US research on artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing would see dramatic boosts in funding for 2021, under a proposed budget released by the White House on 10 February. Thebudget requestissued by President Donald Trump makes cuts across most science agencies for the 2021 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October 2020. Although Congress has repeatedly rebuffed such requests for cutsand has, in fact, increased science spending in the enacted budgetsthe 132-page document from the White House offers a view into the administrations priorities and ambitions leading up to the November election.

Among US agencies that fund and conduct research, NASA would see big gains. The National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Energy (DOE), among others, are slated for budget reductions.

Trump is being Trump, says Michael Lubell, a physicist at the City College of New York who tracks federal science-policy issues. All of Trumps budgets have sought to slash funding for the US research enterprise, but he has yet to convince lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Lubell says. He can ask for what he wants, but it doesnt mean its going to happen.

Under the presidents request, NASA would get US$25.2 billion for fiscal year 2021, a jump of nearly 12% over funding enacted by Congress for the current year. The money is meant to jump-start the administrations plans to send astronauts to the Moon by the end of 2024. The request includes $3.4 billion to develop lunar landers that could carry humans. Last year, lawmakers granted $600 million towards developing such landersless than half of what the White House asked for.

Under the banner of a Moon-to-Mars strategy, the presidents request also includes $529 million for robotic exploration of Mars. That would include bringing back a set of rock samples that will be collected by a rover slated to launch in July, and developing an ice-mapping mission to gather information for future landing sites.

NASAs Science Mission Directorate, which funds external research projects and partners, would receive $6.3 billion, which is the same amount proposed by the White House last year but would be a nearly 12% decrease from what Congress allocated. As in previous years, the presidents request aims to cancel NASAs next flagship space telescope, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, as well as the planned Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) and Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) Pathfinder Earth-science missions. Also on the proposed chopping block is the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a telescope that flies aboard a jumbo jet. Congress has rejected those requested cuts in past years.

The presidents budget proposes $38.7 billion for the NIH, about a 7% cut on the current level of $41.7 billion. The proposal is consistent with past White House budget requests; last year, the administration requested a $5-billion cut. As in the past 2 years, the budget proposes creating a new $335-million NIH institute, the National Institute for Research on Safety and Quality, to replace the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality at the Department of Health and Human Services. Also, as part of the administrations broader push to use and develop AI across sectors, the White House allocates $50 million of its proposed NIH budget for the study of chronic diseases using AI.

The White House proposal seeks a total of $7.7 billion for the NSF for fiscal year 2021, a decrease of more than $500 million from the enacted 2020 budget. This includes a 6% decrease in funding for research and development.

The presidents request includes reductions to six of the NSFs seven research directorates, including cuts of more than $100 million each for biological sciences and engineering. Computer and information science and engineering would be the only major research area to see an increase in its funding, consistent with the administrations plans to prioritize AI and quantum computing. These two areas will receive a combined $1 billion of the NSF budget under the presidents proposal. The NSF budget also includes $50 million for workforce development, with a focus on community colleges, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other minority-serving institutions. But the budget calls for deep cuts to other diversity-focused initiatives, such as the HBCU Excellence in Research programme

Proposed cuts of more than 10% would slash the budgets for geoscience research, the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Office of Polar Programs, which maintains the US research presence in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Tim Clancy, the president of Arch Street, a consulting company in Alexandria, Virginia, with a focus on federal science policy, says that although Congress has typically rejected Trumps proposed cuts to science funding, strict budget caps this year might mean that legislators will have to make difficult decisions about cutting programmes in order to free up money for the presidents AI and quantum initiatives.

The budget would provide $5.8 billion for the DOEs Office of Science, a drop of nearly 17% from 2020 levels. The office would see sharp decreases across its portfolio, which spans biological and environmental research, fusion and high-energy physics. Only the advanced scientific computing programme, with roughly level funding of $988 million, would escape the cuts.

The White House once again proposed slashing funding for clean-energy research. The popular Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E)which received a record $425 million last yearwould be eliminated, and the office of energy efficiency and renewable energy would see its budget slashed by roughly 74%. Funding for fossil-fuel research and development would drop by less than 3%, to $731 million.

The proposal faces long odds on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have balked at such cuts. Last year, for instance, the administration sought to cut the Office of Sciences budget by nearly 16%; Congress responded by nudging the total up 6%, to a record $7 billion.

The White House is once again seeking to drastically cut funding for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which would see its budget drop by roughly 26%, to $6.7 billion. The budget would provide just $478 million for science and technology, a decrease of 33%. But Congress has repeatedly rejected the administrations attempts to cut funding for the EPA, whose budget has increased since Trump entered the White House.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would receive more than $4.6 billion, a drop of 14%. The core science budget in the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would fall by more than 40% to $327 million, although Congress rejected a similar cut last year. The administration has once again proposed eliminating the National Sea Grant College Program, which promotes research into the conservation and sustainable development of marine resources, and which Congress has thus far maintained. The budget would provide $188 million for sea-floor mapping and exploration efforts along the US coasts.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on February 10 2020.

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NASA Soars and Others Plummet in Trump's Budget Proposal - Scientific American

wbur "Electrons will collide with protons or larger atomic nuclei at the Electron-Ion Collider to produce dynamic 3-D snapshots of the building blocks of all visible matter," according to the U.S. Department of Energy. (Courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory/DOE)

The United States will soon have its first new particle collider in decades.

