Lifeboat Foundation

The next generation of wireless communication not only requires greater bandwidth at higher frequencies – it also needs a little extra time.

Cornell researchers have developed a semiconductor chip that adds a necessary time delay so signals sent across multiple arrays can align at a single point in space, and without disintegrating. The approach will enable ever-smaller devices to operate at the higher frequencies needed for future 6G communication technology.

Continue reading “3D reflectors help boost data rate in wireless communications” »

After the advent of 5G, engineers have been trying to devise techniques to further enhance wireless communication technology. To increase these systems’ data transmission rate, they will ultimately need to extend their carrier frequency beyond 100 gigahertz, reaching the terahertz range.

Existing devices and technologies, however, have proved to be unable to achieve such high carrier frequencies. One proposed solution to reach this goal entails the use of some quantum materials that exhibit the so-called non-linear Hall effect.

Researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) e. V. and University of Salerno have identified a promising material for the development of next generation wireless communication systems, namely thin film elemental bismuth. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, shows that this material exhibits a room-temperature nonlinear Hall effect.

Underlying the storm of hype and funding in the AI sector right now is a scarce resource: data, created by old-fashioned humans, that’s needed to train the huge models like ChatGPT and DALL-E that generate text and imagery.

That demand is causing all sorts of drama, from lawsuits by authors and news organizations that say their work was used by AI companies without their permission to the looming question of what happens when the internet fills up with AI-generated content and AI creators are forced to use that to train future AI.

And, of course, it’s also fueling new business deals as AI developers rush to lock down repositories of human-generated work that they can use to train their AI systems. Look no further than this wild scoop from Bloomberg: that an undisclosed AI outfit has struck a deal to pay Reddit $60 million per year for access to its huge database of users’ posts — perhaps the surest sign yet that user data is the key commodity in the AI gold rush.

New phased-array transmitter design overcomes common problems of CMOS technology in the 300 GHz band, as reported by scientists from Tokyo Tech. Thanks to its remarkable area efficiency, low power consumption, and high data rate, the proposed transmitter could pave the way to many technological applications in the 300 GHz band, including body and cell monitoring, radar, 6G wireless communications, and terahertz sensors.

Today, most frequencies above the 250 GHz mark remain unallocated.

Accordingly, many researchers are developing 300 GHz transmitters/receivers to capitalize on the low atmospheric absorption at these frequencies, as well as the potential for extremely high data rates that comes with it.

An analysis of DOIs suggests that digital preservation is not keeping up with burgeoning scholarly knowledge.

SpaceX says it’s made progress to drive down Starlink’s latency by over 30% for US subscribers, citing improvements implemented over the past month.

On Friday, the company published a report that sheds light on SpaceX’s ongoing effort to one day bring the latency rates down to under 20 milliseconds.

“In the United States alone, we reduced median latency by more than 30%, from 48.5ms to 33ms during hours of peak usage,” the company wrote. “Worst-case peak hour latency (p99) has dropped by over 60%, from over 150ms to less than 65ms.”

When will AI match and surpass human capability? In short, when will we have AGI, or artificial general intelligence… the kind of intelligence that should teach itself and grow itself to vastly larger intellect than an individual human?

According to Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNet, that time is very close: only 3 to 8 years away. In this TechFirst, I chat with Ben as we approach the Beneficial AGI conference in Panama City, Panama.

Continue reading “AGI in 3 to 8 years” »

This week now has four flights scheduled, starting with Crew-8, which is sending a new crew to the International Space Station for a six-month tour of duty after successfully launching from Florida. Starlink 6–41 from Cape Canaveral and Transporter 10 from Vandenberg Space Force Base are also on the docket along with the debut of a new small satellite launcher from Japan.

Crew-8 launched three NASA astronauts and one Roscosmos cosmonaut to the Station on March 3, while the Starlink 6–41 flight and Transporter 10 are now due to fly on March 4. The new KAIROS small satellite launcher developed by the Japanese commercial sector is scheduled to fly on March 8.

AI systems, such as GPT-4, can now learn and use human language, but they learn from astronomical amounts of language input—much more than children receive when learning how to understand and speak a language. The best AI systems train on text with a word count in the trillions, whereas children receive just millions per year.

Due to this enormous data gap, researchers have been skeptical that recent AI advances can tell us much about human learning and development. An ideal test for demonstrating a connection would involve training an AI model, not on massive data from the web, but on only the input that a single child receives. What would the model be able to learn then?

Continue reading “New research shows how child-like language learning is possible using AI tools” »