#CES 2015: Nvidia Demos a Car Computer Trained with Deep Learning Many cars now include cameras or other sensors that record the passing world and trigger intelligent behavior,
such as automatic braking or steering to avoid an obstacle. Today systems are usually unable to tell the difference between a trash can
and a traffic cop standing next to it, though. This week at the International Consumer electronics Show in Las vegas, Nvidia, a leading marking of computer graphics chips, unveiled a vehicle computer called the Drive PX that could help cars interpret
and react to the world around them. Nvidia already supplies chips to many car makers but engineers at those companies usually have to write software to collect
and process data from various different sensor systems. Drive PX is more powerful than existing hardware,
and it should also make it easier to integrate and process sensor data. The computer uses Nvidia new graphics microprocessor, the Tegra X1.
It is capable of processing information from up to 12 cameras simultaneously, and it comes with software designed to assist with safety or autonomous driving systems.
Most impressive, it includes a system trained to recognize different objects using a powerful technique known as deep learning (see 0 Breakthrough Technologies 2013:
Deep Learning. Another computer from Nvidia, called the Drive CX, is designed to generate realistic 3-D maps
and other graphics for dashboard displays. t pretty cool to bring this level of powerful computation into cars,
said John Leonard, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, who works on autonomous car technology. t the first such computer that seems really designed for a carn autopilot computer.
The new Nvidia hardware can also be updated remotely, so that car manufacturers can fix bugs or add new functionality.
This is something few car companies, aside from Tesla, do currently. So far Audi has emerged as an early buyer;
at CES, the company showed off a luxury concept car called the Audi Prologue that includes the Drive PX.
A year ago, the company announced at CES that it had developed a compact computer for processing sensor information (see udi Shows Off a Compact Brain for Self-driving cars.
That, too, included Nvidia chips. The introduction of Nvidia product is a landmark moment for deep learning,
a technology that processes sensory information efficiently by loosely mimicking the way the brain works.
At CES, Nvidia showed that its software can detect objects such as cars, people, bicycles and signs, even when they are hidden partly.
Yoshua Bengio, a deep-learning researcher at the University of Montreal, says the Nvidia chipset is an important commercial milestone. would not call it a breakthrough,
but more a continuous advance in a direction that has been going for a number of years now,
Yann Lecun, a data scientist at New york University who leads deep-learning efforts at Facebook (see acebook Launches Advanced AI Effort to Find Meaning in Your Posts,
and proprietary, use custom and inflexible hardware, and tend to be lack boxesthat equipment manufacturers cannot really customize.
At a press event Sunday, Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia CEO, said the devices will provide ore computing horsepower inside a car than anything you have today. e
#AMD's new High Bandwidth Memory will power the graphics cards of the future Sitting down to talk graphics memory isn't usually anyone's idea of a good time
-and AMD just unveiled the memory technology it wants to power the GPUS of the future.
Seven years in the making, High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) promises to provide huge improvements over the GDDR5 memory currently sitting inside AMD's top-end graphics cards
Graphics cards will soon be shrinking significantly thanks to HBM. A comparable 1gb graphics chip takes up just 6 percent of the surface area measured against GDDR5,
That could lead to top-end graphics cards half the size of today's, AMD says.
It means CPU and RAM performance can be increased without hitting a bottleneck on the GPU side of the equation."
"We needed a new memory that was far, far better from a power perspective,"said AMD's Joe Macri at a briefing with journalists."
"With Nvidia working on next-generation graphics technology of its own, battle between the two graphics giants will be renewed in earnest in the very near future-HBM is slated to appear in AMD's flagship graphics cards later this year.
AMD hasn't said whether that technology might be used or will be used in standard RAM; AMD sells a range of high-performance memory modules s
#Opinion: How Toshiba's new storage device could change the data centre Poor hard disk drive; advances in silicon manufacturing have allowed solid state drives to capture the headlines leaving the traditional spindle-spinning devices in the shadows.