Earlier this year, the Department of Energy announced that Brookhaven National Laboratory in Uptown, New York, will be home to the Electron-Ion Collider [EIC], which will investigate whats inside two subatomic particles: protons and neutrons.

Brookhavens website describes this instrument as a machine that will unlock the secrets of the strongest force in nature. Its essentially an electron microscope that shoots electrons at protons and neutrons in order to measure them, says Paul Dabbar, undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy.

You need to accelerate it to very high levels of energy in order to basically shoot it, to do the mapping a little bit like an MRI or a CT scan for the inner workings of matter, he explains.

The electron beam is accelerated very fast in a circle, Dabbar says.

We will generate an electron beam and accelerate it to very, very close to the speed of light, he says. We basically circle around them imparting energy into the electron beam until it reaches the level that we want it so that we can image the protons and neutrons.

Scientists cant accelerate it exactly to the speed of light because as any piece of matter approaches that speed, its mass changes, Dabbar says.

That mass change makes it increasingly hard to get faster and faster, he says. And as you reach the speed of light, you reach an infinite amount of energy needed to get to that last step, and therefore, we cannot do that.

On the practical applications of this research

Well, the basic science research that this country has done and we have led particle physics since World War II, since the Manhattan Project, and a lot of the technologies that we use today have come out of the basic research that came out of the national labs, including in physics. These accelerators can be used for many different things. The first one is medical isotopes that are used for cancer treatment. So I think as many people know, you look at nuclear medicine and nuclear imaging, which is a core part of the medical community right now for treating diseases, that these accelerators can produce those isotopes on the nuclear medicine side that are really critical. And many times you have to produce some very locally. You have to have accelerators around the country to make these isotopes because they decay relatively quickly, some of them. And so for us to move forward, that certainly helps the medical area.

Another one, which is, I think, very interesting here in the near term, is around quantum information technologies. Utilizing quantum, which is inputting data into atoms rather than transistors, is basically a particle physics problem. And so the same equipment that we're looking at, technology that we're developing here and we've developed in the past for kind of older versions of accelerators, is the exact same particle technology that will be used for the upcoming quantum computing and the quantum internet.

Another area is around detectors. The MRI machine came out of the DOE national nuclear physics work. And so we certainly expect that we will have improvements in MRI and CT machines from detectors just like when we helped invent them.

On why this collider wont be up and running until 2030

So first of all, one of the advantages of this particular site and building it here is that we're actually using some existing collider infrastructure. There is a collider at Brookhaven National Lab right now called Rick, which is a relativistic hadron collider. So there's already a loop there that it was accelerating other types of ions. There was an accelerator infrastructure [already] there. And so we're going to finish that mission in terms of imaging for nuclear physics in 2024. Between now and then, we're actually going to be starting both the engineering design in more detail as well as design around components like the accelerators. And then in 2024, when we take down the Rick Collider at Brookhaven National Lab, then we'll start actually installing. And so from then it will take about six years to both do the construction and then do the commissioning and startup.

On why this is the first particle accelerator built in the U.S. in decades

There's a bit of a history around these accelerators. They cost a lot of money. There was one that was looked at a couple of decades ago called the Superconducting Super Collider, which ran into some ... challenges. The U.S. decided to invest in CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research] and the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva for that particular piece of science. We've been focusing on other areas. So one of them has been a neutrino piece of infrastructure at Fermilab outside of Chicago.

We've been investing in Europe for some colliders over the last, you know, the near term. And by the way, we continue that is for that particular type of collider. We're increasing our investment by the United States into the European collider at CERN. But we decided to take a look at building this particular collider in the U.S. I think a key thing for your listeners to kind of understand is that the budgets for the Office of Science and science in general at the federal level, including NASA and the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, are at all-time highs, and we're very excited about the support that, very bipartisan support from both Congress and ultimately president signing the budgets for all-time highs. So we're very excited about that.

Chris Bentley produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Kathleen McKenna. Samantha Raphelson adapted it for the web.

This segment aired on February 12, 2020.

Jeremy Hobson Co-Host, Here & Now Before coming to WBUR to co-host Here & Now, Jeremy Hobson hosted the Marketplace Morning Report, a daily business news program with an audience of more than six million.

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New Particle Accelerator In New York To Probe Protons And Neutrons - Here And Now

The technologies are expected to become an important part of national security, and some worry the United States is behind China in their development.

SAN FRANCISCO White House officials on Monday unveiled plans to increase federal funding for the development of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, two cutting-edge technologies that defense officials say will play a key role in national security.

The funding, part of the Trump administrations $4.8 trillion budget proposal, would direct more money for A.I. research to the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation. The administration also wants to spend $25 million on what it calls a national quantum internet, a network of machines designed to make it much harder to intercept digital communication.

For several years, technologists have urged the Trump administration to back research on artificial intelligence which could affect things as diverse as weapons and transportation and quantum computing, a new way to build super-powerful computers. Chinas government, in particular, has made building these machines a priority, and some national security experts worry that the United States is at risk of falling behind.

The proposed spending follows earlier administration moves. In 2018, President Trump signed a law that earmarked $1.2 billion for quantum research. The Energy Department recently began distributing its portion of that money about $625 million to research labs in industry, academia and government.

