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NEW TECH STUFF TO MAKE OUR LIVES BETTER IN 2020 In the decade now drawing to a close, every part of our lives our personal lives, our businesses and careers became fully digital. And with the 2020s now upon us, were going to see even more massive changes as the tech we use gets further refined and as technology that was dreamed up only recently becomes part of our daily routines! Here are five of the top technologies that IBM says will revolutionize the year and decade ahead:

1. Artificial Intelligence will turbo-charge productivity both personally, and professionally.

While artificial intelligence probably wont take your job, it will change how you work. In the coming decade, expect to see AI making its way into all sorts of workplaces around the world automating routine tasks that will free up your time to concentrate on parts of your job that are more satisfying and meaningful. And there will be lots of new jobs and career possibilities for those who gain the skills to work in technology fields.

2. Blockchain will help to make the food you eat safer than ever.

Food recalls keep consumers constantly on their toes affecting their shopping habits, and calling produce and pantry items into question. But blockchain networks like IBM Food Trust (which is used by a growing number of retailers including Walmart, Albertsons and Carrefour as well as major food suppliers like Dole) are helping to trace foods from the farm to your fork. What is blockchain? Its a digital ledger that means means consumers now have unprecedented insight into exactly where their food has come from and it doesnt stop with food blockchain now tracks global shipments, marriages and more. Right now were able to track food shipments on the blockchain via apps and in the next decade, well see this cutting edge technology become a part of everyday life.

3. Edge Computing will have a big impact on retail, and on the tech you use on your cell phone.

Today's consumer electronics, cars and electric vehicles, and all sorts of other digital devices are equipped with sensors that collectively generate tons of data. Today theres an estimated 15 billion intelligent devices operating on the outer edges of the network, and by 2022, that number is expected to reach 55 billion. In order to make sense of all of the information from these devices, well see massive growth in whats called edge computing: the use of compact, efficient computer servers located at the networks edges/near these smart devices that can process data locally, instead of sending it all back to a data center via the cloud.. The next decade will see a surge in edge computing, aided by the rollout of 5G technology and while consumers wont see edge computing it will transform the way retailers stock the latest goods you buy, and it will affect how cellphone carriers support mobile gaming and augmented reality and more.

4. From cloud computing to the Hybrid Cloud: what you need to know.

You know how when youre getting ready to pack for a big trip, you need to gather stuff from all over the place to make your vacation work? You might have clothes and shoes spread out between multiple closets, your suitcase is in the basement, your passport (which needs to stay super secure) is in a safe. Well, businesses with lots of data are the same way: they might have some info in one type of cloud, some info in another, and more stuff on three servers in two different states. Thats why more and more businesses are turning to hybrid cloud: its a technology infrastructure that makes it easy for companies to quickly access data wherever its stored to make it usable and easy to analyze. For consumers, this means theyre being helped by retailers and companies more quickly all with their data being safer than ever.5. Quantum computing moves from the realm of the theoretical (and from being a sci-fi movie plotline!) into the world of practical experiments and applications.

Its not necessary to be a quantum physicist to grasp the main point of quantum computing: it seeks to solve complex problems that have been considered unsolvable using classical computers alone. IBM is a leader on making quantum technology available to industry, academia and anyone else inspired by quantum computings potential. As the next decade unspools well see quantum computing moving from the lab to the mainstream and it will start to solve problems in chemistry, medicine and more.

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Tucson Morning Blend Top 5 Tech Trends you'll love this year. Heather Rowe 1:27 - KGUN

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. A 2017 report of the discovery of a particular kind of Majorana fermion the chiral Majorana fermion, referred to as the angel particle is likely a false alarm, according to new research. Majorana fermions are enigmatic particles that act as their own antiparticle and were first hypothesized to exist in 1937. They are of immense interest to physicists because their unique properties could allow them to be used in the construction of a topological quantum computer.

