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Daily life during a pandemic means social distancing and finding new ways to remotely connect with friends, family and co-workers. And as we communicate online and by text, artificial intelligence could play a role in keeping our conversations on track, according to new Cornell University research.

Humans having difficult conversations said they trusted artificially intelligent systems —the “smart” reply suggestions in texts—more than the people they were talking to, according to a new study, “AI as a Moral Crumple Zone: The Effects of Mediated AI Communication on Attribution and Trust,” published online in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

“We find that when things go wrong, people take the responsibility that would otherwise have been designated to their human partner and designate some of that to the artificial intelligence system,” said Jess Hohenstein, a doctoral student in the field of information science and the paper’s first author. “This introduces a potential to take AI and use it as a mediator in our conversations.”

Quantum computers will revolutionize information technology, ushering in an era where certain types of calculations will be performed with almost unimaginable speed. Practical applications will include healthcare disciplines such as molecular biology and drug discovery; big data mining; financial services such as portfolio analysis and fraud detection; and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The federal government is helping to create an environment in which quantum computing innovation and experimentation can flourish. The National Quantum Initiative Act puts $1.2 billion into the quantum research budgets of the Energy Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NASA and the National Science Foundation. The law also outlines a 10-year plan to accelerate the development of quantum information science and technology applications.

Meanwhile, The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is working to ensure that economic growth opportunities and opportunities for improving the world are baked into quantum policies and systems.

The same concept applies to the processor integrated into a quantum computer, whose fragile bits should be tuned optimally before it can execute a calculation. But who would be the right mechanic to perform this quantum tune-up task?

According to a group that comprises researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the quantum tune-up job can be performed by artificial intelligence (AI).

Published in the Physical Review Applied journal, the researchers’ paper shows how an AI can be trained to make an interconnected set of modifications to minute quantum dots. These quantum dots are among the numerous potential devices used for developing the quantum bits, also known as qubits,” that would create the switches in the processor of a quantum computer.

The world is only just getting used to the power and sophistication of virtual assistants made by companies like Amazon and Google, which can decode our spoken speech with eerie precision compared to what the technology was capable of only a few short years ago.

In truth, however, a far more impressive and mind-boggling milestone may be just around the corner, making speech recognition seem almost like child’s play: artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can translate our brain activity into fully formed text, without hearing a single word uttered.

It’s not entirely science fiction. Brain-machine interfaces have evolved in leaps and bounds over recent decades, proceeding from animal models to human participants, and are, in fact, already attempting this very kind of thing.

Continue reading “New AI System Translates Human Brain Signals Into Text With Up to 97% Accuracy” »

Quantum-computing vendor D-Wave Systems Inc. said Tuesday it is giving researchers and companies studying the novel coronavirus free access to its early-stage, experimental machines over the cloud.

Canadian firm D-Wave is among several technology companies providing free advanced computing resources to researchers working to combat the global pandemic. International Business Machines Corp., for example, in March started offering free remote access to two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

D-Wave has assembled a team of experts from about a dozen universities and companies including Volkswagen AG, Denso Corp. and startup Menten AI who are familiar with its quantum-computing services to help interested researchers program the computers.

Continue reading “D-Wave Opens Quantum-Computing Resources to Coronavirus Research” »

Quantum computing, for its parts, replaces the traditional 1 and 0 computer binary system with a system that calculates the chances of 1 and 0—meaning that it could have both 1 and 0 at the same time, but with different probabilities. “This enables the computing of certain aspects far faster and in a more efficient manner. The computing time could be 1,000 or 10,000 times faster,” said Lupa. When combined with artificial intelligence, machines could learn on their own with the speed of quantum computing, he stated.

At the moment, only massive quantum computers exist, while quantum communications are still at the proof of concept stage. Quantum radars have made some progress. But all of this is expected to change.

“In the end, it will be a revolution,” said Lupa. “But it will not happen tomorrow. When these things become accessible to everyone, then it will be revolutionary.”

Continue reading “Israel Aerospace Industries works with startups developing quantum technology” »

A new blood test that can detect methylation of DNA can accurately predict whether a person has any one of 50 cancers and where the tumour is growing.

The California-based healthcare company Grail, which developed the test, owns a large database of methylation patterns in cancerous and non-cancerous cell-free DNA. From that repository, a machine learning program was developed to analyse blood samples. The algorithm identified methylation changes that are classified as cancerous or non-cancerous, and it could even pinpoint the tissue of origin before the onset of symptoms.

Validation of the test was carried out by researchers from the US at the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Harvard medical school, working with colleagues at the Francis Crick Institute and University College London in the UK. In all, more than 15,000 volunteers from over 140 clinics in North America took part, and their samples revealed that this ‘liquid biopsy’ had a 0.7% false positive rate for cancer detection. The test was also able to predict the tissue that the cancer originated in with more than 90% accuracy. It performed best on 12 of the most common cancers, including ones that are most lethal and have no established screening paradigms such as pancreatic and ovarian cancers.

Continue reading “‘Liquid biopsy’ blood test accurately predicts cancer” »

Alongside the news that Boston Dynamics is going to let its robot dog, Spot, out of its laboratory for the first time, the company has released a new video of Atlas, its spectacular bipedal robot that’s previously been seen doing everything from parkour to backflips. In this latest video, Atlas does a small gymnastics routine, consisting of a number of somersaults, a short handstand, a 360-degree spinning jump, and even a balletic split leap.

What’s most impressive is seeing Atlas tie all these moves together into one pretty cohesive routine. In the video’s description, Boston Dynamics says that it’s using a “model predictive controller” to blend from one maneuver to the next. Presumably each somersault gives the robot a fair amount of forward momentum, but at no point in the video does it seem to lose its balance as a result. Amazingly, Atlas is able to roll gracefully along its back without any of its machinery getting squashed or tangled.

Continue reading “Boston Dynamics’ Atlas can now do an impressive gymnastics routine” »

Cancer is one of humanity’s leading killers, and the main reason for that is it’s often hard to detect until it’s too late. But that might be about to change. Researchers have developed a new type of AI-powered blood test that can accurately detect over 50 different types of cancer and even identify where it is in the body.

There are just so many types of cancer that it’s virtually impossible to keep an eye out for all of them through routine tests. Instead, the disease usually isn’t detected until doctors begin specifically looking for it, after a patient experiences symptoms. And in many cases, by then it can be too late.

Ideally, there would be a routine test patients can undergo that would flag any type of cancer that may be budding in the body, giving treatment the best shot of being successful. And that’s just what the new study is working towards.