Lifeboat Foundation

[Cross posted on Chi-Ning’s blog, the course is open also to non-Harvard people. Chi-Ning is my amazing grad student, who has worked on several aspects related to the course, including quantum computation and neurally-plausible computation. He assembled a great collection of guest speakers and so this course looks like it will be very exciting. Boaz]

In the following January, Harvard GSAS kindly supports me to offer a mini-course on “What is Computation? From Turing Machines to Blackholes and Neurons”. In this blog post, I’m going to share the motivation for teaching this mini-course and give an overview on what you will learn if you are interested in participating!

Computation is not an exotic word for people living in the 21st century. In high school, kids have to learn and do all sorts of computations in arithmetics (and some even start to write computer programs!). For scientists, computational methods become more and more common and sometimes even completely change the paradigm of a field. There are computers of different forms hiding in our daily life ranging from your smartphones to the toy of your pets. Also, from time to time we see excitement on the news about the development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Computation has become central in human civilization, however, do we really understand what computation is?

People in movies are often quick to resort to sawing off someone’s hand to get past a fingerprint scanner. A report from the Kraken Security Labs Team shows that it would be much easier—and less gruesome—to recreate someone’s fingerprint using a little bit of off-the-shelf wood glue.

Kraken notes that biometric security has become increasingly common as smartphone, tablet, and laptop manufacturers have incorporated fingerprint scanners into their products. These scanners offer a convenient way to access those devices without entering a password.

The report says a fingerprint scanner can be “hacked” by using a picture of the target’s fingerprint, creating a negative in Photoshop, printing the resulting image, and then putting some wood glue on top of the imitated fingerprint so it can be used to trick many commercial scanners.

That could change though, because Samsung and IBM have announced a partnership in which both companies are working together to develop new battery tech that could allow our smartphones to run for an entire week on a single charge.

This comes in the form of a new chip architecture that could potentially reduce the amount of energy consumed by as much as 85% called Vertical-Transport Nanosheet Field Effect Transistor (VTFET). As the name suggests, this new design will allow signals to travel across the chip vertically by stacking transistors on top of each other.

As a result, this could allow phones to perform just as well as they do right now, but with massive gains in energy efficiency. Alternatively, this design would also allow phones to improve on its performance by as much as 100% compared to modern FET alternatives.

The company’s current Glass hardware is built on Android.

Google is hiring an “Augmented Reality OS” team focused on building software for an “innovative AR device,” according to job listings spotted by 9to5Google. The team is led by Mark Lucovsky, who announced he’d joined the company this week. Lucovsky previously worked at Meta developing an in-house alternative to Android to power the company’s hardware, and also co-authored the Windows NT operating system.

According to Google’s job listings, the Augmented Reality OS team is building “the software components that control and manage the hardware on [its] Augmented Reality (AR) products.” This is far from Google’s first stab at developing AR software, and follows the company’s work on ARCore for Android and Tango. The company’s Google Glass, which is aimed at the business and enterprise market, is currently built on Android.

Continue reading “Google staffs up to build OS for unknown ‘innovative AR device’” »

It’s often said Earth’s resources are finite. This is true enough. But shift your gaze skyward for a moment. Up there, amid the stars, lurks an invisible bonanza of epic proportions.

Many of the materials upon which modern civilization is built exist in far greater amounts throughout the rest of the solar system. Earth, after all, was formed from the same cosmic cloud as all the other planets, comets, and asteroids—and it hardly cornered the market when it comes to the valuable materials we use to make smartphone batteries or raise skyscrapers.

A recent study puts it in perspective.

Continue reading “This Asteroid May Be the Shard of a Dead Protoplanet—and Have More Metal Than All the Reserves on Earth” »

“We will constantly be ‘within’ the internet, rather than have access to it, and within the billions of interconnected computers around us,” Ball wrote in his Metaverse Primer. Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse similarly, calling it “an even more immersive and embodied internet.” Picture this: you strap on a headset or pair of goggles, flick a switch, and boom—you’re still standing in your living room, but you’re also walking through a 3D world as an avatar of yourself, and you can interact with other people who are doing the same thing from their living rooms.

Being constantly within the internet doesn’t sound all that appealing to me personally—in fact, it sounds pretty terrible—but the good news for those with a similar sentiment is that the “full vision” of the metaverse, according to Ball, is still decades away, primarily because of the advances in computing power, networking, and hardware necessary to enable and support it.

Continue reading “The Metaverse Will Need 1,000x More Computing Power, Says Intel” »

NSO Group, an Israeli tech firm, developed malware to hack iPhones by creating a “computer within a computer” capable of stealing sensitive data and sitting undetected for months or even years, researchers at Google have revealed.

The malware is part of NSO Group’s Pegasus software tool, which it is thought to have sold to countries including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, India and the United Arab Emirates. US law-makers have called for sanctions against the firm.

An incredibly sophisticated piece of malware developed by the Israeli tech firm NSO Group works by creating an entirely separate computer inside the memory of an iPhone, allowing attackers to snoop and steal data.

Continue reading “NSO iPhone malware builds a computer inside your phone to steal data” »

5G will probably not hurt you, but having these products anywhere around definitely will.

5G is rapidly overtaking other wireless technology networks and may very soon become the standard for cell phone coverage. But there has been a lot of backlash with protesters stating the technology might be harmful to human health.

This has resulted in a rise of anti-5G products that claim to protect against the supposedly harmful radiation. A lot of these products have been discovered to be scams and now a new report from BBC reveals they may actually be dangerous.

Continue reading “Beware, That ‘Anti-5G’ Necklace Might Actually Poison You” »

The innovation could be a game-changer for communication technologies, such as phones and internet connections.

A team from UCF has developed the world’s first optical oscilloscope, an instrument that is able to measure the electric field of light. The device converts light oscillations into electrical signals, much like hospital monitors convert a patient’s heartbeat into electrical oscillation.

Until now, reading the electric field of light has been a challenge because of the high speeds at which light waves oscillates. The most advanced techniques, which power our phone and internet communications, can currently clock electric fields at up to gigahertz frequencies — covering the radio frequency and microwave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Light waves oscillate at much higher rates, allowing a higher density of information to be transmitted. However, the current tools for measuring light fields could resolve only an average signal associated with a ‘pulse’ of light, and not the peaks and valleys within the pulse. Measuring those peaks and valleys within a single pulse is important because it is in that space that information can be packed and delivered.