Lifeboat Foundation

Turing’s machine should sound familiar for another reason. It’s similar to the way ribosomes read genetic code on ribbons of RNA to construct proteins.

Cellular factories are a kind of natural Turing machine. What Leigh’s team is after would work the same way but go beyond biochemistry. These microscopic Turing machines, or molecular computers, would allow engineers to write code for some physical output onto a synthetic molecular ribbon. Another molecule would travel along the ribbon, read (and one day write) the code, and output some specified action, like catalyzing a chemical reaction.

Now, Leigh’s team says they’ve built the first components of a molecular computer: A coded molecular ribbon and a mobile molecular reader of the code.

Their quantum computing processors can store information up to two milliseconds.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales have broken new ground in quantum computing by demonstrating that ‘spin qubits’- qubits where the information is stored in the spin momentum of an electron-can store data for up to two milliseconds, 100 times longer than previous benchmarks in the same quantum processor.

Classical computers work with bits—consisting of ones and zeroes—but a quantum computer uses quantum bits or qubits, which, on top of the ones and zeroes, also has a superposition where it can be a one and a zero at the same time.

Continue reading “Quantum engineers improved the silicon chip performance by 100 times setting a new standard” »

Researchers have assembled the world’s smallest flying structure, a tiny microchip that travels like wind-dispersed seeds with onboard technology to track air pollution and airborne diseases.

A study conducted by scientists from Trinity College Dublin could suggest that quantum processes are involved in the functions of our brains.

Solar cells that are stretchable, flexible and wearable won the day and the best poster award from a pool of 215 at Research Expo 2016 April 14 at the University of California San Diego. The winning nanoengineering researchers aim to manufacture small, flexible devices that can power watches, LEDs and wearable sensors. The ultimate goal is to design and build much bigger flexible solar cells that could be used as power sources and shelter in natural disasters and other emergencies.

Research Expo is an annual showcase of top graduate research projects for the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. During the poster session, graduate students are judged on the quality of their work and how well they articulate the significance of their research to society. Judges from industry, who often are alumni, pick the winners for each department. A group of faculty judges picks the overall winner from the six department winners.

Continue reading “Stretchable, Flexible, Wearable Solar Cells Take Top Prize at Research Expo 2016” »

This podcast features three executives from quantum-computing companies.

TSMC is setting up a new 1-nm chip production facility that will be located in an industrial park in Longtan District in Taiwan.

Large Language Models have the ability to store vast amounts of facts about the world. But little is known, how these models actually do this. This paper aims at discovering the mechanism and location of storage and recall of factual associations in GPT models, and then proposes a mechanism for the targeted editing of such facts, in form of a simple rank-one update to a single MLP layer. This has wide implications both for how we understand such models’ inner workings, and for our ability to gain greater control over such models in the future.

OUTLINE:
0:00 — Introduction.
1:40 — What are the main questions in this subfield?
6:55 — How causal tracing reveals where facts are stored.
18:40 — Clever experiments show the importance of MLPs.
24:30 — How do MLPs store information?
29:10 — How to edit language model knowledge with precision?
36:45 — What does it mean to know something?
39:00 — Experimental Evaluation & the CounterFact benchmark.
45:40 — How to obtain the required latent representations?
51:15 — Where is the best location in the model to perform edits?
58:00 — What do these models understand about language?
1:02:00 — Questions for the community.

Continue reading “ROME: Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT (Paper Explained & Author Interview)” »

After six decades of examining signals from space, why have we yet to discover evidence of extra-terrestrial life?
Keith’s book “The Contact Paradox: Challenging our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” is available now — https://geni.us/JFpy.

For the past six decades a small cadre of researchers have been on a quest, as part of SETI, to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far, SETI has found no evidence of extraterrestrial life, but with more than a hundred billion stars in our Galaxy alone to search, the odds of quick success are stacked against us.

Continue reading “Why Have We Not Found Any Aliens? — with Keith Cooper” »