Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong knows a thing or two about returning to the public eye in style. His latest comeback happened less than a full day ago, bringing some interesting news about Samsung’s long-term design strategy.
What’s even more interesting, however, is the above photograph of Lee during his Thursday tour of Samsung’s main research and development center in Seoul. As the image shows the executive holding a curious smartphone prototype unlike anything else we have seen from the tech giant to date.
Speculation about the device in question is already running rampant, and the currently most popular theory among Korean media is that we are looking at a smartphone with an expandable display.
Japanese researchers have created a mind-controllable Gundam robot, turning one of the anime’s most exciting technological concepts into reality.
The model, based on the mobile suit Zaku, has been available through Bandai’s Zeonic Technics package since last year, but that version requires manual programming on a smartphone app.
A team of researchers at Samsung has developed a slim-panel holographic video display that allows for viewing from a variety of angles. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes their new display device and their plans for making it suitable for use with a smartphone.
Despite predictions in science-fiction books and movies over the past several decades, 3D holographic video players are still not available to consumers. Existing players are too bulky and display video from limited viewing angles. In this new effort, the researchers at Samsung claim to have overcome these difficulties and built a demo device to prove it.
To build their demo device, which was approximately 25 cm tall, the team at Samsung added a steering-backlight unit with a beam deflector for increasing viewing angles. The demo had a viewing angle of 15 degrees at distances up to one meter. The beam deflector was made by sandwiching liquid crystals between sheets of glass. The end result was a device that could bend the light that came through it very much like a prism. Testing showed the beam deflector combined with a tilting mechanism increased viewing angles by 30 times compared to conventional designs. The new design also allows for a slim form at just 1 cm thick. It also has a light modulator, geometric lens and a holographic video processor capable of carrying out 140 billion operations per second. The researchers used a new algorithm that uses lookup tables rather than math operations to process the video data. The demo device was capable of displaying 4K resolution holographic video running at 30 frames per second.
Scientists have successfully teleported a three-dimensional quantum state. The international effort between Chinese and Austrian scientists could be crucial for the future of quantum computers.
The researchers, from Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and University of Science and Technology of China, were able to teleport the quantum state of one photon to another distant state. The three-dimensional transportation is a huge leap forward. Previously, only two-dimensional quantum teleportation of qubits has been possible. By entering a third dimension, the scientists were able to transport a more advanced unit of quantum information known as a “qutrit.”
Quantum computing is different than what’s known as classical computing, which is what powers phones and laptops. These traditional devices store information in bits, which are represented with a binary 0 or 1. A good metaphor is to imagine a circle, where each 0 and 1 are on opposite points. In Quantum computing, which deals with atomic and subatomic particles, qubits can exist at both of those points as well as anywhere else in the circle.
Computer Vision is evolving from the emerging stage and the result is incredibly useful in various applications. It is in our mobile phone cameras which are able to recognize faces. It is available in self-driving cars to recognize traffic signals, signs, and pedestrians. Also, it is in industrial robots to monitor problems and navigating around co-workers.
Japanese researches control Gundam robot using their mind.
Japanese scientists have created a device that controls a mini toy Gundam robot using the human mind, turning one of the anime’s most exciting technological concepts into reality.
The researchers customized a Zaku Gundam robot toy available through Bandai’s Zeonic Technics, but buyers have to manually program their robot using a smartphone app.
The prototype is a joint venture between Tohoku University and Hitachi, where they developed a version that moves in response to brain activity.
Another argument for government to bring AI into its quantum computing program is the fact that the United States is a world leader in the development of computer intelligence. Congress is close to passing the AI in Government Act, which would encourage all federal agencies to identify areas where artificial intelligences could be deployed. And government partners like Google are making some amazing strides in AI, even creating a computer intelligence that can easily pass a Turing test over the phone by seeming like a normal human, no matter who it’s talking with. It would probably be relatively easy for Google to merge some of its AI development with its quantum efforts.
The other aspect that makes merging quantum computing with AI so interesting is that the AI could probably help to reduce some of the so-called noise of the quantum results. I’ve always said that the way forward for quantum computing right now is by pairing a quantum machine with a traditional supercomputer. The quantum computer could return results like it always does, with the correct outcome muddled in with a lot of wrong answers, and then humans would program a traditional supercomputer to help eliminate the erroneous results. The problem with that approach is that it’s fairly labor intensive, and you still have the bottleneck of having to run results through a normal computing infrastructure. It would be a lot faster than giving the entire problem to the supercomputer because you are only fact-checking a limited number of results paired down by the quantum machine, but it would still have to work on each of them one at a time.
But imagine if we could simply train an AI to look at the data coming from the quantum machine, figure out what makes sense and what is probably wrong without human intervention. If that AI were driven by a quantum computer too, the results could be returned without any hardware-based delays. And if we also employed machine learning, then the AI could get better over time. The more problems being fed to it, the more accurate it would get.