The dollars we have put into quantum information science have increased by about fivefold over the last three years, said Paul Dabbar, under secretary for science at the Energy Department, in an interview.

Last year, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that made A.I. research and development a national priority.

The new budget proposal would increase funding for artificial intelligence research at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research arm of the Defense Department, to $249 million from $50 million, and at the National Science Foundation to $850 million from about $500 million. The administration also vowed to double funding for A.I. and quantum computing research outside the Defense Department by 2022.

Big tech companies have invested heavily in A.I. research over the last decade. But many experts have worried that universities and government labs have lost much of their talent to businesses. Under the new funding plan, the National Science Foundation would apply $50 million to help train A.I. experts.

The worlds biggest technology companies, from Google in the United States to Alibaba in China, are also racing to build a quantum computer, a new kind of machine that could be used to break the encryption that protects digital information. Researchers are using the same scientific principles to create new technology that could withstand such an attack.

In 2017, after four years of planning and construction, China unveiled a dedicated quantum communication network between Beijing and Shanghai. Two Chinese provinces invested $80 million in the project. It has also tested quantum encryption techniques via satellite.

With the $25 million, the Energy Department would build a network connecting its 17 national research labs, which include Los Alamos in New Mexico and Argonne outside Chicago. Using this test network, researchers would explore quantum encryption technologies with an eye toward creating a secure network across the country.

This is a test bed for new technologies, said David Awschalom, a professor at the University of Chicago who oversees much of the universitys quantum research and would play a role in the effort at the national labs. We are using the power of the national labs to fuel the country.

Excerpt from:

White House Earmarks New Money for A.I. and Quantum Computing - The New York Times

Buried within the 13,000-odd words of the Union Budget speech on Saturday was a paragraph that set aside 8,000 crore over five years for the National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications. Most commentators seem to have either missed or overlooked this budgetary allocation, but in terms of significance, the implications are well worth considering.

More than two years ago, the department of science and technology launched the Quantum-Enabled Science and Technology (QuEST) programme with an aim to develop technical capacity within the country to build quantum computers and communications systems comparable with the best in the world. The first phase of the project was to build the infrastructure and acquire human resources to develop physical and computation structures for improving precision in quantum measurement. The eventual goal is to build quantum computers domestically.

Though the allocation in this years budget is clearly part of a long-term national strategy, I cannot help wonder whether it is, at least in some small measure, a response to Googles recent announcement that it had achieved quantum supremacy"the ability to perform a calculation on a quantum computer that is impossible on a conventional computer. And the fear that we might, once again, be falling behind.

As much as I enjoy science, quantum mechanics gives me a headache. Quantum computing is an order of magnitude more perplexing. Ordinary computers function using binary logic gates that can be either off or on. This is why classical computers store information in bitseither as a 0 or 1. On the other hand, quantum computers can store information as both a 0 and a 1 at the same time using a quantum property called superposition. This means that with two quantum bits (or qubits), information can be stored in four possible states of superposition, and as more qubits are added, the computational power grows exponentially.

While this gives us more computing power, quantum computers are error-prone. The quantum state is delicate. It lasts for a fraction of a second and is easily disrupted by tiniest of vibrations or variations in temperature. This noise" in calculations causes mistakes to occur, and unless we can make them sufficiently error-free, quantum computing will not be commercially viable. Googles breakthrough was to achieve sufficient control over the process to allow its experimental computer to outperform a traditional computer. As a result, its computer could solve in 200 seconds what would take the worlds fastest supercomputer 10,000 years.

We still have a long way to go before quantum computing becomes commercially viable, but there is reason for urgency. As soon as quantum computing becomes commercially viable, much of what we take for granted today will become irrelevant.

Take encryption, for example. Almost all digital security today is based on the RSA algorithm that encrypts messages by relying on the factorization of two large prime numbers. While it is easy to multiply two prime numbers, it is very difficult to factorize them. RSA encryption exploits this feature, making it impossible for even governments and private actors with near infinite computational resources to decrypt messages. This is why we have the confidence to store valuable information in encrypted archives on the cloud, secure in the knowledge that even the largest corporations and most technologically advanced governments dont have the computational capability to decrypt these databases and access the information stored inside.

Once quantum computers are capable of being used for decryption, the computational hurdles of prime number factorization that we now rely on will become trivial to overcome. Shors algorithm already describes a process by which quantum computers could be used find the prime factors of any integer. In 2001, IBM proved that this algorithm works by using a 7 qubit computer to factorize the number 15 into 5 and 3. Googles Sycamore processor harnessed 53 qubits in its latest experiment, demonstrating that much higher computational capabilities are already within our grasp. Once our quantum computers have reached a sufficiently advanced level of stability, even the highest encryption known to man will be easy to defeat.

When that happens, cyber security as we know it will be a thing of the past. All the secure data services that we rely on will be thrown wide open, allowing anyone with a quantum computer to easily access the information within. Given the imminence of major breakthroughs in quantum computing, it is rumoured that there is already an underground market for encrypted data in anticipation of a time when all this information can be decrypted and the secrets of famous personalities can be exposed.