But things are about to get more exciting for the latter. Toshiba made an important announcement yesterday as it unveiled a new solution that essentially is a new class of server (the Japanese company calls it a multi-device storage solution),
one that integrates, in an industry-standard, 3. 5-inch form factor, compute (64-bit,
probably ARM), networking (Gigabit Ethernet) and storage (with a pinch of SSD storage for low latency tasks and onboard RAM).
Future iterations we guess-could include an all-SSD model, a 2. 5-inch one or even, may be,
The whole set is enabled by an unidentified Linux platform that will allow the device to run what Toshiba calls, the next generation of software-defined storage applications.
The HDD becomes the server The implications for the industry are tremendous; such a solution could allow data centres to offer a richer set of scale-out object storage features.
what it calls commodity servers used for storage management. The other announcement that dovetails nicely with it is that Toshiba has committed finally to deploying SMR technology, well after WD and Seagate.
Interestingly, the company managed to produce two products that shows its skills when it comes to cramming bits on a platter.
an external 2. 5-inch hard disk drive, managed to packs four 750gb platters in a tiny 15mm drive using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) only.
In addition, late last year, it debuted a 6tb hard disk drive that apparently squeezed six 1tb platters without the need of helium gas like HGST-or any other exotic technologies.
When we interviewed Seagate's Joe Fagan in March, he hinted that his company may
and more processing power to the hard drive as its remit goes beyond just holding bits.
if WD (or rather its subsidiary HGST) and Seagate do the same as Toshiba's move seems to be motivated by customer demand.
The development is a key milestone in the field of artificial intelligence. The algorithms allow the robot to build its knowledge slowly over time like humans do,
rather than being preprogrammed from their moment of creation. The resulting'neural nets'were inspired by the neural circuitry of the brain."
"The exact same software, which encodes how the robot can learn, was used to allow the robot to learn all the different tasks we gave it."
the robot was rewarded"with points allocated by the algorithm.""We still have a long way to go before our robots can learn to clean a house
#Processors do grow on trees: your next phone could be made of wood Engineers hunting for a way to make electronics more sustainable have hit on a novel invention-a semiconductor chip made almost entirely out of wood.
The idea is that instead of making chips from petroleum-based plastic, we'd be able to use cellulose nanofibril-a flexible,
and Canadian researchers has managed to successfully sequence the full genome of a living organism using a machine the size of a smartphone called the Minion.
Its tiny size and relatively low cost could allow scientists to perform much more advanced analysis away from a lab."The amazing thing about this device is that it is many times smaller than a normal sequencer-you just attach it to a laptop using a USB cable"
#Google maps can make sure you never see a"Closed"sign again Google maps has got another incredibly useful feature thanks to a recent update that will warn you
Instead, when you set off Google maps will now show a message that reads"Your destination may be closed
At the moment the update is only available for the Android version of Google maps, but we've reached out to Google to find out
when it will be coming to ios. Via The Telegrap p
#Scientists are turning your gut cells into computers A team of biological engineers at the Massachusetts institute of technology are turning the cells in our guts into computers.
It's hoped that this could one day allow us to program those cells to detect
and treat diseases. They've published the details of a series of sensors, memory switches and circuits that can be encoded into the human gut bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron.
Eventually, it's hoped that the resulting gut computers could help the early detection and treatment of disorders like inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer r
French President, Francois Hollande, said on Tuesday in Paris the government will present a draft law next month that makes Internet operators ccomplicesof hate-speech offenses
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he will travel to the U s. to seek help from the heads of Twitter, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.
This is not just leading to the oppression of every internet user but also makes little sense as potential terrorists will move away from public domains controlled by such large companies to darker areas of the web where they are monitored less-easily.
Moving away from terrorism, surveillance is a controversial subject on a global scale thanks to whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden
which would require the personal data of all passengers flying in and out of Europe to be stored up to five years.
BT and EE partnership will reduce'not spots'Broadband provider BT has confirmed its intention to acquire the UK's biggest mobile network
which could be a major step in providing coverage to mobile not spots where residents are struggling with limited or complete lack of connectivity.
Earlier this week the UK government published a map of public digital infrastructure (PDF) in the hope of tackling some of the mobile'not spots'across the country.
