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Brain-to-brain communication is becoming a reality, says Andrea Stocco, who sees a future where minds meet to share ideas.

You are working on brain-to-brain communication. Can one person’s thoughts ever truly be experienced by another person?

Each brain is different. And while differences in anatomy are relatively easy to account for, differences in function are difficult to characterise. And then we have differences in experience – my idea of flying could be completely unlike your idea of flying, for example. When you think about flying, a bunch of associated experiences come into your mind, competing for your attention. We somehow need to strip away the individual differences to grasp the basic, shared factors.

But it seems possible. Other researchers have been able to use information collected from a group of people to make surprisingly successful, if basic, predictions about what another individual is thinking.

What do you need to transmit information between brains?

He pointed out that Horizon Robotics will finish designing its first AI chip for smart home appliances by June and make it commercially available by early 2017.


Mainland Chinese start-up Horizon Robotics, founded by the former head of online search giant Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning, claims it is on pace to bring chips with built-in artificial intelligence (AI) technology to market.

“General processors are too slow for AI functions. A dedicated chip will dramatically increase the speed of these functions,” Yu Kai, the founder and chief executive of Horizon Robotics told the South China Morning Post.

Founded in Beijing in July, Horizon Robotics is developing chips and software that attempt to mimic how the human brain solves abstract tasks, such as voice and image recognition, that are difficult for regular computer programmes. It also makes sensors for smart devices.

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The price of SSDs is continuing to drop, and they’re becoming an ever-more tempting proposition compared to traditional spinning disks, according to a new report.

DRAMeXchange, which is a division of analyst firm TrendForce, produces a quarterly report detailing the prices PC vendors pay for SSDs, and it showed that both MLC-based and TLC-based SSDs dropped considerably in price.

MLC-based drives dropped by around 10 to 12%, and TLC-based SSD prices sank by 7 to 12% in the first quarter of 2016.

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Something for everyone to keep a closer eye on in the coming year/s — And, they are indeed well on their way with Quantum and their partnership with Australia. Australia (as we recall) has been the one country outside the US and Canada that has made incredible progress in Quantum Computing especially introducing in Nov 2015 their discovery in developing a machine language for the Quantum platform.


BEIJING (AP) — China’s government has highlighted big data, encryption technology and “core technologies” such as semiconductors as the key elements of its push to grow into a tech powerhouse, according to a new five-year plan released Saturday that envisages the Internet as a major source of growth as well as a potential risk.

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At this rate, we may see Ray Kurzweil’s vision of connected humans to the cloud and full singularity before 30 years.


Duke University scientists have given a pair of monkeys the ability to drive a wheelchair with their thoughts alone. The work is described in a paper recently published in the journal Scientific Reports and adds to a growing body of work in brain-machine interfaces aiming to return some freedom to the severely disabled.

Duke neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis and his team first began experimenting back in 2012, when they implanted hundreds of microfibers as thin as a human hair in the brains of two rhesus macaque monkeys. The fibers recorded cortical activity associated with “whole-body movement” and sent the signals to a computer.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science is releasing new, highly realistic computer models of neurons. The models were developed using tools and expertise from the Blue Brain Project.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Blue Brain Project are deepening their collaboration. Today, the US-based Allen Institute is releasing a set of 40 computer models of neurons from the mouse visual cortex, created using tools developed by the Swiss-based Blue Brain Project at EPFL. Using Blue Brain technology, the researchers were able to reproduce the physiology and electrical activity of the neurons with an extremely high level of detail.

The Blue Brain Project is the simulation core of the Human Brain Project, a huge pan-European initiative. The scientific journal Cell recently published a long paper demonstrating the effectiveness of the Blue Brain Project’s modeling tools, focusing on the high accuracy and predictive power of the models and the discoveries they have already led to, including insight into the unexpected role of calcium. At the same time, the team has made these resources available to researchers around the world on a web-based platform.

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(Phys.org)—Many quantum technologies rely on quantum states that violate local realism, which means that they either violate locality (such as when entangled particles influence each other from far away) or realism (the assumption that quantum states have well-defined properties, independent of measurement), or possibly both. Violation of local realism is one of the many counterintuitive, yet experimentally supported, characteristics of the quantum world.

Determining whether or not multiparticle quantum states violate local realism can be challenging. Now in a new paper, physicists have shown that a large family of multiparticle quantum states called hypergraph states violates local realism in many ways. The results suggest that these states may serve as useful resources for quantum technologies, such as quantum computers and detecting.

The physicists, Mariami Gachechiladze, Costantino Budroni, and Otfried Gühne at the University of Siegen in Germany, have published their paper on the quantum hypergraph states in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

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Replacing traditional encryption schemes.


What are the prime factors, or multipliers, for the number 15? Most grade school students know the answer — 3 and 5 — by memory. A larger number, such as 91, may take some pen and paper. An even larger number, say with 232 digits, can (and has) taken scientists two years to factor, using hundreds of classical computers operating in parallel.

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