" Chipmaker to work with Dell and Cambridge on helping researchers get the best out of HPC
Dell and the University of Cambridge have partnered with Intel to boost the potential of their High Performance Computing (HPC) research work.
The HPC Solution Centre aims to help researchers solve real world problems by improving the data tools available to them.
Under the partnership, Intel will provide its own products and expertise to bring data analytics and multi-tenanted cloud to the HPC Solution Centre." more>>
"Mathematics of Sensing, Exploitation and Execution (MSEE)
The goal of the Mathematics of Sensing, Exploitation and Execution (MSEE) program is to explore and develop high-impact methods for scalable autonomous systems capable of understanding scenes and events for learning, planning, and execution of complex tasks. The program is exploring powerful mathematical frameworks for unified knowledge representation for shared perception, learning, reasoning, and action. One of the central concepts in MSEE is to exploit methods based on minimalist generative grammar, similar to human language, to represent and process visual scenes and actions. Data-driven methods for spatial, temporal, and causal parsing of information are being developed for semantic understanding of scenes and events in unstructured environments along with cognitive processing methods for exploitation and manipulations. The foundational premise of the program is that a comprehensive mathematical framework to describe an integrated SEE system would allow for detailed analysis of its potential performance and serve as a guide to prototype design. Methods will be demonstrated in use cases motivated by defense applications such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and vision-guided robots to perform repairs.
The MSEE program aims to address a growing difficulty: The amount of data collected by DoD sensor systems exceeds the ability of human analysts and current automated decision systems to extract actionable information. This data deluge is pervasive throughout the military and applies to single and multi-modal sensing platforms. Today, evaluation methods rely on feature detection and category classification using individual pipelines for different tasks due to the lack of an effective unified representation. Hence, under the current paradigm, the semantics derived from sensor outputs do not emerge until an analyst has assimilated the data.
As a result of this dynamics, three challenges emerge:
Data's worth can only be evaluated after analysts have interpreted it, and with knowledge of how it will be used;
Prior knowledge, including that which may have accrued during previous processing, is not used during the production of sensor output products, thus sensors process their signals as if they were seeing the world anew at every instant;
In the presence of multiple sensors, analysts must reconstruct a unified view out of sensor output products that were not, in general, designed for integration.
A new approach to sensing is required to confront these shortcomings. An effective representation for recognizing objects, attributes and actions, and for parsing spatial-temporal relational information, would result in scalable platforms capable of autonomous learning, inference, reasoning, planning and execution of complex tasks.
MSEE includes three planned phases. The goal of Phase I is to create the mathematical foundation for a representation-centric model. The goal of Phase II is to refine the representation constructed in an initial software system able to answer queries related to the content of sensor data from a single modality. The goal of Phase III is to develop a fully integrated, modular system that demonstrates quantitative and qualitative analyses of systems that integrate sensing/perception, exploitation, and execution, with multi-modal sensor data. This implementation-ready software must be able to address queries related to data content, and learn and perform task/objective specific actions with far better performance than non-integrative methods
To date, performers on MSEE have pursued fundamental research into the nature of stochastic modeling and knowledge representation. These basic tools are being used to build prototype systems. Progress in these areas should greatly advance DoD's ability to build high-performance systems in a number of areas including ISR and supervised robust autonomous systems.
Four-armed robot surgeon performs first operation in Britain
A four-armed robot surgeon armed with scalpels has carried out colon surgery on a British patient in a technology breakthrough which could revolutionise the way serious illnesses are treated.
The Da Vinci XI robot looks alarming, but is actually tiny – and ‘miniaturises’ the movements of the surgeon controlling it.
The machine makes it possible for surgeons to operate via without making large incisions in the patient.
Surgeons at the Royal Marsden Hospital hailed the technology as pushing the boundaries in surgery, particularly in cancer care." Morer>>
"Over the last three years, Google has quietly built a cutting-edge health care facility," said the magazine video. Google's facility employs over 100 doctors and scientists. James Hamblin, senior editor at The Atlantic, sat in Mountain View, California, and spoke with Andrew Conrad, head of Google Life Sciences. Conrad told him that the group is trying to change medicine from being episodic and reactive (like going to the doctor because your arm hurts) to proactive. Google is working on a wristband that can detect cancer cells when they first appear. That would be possible in a system where they would be designing tiny magnetic particles to patrol the human body for signs of cancer and other diseases. "So imagine that you swallow a pill [You would take a pill maybe twice a month] and that pill has small things called nanoparticles in it, decorated on their surface with markers that attach to cancer cells, We have them circulate through your whole body, and we collect them in the vasculature of the arm with a magnet, and you ask them what they saw."
Ancient 'genomic parasites' spurred evolution of pregnancy in mammals
n international team of scientists has identified large-scale genetic changes that marked the evolution of pregnancy in mammals.