The telecoms giant has over seven million broadband subscribers many of which will use the company's own'Home Hub'routers.
Although new hardware will be required if BT chooses it could roll out new Home Hub devices which feature femtocell technology to boost mobile coverage in rural areas for its EE purchase.
A femtocell is a small low-power cellular base station which is designed typically for use in a home or small business to boost coverage.
The firm which was created out of a partnership between T-Mobile and Orange had promised to connect more than 1500 rural communities within three years by investing in small cells to extend coverage.
which believes that Wi-fi offload will dominate traffic by 2017 to deal with capacity demands from a mobile data traffic increase of more than sevenfold between 2014 and 2019 as part of a wider global growth of almost ten times.
The ongoing adoption of more powerful mobile devices and wider deployments of emerging M2m applications combined with broader access to faster wireless networks will be key contributors to significant mobile traffic growth in the coming years.
This mobile-centric environment will give service providers a new landscape of challenges and opportunities to innovatively deliver a variety of mobile services
and experiences to consumers and business users as the Internet of Everything (Ioe) continues to take shape.
#Human Genes Can Save Yeast WIKIPEDIA, LILLY MA large number of human genes can substitute for their defective counterparts in yeast
told The Scientist in an e-mail. ny technological advancement that can add in the precision and control of genetic modification is an important advance,
The idea is that users learn how to interpret the tingling patterns and come to eetheir environment through the gadget.
Last week (June 18), the US Food and Drug Administration gave the company permission to begin selling its device,
Users wear glasses mounted with a video camera and suck on an electrode array about the size of a lollipop.
A clinical study found that 69 percent of 74 volunteers were able to make out objects using the gadget after one year of training. his device does not give you your sight, Mike Jernigan,
and an early user of the Brainport, told the Washington post back in 2009. here is not that picture in your head.
but it a first step. or five years I have stared at a blank, black screen, Jernigan told the Post. eople are thinking outside of the box,
Mesulam told Motherboard o
#Diagnosing Ebola in 15 Minutes As West Africa has battled Ebola over the last year, clinicians have been restricted to time-consuming,
In the first, the researchers used electrodes to link the brains of three monkeys to a computer
and allowed each animal to contribute their thoughts to controlling an image of a robotic arm on a screen in front of them.
In a second study, on rats, the team linked the rodentsbrains not just to a computer
The researchers then showed the animals images of a robotic arm on the screen and gave each monkey control over certain parts of its movementither a single axis (x or y) or two dimensions (x-y, y-z,
Perhaps such a brainet could help an experienced user train someone with a new limb to control it,
#Semiconductor crystals could be key to extending Moore Law IBM researchers have developed a process for growing crystals made from semiconductor materials,
which they claim can then be integrated onto silicon chips in a crucial step forward for the future of computing.
an observation made by Intel cofounder Graham Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits doubled every year.
a researcher with IBM Research Gmbh at Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland and the lead author of the paper. e need better performing transistors as we continue down-scaling,
III-V semiconductors are believed to be a potential future material for computer chips but their integration onto silicon has been unsuccessful up until now.
but the details of the dynamics are difficult to monitor, said Ahmad Kabbani, a professor of chemistry at the Lebanese American University,
Researchers at Bristol University department of engineering mathematics have designed now synthetic chromophores which, they say,
Arranging these artificial chromatophores in a linear array, the team devised mathematical algorithms to control how the cells react to changes in state of neighbouring cells,
and the mathematics they developed to control it. In future, they say, they will work on improving propogation of patterns,
and devise new algorithms to simulate patterns in two-dimensional chromophore arrays o
#Zero emissions liquid air engine begins tests 26 june 2015uk liquid-nitrogen engine pioneer Dearman has begun full testing of its zero emission engine technology at its new liquid air R&d facility.
#BBC trials"mind-control"TV remote 26 june 2015 By Helen Knight It a lazy Sunday afternoon.
following experiments carried out by the BBC to investigate the use of technology that allows people to control their televisions with only their brainwaves.
