Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, recently announced a $3 billion effort to cure all disease during the lifetime of their daughter, Max. Earlier this year, Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker donated $250 million to increase collaboration among researchers to develop immune therapies for cancer. Google is developing… Read More
Short History of the Fourth Industrial Revolution
In 2016, many companies are using Industry 4.0 as a buzzword. This doesn’t mean that the old industry has been revolutionized into a new version. On the contrary, this is an extension of what has currently existed, with the dawn of the modern variation arriving about 2010 in Germany.
While the first reference to Industry 4.0 would… Read More
The Ising on the Cake
Just when you thought you knew all the possible foundations for computing, along comes another one. Forget von Neumann, this approach models Ising machines, systems built on solving a statistical ensemble model of ferromagnetism. The concept is quite simple. Imagine a lattice of magnetic dipoles/spins, each of which can only… Read More
Disarming Trolls
An unintended consequence of the ubiquity of the Internet, particularly in social media, is the rise of the troll. Trolls post comments of unbelievable vitriol in some cases, comments that if issued in person and in public might lead to arrest and psych evaluations. Then vitriol turns into viral vitriol and the helpless target … Read More
Vidyo Aims To Disrupt Video Banking After Seeing Success In Healthcare And Defense
Commercial video services are a funny thing- they seem to go through ebbs and flows of industry excitement. One day it seems boring and the next thing you see is live video from a drone, Google releasing Duo, a patient traveling on a dogsled to receive care from a doctor a 1,000 miles away… and then everyone gets excited again. I worked… Read More
Robots could eventually replace soldiers in warfare. Is that a good thing?
The United States has on its Aegis-class cruisers a defense system that can track and destroy anti-ship missiles and aircraft. Israel has developed a drone, the Harpy, that can detect and automatically destroy radar emitters. South Korea has security-guard robots on its border with North Korea that can kill humans.
All of these… Read More
AI and the black box problem
Deep learning based on neural nets and many other types of machine learning have amazed us with their ability to mimic or exceed human abilities in recognizing features in images, speech and text. That leads us to imagine revolutions in how we interact with the electronic and physical worlds in home automation, autonomous driving,… Read More
Climbing the dimensions (part 2)
In the first part of this article we tried to present a way to capture the essence of the tesseract. We did that by “climbing” the dimensions from the point (no dimensions), through the segment (1-D), square (2-D), cube (3-D) and finally tesseract (4-D).
In the following figures we present other attempts at visualizing… Read More
Climbing the dimensions (part 1)
Translated and adapted from an article by Jaime Poniachik
The novel Flatland was written en 1884 by Edwin A. Abbot. This novel describes a fantastic, two-dimensional, flat world. Hence the name of the novel. This world has living beings. They have only two dimensions and they move in a plane which they cannot abandon.
It is not difficult… Read More
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Neural Nets
In 1960, the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner published an article titled “The unreasonable effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. His point was that, at least in the physical and chemical worlds, mathematics is able to describe the behavior of nature to an uncannily accurate degree, which… Read More
Intel’s Tiny Bridges Could Lead to Very Big Paychecks