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Google, NASA quantum computing project could bring stronger machine learning to the masses

Jordan Novet — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:51:07 +0000

It’s been almost two decades since Peter Shor came up with a a breakthrough algorithm for finding the prime factors of a number with a quantum computer, sparking great interest in quantum computing. But commercial adoption has been pretty much nonexistent. On Thursday, though, Google came forward with news that it’s launching a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab that will include a quantum computer, apparently making it the second company to pay for a quantum computer. The development suggests that quantum computing could finally be taking off.

Earlier this year Lockheed Martin shared details of its implementation of a D-Wave Systems quantum computer, which reportedly cost $10 million: The contractor is using the computer to develop new aircraft, radar and space systems.

Now Google is taking steps at incorporating more quantum computing into its operations with the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which will be located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Researchers from the Universities Space Research Association will be able to use the machine 20 percent of the time, Forbes reports. That could lead to lots of interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration.

For Google, though, the goal of the initiative is to make strides in machine learning, according to a Thursday Google Research blog post. The best results could trickle down to end users, perhaps in search results and speech-recognition applications.

Quantum computing could mean smarter smartphones

Google has already assembled machine-learning algorithms that involve quantum elements, Hartmut Neven, a Google director of engineering, explained in the post:

One produces very compact, efficient recognizers — very useful when you’re short on power, as on a mobile device. Another can handle highly polluted training data, where a high percentage of the examples are mislabeled, as they often are in the real world.

It’s not hard to imagine how quantum computing could inform machine learning on a smartphone with just a drop of battery life left. It could be that a smarter smartphone one day will take a minuscule amount of input and determine with a high probability who a user wants to talk to or what information it needs right away, rather than forcing the user to cycle through a string of commands and risking the death of the battery altogether.

The applications might have arisen after Google’s earlier partnership with D-Wave, which came to light in a different blog post from Neven in 2009.

Google has already used machine learning to recognize faces and other things in photos and videos. New technology Google executives talked about at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday also appears to use machine learning to stitch together photos and clean them up.

What Google has learned so far is the best results come from blending regular binary computing using ones and zeros with quantum style computing. Quantum computing accommodates the space between a one and a zero with quantum bits of information, or qubits. It can express likelihood as well as take shortcuts by approximating when handling certain kinds of workloads. Given what Google has observed thus far, it could decide to build hardware combining quantum and classical computing capabilities.

For now, though, Google is diving deeper into quantum computing with the D-Wave machine. The move could kick off a sort of arms race for webscale companies to buy quantum computers and come up with new notions by way of probabilistic logic. In this way, Google could help push the development of quantum computing much like its invention of MapReduce changed the way firms do distributed data processing.

In any case, quantum computing has a long way to go before reaching commercial viability. That could take decades (so far it has). But because the organization at the helm of the quantum research is Google and not IBM or Bell Labs, regular people could start seeing much more of the advantages in just a few years’ time, which in turn could drive commercialization.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user pixeldreams.eu.

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Stunning Google Earth photos show our planet changing

Om Malik — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:36:55 +0000

Google, along with the US Geological Survey, NASA and TIME, has shared a quarter-century of photos taken from space that show the surface of the earth and the changes that have happened over that period. From Google’s blogpost:

We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online. Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year.

The changes on our planet are stunning. A glacier has almost vanished, a new city has been created and the Amazon rainforest has been decimated. Our capability as humans to destroy our planet and re-create it is astonishing. The whole project makes you realize that in order to understand something important and profound, you have to look at it over a period of time.

Check it out on Google’s Timelapse website.

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Coming to America: a Swiss solar powered plane

Ucilia Wang — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 09:36:33 +0000

Ten years ago, when Bertrand Piccard started a project in Switzerland to fly an airplane powered only by sunlight, aerospace companies he spoke to thought he was nuts. That was a good thing, he said, because it told him that he had come up with a worthy challenge that could make a big impact on people’s lives.

The project, called Solar Im pulse, went on to set world records and spark imagination for a future when air travel could leave low-carbon footprint. Now that plane, embedded with solar cells from SunPower, will make its first flight in the United States this year. The plan calls for running test flights in April and taking off in northern California — likely from NASA’s Moffett Field — in May.

“We want to inspire people to go beyond the limitations they have set for themselves,” Piccard said during an event to present Solar Impulse at an affiliate of the Swiss Consulate in San Francisco Tuesday night. “We want to show with Solar Impulse the need for clean technologies.”