The technology could also allow able-bodied people to access TV programmes much more quickly and easily,
he said. his is building on work we have done using voice control on consoles like the Xbox One, for example,
the BBC developed a prototype mind control TV using a low-cost headset equipped with sensors that measure electrical activity in the brain.
The electroencephalography (EEG) brainwave reading headset has a sensor that rests on the user forehead,
The user can choose to operate the device in either oncentrationor editationmode. If they choose meditation
the headset and app monitor their level of relaxation, which is displayed on a volume bar on the side of the screen. hen,
when a certain threshold is reached for that type of electrical activity, it sends a signal to the device on our tablet
which in turn sends a signal to the TV, said Saihan. During the experiment, 10 users were given a headset to wear,
and sat in front of the TV. The users either concentrated hard or relaxed their brain until the volume bar showed the threshold had been reached, at
which point a signal was sent to the TV to open the application, an experimental form of iplayer.
The users were presented then with a screen showing the five most popular programmes on iplayer at that time.
Each programme was highlighted, in turn, for ten seconds. To select a programme the users waited until the show was highlighted,
and then relaxed until the volume bar again reached the necessary threshold. Some users taking part in the experiment found the technology easier to use than others.
A few were able to pick up the technique immediately and begin watching programmes, while others found it harder to time their levels of meditation with the ten seconds in which their chosen programme was highlighted,
for example. The technology is still at a very early stage, and currently only allows users to select
either nor ff said Saihan. Whether the idea takes off will ultimately depend on how the technology evolves over the coming years,
including both the sensors and neuroscientistsunderstanding of brain activity, he said. t very early stages in terms of this type of technology,
technologists and other users an idea of how the technology might be used in the future
#Cold plasma technique helps wounds heal quicker 29 june 2015medical researchers in Germany have developed a technique which,
about the size of a hand-held torch, houses an electrode that the doctor holds close to the wound site.
The result is only about the size of a laptop and can be plugged into a normal socket between 100 and 230 V,
and assembling them on a computer into a three-dimensional mapping. To date, there has been no comparable technique for imaging 3d magnetic structures on nanometre length scales.
The physicists then successfully reconstructed the magnetic features on a computer in three dimensions. hese samples displayed structures not smaller than 75nm.
the surgeon can move the tip of the needle to the site of surgery with great accuracy.
and may even enable us to perform operations that are not feasible at present. he team is now working on the user interface and control software for the device,
Jeff Clune, a computer scientist at the University of Wyoming, said: verything we take for granted works so well
The study, published in the journal Nature, describes the new algorithms that underpin the advance,
it uses a computer simulation of its own body to create a detailed map of the types of movements it can make something the researchers describe as the robot imulated childhood f you watch children play,
but via smartphones and without directly employing its drivers. The taxi drivers were protesting at seeing their livelihoods threatened:
The unit stores 2 to 4 kilowatt hours, enough energy to watch television for 14 or 28 hours or wash two to four full loads in the washing machine.
as recently revealed by IBM. For comparison a strand of human hair, at 100, 000nm thick, is about 600,000 times wider than the atoms surrounding the new transistor.
The international team of researchers from Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik and the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, the NTT Basic Research Laboratories, Japan,
and opens the door to further research into harnessing these tiny transistors for computers and systems with orders of magnitude more processing power than today machines.
Chips used in computers are made currently at the 14nm scale, but going smaller has proven difficult, with 7nm the latest breakthrough.
widely considered to be the next stage in the evolution of computers. Quantum computing explained: harnessing particle physics to work faste o
and potential applications in everything from bulletproof vests to computer electronics but now we have discovered that limpet teeth exhibit a strength that is potentially higher.
Princeton university provides further details about the study's promising outlook for quantum computing here. The paper, Semiconductor double quantum dot micromaser, was published in the Science journal yesterday d
#Graphene sheaths could boost processor signal speeds by 30 per cent Scientists at Stanford have found a new use for graphene that will significantly increase the speed of standard computer processors.
can reliably transfer data between four and 17 per cent faster than the equivalent interconnects in today's processor designs, apparently."
TERABIT fibre tested Proximus and Huawei have successfully trialled a super-channel optical signal, flinging out information at up to one terabit per second (Tbps.
