appear to be peaks and valleys when viewed at a microscopic scale.

Entropy trains its AI starting with images of an area of handbags, both authentic and counterfeit, and breaks that image into smaller chunks. It then applies bag-of-words, a technique developed for natural language processing that sorts words by their frequency in a text and uses that to make inferences about the text. In the case of handbags, the "words" are small areas of structural features that might repeat or vary from place to place across the material. The computer creates a histogram showing the frequency of these visual words and how that frequency differs between real and fake goods.  ... " 

SMU ChemGen for Drug Discovery

An example of rigorous prep  work that must be done consistently well. 

SMU's ChemGen Completes Essential Drug Discovery Work in Days

Southern Methodist University,  April 14, 2021

Southern Methodist University (SMU) researchers have developed ChemGen, a set of computer-driven routines that emulate chemical reactions in a laboratory, significantly reducing the time and costs of drug discovery. ChemGen accelerates pharmacological optimization from months to days, using high-performance computers like SMU's ManeFrame II shared high-performance computing cluster. The tool computationally generates molecular variants of the original chemical key, mimicking reactions under various combinations of circumstances. SMU's John Wise said, "A research group or pharmaceutical company need only actually synthesize the molecules with the best chances of being improved, leaving the thousands of unimproved molecules in the computer and not on the lab bench."  ... " 

LiDar and Digital Twins

 From LiDAR News  Home of the LiDAR Industry: 

USIBD Announces White Paper for Facility Owners and Operators Considering Digital Twins

April 22, 2021, Irvine, CA:   The U.S. Institute of Building Documentation (USIBD) is pleased to publish an educational white paper, BIM with the End in Mind. This paper will help facility owners and operators decide whether a digital twin is right for them and help them understand what to consider before recruiting outside support to generate a digital twin.

Though a digital twin is one of the best ways for a facility owner or operator to improve their asset’s data-management strategy, it can be challenging to find the information to get started. We want to help you by defining basic terms and ideas, explaining what facility owners and operators can expect to gain from a digital twin, and showing what it takes to plan and execute a successful digital twin. 

In this paper, you’ll learn:    .... "

Amazon Knowledge Skills for Business

 In the current Amazon Skills kit, a number of interesting things, including some minimal code things.,which is useful to see.   While the really remarkable knowledge things will need deep coding for now,  how nice to be able to patch in some true insights with little complex code.   Gives more power to non-coders. 

Announcing Alexa Knowledge Skills for Alexa for Business and Personal Devices (Generally Available): Build Q&A Skills In Minutes Using Only Spreadsheets, Without Writing Code

Tom Reno Apr 07, 2021 

Also see the rest of the developers knowledge skills update.  

Space Fence? Traffic Cop for Low Earth Orbit.

 With all the communications things going up wonder this.  Worried about the loss our clear skies, but also just getting in each others way.   Its getting crowded up there.   Will a "Space Fence' Work?

A Traffic Cop for Low Earth Orbit

By Keith Kirkpatrick   Communications of the ACM, May 2021, Vol. 64 No. 5, Pages 15-17  10.1145/3453703

On Earth, avoiding collisions is a key priority for traffic cops, air traffic controllers, and the parents of toddlers. It is no different in space—and perhaps even more critical—given that objects orbiting the Earth are moving at more than 17,000 m.p.h., which means that even very small objects less than a centimeter in diameter have caused damage to the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, and satellites.

In fact, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) estimates there are more than 500,000 such objects orbiting the Earth that are larger than a marble, and at least a million smaller pieces of debris that cannot be tracked. Based on the growing number of commercial and government launches of spacecraft, satellites, and even space stations, the number of objects that will need to be catalogued, tracked, and managed is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. And the solutions to this issue are fraught with both technical and political challenges.

A key organization charged with tracking and notifying the operators of space objects of a potential course collision is the 18th Space Control Squadron (SPCS), part of the U.S. Air Force's Space Surveillance Network (SSN), which currently tracks 27,000 objects in low Earth orbit (up to 2,000km above the Earth's surface), medium Earth orbit (2,000km to 3,600km up), and geosynchronous equatorial orbit (located 35,786km above the Earth).

The 18th SPCS is co-located with the Combined Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County, CA, and is charged with handling conjunction assessments (the close physical encounters of two tracked objects in space), collision avoidance, and reentry assessment for satellites and other objects returning to Earth from space.