When the plane preps for its flight east to Washington, D.C. and then New York, it will be an awesome sight to behold. The aircraft’s designs aimed to create ample surface area to accommodate solar cells and to minimize its weight and energy needs. The single-seat plane has long wings: at 63.40 meters (208 feet), about the wingspan of an Airbus A340. Yet at 1,600 kilogram (3,527 pounds), it has the heft of a sedan.

It’s also got the power of a scooter: four engines of 10 horsepower each. The plane also sports four lithium polymer batteries to store solar energy during the day in order to power the plane at night. The 11,628 solar cells blanket both the wing and the horizontal stabilizer.

The batteries made it possible for Solar Impulse to complete a 26-hour flight in 2010. The four batteries collectively could provide 90 kilowatt-hour of energy, and they are well insulated so that they could still function at minus 40-degree Celsius, which is the temperature at the plane’s maximum cruising altitude of 8,500 meters (27,900 feet). Each has the energy density of 240 wh/kg. The four batteries weigh a total of 400 kilograms (881 pounds), or about a quarter of the total weight of the plane.

Instead of flying without stopping to show off the aircraft’s technical prowess, the plane will land at three places between San Francisco and the nation’s capital. The idea is to educate the public about the solar-powered plane and inspire people to support clean tech.

The successful flight of 2010 came after years of engineering and flight simulations to figure out and correct problems. The plane took its maiden flight in 2009. The Solar Impulse’s home is at the research institute called Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, and it materialized at the hands of nearly 80 engineers, technicians and mission controllers. The $130 million project also has relied on many corporate sponsors, including chemical company Solvay, Omega, Deutsche Bank and Schindler, an engineering firm.

Piccard is a founder with a colorful background. A psychiatrist, he co-piloted the first balloon that traveled non-stop around the world. His father, Jacques Piccard, was the first, along with Don Walsh of the U.S. Navy, to explore the deepest part of the ocean, located in the Mariana Trench. His grandfather, Auguste Piccard, set world records for flying balloons to great altitudes.

Piccard and the CEO of Solar Impulse, Andre Borschberg, came to San Francisco to drum up interest not only for their maiden flight across the country but also the around-the-world voyage they plan to take in 2015. Solar Impulse is building a second, larger plane to circumnavigate the world. It has yet to release the technical specs of the new plane, though Borschberg said SunPower will be the cell supplier. The second plane will still use lithium polymer batteries, but they will have an energy density of 261 wh/kg.

While Solar Impulse has demonstrated that solar energy could be a stand-alone fuel, the days of solar-powered commercial flights are far far away. Borschberg, an engineer and an airplane pilot, believes those days are still about four decades away.

Some interesting tidbits:

*Because of its light weight, the aircraft avoids turbulence by using weather data to calculate the best flight path. It usually takes off early in the morning and land at night.

*The average flying speed of the first plane is 70 kilometers per hour (43 miles per hour). It takes off at 44 kilometers per hour (27 miles per hour).

*The payload, or carrying capacity, of the first plane is 200 kilograms (440 pounds), which account for the pilot and cargo.

*The cockpit of the second plane will be larger so that the pilot could sleep throughout the journey, which will last nearly a month long.

*Negotiating for permissions to fly in and out of countries around the world is a lot of work. It took two years for China to say yes.

*The second plane will have a pressurized cockpit and on-board production of oxygen.

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Nebula promotes NASA vet to oversee OpenStack effort

Barb Darrow — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 14:05:10 +0000

Companies pushing OpenStack love to boast that they have former NASA technologists on staff. After all, NASA, along with Rackspace, incubated the open-source cloud stack. In that vein, Nebula, which is led by former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, is naming Jesse Andrews as VP of product management. In that capacity Andrews will oversee the entire Nebula project as the company prepares it for launch.

Andrews has a great OpenStack pedigree. He was also formerly CEO of ANSO Labs, the NASA spinoff, where he worked with Kemp and the rest of the team behind the Nova compute engine underlying OpenStack.

ANSO was acquired by Rackspace in February, 2011 and Andrews worked on that company’s Cloud Builder program while continuing to contribute to OpenStack. In fact, Andrews is not totally new to Nebula: He was one of the half dozen or so former ANSO people at Rackspace who decamped to Nebula last July.

Two months ago, Nebula netted $25 million in funding from Comcast Ventures and two months ago to fuel its push toward launch. Other OpenStack cloud offerings from Rackspace itself, from HP, Internap, and others are already available. Nebula’s Kemp has characterized Nebula’s take is to provide an easy-to-deploy but fully enterprise-class cloud.

Last September, Kemp said Nebula will offer sort of a cloud appliance that companies can plug their services into to get up and running fast. Other OpenStack clouds — from Red Hat or Canonical — for example, will be more suited to hard-core techies who want to customize their clouds, he said.

