Lifeboat Foundation

Quantum simulators are a strange breed of systems for purposes that might seem a bit nebulous from the outset. These are often HPC clusters with fast interconnects and powerful server processors (although not usually equipped with accelerators) that run a literal simulation of how various quantum circuits function for design and testing of quantum hardware and algorithms. Quantum simulators do more than just test. They can also be used to emulate quantum problem solving and serve as a novel approach to tackling problems without all the quantum hardware complexity.

Despite the various uses, there’s only so much commercial demand for quantum simulators. Companies like IBM have their own internally and for others, Atos/Bull have created these based on their big memory Sequanna systems but these are, as one might imagine, niche machines for special purposes. Nonetheless, Nvidia sees enough opportunity in this arena to make an announcement at their GTC event about the performance of quantum simulators using the DGX A100 and its own custom-cooked quantum development software stack, called CuQuantum.

After all, it is probably important for Nvidia to have some kind of stake in quantum before (and if) it ever really takes off, especially in large-scale and scientific computing. What better way to get an insider view than to work with quantum hardware and software developers who are designing better codes and qubits via a benchmark and testing environment?

Advances in machine learning have made it possible to automate a growing array of coding tasks, from auto-completing segments of code and fine tuning algorithms… See More.

Programs such as GPT-3 can compose convincing text. Some people are using the tool to automate software development and hunt for bugs.

Reinforcement learning algorithms are only now starting to be applied in business settings — but could help companies solve complicated problems. Here’s how.

Most machine learning systems leverage historical data to make predictions. But learning through trial and error lead to more creative solutions.

As content moderation continues to be a critical aspect of how social media platforms work — one that they may be pressured to get right, or at least do better in tackling — a startup that has built a set of data and image models to help with that, along with any other tasks that require automatically detecting objects or text, is announcing a big round of funding.

Hive, which has built a training data trove based on crowdsourced contributions from some 2 million people globally, which then powers a set of APIs that can be used to identify automatically images of objects, words and phrases — a process used not just in content moderation platforms, but also in building algorithms for autonomous systems, back-office data processing, and more — has raised $85 million in a Series D round of funding that the startup has confirmed values it at $2 billion.

“At the heart of what we’re doing is building AI models that can help automate work that used to be manual,” said Kevin Guo, Hive’s co-founder and CEO. “We’ve heard about RPA and other workflow automation, and that is important too but what that has also established is that there are certain things that humans should not have to do that is very structural, but those systems can’t actually address a lot of other work that is unstructured.” Hive’s models help bring structure to that other work, and Guo claims they provide “near human level accuracy.”

AI systems can lead to race or gender discrimination.

The US Federal Trade Commission has warned companies against using biased artificial intelligence, saying they may break consumer protection laws. A new blog post notes that AI tools can reflect “troubling” racial and gender biases. If those tools are applied in areas like housing or employment, falsely advertised as unbiased, or trained on data that is gathered deceptively, the agency says it could intervene.

“In a rush to embrace new technology, be careful not to overpromise what your algorithm can deliver,” writes FTC attorney Elisa Jillson — particularly when promising decisions that don’t reflect racial or gender bias. “The result may be deception, discrimination — and an FTC law enforcement action.”

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Basically, we live in one giant algorithm.

In fascinating new research, cosmologists explain the history of the universe as one of self-teaching, autodidactic algorithms.

The more data collected, the better the results.

Understanding the genetics of complex diseases, especially those related to the genetic differences among ethnic groups, is essentially a big data problem. And researchers need more data.

1000, 000 genomes

Continue reading “Scientists are on a path to sequencing 1 million human genomes and use big data to unlock genetic secrets” »

Developing Next Generation Artificial Intelligence To Serve Humanity — Dr. Patrick Bangert, Vice President of AI, Samsung SDS.

Dr. Patrick D. Bangert, is Vice President of AI, and heads the AI Engineering and AI Sciences teams, at Samsung SDS is a subsidiary of the Samsung Group, which provides information technology (IT) services, and are active in research and development of emerging IT technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, Internet of things (IoT) and Engineering Outsourcing.

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Whatever business a company may be in, software plays an increasingly vital role, from managing inventory to interfacing with customers. Software developers, as a result, are in greater demand than ever, and that’s driving the push to automate some of the easier tasks that take up their time.

Productivity tools like Eclipse and Visual Studio suggest snippets of code that developers can easily drop into their work as they write. These automated features are powered by sophisticated language models that have learned to read and write computer code after absorbing thousands of examples. But like other deep learning models trained on big datasets without explicit instructions, language models designed for code-processing have baked-in vulnerabilities.

“Unless you’re really careful, a hacker can subtly manipulate inputs to these models to make them predict anything,” says Shashank Srikant, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re trying to study and prevent that.”