Two chipmakers are developing 3-D chips to increase semiconductor power and speed by a factor of 10–at no additional cost.
Tohoku University professor Fujio Masuoka, who invented flash memory, and a small team of researchers plan to have a 3-D chip ready in five years.
Matrix Semiconductor, with has raised $80 million, says it has already created a 3-D chip that it will start selling by year-end, mainly to… read more
Ray Kurzweil believes we are fewer than 30 years away from a time when machine intelligence will surpass our own, he said, speaking at the annual conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.Kurzweil predicted:
Researchers from the University of Southern California School of Engineering have developed a 256-bits “Data IntensiVe Architecture (DIVA)” memory that puts a processor on the DRAM chip, allowing for significantly faster memory performance and eliminating the gap between CPU and memory performance.
On July 21, Edge held a meeting, REBOOTING CIVILIZATION II, concerned with information processing and computation as central metaphors.
It included leading scientists commenting on various “universes”: physicist Seth Lloyd (the computational universe), physicist Paul Steinhardt (the cyclic universe), physicist Alan Guth (the inflationary universe), computer scientist Marvin Minsky (the emotional universe), and technologist Ray Kurzweil (the intelligent universe).
The text and… read more
Programmers working on Go — which is more complex than chess — see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting how the human mind uses pattern recognition. “Writing a strong Go program will teach us more about making computers think like people than writing a strong chess program,” says David Fotland, creator of “The Many Faces of Go” software.
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and UK-based Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have identified a mechanism by which neurons can synthesize a diverse range of proteins from a relatively limited number of genes.
For the Pcdh family of proteins, the diversity is achieved by “alternative promoters and cis-alternative splicing with a low level of trans-splicing,” enabling individual neurons to express distinct combinations of Pcdh genes, and, in turn, proteins.
Web-based avatars are being developed in the U.K. as a simplified interface to computer systems that inform citizens about services.
Game theorists need to consider emotions and their consequences, not just rational behavior, according to game theorist Martin Shubik, speaking at the International Conference on Game Theory.
Nobel prize winner John Nash spoke on “Further work on computational study of models in cooperation in games. Study of standard three-person games in terms of agencies.”
Researchers at University of Texas at Austin are able to extract an exact number of atoms from a Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) — clouds of atoms that behave as though they were a single super-atom — using a quantum dot. Manipulating BECs is important in developing quantum computers.
SIGGRAPH’s Emerging Technologies Exhibition features advances in seamless human-machine integration, robots, machines that enhance the five senses, and explorations of virtual reality.
ETC Group (“dedicated to the conservation and sustainable advancement of cultural and ecological diversity and human rights”) calls for “an immediate moratorium on commercial production of new nanomaterials [and for launching] a transparent global process for evaluating the socio-economic, health and environmental implications of the technology.” ETC Group cites an EPA meeting where it was claimed that “nanoparticles are showing up in the livers of research animals, can seep into… read more
A white paper says nanotechnology will affect a wide range of industries and there are promising investments to be made, but warns about the hype.
University of Alberta researchers have developed a poker-playing computer program that successfully guesses whether an opponent is bluffing, wavering or playing his hands straight.
It records a player’s habits or biases as the game progresses and uses algorithms to mix that information with baseline probabilities, creating the effect of both reason and intuition. The program now defeats 90% of opponents.
The Hyper-Sonic Sound System (HSS) can convert any audio signal to an ultrasonic frequency that can be precisely directed toward a listener up to 100 yards away.
Uses include promotion from stores and vending machines (as in Minority Report), home theater systems, entertainment, and military weapons and psychological operations.
Researchers have used neural network program and fuzzy logic to achieve nearly 90 per cent accuracy in predicting the extent of spread of breast cancer and whether patients would survive for five years. This significantly outperformed conventional statistical analysis techniques.