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Science Hack Day: Bridging the gap between coders and chemists

Eliza Kern — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 23:40:30 +0000

At SXSW in 2010, Ariel Waldman was on a panel talking about making science more open to average citizens and hackers, but soon the discussion changed course.

“The discussion was that, there actually is a lot of science that’s actually open, but we’re frusterated that no one’s doing anything interesting with it.”

From 2011 Hack Day: A group created a mask to simulate synesthesia, a condition where the senses are mixed up, in an effort to allow the face to feel vibrations associated with sight detected on a webcam.

From that discussion, the idea of a Science Hack Day was born, with the first event taking place in London in June 2010 and Waldman, currently a freelance designer and researcher at the Institute for the Future, bringing a second one to San Francisco shortly after.

The idea quickly became about more than doing cool things with science data, and turned into an exploration of a broader question: Could a hack day bring together scientists, technologists, and designers — three groups that have traditionally been a bit wary of each other — and get them to learn from each other and collaborate?

“We have the tech and science industries right here and they’re enamored with each other, but they feel like completely separate industries,” Waldman said. “People who work at NASA, when they get to visit Google, they think it’s so cool, and vice versa. You have this infatuation from afar but no interactions.”

From 2011 Hack Day: A group of biohackers decided to investigate whether they could chemically extract DNA and keep the items edible, creating a strawberry daiquiri or “DNAquiri,” that remained totally edible.

Waldman said she attributes the totally different perspectives on collaboration as indicative of the industries: for most coders, side projects and weekend hacks are seen as natural extensions of a person’s professional and personal development, and the industry seems to recognize that those side projects can roll back into a company and find success. Whereas scientists can be a little warier of these kinds of diversions, she said.

“I think most scientists tend to be a little more unsure of the concept until they attend,” she said.

But the goal of bringing non-scientists in to embrace science is one Waldman is well-positioned to spearhead: while she’s a designer and researcher by trade, she nabbed a job at NASA in 2008 at the company’s CoLab, which was engineered to connect groups inside and outside of NASA and get them to interact.

From 2011 Hack Day: This group decided to see if they could use smartphone sensors to detect earthquakes, giving areas the ability to detect and send data to the U.S. Geological Survey. Their project was picked up by UC Berkeley and is ongoing.

“When I got this job at NASA a few years ago, I had never expected to do anything space or science-related, and it totally changed my perception of it,” she said. “I realized I want people to feel like they can play with science even if they know nothing about it.”

Science Hack Day San Francisco will hold its third edition this weekend, Nov 3 and 4, at Howard and 2nd. St. The event is completely full, with a waitlist of more than 100 people (although you can still add your name to it), but Waldman said they will soon be announcing next year’s Hack Day, with some pretty cool updates. Interested in attending next year? Check out the group’s Twitter accounts for upcoming details.

All thumbnail and post images of 2011 Science Hack Day courtesy Flickr user Matt Biddulph.

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NASA ponders $1.5M drone challenge

Barb Darrow — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 07:38:37 +0000

NASA wants unmanned aircraft that can maneuver in busy airspace and may launch a $1.5 million competition to help bring such drones to life.

Drones — already used by the Pentagon in Afghanistan – could have many other military and civilian uses if they are able to fly and maneuver in congested air corridors. That’s the problem the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Airspace Operations Challenge (UAS AOC, for short) would address.

If this effort – part of NASA’s Centennial Challenge series - proceeds, NASA would request designs that use “sense-and-avoid” techniques to fly safely. Current drones are typically operated at least in part by remote “pilots” on the ground. Here’s NASA’s official Request for Information (RFI). And, NetworkWorld has more on the proposed competition here.

The challenge would help NASA and its partners – the FAA and US Air Force Research Lab – assess the level of interest among manufacturers, get feedback, and identify possible partners in the effort.

There’s already considerable research and commercial effort around drones:

An unmanned vehicle designed at MIT’s Robust Robotics lab that uses on-board sensors to avoid collisions in constricted areas — including an MIT garage — might be something NASA would look at.
Rotary Robotics, a Mass Challenge participant, is working on “drones for peace” — small unmanned vehicles that reporters could use to research stories or farmers to get a bird’s-eye view of their land.

The use of drones in military and law enforcement contexts is controversial:

For example, some Oakland residents are outraged at plans by the Alameda County Sheriff’s office to deploy drones for “unspecified law enforcement purposes.”
And the Obama administration has taken heat over the use of drones both by the military and intelligence agencies.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Jordan Tan

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NASA tries to free creativity with Big Data Challenge

Derrick Harris — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 19:51:44 +0000

Some of the U.S. government’s most research-intensive agencies want your help to come up with better ways to analyze their expansive data sets. NASA, along with the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, launched a competition on TopCoder called the Big Data Challenge series. Essentially, it’s a competition to crowdsource a solution to the very big problem of fragmented and incompatible federal data.

