Month: June 2010

Entangled DNA

one line of evidence is that a purely classical analysis of the energy required to hold DNA together does not add up. It is possible that DNA is indeed quantum-efficient.

if Grover-algorithmic processing is some sort of fundamental property of nature, then you might expect the genetic material to be synthesized most efficiently when the machinery has a choice of 4 different nucleotides. And when translating these into proteins, a triplet code (which requires 3 processing steps) would function most efficiently when working with a palette of 20 amino acids. I will admit to being unusually susceptible to ideas like this, but that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

Electrical frequency analysis

a forensic technique for validating audio recordings by comparing frequency changes in background mains hum in the recording with long-term high-precision historical records of mains frequency changes from a database. In effect the mains hum signal is treated as if it was a time-dependent digital watermark that can be used to identify the time at which the recording was created, and to help detect any edits in the sound recording.

Last IPv4

As the remaining pool of IPv4 addresses dwindles (only 623m are left!), it turns out that the remaining address space isn’t exactly beachfront property. In the 1.0.0.0/8 block, 80% of traffic is due to misconfiguration. It turns out that this traffic is mostly audio data, apparently sent by misconfigured VoIP systems.

IBM Watson

This will be fun to watch. And to witness the drama and handwringing of the dilettante press.

For the last 3 years, IBM scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

2014-05-05: Watson Debater

In a canned demo, Kelly chose a sample debate topic: “The sale of violent video games to minors should be banned.” The Debater was tasked with presenting pros and cons for a debate on this question. Speaking in nearly perfect English, Watson/The Debater replied: Scanned 4 million Wikipedia articles, returning 10 most relevant articles. Scanned all 3000 sentences in top 10 articles. Detected sentences which contain candidate claims. Identified borders of candidate claims. Assessed pro and con polarity of candidate claims. Constructed demo speech with top claim predictions. Ready to deliver. It then presented 3 relevant pros and cons.

2014-10-07: If the process of science itself can be changed from the current miasma of writing 19th century style papers, lack of negative results etc towards a process of discovery where all knowledge is like wikipedia, and AI infers new things, that’d be quite something.

Scientists demonstrated a possible new path for generating scientific questions that may be helpful in the long term development of new, effective treatments for disease. In a matter of weeks, biologists and data scientists using the Baylor Knowledge Integration Toolkit (KnIT), based on Watson technology, accurately identified proteins that modify p53, an important protein related to many cancers, which can eventually lead to better efficacy of drugs and other treatments. A feat that would have taken researchers years to accomplish without Watson’s cognitive capabilities, Watson analyzed 70k scientific articles on p53 to predict proteins that turn on or off p53’s activity. This automated analysis led the Baylor cancer researchers to identify 6 potential proteins to target for new research. These results are notable, considering that over the last 30 years, scientists averaged 1 similar target protein discovery per year.

2015-07-05: Chef Watson

Enter blueberries as the essential ingredient, click dessert and Watson recommends similar ingredients based on food pairing chemistry. After you’ve narrowed preferences down, Watson recommends brand-new cooking ideas, based on recipes Watson has studied. And users can go more deeply into the app too, modifying Watson’s modifications. Its website calls the human-computer partnership a tool to “amplify human creativity.”