“The best-kept secret in quantum computing.” That’s what Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) CEO Ilyas Khan called Honeywell‘s efforts in building the world’s most powerful quantum computer. In a race where most of the major players are vying for attention, Honeywell has quietly worked on its efforts for the last few years (and under strict NDA’s, it seems). But today, the company announced a major breakthrough that it claims will allow it to launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer within the next three months.
In addition, Honeywell also today announced that it has made strategic investments in CQC and Zapata Computing, both of which focus on the software side of quantum computing. The company has also partnered with JPMorgan Chase to develop quantum algorithms using Honeywell’s quantum computer. The company also recently announced a partnership with Microsoft.
Honeywell (NYSE: HON) announced today the launch of Honeywell Forge Energy Optimization, a cloud-based, closed-loop, machine learning solution that continuously studies a building’s energy consumption patterns and automatically adjusts to optimal energy saving settings without compromising occupant comfort levels. Honeywell Forge Energy Optimization, the first autonomous building solution focused on decreasing energy consumption, may deliver double-digit energy savings, decrease a building’s carbon footprint, and can be implemented without significant upfront capital expenses or changes to a building’s current operational processes.
During a pilot at Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Honeywell Forge Energy Optimization demonstrated an initial 10% energy savings. HBMSU is the first accredited smart university in the UAE and is known for its technology and innovation programs.
Computer scientists established a new boundary on computationally verifiable knowledge. In doing so, they solved major open problems in quantum mechanics and pure mathematics.
I tell research institutions that, on average, 5% of overall research costs should go towards data stewardship. With €300 billion (US$325 billion) of public money spent on research in the European Union, we should expect to spend €15 billion on data stewardship. Scientists, especially more experienced ones, are often upset when I say this. They see it as 5% less funding for research.
Bunk. First, taking care of data is an ethical duty, and should be part of good research practice. Second, if data are treated properly, researchers will have significantly more time to do research. Consider the losses incurred under the current system. Students in PhD programmes spend up to 80% of their time on ‘data munging’, fixing formatting and minor mistakes to make data suitable for analysis — wasting time and talent. With 400 such students, that would amount to a monetary waste equivalent to the salaries of 200 full-time employees, at minimum. So, hiring 20 professional data stewards to cut time lost to data wrangling would boost effective research capacity. Many top universities are starting to see that the costs of not sharing data are significant and greater than the associated risks. Data stewardship offers excellent returns on investment.
Four out of five early-career researchers in Australia have considered leaving science or their jobs because of factors including questionable research practices and an absence of institutional support, suggests a survey of 658 postdocs and junior faculty members.
The study was led by Katherine Christian, a social scientist at Federation University Australia in Ballarat, who is collecting data for her PhD thesis on the challenges faced by early-career researchers in the country. “I found everything I expected, but more so,” she says.
Unlike the U.S. and other nations, Taiwan acted quickly, aggressively and strategically to prevent the kinds of outbreaks and death rates seen in faraway places such as Europe and now the United States. It’s been using a combination of disaster preparedness set up following the SARS crisis, a strong health care infrastructure, big data and technology to combat the spread there, according to a new paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And the small self-governed island acted quickly, by as early as Dec. 31, while much the world was carefree.
For insight into how Taiwan is handling the threat of the virus, TheStreet asked the JAMA paper’s main author, Dr. C. Jason Wang, associate professor of pediatrics and director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention at Stanford University School of Medicine, by email. Dr. Wang was also a management consultant with McKinsey and Company and served as the project manager for Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Reform Task-force. Following is an edited version of the exchange.
What Amazon has done, by accident or intention, is to upset the entire postwar food system to be driven by the consumer backward, rather than from corn subsidies forward.
Not only will people get Amazon Go’s highly accurate personalized recommendations to buy their organic spelt, einkorn and emmer-filled breakfast cereals without ever waiting in line again, but their willingness to pay more for it will propagate backward to farmers who suddenly can make a living because they are not growing the same winter wheat that every other farmer is pouring into grain elevators. The more consumers desire foods with particular attributes, like diverse plants, sustainable production practices and even terroir, the more the farm system becomes decommodified and gives farmers a viable path to making a living.
The work of MIT computer scientist Aleksander Madry is fueled by one core mission: “doing machine learning the right way.”
Madry’s research centers largely on making machine learning — a type of artificial intelligence — more accurate, efficient, and robust against errors. In his classroom and beyond, he also worries about questions of ethical computing, as we approach an age where artificial intelligence will have great impact on many sectors of society.
“I want society to truly embrace machine learning,” says Madry, a recently tenured professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “To do that, we need to figure out how to train models that people can use safely, reliably, and in a way that they understand.”
Computing Community Consortium, CCC Blog, Helen Wright
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“The goal of the Robotics program is to erase artificial disciplinary boundaries and provide a single home for foundational research in robotics. Robotics is a deeply interdisciplinary field, and proposals are encouraged across the full range of fundamental engineering and computer science research challenges arising in robotics. All proposals should convincingly explain how a successful outcome will enable transformative new robot functionality or substantially enhance existing robot functionality.”
Illinois Tech is launching a new College of Computing to help prepare students for tech jobs of the future and provide Chicago with the talent it needs to boost its tech ecosystem.
The Illinois Institute of Technology, otherwise known as Illinois Tech, announced this week that it has launched the College of Computing, which will house the school’s computer science, data science, artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, cybersecurity, and information technology and management programs. The college will start on June 1 in advance of the fall 2020 semester.