In the war for quantum supremacy, it is those who can understand and use the fundamental technologies behind quantum computing who will emerge dominant. In the not-so-distant future, the world will be divided into the quantum haves and have-nots. It is imperative that India makes every effort to stay in the game if it is to have any hope of remaining relevant. If we are to retain any measure of technological independence, we will need to ramp up our research in quantum computing and actively invest in the development of indigenous quantum computational capabilities.

Rahul Matthan is a partner at Trilegal and author of Privacy 3.0: Unlocking Our Data Driven Future

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Opinion | Prepare for a world of quantum haves and have-nots - Livemint

The White House is pushing to dedicate an additional billion dollars to fund artificial intelligence research, effectively doubling the budget for that purpose outside of Defense Department spending, Reuters reported today, citing people briefed on the plan. Investment in quantum computing would also receive a major boost.

The 2021 budget proposal would reportedly increase AI R&D funding to nearly $2 billion, and quantum to about $860 million, over the next two years.

The U.S. is engaged in what some describe as a race with China in the field of AI, though unlike most races this one has no real finish line. Instead, any serious lead means opportunities in business and military applications that may grow to become the next globe-spanning monopoly, a la Google or Facebook which themselves, as quasi-sovereign powers, invest heavily in the field for their own purposes.

Simply doubling the budget isnt a magic bullet to take the lead, if anyone can be said to have it, but deploying AI to new fields is not without cost and an increase in grants and other direct funding will almost certainly enable the technology to be applied more widely. Machine learning has proven to be useful for a huge variety of purposes and for many researchers and labs is a natural next step but expertise and processing power cost money.

Its not clear how the funds would be disbursed; Its possible existing programs like federal Small Business Innovation Research awards could be expanded with this topic in mind, or direct funding to research centers like the National Labs could be increased.

Research into quantum computing and related fields is likewise costly. Googles milestone last fall of achieving quantum superiority, or so the claim goes, is only the beginning for the science and neither the hardware nor software involved have much in the way of precedents.

Furthermore quantum computers as they exist today and for the foreseeable future have very few valuable applications, meaning pursuing them is only an investment in the most optimistic sense. However, government funding via SBIR and grants like those are intended to de-risk exactly this kind of research.

The proposed budget for NASA is also expected to receive a large increase in order to accelerate and reinforce various efforts within the Artemis Moon landing program. It was not immediately clear how these funds would be raised or from where they would be reallocated.

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White House reportedly aims to double AI research budget to $2B - TechCrunch

Lead story - Quantum computing - risks, opportunities and use cases - by Chris Middleton

MyPOV: Master-of-the-edgy-think-piece Chris Middleton unfurled a meaty two-parter on the realities of quantum computing. As a quantum computing fan boy and a proud quantum-changes-everything association member curmudgeon, I was glad to see Chris take this on.

In Quantum tech - big opportunities from (very, very) little things, he reminds us that pigeonholing quantum as "computing" is a mistake:

Quantum technology embraces a host of different systems, each of which could form a fast-expanding sector of its own if investors shift their focus away from computing. These include quantum timing, metrology, and navigation, such as the development of hyper-accurate, portable atomic clocks.

Each use case carries its own risks/opportunities, and need for transparency, particularly when you combine quantum and "AI." However, based on the recent sessions he attended, Chris says we should think of quantum as enhancing our tool kit rather than replacing classic computing outright. He concludes:

In business and technology, we see a world of big objects and quantifiable opportunities, and it is far from clear how the quantum realm relates to it though it is clear that it does. In short, investors, policymakers, and business leaders need something tangible and relatable before they reach for their credit cards.

Translation quantum computing is so 2021 (or maybe 2025). But I find middle ground with the hypesters: we'd better start talking about the implications now. Quantum computing has a far greater inevitability than say, enterprise blockchains.

Diginomica picks - my top stories on diginomica this week

Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Bears might be hibernating, but enterprise software vendors sure aren't napping:

Koch buys Infor: When Infor's CFO Kevin Samuelson took over the CEO role from Charles Phillips, many felt that the pending Infor IPO was in play. Well, many were wrong. Derek was on the case:

Infor to be acquired by Koch Industries - whats the likely impact? and the follow-on: Infor answers questions on Koch acquisition. The big question here, to me, isn't why Koch versus IPO. It's CloudSuite SaaS adoption. And which industries can Infor address via SaaS industry ERP? Derek's pieces give us important clues - and we'll we watching.

Google breaks out cloud earnings: ordinarily, earning reports are not watershed moments. But this was the first time "Alphabet" broke out Google Cloud (and YouTube) numbers. Google is obviously wary of the AWS and Azure comparisons. But it's not easy to break it all out anyhow (Google added GSuite revenues in also). Stuart parses it out inGoogle's 'challenger' cloud business hits $10 billion annual run rate as Alphabet breaks out the numbers for the first time.

SAP extends Business Suite maintenance to 2030 (with caveats): Arguably the biggest SAP story since the leadership change. Den had some questions stuck in his craw things to say, so he unfurled a two-parter:

MyPOV: a smart move - though an expected one - for the SAP new leadership team, with the user groups heavily involved in pushing the case. However, the next smart moves will be a lot tougher.

More vendor analysis:

And if that's not enough, Brian's got a Zoho review, I filed an Acumatica use case on SaaS best-of-breed, and Stuart crunched a landmark Zendesk earnings report.