A team of physicists at Penn State and the University of Wurzburg in Germany led by Cui-Zu Chang, an assistant professor of physics at Penn State, studied over three dozen devices similar to the one used to produce the angel particle in the 2017 report. They found that the feature that was claimed to be the manifestation of the angel particle was unlikely to be induced by the existence of the angel particle. A paper describing the research appears on Jan. 3 in the journal Science.

When the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana predicted the possibility of a new fundamental particle which is its own antiparticle, little could he have envisioned the long-lasting implications of his imaginative idea, said Nitin Samarth, Downsbrough Department Head and professor of physics at Penn State. Over 80 years after Majoranas prediction, physicists continue to actively search for signatures of the still elusive 'Majorana fermion' in diverse corners of the universe.

In one such effort, particle physicists are using underground observatories that seek to prove whether the ghost-like particle known as the neutrino a subatomic particle that rarely interacts with matter might be a Majorana fermion.

On a completely different front, condensed matter physicists are seeking to discover manifestations of Majorana physics in solid-state devices that combine exotic quantum materials with superconductors. In such devices, electrons are theorized to dress themselves as Majorana fermions by stitching together a fabric constructed from core aspects of quantum mechanics, relativistic physics, and topology. This analogous version of Majorana fermions has particularly captured the attention of condensed-matter physicists because it may provide a pathway for constructing a topological quantum computer whose qubits (quantum versions of binary 0s and 1s) are inherently protected from environmental decoherence the loss of information that results when a quantum system is not perfectly isolated, and a major hurdle in the development of quantum computers.

An important first step toward this distant dream of creating a topological quantum computer is to demonstrate definitive experimental evidence for the existence of Majorana fermions in condensed matter, said Chang. Over the past seven or so years, several experiments have claimed to show such evidence, but the interpretation of these experiments is still debated.

The team studied devices fashioned from a quantum material known as a quantum anomalous Hall insulator, wherein the electrical current flows only at the edge. A recent study predicted that when the edge current is in clean contact with a superconductor, propagating chiral Majorana fermions are created and the electrical conductance of the device should be half-quantized a value of e2/2h where e is the electron charge and h is Planck constant when subject to a precise magnetic field. The Penn State-Wurzburg team studied over three dozen devices with several different materials configurations and found that devices with a clean superconducting contact always show the half-quantized value regardless of magnetic field conditions. This occurs because the superconductor acts like an electrical short and is thus not indicative of the presence of the Majorana fermion, said the researchers.

The fact that two laboratories at Penn State and at Wurzburg found completely consistent results using a wide variety of device configurations casts serious doubt on the validity of the theoretically proposed experimental geometry and questions the 2017 claim of observing the angel particle, said Moses Chan, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Physics at Penn State.

I remain optimistic that the combination of quantum anomalous Hall insulators and superconductivity is an attractive scheme for realizing chiral Majoranas, said Morteza Kayyalha, a postdoctoral research associate at Penn State who carried out the device fabrication and measurements. But our theorist colleagues need to rethink the device geometry.

This is an excellent illustration of how science should work, said Samarth. Extraordinary claims of discovery need to be carefully examined and reproduced. All of our postdocs and students worked really hard to make sure they carried out very rigorous tests of the past claims. We are also making sure that all of our data and methods are shared transparently with the community so that our results can be critically evaluated by interested colleagues.

In addition to Chang, Samarth, Chan and Kayyalha, the research team includes Penn State faculty member Qi Li, and Wurzburg faculty members Laurens Molenkamp and Charles Gould. The project relied on materials synthesis carried out at Penn States 2D Crystal Consortium user facility for synthesis of 2D quantum materials and was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Army Research Office, and the European Research Council.

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The case of the elusive Majorana: The so-called 'angel particle' still a mystery - Penn State News

Image Courtesy: Smithsonian Magazine. Image depicts some of the skull caps excavated from Ngandong.

In development of science, what should matter the most is the findings that help the humanity, the findings that have the potential to open up new paradigms or those which change our understanding of the past or open our eyes to the future. The year 2019 also witnessed several such findings in the science world.

HUMAN HISTORY THROUGH GENETICS

Tracing human history has been achieved with the realm of genetics research as well. Year 2019 also witnessed some of the breakthroughs about human history based on analysis done on ancient DNA found on fossils and other sources.