Object tracking is handled via a network of sensors and telescopes located around the world and in space, and utilizes two-line element (TLE) position datasets (which incorporate the parameters required to uniquely identify an orbiting element at a given point in time), which can then be fed into models that take into account atmospheric drag, gravitational drag caused by the Earth's shape, the Earth's spin, and various other factors in order to predict the motion of each orbiting object over time.

The Space Surveillance Network also incorporates the Haystack Ultrawideband Satellite Imaging Radar (HUSIR), which is located in the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). HUSIR, the highest-resolution, longest-range sensor in the world, simultaneously generates X- and W-band images that can provide valuable information about the size, shape, and orientation of Earth orbiting objects. HUSIR was incorporated into the SSN in 2014.

In March 2020, additional object tracking capability known as the Space Fence, designed to provide higher resolution for tracked objects, was declared operational. Located on Kwajalein Island in the Republic of the Marshall Islands near the Equator in the Pacific Ocean, the Space Fence uses an S-band radar system to track objects primarily in low Earth orbit (though it is also capable of tracking objects in higher orbits), and allows the tracking of objects below the previous size limitation of 10cm.

While the Space Fence technology permits greater visibility of smaller objects orbiting the Earth, it requires a significant amount of compute power to project the paths of these objects, according to Mike Gruntman, a professor of Astronautics at the University of Southern California's School of Engineering.  .... "

Combatting Ransomware: A Comprehensive Recommendation

 Will this be sufficient to address the problem and likely variants of the ploy that re likely to arise? 

RTF Report: Combatting Ransomware

A Comprehensive Framework for Action: Key Recommendations from the Ransomware Task Force

Ransomware is no longer just a financial crime; it is an urgent national security risk that threatens schools, hospitals, businesses, and governments across the globe.

This is not a problem that any one entity can solve. Over 60 experts from industry, government, law enforcement, civil society, and international organizations worked together to produce this comprehensive framework, which breaks down siloed approaches and advocates for a unified, aggressive, comprehensive, public-private anti-ransomware campaign. These recommendations are informed by a deep bench of experts and are immediately actionable, together forming a framework to reduce this criminal enterprise.

It will take nothing less than our total collective effort to mitigate the ransomware scourge. Read the report now to learn our path forwards.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT  81 pages. ... 

Updated 4/30. On page 45, “Global Resilience Institute” has been corrected to “Global Resilience Federation.

We felt an urgent need to bring together world-class experts across all relevant sectors to create a ransomware framework that government and industry can pursue, and ensure the continued faith of the general public in its institutions.

Philip Reiner, IST CEO and Executive Director of the RTF

THANK YOU: This report is the result of an immense collective effort by the RTF Members, and we at IST are proud to have convened such an incredible group of experts. We sincerely thank the RTF members, who volunteered immense time and care to this effort, whose lively discussions and deep expertise led to these recommendations, and who dedicate themselves each day towards making the ransomware problem better.

Priority Recommendations

The RTF report includes 48 recommendations that together form a comprehensive framework to address ransomware. Among those, these priority recommendations are the most foundational and urgent, and many of the other recommendations were developed to facilitate or strengthen these core actions.  ... " 

Robots Sniffing COVID

 Interesting robot sensor approach to COVID detection.

Startup bets on new coronavirus testing alternative: COVID-sniffing robots

By: Bloomberg - 02 Oct, 2020

Startup bets on new coronavirus testing alternative: COVID-sniffing robots

A biotechnology startup called Koniku is trying to develop robots that could sniff out Covid-19 infections faster than conventional testing.

The technology fuses neurons with a silicon chip to create a “smell cyborg" capable of detecting scents ranging from explosives to pathogens.

Koniku’s first clinical trial began three weeks ago and will examine samples from patients tested for Covid-19 to compare how well the smell-bot detects the virus compared with traditional methods. Small internal trials have already demonstrated that it can accurately detect the presence of influenza A.

“Our goal is to have a device that merges synthetic biology with silicon and maps all of the smells of human life on a global scale," said Oshiorenoya Agabi, the San Rafael, California-based company’s chief executive officer and co-founder. “We should have a device in every home in America to screen for disease."  .... '

A Smart Identifying Finger Ring

 Seems out of place for Fraunhofer,  but the breadth of application is interesting.