Tech lothario Huawei shacked up with Belgian box-wrecker Proximus back in January. The pairing has produced now a single super-channel optical transport network (OTN) card with a transmission speed of a pretty hefty 1tbps, running along Proximus'optical backbone.
Alcatel-lucent and BT managed to achieve 1. 4 Tbps using BT's fibre-optic pipe between the BT Tower and BT's Adastral Park in Ipswich.
Proximus/Huawei's transmission speed was conducted over a 1, 040km fiber link using an advanced"Flexgrid"infrastructure with Huawei's Optical Switch Node OSN 9800 platform.
The companies claim their approach increases the capacity on a fiber cable by compressing the gaps between transmission channels."
Jeffrey Gao, president of the Huawei transmission network product line, said the network"is turning to data center centric,
"Geert Standaert, chief technology officer at Proximus, said"together with Huawei we want to let our network infrastructure evolve to support current and future bandwidth demands."
whether Huawei's technology can be integrated into the core network, to anticipate the constant and growing customers demand for more bandwidth."
and health information technology to accelerate biomedical discoveries.""The White house investment is split in four parts.
the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information technology will receive $5 million that will be used to address privacy issues
anonymous accounts will no longer be permitted on many Chinese web services. The Cyberspace Administration of China set the policy today in a statement on the China Communication Network,
which said the policy was aimed at wiping out the"username chaos"that allowed users to masquerade as world leaders or counterfeit news organizations.
The new regulations will still allow users to choose their own username and photo but require them to register an actual name with the service
and stamping out the casual anonymity that defines US social networks like Twitter and Tumblr. Enforcement of the policy has been left to companies
Sina Weibo, a Chinese micro-blogging service similar to Twitter, has adopted already real-name registration at the urging of the central government,
when a paralyzed man named Matthew Nagle moved a cursor on a computer using only his thoughts.
and lets the computer figure out how to make the movement.""I wanted to run around and just high-five everybody.""
That way, the computer gets information about intent and precise movements, more closely mimicking how we control our own limbs."
That's because right now, Sorto has wire bundling connecting his implant to the computer that controls his robot limb.
The wire bundling goes through a plug in his skin which could be a prime site for infections.
Sorto hasn't had any infections there yet, Andersen says.)Ideally, the implants would need to be wireless,
but the amount of information coming out of the chips is so large, it's a tough problem to solve,
Maybe moving objects or playing video games with your mind isn't going to be routine any time soon but for patients like Sorto,
Today, United will announce a $30 million investment in Fulcrum Bioenergy, one of the largest makers of aviation biofuels.
and have built their own molecular gadget. They created a ribosome, the factory for proteins within the cell, inside a living cell,
#Obama wants to build an exascale supercomputer by 2025 The White house is getting serious about supercomputers.
Today, President Obama issued an executive order establishing the National Strategic Computing Intiative essentially a federal strategy for making sure America leads the field in supercomputers.
within the next ten years, the government pledges to build an exascale computer, capable of 10 18 operations per second.
but supercomputer experts had predicted already the US could break the so-called exaflop barrier as early as 2023.
The most powerful supercomputers currently in development in the US are the twin Summit and Sierra supercomputers, built by IBM for the Department of energy
and expected to handle 100 petaflops each when completed in 2017. But breaking the exaflop barrier is complicated more than simply strapping ten Summits together.
Without architectural breakthroughs a computer that powerful would require an entire power plant's worth of energy to keep going,
making it impractical for publicly funded science. The hope for data-crunching scientists is that in the years to come,
new architectures will be developed alongside software formats that can make use of all that raw power w
but white lasers could serve as a potential alternative light source both in people's homes and in the screens of their electronics.
and the ASU researchers claim that their white lasers can cover 70 percent more colors than current standard displays.
a developing technology that uses multiple colors of light to enable high-speed wireless internet access. Currently, LEDS are being used to develop Li-Fi technology,
which could be 10 times faster than current radio-based Wi-fi. Ning and his colleagues argue that Li-Fi using white lasers could be 10 to 100 times faster than LED-based Li-Fi.
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