Google Buys A.I. Firm

Google has purchased DeepMind Technologies, an artificial intelligence company in London, reportedly for $400 million.

A Google representative confirmed the via email, but said the company’s isn’t providing any additional information at this time.

News website Re/code said in a report this past Sunday that Google was paying $400 million for the company, founded by games prodigy and neuroscientist Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.

The company claims on its website that it combines “the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms.” It said its first commercial applications are in simulations, e-commerce and games.

Google announced this month it was paying $3.2 billion in cash to acquire Nest, a maker of smart smoke alarms and thermostats, in what is seen as a bid to expand into the connected home market. It also acquired in January a security firm called Impermium, to boost its expertise in countering spam and abuse.

The Internet giant said on a research site that much of its work on language, speech, translation, and visual processing relies on machine learning and artificial intelligence. “In all of those tasks and many others, we gather large volumes of direct or indirect evidence of relationships of interest, and we apply learning algorithms to generalize from that evidence to new cases of interest,” it said.

In May, Google launched a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, hosted by NASA’s Ames Research Center. The Universities Space Research Association was to invite researchers around the world to share time on the quantum computer from D-Wave Systems, to study how quantum computing can advance machine learning.

Source

Particle Accelerator Put On A Chip

Researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) National Accelerator Laboratory have demonstrated a “particle accelerator on a chip”.

The Stanford University facility believes that the tiny particle accelerator has applications in science and medicine. A series of the miniature accelerators 100 feet long potentially could be more powerful than SLAC’s existing two mile long linear accelerator, despite each little segment being a glass chip smaller than a single grain of rice.

In a statement, experiment leader Joel England of SLAC said, “We still have a number of challenges before this technology becomes practical for real-world use, but eventually it would substantially reduce the size and cost of future high-energy particle colliders for exploring the world of fundamental particles and forces.”

At a practical level the accelerator could power tiny portable X-ray scanners used for treating military casualties in the field, as well as for use in security operations in airports and a wide range of scientific research.

Before we get too excited, it is worth pointing out that at the moment there is no compact way to get electrons up to the speed that the accelerator can work with, so at this stage, we have a two mile long machine with a tiny working part, but this is a major leap forward toward finding an alternative to microwaves in particle accelerators and making the process more portable.

Stanford University professor and principal investigator Robert Byer added, “Our ultimate goal for this structure is [one] billion electron volts per meter, and we’re already one-third of the way in our first experiment.”

We hope that this could also lead to the ability to create wormholes into other galaxies. But we doubt it.

Source

Satellite Phone Encryption Cracked

German researchers claim to have cracked the algorithm that secures satellite phone transmissions.

Benedikt Driessen and Ralf Hund from Ruhr University have reverse engineered the GMR-1 and GMR-2 voice ciphers used in a lot of satellite systems. These are used by, among others, government agencies and the military.

Bjoern Rupp, CEO at GSMK Cryptophone said, “This breakthrough has major implications for the military, civilians engaged on overseas operations, or indeed anyone using satellite phones to make sensitive calls in turbulent areas.”

Their report is titled “Don’t Trust Satellite Phones” and shows how someone with a “suitably programmed computer” and software radio capable of receiving satellite frequencies can hack calls. These include ones made by disaster relief agencies and the military.

Source…

China Denies Hack Attack

China has denied involvement in hacking US environment monitoring satellites.

Last week the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission released a draft report about several incidents where US satellites were interfered with in 2007 and 2008.

The Commission did not say that the attacks were traced back to China, but it did cite China’s military as a prime suspect, due to the similarity of the techniques used with “authoritative Chinese military writings” on disabling satellite control.

The hackers gained access to the satellites on at least four occasions through a ground station in Norway. The unauthorised access lasted for between two and 12 minutes. While the attacks did no real damage, they did demonstrate that it is possible to hijack satellites, which is a worrying realisation when military satellites are taken into consideration.

China has a bad reputation throughout the world for alleged cyber attacks, often being the first to blame when a major attack has been discovered. The US has not been the only target either, with alleged attacks against Canada and France having been reported earlier this year.

“[The US] has always been viewing China with colored lenses. This report is untrue and has ulterior motives. It’s not worth a comment,” said Hong Lei, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, according to Reuters.

Source….

Will Help Desks Become Extinct?

Tom Soderstrom, CTO at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), views everything through the clouds.

NASA’s JPL uses 10 public or private clouds to store everything from photos of Mars for public purview to top-secret data.

Pretty soon, Soderstrom told attendees of Computerworld‘s SNW conference, data stored by large enterprises like NASA will be measured in Exabytes; one Exabyte is equal to 1.5 billion CDs or a million terabytes.

And, he noted, the only place to store Exabytes of data is on public and private clouds.

The good news is that with data in the cloud, people will be able to “work with anyone, from anywhere, with any data, using any device at any time,” he said.

And the not-so-bad news is that IT help desks, as we know them, will become a thing of the past, and IT workers in general will have to rethink how they approach application development and security.

“Now the workforce and consumers of IT are becoming mobile. Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it. If you can’t get the answer there, you ask your kids. If you can’t get your answer there, you ask your friends who are like you. For us, that’s the workgroup,” Soderstrom said.

Source….

Japan Takes 1st Place On Supercomputer List

A Japanese computer has earned the number one spot on the Top 500 supercomputer list, ending China’s short reign of just six months. At 8.16 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), the K computer is more powerful than the next five systems combined.

The K computer’s performance was measured using 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores, almost twice as many as any other system on the Top500 list. The computer is still being put together, and when it enters service in November 2012 will have more than 80,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs according to its manufacturer, Fujitsu.

Japan’s ascension to the top means that the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which took the number 1 position in November last year, is now in second spot with its 2.57 petaflops. But China continues to grow the number of systems it has on the list, up from 42 to 62 systems. The change at the top also means that Jaguar, built for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is bumped down to third place.

Read More….

‘Monster’ Solar Storm Erupts On the Sun (Video)

  Sun makes a major eruption and NASA captures it.