Press Release   Fraunhofer

Additive manufacturing

Smart finger ring with integrated RFID chip

Research News / May 03, 2021

House key, wallet, health insurance card, hotel key card — a smart finger ring could replace all these in the future. Produced by a 3D printing process, the ring has an integrated RFID chip, tamper-proof, sealed and invisible. The technology of integrating electronics during 3D printing can of course be used for other applications too. The multifunctional ring was developed by a research team at Fraunhofer Institute for Casting, Composite and Processing Technology IGCV.

Now, where’s my house key — could I have left it in the office? And when we want to pull out our wallet at the supermarket checkout, we often find that it’s somehow made way to the bottom of the shopping bag in all the hustle and bustle. A smart ring could soon put an end to such frantic searches: Concealed inside the ring is an RFID tag that is able to pay at the checkout, open the smart front door, act as our health insurance card when attending a medical appointment or replace the key card in a hotel. It might also be possible to save medical data such as our blood group or drug intolerances on this chip: In an accident, the emergency physician would have all the necessary information to hand. Researchers at Fraunhofer IGCV developed the intelligent ring as part of the MULTIMATERIAL Center Augsburg. The large-scale project, sponsored by the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development and Energy, is divided into ten individual projects — including the KINEMATAM project, which came up with the idea and the demonstrator model of the smart part.

3D printing with automated integration of electronics

More important than the ring itself, however, are the manufacturing process and the ability to integrate electronics while a component is being produced — even at places within the component that would otherwise be inaccessible. The inside of a ring, for example. We can refer to 3D printing in the broadest sense to describe a production process, but in technical jargon, it would be called “powder bed-based additive manufacturing”. The principle is this: A laser beam is guided over a bed of fine metal powder. At the point where the 80 micrometer laser spot hits the powder, the powder melts and then solidifies to form a composite material — the rest of the metal, which is not exposed, retains its powder form. The ring is built up layer by layer, with a cavity left for the electronics. Midstream, the process is halted: A robot system automatically picks up an RFID component from a magazine and places it in the recess before the printing process continues. This precisely controllable production technology is opening the door to a host of possibilities for realizing completely individualized ring designs. And the chip is sealed by the ring, making it tamper-proof.  ... " 

From Computational to Generalized Thinking

Interesting view that I am not quite understanding.   Shall we think as computers, the way the exist today or should we break through from this approach?   Thought provoking, but very technical.

HCDA: From Computational Thinking to a Generalized Thinking Paradigm   By Yuhang Liu, Xian-He Sun, Yang Wang, Yungang Bao

Communications of the ACM, May 2021, Vol. 64 No. 5, Pages 66-75   10.1145/3418291

In 2006, Jeannette M. Wing45 proposed the concept of "computational thinking," which has produced significant worldwide impacts on the education, research, and development of computer science. After more than a decade, we reexamine computational thinking, and find that a more general-thinking paradigm is urgently needed to address new challenges.

A couple of recent commentaries12,41 regarding computational thinking attracted our interests and inspired us to reflect further. More than that, we want to summarize and generalize the rationale of our solutions, for instance, the Labeled von Neumann Architecture (LvNA)1,28 and the Layered Performance Matching (LPM) methodology.26,27

Nurtured by Moore's Law, the number of transistors available on a single chip increases exponentially. Meanwhile, due to architectural innovations, transistors are organized more effectively and utilized more vigorously. As a result of the combined efforts, computers have witnessed a significant performance advancement during their 70-year history. However, the new age, characterized by the slowdown of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling,44 and by the rise of big data applications, brings serious challenges that computer scientists must face.

The scaling of on-chip transistors impacts microprocessor performance significantly. However, further improvements to transistor density and power become more difficult due to the limits of semiconductor physics.44 As a result, architectural innovations become increasingly crucial for performance breakthroughs, and the epoch we are entering is "a new golden age for computer architecture."14

The rise of big data has caused an unprecedented shift, where the memory system, rather than the computational core, plays a more vital role. Accordingly, the memory access limitation described by Sun-Ni's Law38 is becoming a performance killer for many applications. Thus, data-centric innovations of computer system design are urgently needed to address the issues of data storage and access. Both the emergence of big data and the slowdown of Moore's Law have changed the landscape of computer systems and require us to examine past solutions to pave a new path for future innovations and for addressing new challenges.  ... " 

HCDA: ... . A Framework of the Four Thinking Patterns ("H" represents "Historical thinking," "A" represents "Architectural thinking," "D" represents "Data-centric thinking," and "C" represents "Computational thinking"). ... "

VW Will Design its own Self-Driving Chips

 Perhaps expected, adds some control, link to driving data

VW will design its own chips for self-driving cars in Engadget

It's borrowing its strategy from Apple and Tesla.

