Advances in Computers thread

[ScienceRocks]

The production of 10 nm chips are expected to commence by 2016

Samsung’s plans for domination are looking highly ambitious. After refusing to incorporate Snapdragon 810 in its flagship duo and choosing to produce its own custom core, not to mention that the next SoC present in Galaxy Note 5 is reported to be Exynos 7422, 10 nm node production is the next objective that Samsung intends on completing. The production of 10 nm chips are expected to commence by 2016 and while the company might be leading from the front with its superior 14 nm FinFET process, TSMC has set its eyes to overtake Samsung in the 10 nm production race.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Stereolabs' ZED camera delivers long range 3D vision
By Francis X Govers III
May 28, 2015
4 Pictures

San Francisco-based Stereolabs has launched a new 3D camera that promises to deliver high quality 3D image capture at a less than astronomical price. The compact, lightweight ZED 3D vision sensor can measure distances out to 20 meters (65 feet) and work indoors and out, making it a strong candidate for applications such as large-scale architectural scanning and obstacle detection for self-driving cars and unmanned drones.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Is This the First Computational Imagination? | The ability to read a description of a scene and then picture it has always been uniquely human. Not anymore.

Imagine an oak tree in a field of wheat, silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky on a dreamy sunny afternoon. The chances are that most people reading this sentence can easily picture a bucolic scene in their mind’s eye. This ability to read a description of a scene and then imagine it has always been uniquely human. But this precious skill may no longer be ours alone.

Anyone thinking that these kinds of imaginings are far beyond the ability of today’s computing machines will be surprised by the work of Hiroharu Kato and Tatsuya Harada at the University of Tokyo in Japan.

Today, these guys unveil a machine that can translate a description of an object into an image. In other words, their computer can conjure an image of an external object not otherwise present. That’s a pretty good definition of imagination—in this case of the computational variety.

For sure, these computer imaginings are simple, sometimes confusing and often nonsensical. But the fact they are possible at all represents a significant step forward for computational creativity.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Project Jacquard hands-on: Google's crazy/brilliant idea to make touchscreen clothing
By Will Shanklin
May 30, 2015
10 Pictures

This year's Google I/O gave us Android M and updated Google Cardboard, along with free and unlimited photo storage. But it wouldn't be Google if there weren't also some moonshots in there. We go hands-on with one of them, Project Jacquard.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Asus' ZenWatch 2 will be available in two sizes
By Chris Wood
June 1, 2015
6 Pictures

It may have only been a little over six months since we reviewed the original ZenWatch, but Asus is already back with a second generation of its wearable. The ZenWatch 2 has a similar design to its predecessor, but offers significant customization over two different case sizes.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Asus's new AiO and Transformer Book pack USB-C ports
By Chris Wood

Asus has outed a bevy of new hardware at Computex 2015, including a brand new all-in-one and an updated Transformer Book hybrid. The Zen AiO offers an attractive design and compelling specs, and both systems offer USB Type-C connectivity.

 

[ScienceRocks]

HGST's helium-filled HDD offers a world-first 10 TB of storage
By Nick Lavars
June 9, 2015
3 Pictures

We first caught wind of HGST's high capacity hard drives in 2012, when the company claimed it could boost storage capacities by 40 percent by replacing regular old air inside the drive enclosure with helium. The Western Digital subsidiary stayed the course, producing a helium-based 6 TB HDD in 2013 and 8 TB model in 2014, and has now continued the upward trend with the world's first 10 TB hard drive.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Engineers create a computer with a water droplet processor
By Colin Jeffrey
June 9, 2015
6 Pictures

From driving water wheels to turning turbines, water has been used as the prime mover of machinery and the powerhouse of industry for many centuries. In ancient times, the forces of flowing water were even harnessed to power the first rudimentary clocks. Now, engineers at Stanford University have created the world’s first water-operated computer. Using magnetized particles flowing through a micro-miniature network of channels, the machine runs like clockwork and is claimed to be capable of performing complex logical operations.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Microsoft Surface Hub launches in September, starting at $6,999
By Chris Wood
June 10, 2015
3 Pictures

Microsoft has released pricing and availability information for its enterprise focused Surface Hub, announced back in January of this year. The hardware is pitched as an all-in-one solution for collaboration in meetings, consisting of a large display, active stylus, and a host of sensors and connectivity options.

