News

Breakthrough Announced in Dark Matter Detection Technology

This week, the Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) unveiled a new result, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, that places it in a category of one: it is the world’s first and only experiment to have achieved the necessary sensitivity to “hear” the telltale signs of dark matter axions. This technological breakthrough is the result of more than 30 years of research and development, with the latest piece of the puzzle coming in the form of a quantum-enabled device that allows ADMX to listen for axions more closely than any experiment ever built.

The Case Against an Autonomous Military

The potential harm of A.I.s deliberately designed to kill in warfare is much more pressing. The U.S. and other countries are working hard to develop military A.I., in the form of automated weapons, that enhance battlefield capabilities while exposing fewer soldiers to injury or death. For the U.S., this would be a natural extension of the existing imperfect drone warfare program—failures in military intelligence have led to the mistaken killing of non-combatants in Iraq.

Here’s how it’s possible to make perfect diamonds in a microwave

What Is Meat? Missouri Is Working to Legislate Against Lab-Grown Alternatives

ACE Submarine Cable Cut Impacts Ten Countries

The ACE (African Coast to Europe) submarine cable runs along the west coast of Africa between France and South Africa, connecting 22 countries. It extends over 17,000 km, and has a potential capacity of 5.12 Tbps. The cable system is managed by a consortium of 19 telecommunications operators & administrations, and the first phase entered service in December 2012.

DeepMarks: A Digital Fingerprinting Framework for Deep Neural Networks

DeepMarks introduces the first fingerprinting methodology that enables the model owner to embed unique fingerprints within the parameters (weights) of her model and later identify undesired usages of her distributed models. The proposed framework embeds the fingerprints in the Probability Density Function (pdf) of trainable weights by leveraging the extra capacity available in contemporary DL models. DeepMarks is robust against fingerprints collusion as well as network transformation attacks, including model compression and model fine-tuning.

What makes a tree a tree?

Despite numerous studies and 30-plus genomes under their belts, scientists are still struggling to nail down the defining traits of these tall, long-lived, woody plants.

Lessons Learned Reproducing a Deep Reinforcement Learning Paper

There are a lot of neat things going on in deep reinforcement learning. One of the coolest things from last year was OpenAI and DeepMind’s work on training an agent using feedback from a human rather than a classical reward signal. There’s a great blog post about it at Learning from Human Preferences, and the original paper is at Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences.

Spyce Kitchen, a robotic chef built by four recent M.I.T. grads

Leap Motion designed a $100 augmented reality headset with hand tracking