Jon's grab bag - My annual productivity post is up and out; plus I took gratuitous shots at linkbaity Slack-has-ruined-work headlines (Personal productivity 2020 - Slack and Microsoft Teams didn't ruin work - but they didn't fix work either).

Neil explains the inexplicable in The problem of AI explainability - can we overcome it? Finally, I'm glad Jerry addressed the Clearview AI bottom-feeders in Clearview AI - super crime fighter or the death of privacy as we know it? There's a special place in my personal Hades for greedy entrepreneurs who steal faces, drape their motives in totally bogus 1st amendment claims, and plan to sell said data to authoritarian regimes. These bozos make robocallers look like human rights activists.

Lead story - analyzing the wreckage of the Iowa caucus tech fail

MyPOV: This could probably just be the whiffs section. The Iowa caucus app failure is very much like this: if you and I wrote down a step-by-step plan on how to screw up a mission-critical app launch, with everything from poor user engagement to technical failure to lack of contingencies to hacking vulnerabilities (which fortunately were not exploited), we've have this mess.

Hits/misses reader Clive reckons this is the best post-mortem: Shadow Inc. CEO Iowa Interview: 'We Feel Really Terrible' . First off, don't feel terrible, just go away. Shovel snow, or get involved in a local recycling initiative. Make a pinball app. Just stay away from the future of democracy from now on. Then there's this doozy: An 'Off-the-Shelf, Skeleton Project': Experts Analyze the App That Broke Iowa. Tell me if this sounds like something that would go smoothly:

To properly login and submit results, caucus chairs had to enter a precinct ID number, a PIN code, and a two-factor identification code, each of which were six-digits long.

Then there's the IDP, which was warned not to use the app by at least one party, and went headlong into their own abyss. Fortunately, there are a few lessons we can extract. Such as this one from Greg Miller, co-founder of the Open Source Election Technology Institute, which warned the IDP not to use the app weeks ago:

Our message is that apps like this should be developed in the sunlight and part of an open bug bounty.

An ironic message for an app developer named Shadow...

Honorable mention

I got a terrifying college flashback when I saw this one: Note targeting 'selfish' bongo player at Glastonbury Tor demands he stops playing. This prankster brought us back to the future though: Berlin artist uses 99 phones to trick Google into traffic jam alert.

In my line of work, we joke about PR hacks over-achievers pogo sticks pros "circling back", as if a second blast will somehow polish the turd of a crummy pitch as it slinkers by - well, this takes the noxious act of circling back to another level: Family Gets 55,000 Duplicate Letters from Loan Company. But hey, it's not all crash-and-burn here:

I can't let this slide another week:

I think we all realize by now that "free" services are all about data hucksters gorging themselves on the sweet nectar of our personal lives selling us out to the highest bidder. But when an anti-virus company gets it on the action, surely the Idiocracy has been achieved: "To make matters worse, Avast seems to maintain a lukewarm stance on the issue."

I'd like to invite the Avast team to step into my fiery cauldron. The only thing that's lukewarm is your grasping business model and your mediocre adware, err, I mean, anti-virus protection. Just one question: who protects us from you? As for Liz:

I'm with ya, Ms. Miller. Hopefully this is the next best thing....

If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does. Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.

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Enterprise hits and misses - quantum gets real, Koch buys Infor, and Shadow's failed app gets lit up - Diginomica

The mysterious quantum realm, or at least a Hollywood version of it, made its way into pop culture via the recent superhero film, Ant-Man. The hero shrinks down to a subatomic level even smaller than atoms and encounters a bizarre world that warps space and time in unpredictable ways.

At such miniscule scales, the fundamental laws of physics simply break down. But scientists have found ways to store information in individual electrons, making quantum communications possible. Or, they can measure the positions of atoms in incredibly precise ways to design navigation systems.

Were working on a navigation system based on quantum physics, that will be so accurate that you dont need any more GPS, explains Marko Erman, the Global Chief Scientific Officer of French defence and aerospace giant, Thales. He shares the real-world potential of this mysterious, but exciting field.

Beyond the electrons

Quantum physics will shape Thales trajectory over the coming years, says Erman. At least two-thirds of their business will be impacted in some way by new quantum devices and systems in the next 5-10 years, he announced in November at the Saclay research and technology cluster in the south of Paris.

Quantum sensors, quantum communications and quantum computing are the three main areas of focus in Thales research collaborations with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Universit Paris-Saclay. It is theoretically possible to build sensors that are ten thousand times more accurate; develop new energy sources; and create ultra-secure communications.

When people built atomic clocks, they never thought about global positioning systems. They didnt make the connection, says Erman. He was referring to quantum positioning, which can determine the position of a moving object with an almost absolute precision. Imagine being able to navigate submarines or underground vehicles without a satellite connection. Its possible, below seawater, Erman continues.

This technology has potential in the air too. If the GPS is not working on a plane, the pilot would be able to land at the destination with an accuracy of up to 20 kilometres, based only on the onboard inertia system, according to Erman. With a quantum positioning system however, it can land with the precision of within a metre. And in the military, quantum sensors within radar systems could help pilots detect suspicious flying objects or drones much more accurately in crowded airspace.

There are also quantum applications in the medical field. Take cancer treatment, for example. Current therapies can be destructive towards healthy cells, and not very targeted. Quantum devices could turn this on its head, and allow doctors to zoom in on individual diseased cells. I think the next phase of bio science is personalisation and going down to the cellular level; this would not be possible without quantum devices, Erman explains.