Chris Gladwin (via Illinois Tech)
Chicago serial entrepreneur Chris Gladwin helped spearhead the initiative and, along with Illinois Tech’s computer science department and advisory board, examined how other universities like Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech developed similar colleges of computing to help prepare students for tech careers.
What would the implications be if decoding your genes cost less than a pair of designer jeans? We might soon find out after a Chinese company claimed it can sequence the human genome for $100.
The speed at which the price of genetic sequencing has fallen has been astonishing, from $50,000 a decade ago to roughly $600 today. For a long time, the industry saw the $1,000 genome as the inflection point at which we would enter the genomic age—where getting a read out of your DNA would be within reach for huge swathes of the population.
That milestone has come and gone, but progress hasn’t stopped. And now Chinese firm BGI says it has created a system that can sequence a full genome for just $100. If the claims hold up, that’s a roughly six times improvement over state-of-the-art technology.
A key takeaway from that episode is that even if there’s a sense in which we find a technological solution to a real problem, very often that’s not enough to make it the case that we should implement that solution. In particular, there were real failures of communication with the affected people, the families of the students. That became a key feature of all the ways that I teach about ethics and technology. Even if you get it right, you can still get it wrong. Especially if you’re not in conversation with all the people who will be affected by the things you build and create. [audio, 22:19]
It’s part of Ikea’s larger push to reduce its carbon footprint. Jesper Brodin, CEO of Ingka Group (the company that oversees Ikea’s retail outposts), has expressed a commitment to making the company “climate positive” by the end of the decade; the company has allocated roughly $223 million to the initiative and has pledged to invent more energy-efficient alternatives for some of its most popular products.
Waste poses a particularly tricky problem. Once a product leaves an Ikea store, the company doesn’t have much control over whether it gets returned, passed on to some college kids, or ends up in a landfill. So Ikea is trying to prevent waste in the first place. The company installed an AI platform developed by the logistics software company Optoro Inc. (of which Ikea is an investor) in 50 U.S. locations last fall, the Wall Street Journal reported. So far it only covers items returned from in-store purchases, but the software is expected to accommodate online returns soon, too. It works by predicting the best possible destination for returned merchandise, whether that be back on the floor, up on the website, donated to charity, or sold to a third-party wholesaler. The algorithm determines this based on what makes most sense for Ikea’s profits.
New York University, Center for Health and Rehabilitation Research
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Remote TBD April 24, starting at 3 p.m., NYU (Pless Hall, 82 Washington Square East). “The Center of Health and Rehabilitation Research is very pleased to announce our Spring Speaker Event for 2020 featuring Dr. Ivan Oransky, MD.” [free, registration required]
Online May 5-7. “The company’s premier client and developer conference, and PartnerWorld for our Business Partners, will be recreated as a global, digital-first event.”
Ann Arbor District Library, University of Michigan School of Information
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Ann Arbor, MI March 13, starting at 7 p.m, Ann Arbor Downtown Libary. “The University of Michigan has been developing a conversational chatbot as a part of the Alexa Prize Competition, a select international competition to develop interactive AI on Amazon’s Alexa that can hold an engaging conversation for 20 minutes–a lofty goal! Join us for an evening to discuss research on how we are building AI systems that converse naturally with humans, and what the future of chatbots may look like.” [free]
Stanford University, Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute
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Online April 1. “COVID-19 and AI: A Virtual Conference will address a developing public health crisis. Sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the event will convene experts from Stanford and beyond to advance the understanding of the virus and its impact on society. It will be livestreamed to engage the broad research community, government and international organizations, and civil society.” [Event details and agenda will be posted soon.]
Breukelen, Netherlands July 7-10 at Nyenrode Business School. “It’s the ideal learning setting for professionals that wish to solve real-world problems by applying Machine Learning in a hands-on manner. This includes analysts, business leaders, industry practitioners, and anyone looking to boost their team’s productivity by leveraging the power of automated data-driven decision making.” [$$$]
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley Center for New Media
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Berkeley, CA March 12, starting at 5 p.m., University of California-Berkeley, Townsend Center for the Humanities (220 Stephens Hall, Geballe Room). “The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) works to provide a safe space for women and queer users through its open access fan works online archive. Stop by to discover how the OTW built a Hugo award-winning model for non-corporate, user-driven, online participatory cultures.”
Boston, MA June 28-30 at Boston University. The symposium “will gather experts and enthusiasts from many areas of academia and industry, in order to explore the use of computational tools for the creation of physical things. SCF provides a venue for participants to discuss cutting-edge results, cross-pollinate ideas, and strengthen interdisciplinary connections and collaborations.” Deadline for paper submissions is April 10.
Flatiron Center for Computational Astrophysics, Astro Data Group, Ruth Angus
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“Inspired by a conversation with Andy Casey who we visited at Monash University in Melbourne last week, I decided to write a Collaboration Policy, and share my feelings on the topic at our weekly group meeting.”
“At Monash, Andy showed me the Research Expectations page of his website, which is a document outlining the expectations he has for his students, and what their expectations might be for him. I love this idea and would like to create my own research expectations guidelines for any students working with me, current or future. As I started to write it however, I realized I wanted to write a zeroth-order expectations document first. Something a little more general, targeted at everyone I work with: a collaboration policy.”