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Leading Australian engineer and physicist, Professor Andrea Morello, was today named inaugural recipient of the Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing by the prestigious American Physical Society, the world’s leading organisation of physicists.

Morello, a professor in UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications and head of the Quantum Spin Control group at the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, was awarded the prize “for remarkable achievements in the experimental development of spin qubits in silicon”.

The prize, endowed by the International Business Machines Corp, is named for two of the founding fathers of modern information science, both classical and quantum.

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Rocket Lab is dedicating itself to launching small satellites cheaply and efficiently — a capability the American company thinks the burgeoning private spaceflight industry desperately needs.

Small satellites, some no bigger than a lunch box, are revolutionizing how people gather data about the Earth, and they might be the future of global communications.

Rocket Lab’s business model is a bit like Henry Ford’s was when he started selling Model T’s: keep the machine simple, produce a lot of them and keep them affordable. Peter Beck, the company’s owner, told Space.com that he’d like to reach a point where Rocket Lab launches one of its custom-made, small-satellite rockets about once per week. And similar to Henry Ford (who didn’t even want to make different colors of the Model T), Beck said that until that basic goal is met, he has no plans to diversify the company’s services. [Satellite Quiz: How Well Do You Know What’s Orbiting Earth?].

By now everyone has heard of Google’s RankBrain, the new artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm that is supposed to be the latest and greatest from Mountain View, Calif. What many of you might not realize, however, is just how fast the SEO industry is changing because of it. In this article, I’ll take you through some clear examples of how some of the old rules of SEO no longer apply, and what steps you can take to stay ahead of the curve in order to continue to provide successful SEO campaigns for your businesses.

So what is artificial intelligence?

There are generally three different classifications of artificial intelligence:

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Earlier this week, Canada’s electronic spy agency the Communications Security Establishment warned government agencies and businesses against quantum mechanics, which could cripple the majority of encryption methods implemented by leading corporations and agencies globally.

Governments and private companies employ a variety of cryptographic security systems and protocols to protect and store important data. Amongst these encryption methods, the most popular system is public key cryptography (PKC), which can be integrated onto a wide range of software, platforms, and applications to encrypt data.

The Communications Security Establishment and its chief Greta Bossenmaier believes that quantum computing is technically capable of targeting PKC-based encryption methods, making data vulnerable to security breaches and hacking attempts from foreign state spies and anonymous hacking groups.

Continue reading “Quantum Computing Could Cripple Encryption; Bitcoin’s Role” »

Amid rising political tensions with the U.S., Russia is planning to further lower its usage of licensed software from IT giants like International Business Machines Corp IBM, Microsoft Corporation MSFT, SAP AG SAP and Oracle Corporation ORCL.

Per Bloomberg, “The State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, is drafting a bill to restrict government agencies from buying licensed software, giving preference to open-source software.”

The proposed law is an addition to an already existing federal law that came into effect on Jan 1, 2016, which restricts the use of foreign software in the public sector, if there is a domestic version available.

In an age when digital information can fly around the connected networks of the world in the blink of an eye, it may seem a little old timey to consider delivering messages by hand. But that’s precisely what Panasonic is doing at CEATEC this week. The company is demonstrating a prototype communication system where data is transmitted from one person to another through touch.

There’s very little information on the system available, but Panasonic says that the prototype uses electric field communication technology to move data from “thing-to-thing, human-to-human and human-to-thing.” Data transfer and authentication occurs when the objects or people touch, with digital information stored in a source tag instantaneously moving to a receiver module – kind of like NFC tap to connect technology, but with people in the equation as well as devices.

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DULLES, Va.—(BUSINESS WIRE)— Orbital ATK, Inc. (NYSE: OA), a global leader in aerospace and defense technologies, and Stratolaunch Systems today announced a multi-year production-based partnership that will offer significant cost advantages to air-launch customers. Stratolaunch Systems, in cooperation with Vulcan Aerospace, is responsible for realizing Paul G. Allen’s vision for space.

“The combination of our extensive air-launch experience and the Stratolaunch aircraft has the potential to provide innovative and cost-effective options for commercial launch customers.” Tweet this

Under this partnership, Orbital ATK will initially provide multiple Pegasus XL air-launch vehicles for use with the Stratolaunch aircraft to provide customers with unparalleled flexibility to launch small satellites weighing up to 1,000 pounds into low Earth orbit. Pegasus has carried out 42 space launch missions, successfully placing more than 80 satellites into orbit for scientific, commercial, defense and international customers.

Continue reading “Orbital ATK and Stratolaunch Systems Partner to Offer Competitive Space Launch Opportunities” »

A Chinese man has been sentenced to three years in a U.S. prison for conspiring to steal high-tech U.S. corn seeds with the intention of transporting them to China, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday.

Mo Hailong, 46, pleaded guilty in January in federal court in Iowa to conspiring to steal patented corn seeds from DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto Co. Mo was employed as director of the international business of the Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group Co Ltd.

(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

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Digitising Business —

At the bleeding edge of AI: Quantum grocery picking and transfer learning.

Computer vision, neural nets, and deep learning are hot topics at UK R&D centres.

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