Lifeboat Foundation

At Quora, I occasionally role play, “Ask the expert” under the pen name, Ellery. Today, I was asked “Is it too late to get into Bitcoin and the Blockchain”.

A few other Bitcoin enthusiasts interpreted the question to mean “Is it too late to invest in Bitcoin”. But, I took to to mean “Is it too late to develop the next big application—or create a successful startup?”. This is my answer. [co-published at Quora]…

The question is a lot like asking if it is too late to get into the television craze—back in the early 1930s. My dad played a small role in this saga. He was an apprentice to Vladamir Zworykin, inventor of the cathode ray tube oscilloscope. (From 1940 until the early 2000s, televisions and computer monitors were based on the oscilloscope). So—for me—there is fun in this very accurate analogy…

John Logie Baird demonstrated his crude mechanical Televisor in 1926. For the next 8 years, hobbyist TV sets were mechanical. Viewers peeked through slots on a spinning cylinder or at an image created from edge-lit spinning platters. The legendary Howdy Doody, Lucille Ball and Ed Sullivan were still decades away.

Continue reading “Is it too late to get into Bitcoin and the Blockchain?” »

Did you know you can rewire your brain? Neuroscientific research breakthroughs are revealing fascinating new truths about the malleability of our brains and, thus, the malleability of ourselves as well.

” … discuss using drones to leapfrog infrastructure, and save lives by doing it in less than 15 minutes.”

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Intel is making a huge push into AI and deep learning, and intends to build custom variants of its Xeon Phi hardware to compete in these markets. Several months ago, the Santa Clara corporation bought Nervana, an AI startup, and this new announcement is seen as building on that momentum. AI and deep learning have become huge focuses of major companies in the past few years — Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, and a number of smaller firms are all jockeying for position, chasing breakthroughs, and building their own custom silicon solutions.

The upcoming Knights Mill is still pretty hazy, but Intel has stated that the chip will be up to 4x faster than existing Knights Landing hardware. Right now, the company is working on three separate forays into the AI / deep learning market. First up, there’s Lake Crest. This product is based on Nervana technology that existed prior to the Intel purchase. Nervana was working on an HBM-equipped chip with up to 32GB of memory, and that’s the product Intel is talking about rolling out to the wider market in the first half of 2017. Lake Crest will be followed by Knights Crest, a chip that takes Nervana’s technology and implements it side-by-side along with Intel Xeon processors.

“The technology innovations from Nervana will be optimized specifically for neural networks to deliver the highest performance for deep learning, as well as unprecedented compute density with high-bandwidth interconnect for seamless model parallelism,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich wrote in a recent blog post. “We expect Nervana’s technologies to produce a breakthrough 100-fold increase in performance in the next three years to train complex neural networks, enabling data scientists to solve their biggest AI challenges faster.”

Continue reading “Intel announces major AI push with upcoming Knights Mill Xeon Phi, custom silicon” »

Harsh environment, less rain, and lack of infrastructure are among the many problems African countries face. Water scarcity and the lack of drinkable water, however, is a grave problem among all. It makes people use water from contaminated bodies which is the sole reason of water borne diseases like, diarrhea and typhoid.

Hundreds of organizations around the globe have taken this issue head-on. And Google, one of the most innovative companies of the planet, is in the league, too.

Google has launched multiple projects including Project Makani and Project Loon to resolve the power outages and connectivity issues in areas where they are most needed. Since the power and connectivity issues are already being worked upon, Google took another step to help these countries fight the water scarcity problem.

Continue reading “Google’s Water Harvesting Rafts Could Save Water Scarcity In Africa” »

In Brief:

• A drug already in use to treat chronic diseases like Multiple Sclerosis has been discovered to also effectively restore nerve function.
• The Department of Defense also has shown confidence in the drug by giving a million dollars to help fund research.

A new study led by the University of Rochester Medical Center suggests that a currently available drug may have properties that allow it to be used for the treatment of traumatic nerve injuries sustained in car accidents, sports injuries, or in combat.

As I have stated many times; anyone not adding QC to their 5 yr roadmaps is not planning well.

Scientists are getting closer to a breakthrough in quantum technology — one where the transfer of information via quantum principles makes the process almost instantaneous.

Scientists from the Polytechnique Montreal and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) have brought the world closer to a time when information can now be transferred instantaneously.

Continue reading “A Quantum Era: Scientists Now Closer to Instantaneous Information Transfer Between Matter and Light” »

Humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating, and communicating information since the Sumerians in Mesopotamia developed writing in 3000 BCE. Since then, we have continuously developed more and more sophisticated means to communicate and push information. Whether unconsciously or consciously, we seem to always need more data, faster than ever. And with every technological breakthrough that comes along, we also have a set of new concepts that reshape our world.

We can think back, for example, to Gutenberg’s printing press. Invented in 1440, it pushed printing costs down and gave birth to revolutionary concepts like catalogs (the first was published in 1495 in Venice by publisher Aldus Manutiu and listed all the books that he was printing), mass media (which enabled revolutionary ideas to transcend borders), magazines, newspapers, and so on. All these concepts emerged from a single “master” technology breakthrough and have had a great impact on every single aspect of individuals’ lives and the global world picture.

A hundred years later, the core idea of data distribution has not changed much. We still browse catalogs to buy our next pair of shoes, we create catalogs to sell our products and services, and we still browse publications looking for information.

Continue reading “Why chatbots are the last bridge to true AI” »

From stationary to flying qubits at speeds never reached before… This feat, achieved by a team from Polytechnique Montréal and France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), brings us a little closer to the era when information is transmitted via quantum principles.