They found thousands of genes that evolved to be expressed in the uterus in early mammals, including many that are important for maternal-fetal communication and suppression of the immune system. Surprisingly, these genes appear to have been recruited and repurposed from other tissue types by transposons - ancient mobile genetic elements sometimes thought of as genomic parasites." more
"In this week's issue of the journal Science, MIT researchers report that just four fairly vague pieces of information—the dates and locations of four purchases—are enough to identify 90 percent of the people in a data set recording three months of credit-card transactions by 1.1 million users
When the researchers also considered coarse-grained information about the prices of purchases, just three data points were enough to identify an even larger percentage of people in the data set. That means that someone with copies of just three of your recent receipts—or one receipt, one Instagram photo of you having coffee with friends, and one tweet about the phone you just bought—would have a 94 percent chance of extracting your credit card records from those of a million other people. This is true, the researchers say, even in cases where no one in the data set is identified by name, address, credit card number, or anything else that we typically think of as personal information." more>>
"A skull provides direct anatomical evidence that fills a problematic time gap of modern human migration into Europe. It is also the first proof that anatomically modern humans existed at the same ...hile it is widely accepted that the origins of modern humans date back some 200,000 years to Africa, there has been furious debate as to which model of early Homo sapiens migration most plausibly led to the population of the planet -- and the eventual extinction of Neanderthals. While fossil records prove that some anatomically modern human groups reached the Levantine corridor (the modern Middle East) as early as 100,000 years ago, genetic testing indicates that human populations inhabiting the globe today descended from a single group that migrated from Africa only 70,000 years ago -- an unexplained gap of 30,000 years. Little evidence has emerged to bridge the contradictory theories.
Until now. The discovery in the Manot Cave of Israel's Western Galilee of an almost complete skull dating back 55,000 years provides direct anatomical evidence that fills the historic time gap of modern human migration into Europe. It is also the first proof that anatomically modern humans existed at the same time as Neanderthals in the same geographical area.
The British Museum's 2013 show of artefacts from the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in ash during an explosive eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was a sell-out. But could even greater treasures - including lost works of classical literature - still lie underground?
For centuries scholars have been hunting for the lost works of ancient Greek and Latin literature. In the Renaissance, books were found in monastic libraries. In the late 19th Century papyrus scrolls were found in the sands of Egypt. But only in Herculaneum in southern Italy has an entire library from the ancient Mediterranean been discovered in situ.
On the eve of the catastrophe in 79 AD, Herculaneum was a chic resort town on the Bay of Naples, where many of Rome's top families went to rest and recuperate during the hot Italian summers.
It was also a place where Rome's richest engaged in a bit of cultural one-upmanship - none more so than Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a politician and father-in-law of Julius Caesar.
In Herculaneum, Piso built a seaside villa on a palatial scale - the width of its beach frontage alone exceeds 220m (721ft). When it was excavated in the middle of the 18th Century, it was found to hold more than 80 bronze and marble statues of the highest quality, including one of Pan having sex with a goat.
When he came to plan his own exercise in cultural showing off, J Paul Getty chose to copy Piso's villa for his own Getty museum in Malibu, California." more>>>
What scrolls have been found?
nearly 2,000 with the main library yet to be exhumed.
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Finding a pretty great library from 200 years ago is major..possibly bigger than finding Tutankhamen
Neutron Scans used to Discover Michaelangelo statues
"The pair of sculptures – showing naked, muscular men riding triumphantly on two ferocious panthers – were made shortly after Michelangelo completed the marble David and as he was about to begin painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Victoria Avery, keeper of the applied arts department of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where the pair will go on public display tomorrow, said the sculptures had been attributed to Michelangelo following 'a Renaissance whodunnit' investigation."
Humans have fewer remnants of viral DNA in their genes compared to other mammals, a new study has found. This decrease could be because of reduced exposure to blood-borne viruses as humans evolved to use tools rather than biting during violent conflict and the hunting of animals." more>>
o, it’s official. Everyone in Iceland is related. Every member of the 300,000 population derives from the same family tree, according to genealogy website islendingabok.is.
“I am not related to my boyfriend,” I stubbornly insisted the other day, having carefully made sure we weren't before we started dating. I was having a debate with my brother about his theory that all Icelanders were related to each other. He offered to prove it to me.
The next day there was an email from him waiting in my inbox. I opened it and discovered a list of names and dates of birth – a family tree. I recognized some of the names and soon realized that this was a list of my ancestors and my boyfriend’s ancestors, all the way back to the 18th century." more
After robot servers and concierges, Japan is set to open a hotel staffed entirely by robots.
When the Hen-na Hotel opens this summer, guests will hand over their luggage to robotic porters, and present themselves to a front desk staffed by blinking, beeping robots, reported The Japan Times.
Rooms will likewise be cleaned by robots, and coffee poured by AI.
Likewise, the “cutting-edge” hotel will use the latest in facial recognition technology and allow guests to open their door by simply presenting themselves in front of their room, without a key." more
"Unveiling Nao in Tokyo on Monday, officials at the bank pointed out that the android is able to speak no fewer than 19 languages and can determine customers' emotions from their facial expressions.
Nao is still undergoing some minor adjustments, officials said, but the bank anticipates that several of the robots will be meeting and greeting customers in branches from April." more>>
Poland: Huge 2000-year-old Iron Age necropolis found with princely Tombs
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Polish archaeologists have released new details about ancient burials found in a huge necropolis dating back over 2,000 years, which include two tombs that likely contained princes.
The burial site, located in Karczyn, Kujawy in north central Poland, is the largest to have ever been found in the country and dates from 3rd century BC to 5th century AD." More>>
The Ministry of Antiquities has discovered several new mummies buried in tombs in a small village near Minya, in Upper Egypt, on Saturday night. The two discovered mummies go back to the Greco-Roman era, as indicated by how their remains have been buried.
The sarcophagi the police found the mummies in were, however, floating in sewage, and their conditions were so bad that they had disintegrated, according to the report of the ministry. They had drawings of women with several colours clearly outlining and showing their faces on their top covers.
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