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.
Read moreTHE 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.
Read moreHERE’S HOW IT’S POSSIBLE TO MAKE PERFECT DIAMONDS IN A MICROWAVE
And nope, these artificial diamonds are nothing like those cheap, lab-grown imitation diamonds, such as cubic zirconia — they have the exact same physical structure and chemical composition as a diamond that’s been pulled out of the ground. Source: sciencealert.com
WHAT IS MEAT? MISSOURI IS WORKING TO LEGISLATE AGAINST LAB-GROWN ALTERNATIVES
In Missouri, lawmakers with ties to the meat industry are seeking to pass a law that would prohibit the labeling of lab-grown meat as meat. Source: theintercept.com
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. While it may not have been completely problem-free over the last 5+ years, online searches do not return any published reports of significant outages caused by damage to the cable.
Read moreDEEPMARKS: 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.
Read moreWHAT 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. Source: knowablemagazine.org
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.
Read moreSPYCE KITCHEN, A ROBOTIC CHEF BUILT BY FOUR RECENT M.I.T. GRADS
Last month, four recent M.I.T. graduates, engineers with a shared passion for robotics, gathered in a lab at a startup incubator near Boston, to show off their pet project. They stood around a hulking console that looked like an old mainframe computer but was actually a self-cleaning robotic kitchen, designed to prepare an entire meal in less than three minutes. They call their contraption the Spyce Kitchen, which spawned a nickname, the Spyce Boys, and, as they introduced themselves, they might have been members of a boy band taking the stage.
Read moreLEAP MOTION DESIGNED A $100 AUGMENTED REALITY HEADSET WITH HAND TRACKING
Gesture interface company Leap Motion is announcing an ambitious, but still very early, plan for an augmented reality platform based on its hand tracking system. The system is called Project North Star, and it includes a design for a headset that Leap Motion claims costs less than $100 at large-scale production. The headset would be equipped with a Leap Motion sensor, so users could precisely manipulate objects with their hands — something the company has previously offered for desktop and VR displays.
Read more