Volkswagen won't settle for off-the-shelf computing power with its self-driving cars. As Reuters (via Autoblog) reports, company chief Herbert Diess told Handelsblatt in an interview that VW will design its own high-performance chips for autonomous vehicles. It was a matter of eking out the best possible hardware, Diess said — much like Apple and Tesla, the move would give VW "higher competence" in defining its processors.  ... ' 

Local Airport Optimizes Takeoff Operations with Machine Learning

 I see that our local airport is using this scheduling application.  A presentation on the method is linked to in the article.  Deep earning and scheduling using NVIDIA.  Useful example of operations application. Uses cameras for gathering data about operations.  " ...By installing cameras at several gates, airports can optimize the cleaning, restocking and servicing of planes — saving time for customers and costs for the airlines. ... "

Inception Spotlight: Assaia AI Ready for Takeoff at Kentucky Airport   By Isha Salian

Tags: Business Intelligence & Analytics, Computer Vision & Machine Vision, featured, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, News, NVIDIA Inception

Discuss

Switzerland-based Assaia International AG, an NVIDIA Metropolis partner and member of the NVIDIA Inception acceleration platform for AI startups, is deploying a deep learning solution at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) to help airport employees monitor the turnaround time between flights. 

The Turnaround Control tool will help the airport work with its airline partners to improve turnaround transparency, identify situations that most often cause delayed flights, and notify employees of deviations from the schedule. 

“Assaia’s technology adds critical data points to CVG’s early-stage neural network for operational advancements,” said Brian Cobb, the airport’s chief innovation officer. “Structured data generated by artificial intelligence will provide information to make decisions, optimize airside processes, and improve efficiency and safety.”

The company uses NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier modules and the NVIDIA Metropolis intelligent video analytics platform to run image recognition and predictive analysis algorithms on video streams from multiple cameras around an airport. 

By installing cameras at several gates, airports can optimize the cleaning, restocking and servicing of planes — saving time for customers and costs for the airlines.

Assaia is also deploying AI solutions at London Gatwick Airport and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Watch a replay from the recent GPU Technology Conference for more:  ... " 

Quantum Computing Catching up for Market Analysis

 Quite an interesting prediction.  Will there be a post-quantum market analysis era?   I can see some of the combinatorics coming in, but the accuracy of results are not yet there.  

Goldman Sachs Predicts Quantum Computing is 5 Years Away from Use in Markets  By Financial Times

Quantum computing could be brought to bear on some of the most complex calculations in financial markets within five years, considerably earlier than expected, according to research jointly conducted by Goldman Sachs.

The findings come as banks and other companies at the leading edge of quantum research have turned their attention to trying to get practical results using the imperfect quantum computers that are expected to be in use in the next few years, rather than wait for the much more powerful systems that are one day expected to bring a revolution in computing.

The bank's research, conducted with quantum start-up QC Ware, suggests that programmers looking to harness the machines could achieve practical results sooner in return for giving up some of the huge gains in performance that quantum systems promise.

From Financial Times

Simple Examples of Anomaly/Outlier Detection

 A common need,  nicely and simply put here in KDNuggets.  Very classic and should be done with most every set of data you are seriously working with.  With more tech and coding at the link:

Four Techniques for Outlier Detection

Tags: DBSCAN, Knime, Outliers, Python

There are many techniques to detect and optionally remove outliers from a dataset. In this blog post, we show an implementation in KNIME Analytics Platform of four of the most frequently used - traditional and novel - techniques for outlier detection.   By Maarit Widmann, Moritz Heine, Rosaria Silipo, Data Scientists at KNIME

Anomalies, or outliers, can be a serious issue when training machine learning algorithms or applying statistical techniques. They are often the result of errors in measurements or exceptional system conditions and therefore do not describe the common functioning of the underlying system. Indeed, the best practice is to implement an outlier removal phase before proceeding with further analysis.

But hold on there! In some cases, outliers can give us information about localized anomalies in the whole system; so the detection of outliers is a valuable process because of the additional information they can provide about your dataset.

There are many techniques to detect and optionally remove outliers from a dataset. In this blog post, we show an implementation in KNIME Analytics Platform of four of the most frequently used - traditional and novel - techniques for outlier detection.  .... " 

UK Allowing ALKS , Self Driving this Year

 Things continue to move in this space, though lots of issues remain.    But note this appears to be only ALKS (Automateed Lane Keeping) only.  