The burgeoning quantum innovation space holds great potential to transform the world as we know it. Right now, it is not particularly constrained by much regulation, Erman notes. Unlike genetics or artificial intelligence, which have a lot of debate about the societal impact and ethics, quantum escapes from that.

Research in Asia

Besides its huge focus on quantum innovation, Thales is continuing to build on research in its traditional verticals. Singapore is Thales only Asia research hub, where the company works with Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on space research such as nanosatellite technology.

The city was chosen as it is very dynamic, is very high tech oriented, according to Erman. Whats more, the government wants to push innovation and there are problems that are unique because of the size, the mission, he continues. Its an interesting place to be.

Singapore is also where you have land, air, sea, and you can basically address all aspects in one place, adds Herve Jarry, Chief Technical Officer of Thales Solutions Asia. I think also with the proximity of people, different agencies, it is quite easy to interact.

In September 2019, the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore has announced a S$30 million Joint Aviation Innovation Research Lab with Thales to build advanced air traffic management technologies. These are meant to augment air traffic controllers abilities in a stressful environment, Jarry explains.

Weve been doing some work for instance with the ATM Lab in NTU on the interactions with different sensors and heartbeat, ECG, and so on, Jarry continues. The work will also look at how to reduce the cognitive load on air traffic controllers so they can handle more objects, he adds. Other research areas in Singapore include artificial intelligence and digital identity, Jarry goes on to say.

In the lonely spaces between protons and neurons, there exists a strange quantum world which does not always make much sense. But what does make sense is how it can improve communication, health, transport, and more, in ways we cant fathom today. As Erman puts it: Its beyond imagination.

Excerpt from:

Is quantum innovation the future of tech? - GovInsider

Peter Wittek was announced missing on September 29. PHOTO COURTESY OF SRIRAM KRISHNAN/GOFUNDME

On February 3, the Rotman School of Management and the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) held a ceremony in honour of Assistant Professor Peter Wittek, who went missing in India in late September. Wittek was a leading expert in quantum machine learning, and his work at the CDL as a founding academic director sought to lead the charge in the commercialization of these technologies.

An avid mountaineer, Wittek was part of a six-person team that was attempting to summit Mount Trishul, a 7,120 metre-high peak in the Himalaya mountain range of India. On September 29, the Indian National Disaster Response Force received an SOS distress signal that originated from Witteks camp. Search and rescue operations were unsuccessful, and it is believed that Witteks camp was caught in an avalanche. His body has yet to be found.

In a statement to U of T News, Professor Ken Corts, Acting Dean of the Rotman School of Management, said that Peters loss is keenly felt. Wittek is remembered by Corts as an exceptional contributor to Rotman and U of T and a wonderful colleague.

Over a hundred U of T students, staff, and faculty, as well as members of the artificial intelligence (AI) community attended his ceremony on Monday. A number of speakers who were close to Wittek shared stories of his brilliance and generosity of spirit.

Witteks brother, Gergo Oberfrank, came from Hungary to attend the ceremony. He expressed the anguish that he and his family feel at the possibility that they will never find Witteks body. Oberfrank began his speech by saying goodbye to not only a brother for [him], but a father figure too. The two had an 11-year age difference, and Wittek was his biggest role model.

Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Multiverse Computing Samuel Mugel also spoke about looking up to Wittek, even before he met him. Mugel recounted his time starting out in the field of quantum computing, saying, What I found difficult was that I didnt really have many role models [that were both] entrepreneurs and scientists and this is really the position that Peter started to take for me because I saw him as someone that really managed to find the balance between an entrepreneurs career [while] simultaneously [pursuing] fundamental research.

CDL Founder Ajay Agrawal also marvelled at Witteks eagerness to pursue the entrepreneurial side of cutting-edge technologies. I knew that he was a scholar and he had tendencies as a theorist. And I know that theorists can be resistant to thinking about such crass things as commercialization, Agrawal remarked with a bit of wryness in his voice.

This seems to be the crux of what made Wittek such a consequential academic and caused his fame in the field of quantum machine learning to be so enduring. He was both interested in the way nature works, [and] in understanding the underlying science, but also interested in commercialization, noted Agrawal.

Wittek was not only influential for his work in the field as a whole, but also for providing critical advice and guidance to a number of budding researchers and entrepreneurs. Mugel noted that Wittek was the one who had encouraged him to apply for the CDL Quantum Stream.

I think there [are] an awful lot of people here who can tell you something similar that Peter turned up at a key turn in their life and with advice or a push in the right direction, helped us in these really difficult decisions. Multiverse Computing is now a cutting-edge provider of quantum computing and AI software for the financial industry.

Khalid Kurji, a senior venture manager at the CDL, spoke on behalf of the team behind the Quantum Machine Learning Stream, of which Wittek was a crucial part. Kurji spoke on Witteks cosmopolitan outlook, remarking that his teams aspirations to lead globally could only become a reality because our academic director [Wittek] considered the entire planet his neighbourhood and treated every single person as if they grew up next door to him.

To Kurji, Witteks defining characteristic was his generosity. He gave the full of himself of his enthusiasm and intellect into everything he did.

