21st Century Innovative Technologies and Developments as also discoveries, curiosity ( insolite)...

Why This New Quantum Computing Startup Has a Real Shot at Beating Its Competition

A startup called Quantum Circuits plans to compete with the likes of IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Intel to bring quantum computing out of the lab and into the wider world. There’s one good reason to think it might be able to beat them all.

That’s because Quantum Circuits was founded by Robert Schoelkopf, a professor at Yale, whose work in many ways has helped kick-start this exciting new era of quantum advances.

Quantum computers exploit two strange features of quantum physics, entanglement and superposition, to process information in a fundamentally different way from traditional computers. The approach allows the power of such machines to scale dramatically with even just a few quantum bits, or qubits. Those racing to build practical quantum computers are nearing the point where quantum machines will be capable of doing things that no conventional machine could—an inflection point known as quantum supremacy.

The promise of reaching such a milestone has transformed the field from a mostly academic endeavor into a high-stakes competition between the research arms of several big companies and a few startups. And everyone is using the superconducting circuits Schoelkopf pioneered.  

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https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Quantum-Computing

For years now, scientists have been working to make cells into computers. It’s a logical goal; cells store information in something roughly approximating memory, they behave due to the strict, rules-based expression of programming in response to stimuli, and they can carry out operations with astonishing speed. Each cell contains enough physical complexity to theoretically be quite a powerful computing unit all on its own, but each is also small enough to pack by the millions into tiny physical spaces. With a fully realized ability to program cell behavior as reliably as we do computer behavior, there’s no telling what biological computing could accomplish.

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Towards this end, researchers at MIT are investigating ways of making artificial neural networks more transparent in their decision-making. As they stand now, artificial neural networks are a wonderful tool for discerning patterns and making predictions. But they also have the drawback of not being terribly transparent.

The beauty of an artificial neural network is its ability to sift through heaps of data and find structure within the noise. This is not dissimilar from the way we might look up at clouds and see faces amidst their patterns.

And just as we might have trouble explaining to someone why a face jumped out at us from the wispy trails of a cirrus cloud formation, artificial neural networks are not explicitly designed to reveal what particular elements of the data prompted them to decide a certain pattern was at work and make predictions based upon it.

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http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?tag=AI

Wi-Fi could soon have a very detailed geofence, if MIT researchers have their way. They’ve introduced a new project named ‘Chronos’ that helps Wi-Fi signals locate you within “tens of centimeters.”

The team managed this by monitoring several Wi-Fi bands, then cobbling the data together to find out how long a signal takes to find the end user. In knowing the time and distance it takes for a Wi-Fi signal to travel, MIT can create advanced geofencing.