'Self-driving' cars to be allowed on UK roads this year  By Cristina Criddle In the BBC

"Self-driving" vehicles could be allowed on UK roads by the end of this year, the government has said. The Department for Transport said automated lane-keeping systems (ALKS) would be the first type of hands-free driving legalised.

The technology controls the position and speed of a car in a single lane and it will be limited to 37mph (60km/h)  But insurers have warned the government's definition of ALKS as "self-driving" is misleading.  Previously, the government had said these new laws would be in place by spring this year and told the BBC there was no delay in its suggested timeframes.

Hands-free

Following a consultation last year, the government has now said that vehicles with ALKS technology can be legally defined as self-driving, “as long as they receive GB type approval and that there is no evidence to challenge the vehicle’s ability to self-drive.” The government confirmed that drivers will not be required to monitor the road or keep their hands on the wheel when the vehicle is driving itself.

But the driver will need to stay alert and be able take over when requested by the system within 10 seconds. ..... " 

Nokia and Claro Chile Deploy Private Wirelesss Network for Minera

 See more about mining applications at the link and my topic label: 

Nokia and Claro Chile deploy private wireless network for Minera Gold Fields  GlobalNewsWire: 

Press Release Nokia and Claro Chile deploy private wireless network for Minera Gold Fields The project with Claro Chile will transform Salares Norte into one of most digitalized mines in Latin America, and a benchmark for Industry  ... 

Press Release

Nokia and Claro Chile deploy private wireless network for Minera Gold Fields

The project with Claro Chile will transform Salares Norte into one of most digitalized mines in Latin America, and a benchmark for Industry 4.0

Nokia’s private LTE/4.9G network will help make mining safer, more efficient and productive

Deployment is an example of asset-intensive industry digitalizing as they embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution, expanding the possibilities for industries such as energy, railways, utilities and agriculture ... 

Autonomous Laser Weeding

 Another attempt at the classic problem, seen it posed for many years, now with Ai and lasers. 

THE AUTONOMOUS WEEDER

The Carbon Robotics Autonomous Weeder leverages robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and laser technology to safely and effectively drive through crop fields to identify, target and eliminate weeds.

Unlike other weeding technologies, the robots utilize high-power lasers to eradicate weeds through thermal energy, without disturbing the soil. The automated robots allow farmers to use less herbicides and reduce labor to remove unwanted plants while improving the reliability and predictability of costs, crop yield and more. ... " 

Merck Challenging Quantum Hype and its Future

Good thoughts regards the hype.  Whats it for?   Nice to see a Pharma company taking a closer look.

How Merck works with Seeqc to cut through quantum computing hype  Chris O'Brien   @obrien in Venturebeat

When it comes to grappling with the future of quantum computing, enterprises are scrambling to figure just how seriously they should take this new computing architecture. Many executives are trapped between the anxiety of missing the next wave of innovation and the fear of being played for suckers by people overhyping quantum’s revolutionary potential.

That’s why the approach to quantum by pharmaceutical giant Merck offers a clear-eyed roadmap for other enterprises to follow. The company is taking a cautious but informed approach that includes setting up an internal working group and partnering with quantum startup Seeqc to monitor developments while keeping an open mind.

Scaling Creativity through the Scopely Operating System 1

According to Philipp Harbach, a theoretical chemist who is head of Merck’s In Silico Research group, a big part of the challenge remains trying to keep expectations of executives reasonable even as startup funding to quantum soars and the hype continues to mount.

“We are not evangelists of quantum computers,” Harbach said. “But we are also not skeptics. We are just realistic. If you talk to academics, they tell you there is no commercial value. And if you talk to our management, they tell you in 3 years they want a product out of it. So, there are two worlds colliding that are not very compatible. I think that’s typical for every hype cycle.”

The quantum realm

Merck’s desire for the dream of quantum computing to become reality is understandable. The fundamental nature of its business — biology and chemistry — means the company has been building molecular or “quantum” level models for more than a century.

Part of the role of the In Silico Research group is to develop those models that can solve quantum problems using evolving technologies such as data analytics and AI and applying them to natural sciences to make experimental work less time-consuming.