Read More

 

[ScienceRocks]

Interactive "holographic" tabletop platform Holus heads to Kickstarter
By Richard Moss
June 10, 2015
10 Pictures

In the future we'll all be sitting around a box in the middle of the room, rather than a TV in the corner. Canadian startup H+ Technology thinks so, anyway. H+ has created a see-through tabletop box called Holus that presents a tiny three-dimensional digital world you can interact with

 

[ScienceRocks]

June oven knows how to cook your dinner and helps with the shopping
By Stu Robarts
June 10, 2015
4 Pictures

If you can't cook toast without burning it then pay attention: help may soon be at hand. The June Intelligent Oven is a computer-based countertop oven that's aimed at letting anyone produce restaurant-quality meals. It can recognize food, cook to preference and help plan the shopping.

 

[ScienceRocks]

NRAM’s Time Is Here, Says Startup Nantero

one of 10 top startups to watch in 2013. Schmergel said progress working with systems and device companies prompted Nantero to come out of stealth mode. He said NRAM is ready for commercialization and high-volume production, and that the company is sampling 4Mb high-yield memory chips, with the NRAM process installed in in seven production CMOS fabs.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Samsung targets retailers with Mirror and Transparent OLED panels
By Darren Quick
June 12, 2015
2 Pictures

Transparent and reflective displays might look cool, but in terms of the home, their applications are limited. However, bricks and mortar shops looking for some technological wizardry to get shoppers through the door are a different proposition. So it should come as no surprise that Samsung chose this week's Retail Asia Expo 2015 in Hong Kong to unveil the first commercial use of its Mirror and Transparent OLEDs.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Deep Learning Machine Beats Humans in IQ Test
Computers have never been good at answering the type of verbal reasoning questions found in IQ tests. Now a deep learning machine unveiled in China is changing that.

Just over 100 years ago, the German psychologist William Stern introduced the intelligence quotient test as a way of evaluating human intelligence. Since then, IQ tests have become a standard feature of modern life and are used to determine children’s suitability for schools and adults’ ability to perform jobs.

These tests usually contain three categories of questions: logic questions such as patterns in sequences of images, mathematical questions such as finding patterns in sequences of numbers and verbal reasoning questions, which are based around analogies, classifications, as well as synonyms and antonyms.

It is this last category that has interested Huazheng Wang and pals at the University of Science and Technology of China and Bin Gao and buddies at Microsoft Research in Beijing. Computers have never been good at these. Pose a verbal reasoning question to a natural language processing machine and its performance will be poor, much worse than the average human ability.

Today, that changes thanks to Huazheng and pals who have built a deep learning machine that outperforms the average human ability to answer verbal reasoning questions for the first time.

 

[Judicial review]

Deep Learning Machine Beats Humans in IQ Test
Computers have never been good at answering the type of verbal reasoning questions found in IQ tests. Now a deep learning machine unveiled in China is changing that.

Just over 100 years ago, the German psychologist William Stern introduced the intelligence quotient test as a way of evaluating human intelligence. Since then, IQ tests have become a standard feature of modern life and are used to determine children’s suitability for schools and adults’ ability to perform jobs.

These tests usually contain three categories of questions: logic questions such as patterns in sequences of images, mathematical questions such as finding patterns in sequences of numbers and verbal reasoning questions, which are based around analogies, classifications, as well as synonyms and antonyms.

It is this last category that has interested Huazheng Wang and pals at the University of Science and Technology of China and Bin Gao and buddies at Microsoft Research in Beijing. Computers have never been good at these. Pose a verbal reasoning question to a natural language processing machine and its performance will be poor, much worse than the average human ability.

Today, that changes thanks to Huazheng and pals who have built a deep learning machine that outperforms the average human ability to answer verbal reasoning questions for the first time.

It hasn't challenged me yet. Still it trial stage...

 

[ScienceRocks]

Researchers develop the first flexible phase-change random access memory

Phase change random access memory (PRAM) is one of the strongest candidates for next-generation nonvolatile memory for flexible and wearable electronics. In order to be used as a core memory for flexible devices, the most important issue is reducing high operating current. The effective solution is to decrease cell size in sub-micron region as in commercialized conventional PRAM. However, the scaling to nano-dimension on flexible substrates is extremely difficult due to soft nature and photolithographic limits on plastics, thus practical flexible PRAM has not been realized yet.