Agrawal also shared this sentiment, and, as evidence, pointed out the surprising number of students who have emailed to express their gratitude for having had Wittek in their lives. I think people have a need to tell somebody how much someone has touched their life, changed the trajectory of their life, Agrawal reflected.

Agrawal also shared the story of how he first met Wittek. After reading Witteks book, Quantum Machine Learning: What Quantum Computing Means to Data Mining, Agrawal sent him an email with a few questions. Very often when I send the author a question about their book, they either dont reply or if they do reply they might send a very quick one-sentence response.

On the screen behind him, Agrawal projected an image of Witteks response to his question. The email was too long to fit on a single slide, and had to be shown in two parts. He had received it 48 minutes after his initial email. Its remarkable how much you can tell about a person from the very first interaction, Agrawal noted.

Im an economist; I was not in his community. And I was surprised that he would take the time to send me such a thorough response and then ask me if I had more questions. And I thought, This is my kind of person.

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Memorial ceremony held for Peter Wittek, U of T professor who went missing in India - Varsity

The smallest scale events have giant consequences. And no field of science demonstrates that better than quantum physics, which explores the strange behaviors of mostly very small things. In 2019, quantum experiments went to new and even stranger places and practical quantum computing inched ever closer to reality, despite some controversies. These were the most important and surprising quantum events of 2019.

If one quantum news item from 2019 makes the history books, it will probably be a big announcement that came from Google: The tech company announced that it had achieved "quantum supremacy." That's a fancy way of saying that Google had built a computer that could perform certain tasks faster than any classical computer could. (The category of classical computers includes any machine that relies on regular old 1s and 0s, such as the device you're using to read this article.)

Google's quantum supremacy claim, if borne out, would mark an inflection point in the history of computing. Quantum computers rely on strange small-scale physical effects like entanglement, as well as certain basic uncertainties in the nano-universe, to perform their calculations. In theory, that quality gives these machines certain advantages over classical computers. They can easily break classical encryption schemes, send perfectly encrypted messages, run some simulations faster than classical computers can and generally solve hard problems very easily. The difficulty is that no one's ever made a quantum computer fast enough to take advantage of those theoretical advantages or at least no one had, until Google's feat this year.

Not everyone buys the tech company's supremacy claim though. Subhash Kak, a quantum skeptic and researcher at Oklahoma State University, laid out several of the reasons in this article for Live Science.

Read more about Google's achievement of quantum supremacy.

Another 2019 quantum inflection point came from the world of weights and measures. The standard kilogram, the physical object that defined the unit of mass for all measurements, had long been a 130-year-old, platinum-iridium cylinder weighing 2.2 lbs. and sitting in a room in France. That changed this year.

The old kilo was pretty good, barely changing mass over the decades. But the new kilo is perfect: Based on the fundamental relationship between mass and energy, as well as a quirk in the behavior of energy at quantum scales, physicists were able to arrive at a definition of the kilogram that won't change at all between this year and the end of the universe.

Read more about the perfect kilogram.

A team of physicists designed a quantum experiment that showed that facts actually change depending on your perspective on the situation. Physicists performed a sort of "coin toss" using photons in a tiny quantum computer, finding that the results were different at different detectors, depending on their perspectives.

"We show that, in the micro-world of atoms and particles that is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, two different observers are entitled to their own facts," the experimentalists wrote in an article for Live Science. "In other words, according to our best theory of the building blocks of nature itself, facts can actually be subjective."

Read more about the lack of objective reality.

For the first time, physicists made a photograph of the phenomenon Albert Einstein described as "spooky action at a distance," in which two particles remain physically linked despite being separated across distances. This feature of the quantum world had long been experimentally verified, but this was the first time anyone got to see it.

Read more about the unforgettable image of entanglement.

In some ways the conceptual opposite of entanglement, quantum superposition is enables a single object to be in two (or more) places at once, a consequence of matter existing as both particles and waves. Typically, this is achieved with tiny particles like electrons.

But in a 2019 experiment, physicists managed to pull off superposition at the largest scale ever: using hulking, 2,000-atom molecules from the world of medical science known as "oligo-tetraphenylporphyrins enriched with fluoroalkylsulfanyl chains."

Read about the macro-scale achievement of superposition.

Under normal circumstances, heat can cross a vacuum in only one manner: in the form of radiation. (That's what you're feeling when the sun's rays cross space to beat on your face on a summer day.) Otherwise, in standard physical models, heat moves in two manners: First, energized particles can knock into other particles and transfer their energy. (Wrap your hands around a warm cup of tea to feel this effect.) Second, a warm fluid can displace a colder fluid. (That's what happens when you turn the heater on in your car, flooding the interior with warm air.) So without radiation, heat can't cross a vacuum.

But quantum physics, as usual, breaks the rules. In a 2019 experiment, physicists took advantage of the fact that at the quantum scale, vacuums aren't truly empty. Instead, they're full of tiny, random fluctuations that pop into and out of existence. At a small enough scale, the researchers found, heat can cross a vacuum by jumping from one fluctuation to the next across the apparently empty space.

Read more about heat leaping across the quantum vacuum of space.

This next finding is far from an experimentally verified discovery, and it's even well outside the realm of traditional quantum physics. But researchers working with quantum gravity a theoretical construct designed to unify the worlds of quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity showed that under certain circumstances an event might cause an effect that occurred earlier in time.