But those models are always limited and imperfect because they are being calculated on non-quantum platforms that can’t fully mimic the complexity of interactions. If someone can build a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer that operates at sufficient scale and cost, Merck could unlock a new generation of efficiencies and scientific breakthroughs.... " 

Re the Future of Info Warfare

Increasingly a dangerous direction. Need to  analyzse threats, determine risks and address appropriately. We have the skills, build ahead to emerging threats. 

DOD Isn't Armed to Combat Growing Threat of Info Warfare, Experts Warn  By The Washington Post

National security experts will warn Congress today that the U.S. government isn't doing enough to fight back against the growing national security threat of information warfare aimed at sowing distrust in the U.S. government at home and abroad.

"Cyber-enabled disinformation, whether domestically or foreign generated, is a national security problem, corroding our democracy and governmental institutions, and threatening our public health and, potentially, public safety," former NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell will testify in front of the House Armed Services subcommittee on cyber, innovative technologies and information systems.

Other witnesses include Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center; Herb Lin, senior research scholar at the center for international security and cooperation at Stanford University; as well as Joseph Kirschbaum, director of the defense capabilities and management team at the Government Accountability Office.

The hearing underscores how the United States has struggled to combat the emerging cyberthreat of information warfare.

From The Washington Post

AWS Pushes Means for more Accurate Quantum Computer

Amazon seems to take some new approaches to error correction. Schrodingers cat in action?

AWS Reveals Method to Build More Accurate Quantum Computer  By ZDNet

Amazon cloud subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS) has revealed a new architecture for a fault-tolerant quantum computer that could ensure quantum bits (qubits) execute calculations with maximum accuracy.

The architecture presents a system based on "cat states"—a form of passive quantum error correction (QEC) where qubits are superpositioned within an oscillator, while photon pairs are injected and extracted to guarantee the quantum state's stability.

This design can reduce bit-flip error, but the AWS team proposed coupling passive QEC with known active QEC methods for safeguards against other types of error.

The resulting architecture enables just over 2,000 superconducting components used for stabilization to produce 100 logical qubits capable of executing 1,000 gates.

From ZDNet

Getting Ideas from the Crowd

Only part of an article from Sloan on creative uses of crowdsourcing.   Also a favorite topic and means  of our data gathering. How much is the crowd (generally) biased, and how do we reasonably adjust for that?  Elements of reasonable and directional bias? Can we get a good indication of types of bias in play in a particular crowd? 

Get More Ideas From the Crowd

These five techniques for writing problem statements can improve results from crowdsourced challenges.

Claudia Kubowicz Malhotra, Arvind Malhotra, and Barry L. Bayus

The rise of crowdsourcing platforms as a potential source for innovative ideas presents a challenge: How do you attract contributors to work on your particular problem?1 Past research has demonstrated the importance of well-crafted problem statements as a means to attract more innovative solutions.2 But what really goes into a problem statement that engages the crowd? Do the statements that attract a large number of proposed ideas share common elements?

Our research sought to answer these questions by unpacking problem statements, word by word, to identify the characteristics that attract the most idea submissions. Our analysis points to guidelines for managers tapping crowdsourcing sites on do’s and don’ts when writing a problem statement meant to attract solutions from creative freelancers.

We used data from Eÿeka, an online crowdsourcing platform focused on creative projects. Our findings are based on an analysis of 362 unique problem statements posted by 85 companies between 2016 and 2018. The statements sought ideas for marketing and social media campaigns, solutions to complex issues, proposals for products, and recommendations for entering new markets. The average number of responses received for each statement was 88; the highest number received was 370 and the lowest was five. We found that those receiving an above-average number of submissions shared some common elements — and we also identified four approaches to avoid when presenting a challenge to the crowd.

Five Ways to Engage Creatives

Our research found that the problem statements that attracted an above-average number of proposals used one or more of the following five techniques to pique freelancers’ interest and engage them with the problem.

Personalize the problem. Statements that address freelancers as “you” and explicitly ask them to solve the problem as if they were the customer are very effective in attracting more ideas.

For example, a company wanted to invent a new coffee drink. “We are sure you’ve known these moments in the afternoons when you just need to take a break from sleepiness, stress, or anxiety,” the statement noted. It described the coffee shop environment and referred to the opportunity to “enjoy some sweet time all by yourself or maybe sharing this moment with your friends.” And it concluded with a direct appeal: “We’d like to invent a new range of cold and sweet, ready-to-drink, milk-based coffee that people will love.   ... '