Recently, a team led by Professors Keon Jae Lee and Yeon Sik Jung of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST has developed the first flexible PRAM enabled by self-assembled block copolymer (BCP) silica nanostructures with an ultralow current operation (below one quarter of conventional PRAM without BCP) on plastic substrates. BCP is the mixture of two different polymer materials, which can easily create self-ordered arrays of sub-20 nm features through simple spin-coating and plasma treatments. BCP silica nanostructures successfully lowered the contact area by localizing the volume change of phase-change materials and thus resulted in significant power reduction. Furthermore, the ultrathin silicon-based diodes were integrated with phase-change memories (PCM) to suppress the inter-cell interference, which demonstrated random access capability for flexible and wearable electronics.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Estimates put Apple Watch sales at 2.8M in US, 17% bought extra band

We've heard several comments from Apple recently, including Tim Cook himself, about how the company is more than "thrilled" with how well the Apple Watch has been selling, however we've yet to get any official numbers from Cupertino. Slice Intelligence, a research firm specializing in digital commerce, on the other hand, have said they estimate that 2.79 million units of the wearable have been sold in the U.S. in its first two months of availability.

Slice's previous estimate reports put close to 1.5 million U.S. orders placed on April 10th, the day pre-orders began, and 2.5 million orders through late May. Also interesting is that Slice believes 17% of buyers also picked up an extra band for the Watch, with the black Sport Band being the most popular option, followed by the more up-scale Milanese Loop.

 

[ScienceRocks]

World’s thinnest light source made from graphene
Can be integrated into chips, paving the way to atomically thin, flexible, and transparent displays and graphene-based on-chip optical communications
June 17, 2015

Illustration of light emission from electrically biased suspended graphene (credit: Young Duck Kim/Columbia Engineering)

The first on-chip visible light source using graphene as a filament has been developed by a team of scientists from Columbia Engineering, Seoul National University (SNU), and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS).

The scientists attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above the silicon substrate, and passed a current through the filaments to cause them to heat up. The study was published in the Advance Online Publication (AOP) on the Nature Nanotechnology website.

“We’ve created what is essentially the world’s thinnest light bulb,” says James Hone, Wang Fon-Jen Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia Engineering and coauthor of the study. “This new type of ‘broadband’ [works at near-infrared-to-visible-range wavelengths] light emitter can be integrated into chips and will pave the way towards the realization of atomically thin, flexible, and transparent displays, and graphene-based on-chip optical communications.”

Creating light in small structures on the surface of a chip is crucial for developing fully integrated “photonic” circuits that do with light what is now done with electric currents in semiconductor integrated circuits. Researchers have developed many approaches to do this, but have not yet been able to put the oldest and simplest artificial light source — the incandescent light bulb — onto a chip.

World s thinnest light source made from graphene KurzweilAI

 

[ScienceRocks]

BBC develops 'mind-control TV' headset for iPlayer app
http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-33163593

• 18 June 2015
• From the section Technology

In tests, some people found using the control easier than others

If you think controlling your TV with your mind is the stuff of science fiction, think again.

The BBC, in collaboration with tech company This Place, has developed a way people can select programmes using a cheap, brainwave-reading headset.

The headset works with an experimental version of the BBC's iPlayer on-demand platform.

Users can turn on and operate the app by concentrating or relaxing their minds.

"It's an internal prototype designed to give our programme makers, technologists and other users an idea of how this technology might be used in future," said Cyrus Saihan, head of business development for the BBC's Digital division.


In the first trial, 10 BBC staff tried out the app and were able to launch iPlayer and start viewing a programme via the headset, he said.

 

[ScienceRocks]

5G network speeds officially defined as up to 20 gigabits/second by ITU, demo in 2018 at Olympics

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has agreed on the definition of fifth-generation (5G) networks, a key technological requirement and its schedule to commercialize the technology by 2020.
The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning said Thursday it sent a 12-member delegation to an ITU meeting in San Diego, and succeeded in reflecting the nation’s suggestions on the international agreement.
“The vision for the 5G network and its global standardization schedule has been agreed based on our suggestion. This has shown that Korea is leading the world’s mobile communication technology and related policies,” a ministry official said. “We will beef up international cooperation to have the agreement approved without any problems.
The ministry said the union has decided to define 5G as a network which is capable of transmitting data at up to 20 gigabits-per-second. This means that users can download one ultra high-definition movie in 10 seconds.