Advanced Concepts Team

Makes me think how little we know on sleep ....

At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced its moves to embrace the next big thing in computing: quantum computing. Later this year, Microsoft will release a new quantum computing programming language, with full Visual Studio integration, along with a quantum computing simulator. With these, developers will be able to both develop and debug quantum programs implementing quantum algorithms.

At SRI International in Silicon Valley, researchers have developed perhaps the most impressive microbot army yet: the MicroFactory. It's an ant colony made robotic, with half-millimeter machines zipping around to construct truly impressive structures.

interesting idea to produce O2 differently on Mars

Also, let's see how MOXIE does onboard the Mars2020 rover! https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/instruments/moxie/for-scientists/

Exciting new technique in genetic engineering

This best-in-class streaming algorithm works by remembering just enough of what it's seen to tell you what it's seen most frequently. It suggests that compromises that seemed intrinsic to the analysis of streaming data are not actually necessary.

"Hinton's new approach, known as capsule networks, is a twist on neural networks intended to make machines better able to understand the world through images or video. In one of the papers posted last week, Hinton's capsule networks matched the accuracy of the best previous techniques on a standard test of how well software can learn to recognize handwritten digits." Links to papers: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09829 https://openreview.net/forum?id=HJWLfGWRb&noteId=HJWLfGWRb

impressive!

seems a very impressive guy :"Hinton formed his intuition that vision systems need such an inbuilt sense of geometry in 1979, when he was trying to figure out how humans use mental imagery. He first laid out a preliminary design for capsule networks in 2011. The fuller picture released last week was long anticipated by researchers in the field. "Everyone has been waiting for it and looking for the next great leap from Geoff," says Kyunghyun Cho, a professor"

" The goal of the APT program is to control and direct plant physiology to detect chemical, biological, radiological, and/or nuclear threats, as well as electromagnetic signals. " Now that is an advanced concept...

and look at this exceptional insight: "plants are easily deployed, self-powering, and ubiquitous in the environment, and the combination of these native abilities with specifically engineered sense-and-report traits will produce sensors occupying new and unique operational spaces" :-)

This has been around for over a year. The current trend in deep learning is "deeper is better". But a consequence of this is that for a given network depth, we can only feasibly evaluate a tiny fraction of the "search space" of NN architectures. The current approach to choosing a network architecture is to iteratively add more layers/units and keeping the architecture which gives an increase in the accuracy on some held-out data set i.e. we have the following information: {NN, accuracy}. Clearly, this process can be automated by using the accuracy as a 'signal' to a learning algorithm. The novelty in this work is they use reinforcement learning with a recurrent neural network controller which is trained by a policy gradient - a gradient-based method. Previously, evolutionary algorithms would typically be used. In summary, yes, the results are impressive - BUT this was only possible because they had access to Google's resources. An evolutionary approach would probably end up with the same architecture - it would just take longer. This is part of a broader research area in deep learning called 'meta-learning' which seeks to automate all aspects of neural network training.

Btw that techxplore article was cringing to read - if interested read this article instead: https://research.googleblog.com/2017/05/using-machine-learning-to-explore.html

"...the European Commission announced in 2016 that it was investing one billion euros in a research effort known as the Quantum Technology Flagship. The goal for this project is to develop four technologies: quantum communication, quantum simulation, quantum computing, and quantum sensing. After almost two years, how is it going?" arxiv link to the actual report: http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03773

38 degree core body temp in microgravity stabilised after 2 months - due to reduced conv. heat transfer+evaporation https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15560-w

so that's hypopyrexia (augmented concentrations of interleukin-1 receptor antagonist) AND hypothermia (convection/evaportation)? what puzzles me is that temperatures take so long to return to baseline after astronauts return to earth.

impressive achievement - extremely absorbant feather almost as black as our most "black" material

An overview of all the neurotech companies messing with the brain. When reading this I really wonder why we need ethical approval for everything in human research.

Some locations on Mars are known to have water ice just below the surface, but how much has remained unclear. Dundas et al. used data from two orbiting spacecraft to examine eight locations where erosion has occurred. This revealed cliffs composed mostly of water ice, which is slowly sublimating as it is exposed to the atmosphere. The ice sheets extend from just below the surface to a depth of 100 meters or more and appear to contain distinct layers, which could preserve a record of Mars' past climate. They might even be a useful source of water for future human exploration of the red planet.

No GUTs, no glory

any papers or insights on methods available?

Couldn't find a paper for Alibaba's results but Microsoft Research's performance on this dataset was very close. The paper is here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/r-net.pdf Btw the 'reading test' is a publicly available dataset called 'Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD)'. Their website shows a leaderboard: https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/