Certain very heavy objects can influence the flow of time in their immediate vicinity due to general relativity. We know this is true. And quantum superposition dictates that objects can be in multiple places at once. Put a very heavy object (like a big planet) in a state of quantum superposition, the researchers wrote, and you can design oddball scenarios where cause and effect take place in the wrong order.

Read more about cause and effect reversing.

Physicists have long known about a strange effect known as "quantum tunneling," in which particles seem to pass through seemingly impassable barriers. It's not because they're so small that they find holes, though. In 2019, an experiment showed how this really happens.

Quantum physics says that particles are also waves, and you can think of those waves as probability projections for the location of the particle. But they're still waves. Smash a wave against a barrier in the ocean, and it will lose some energy, but a smaller wave will appear on the other side. A similar effect occurs in the quantum world, the researchers found. And as long as there's a bit of probability wave left on the far side of the barrier, the particle has a chance of making it through the obstruction, tunneling through a space where it seems it should not fit.

Read more about the amazing quantum tunneling effect.

This was a big year for ultra-high-pressure physics. And one of the boldest claims came from a French laboratory, which announced that it had created a holy grail substance for materials science: metallic hydrogen. Under high enough pressures, such as those thought to exist at the core of Jupiter, single-proton hydrogen atoms are thought to act as an alkali metal. But no one had ever managed to generate pressures high enough to demonstrate the effect in a lab before. This year, the team said they'd seen it at 425 gigapascals (4.2 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level). Not everyone buys that claim, however.

Read more about metallic hydrogen.

Zap a mass of supercooled atoms with a magnetic field, and you'll see "quantum fireworks": jets of atoms firing off in apparently random directions. Researchers suspected there might be a pattern in the fireworks, but it wasn't obvious just from looking. With the aid of a computer, though, researchers discovered a shape to the fireworks effect: a quantum turtle. No one's yet sure why it takes that shape, however.

Read more about the quantum turtle.

Time's supposed to move in only one direction: forward. Spill some milk on the ground, and there's no way to perfectly dry out the dirt and return that same clean milk back into the cup. A spreading quantum wave function doesn't unspread.

Except in this case, it did. Using a tiny, two-qubit quantum computer, physicists were able to write an algorithm that could return every ripple of a wave to the particle that created it unwinding the event and effectively turning back the arrow of time.

Read more about reversing time's arrow.

A nice feature of quantum computers, which rely on superpositions rather than 1s and 0s, is their ability to play out multiple calculations at once. That advantage is on full display in a new quantum prediction engine developed in 2019. Simulating a series of connected events, the researchers behind the engine were able to encode 16 possible futures into a single photon in their engine. Now that's multitasking!

Read more about the 16 possible futures.

Originally published on Live Science.

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The 12 Most Important and Stunning Quantum Experiments of 2019 - Livescience.com

As 2019 winds to a close, the journey towards fully realised quantum computing continues: physicists have been able to demonstrate quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time.

Put simply, this breakthrough means that information was passed between the chips not by physical electronic connections, but through quantum entanglement by linking two particles across a gap using the principles of quantum physics.

We don't yet understand everything about quantum entanglement (it's the same phenomenon Albert Einstein famously called "spooky action"), but being able to use it to send information between computer chips is significant, even if so far we're confined to a tightly controlled lab environment.

"We were able to demonstrate a high-quality entanglement link across two chips in the lab, where photons on either chip share a single quantum state," explains quantum physicist Dan Llewellynfrom the University of Bristol in the UK.

"Each chip was then fully programmed to perform a range of demonstrations which utilise the entanglement."

Hypothetically, quantum entanglement can work over any distance. Two particles get inextricably linked together, which means looking at one tells us something about the other, wherever it is (in this case, on a separate computer chip).

To achieve their result, the team generated pairs of entangled photons, encoding quantum information in a way that ensured low levels of interference and high levels of accuracy. Up to four qubits the quantum equivalent of classical computing bits were linked together.

"The flagship demonstration was a two-chip teleportation experiment, whereby the individual quantum state of a particle is transmitted across the two chips after a quantum measurement is performed," says Llewellyn.

"This measurement utilises the strange behaviour of quantum physics, which simultaneously collapses the entanglement link and transfers the particle state to another particle already on the receiver chip."

The researchers were then able to run experiments in which the fidelity reached 91 percent as in, almost all the information was accurately transmitted and logged.

Scientists are learning more and more about how quantum entanglement works, but for now it's very hard to control. It's not something you can install inside a laptop: you need a lot of bulky, expensive scientific equipment to get it working.

But the hope is that advances in the lab, such as this one, might one day lead to advances in computing that everyone can take advantage of super-powerful processing power and a next-level internet with built-in hacking protections.

The low data loss and high stability of the teleportation, as well as the high level of control that the scientists were able to get over their experiments, are all promising signs in terms of follow-up research.

It's also a useful study for efforts to get quantum physics working with the silicon chip (Si-chip) tech used in today's computers, and the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) techniques used to make those chips.

"In the future, a single Si-chip integration of quantum photonic devices and classical electronic controls will open the door for fully chip-based CMOS-compatible quantum communication and information processing networks," says quantum physicist Jianwei Wang, from Peking University in China.

The research has been published in Nature Physics.

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Physicists Just Achieved The First-Ever Quantum Teleportation Between Computer Chips - ScienceAlert