The first contest in the series involves answering a question, albeit a difficult one. From the contest page:

“How can we make heterogeneous (dissimilar and incompatible) data sets homogeneous (uniformly accessible, compatible, able to be grouped and/or matched) so usable information can be extracted? How can information then be converted into real knowledge that can inform critical decisions and solve societal challenges?”

This a problem that’s magnified in government agencies, but that plagues companies of all types that try to get started with big data. While future big data strategies might mandate a particular data format or other standards, the past and, often, the present is a messy pile of stuff created by different divisions within different agencies or departments. The dream of creating spectacular algorithms, beautiful visualizations and uncovering hidden insights often only comes after untold man-hours spent cleaning and munging data (often with Hadoop) into formats that software systems can work with.

The registration deadline for the first contest is Oct. 13, and the submission deadline is Oct. 19. The 1st place prize is $1,000. Later contests will focus on more domain-specific fields such as energy, health care and earth science.

Although the possibility of influencing big data strategies within some of the country’s most advanced agencies might be novel, crowdsourcing solutions to these types of difficult problems is becoming rather common. TopCoder exists as a competitive platform for solving application development and design issues, and the Big Data Challenge is just the latest it’s hosting for NASA via the agency’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation and NASA Tournament Lab. There’s also general-purpose platform InnoCentive and wildly popular data science platform Kaggle.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Prokhorova Nadila.

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Hubble goes deep for amazing new space images

Barb Darrow — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:06:52 +0000

What’s being called the deepest look yet into the universe is now available for your perusal, thanks to the folks running the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The “eXtreme Deep Field,” or XDF image, was built using 10 years of Hubble observations taken on one patch of sky. The area under study was the Hubble Ultra Deep Field — a part of the Fornax (or Furnace) constellation. The data dates from 2003 and 2004. The image itself shows thousands of galaxies — some relatively close and some very distant to the earth.

photo /hubblesite.org

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NASA scrubbed Mars Rover code clean — over and over

Barb Darrow — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 01:54:34 +0000

More than 2 million lines of software code drove NASA’s successful Rover Curiosity landing on Mars. And, for the last two years, every single line was analyzed and scrubbed by static analysis products from Coverity, Grammatech, Semmle, and Uno.

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used all of the aforementioned products plus a GCC compiler and a homegrown tool to comb through the software, looking for errors or possible errors.

One of the tricky things about checking all that code — most written in C — is that sometimes it’s hard to know what to look for. “If you put software through three code reviews you’ll find stuff, and then if you put it through a fourth review, you’ll find something else. All these products all have their own strengths,’ said Gerard Holzmann, chief scientist for the JPL Lab for Reliable Software.

Ben Cichy, chief software engineer at JPL, said these programs check for things like array overloads, which can corrupt system memory and lead to all sorts of hard-to-foresee results.

The fact that space agency used a full suite of analysis tools illustrates just how important the $2.5 billion Mars project was to the agency. NASA tends to use a redundant “belt and braces approach” said Chris Adlard, Coverity’s senior manager, worldwide customer advocacy. Apparently, given the mission’s success, all that work did the trick.

Feature image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Red Hat posts OpenStack preview

Barb Darrow — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 15:03:57 +0000

If you’ve been waiting for Red Hat’s OpenStack cloud release, you can now download a preview here.

It’s safe to say many folks have been waiting for the enterprise Linux leader to get its OpenStack bits out there — after all OpenStack has been characterized as “The Linux of Cloud.” Red Hat joined the OpenStack faithful last April, a little late, although it had already contributed significant code before then.

OpenStack leader Rackspace just transitioned to its OpenStack-based public cloud platform and Hewlett-Packard has customers running on its pre-release OpenStack-based cloud as well. Internap has been online since last year with AT&T and other companies also hosting OpenStack-based technology, which flowed out of initial work by Rackspace and NASA.

All of these players hope to compete not only with Amazon, the leader in public cloud infrastructure, but with each other for business workloads.

Earlier this year, Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of worldwide products, would not talk much about Red Hat’s OpenStack plans but said it was safe to say its implementation would parlay the company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux and KVM-based virtualization franchises.

The fully supported release is due in 2013.

With Red Hat’s platform now available for tire kickers, IBM which joined the OpenStack Foundation as a Platinum member at the same time as Red Hat, has yet to outline its specific OpenStack plans.

Feature photo courtesy Flickr user Dennis Vu Photography for Unleashed Media

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