One of such important findings has come up with a claim about the origin of modern human. What it says is that anatomically, modern humans first appeared in Southern part of Africa. A wetland that covered present day Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe was where the first humans lived some 200,000 years ago. Eventually, humans migrated out of this region. How was the study conducted? Researchers gathered blood samples from 200 living people in groups whose DNA is poorly known, including foragers and hunter-gatherers in Namibia and South Africa. The authors analyzed the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), a type of DNA inherited only from mothers, and compared it to mtDNA in databases from more than 1000 other Africans, mostly from southern Africa. Then the researchers sorted how all the samples were related to each other on a family tree. The data reveals that one mtDNA lineage in the Khoisan speakersL0is the oldest known mtDNA lineage in living people. The work also tightens the date of origin of L0 to about 200,000 years ago

Another very important and interesting finding in this field is that Homo Erectus, the closest ancestor of modern humans, marked its last presence on the island of Java, Indonesia. The team of scientists has estimated that the species existed in a place known as Ngandong near the Solo riverbased on dating of animal fossils from a bone bed where Homo Erectus skull caps and leg bones were found earlier. Scientists used to believe that Homo Erectus migrated out of Africa, into Asia, some two million years back. They also believed that the early human ancestor became extinct from the earth around 4 lakh years ago. But the new findings indicate that the species continued to exist in Ngandong even about 117,000 to 108,000 years ago.

So far, anything that is known about the Denisovans, the mysterious archaic human species, was confined to the Denisova caves in Altai Mountain in Siberia. Because the remnants of this ancient species could be discovered in the fossils of the Denisova cave only. But a recent report published in Nature about the discovery of a Denisovan jawbone in a cave in the Tibetan Plateau has revealed many interesting facts about archaic humans. The fossil has been found to be 1,60,000 years old with a powerful jaw and unusually large teeth, resembling the most primitive Neanderthals. Protein analysis of the fossil revealed that they are closer to the Siberian Denisovans.

Image Courtesy: dawn.com

QUANTUM COMPUTING AND SUPREMACY:

Image Courtesy: Quantum magazine.

Computer scientists nowadays are concentrating on going far beyond the speed that the present genre of computing can achieve. Now the principles of quantum mechanics are being tried to incorporate into the next-generation computing. There have been some advances, but the issue in this realm that has sparked controversies is Googles claim to have obtained quantum supremacy.

Sycamore, Googles 53-qubit computer has solved a problem in 200 seconds which would have taken even a supercomputer 10,000 years. In fact, it is a first step. It has shown that a quantum computer can do a functional computation and that quantum computing does indeed solve a special class of problems much faster than conventional computers.

On the other hand, IBM researchers have countered saying that Google hadnt done anything special. This clash indeed highlights the intense commercial interest in quantum computing.

NATURE, CLIMATE AND AMAZON FOREST

Image Courtesy: NASA Earth Observatory.

The man-made climate change has already reached a critical state. Climate researches have already shown how crossing the critical state would bring irreversible changes to the global climate and an accompanying disaster for humanity.

In the year 2019 also, the world has witnessed many devastations in the forms of storms, floods and wildfires.

Apart from the extreme weather events that climate change is prodding, the nature itself is in the most perilous state ever, and the reason is human-made environmental destruction.

The global report submitted by Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reviewed some 15,000 scientific papers and also researched other sources of data on trends in biodiversity and its ability to provide people everything from food and fiber to clean water and air.

The report notes that out of 8 million known species of animals and plants, almost 1 million are under the threat of getting extinct and this includes more than 40% of amphibian species and almost a third of marine mammals.

The month of August witnessed an unprecedented wildfire in Amazon rainforest, the biggest in the world. The fire was so large-scale that the smoke covered nearby cities with dark clouds. It has been reported that Brazils National Institute for Space Research (INPE) recorded over 72,000 fires this year, which is an increase of about 80% from last year. More worrisome is the fact that more than 9,000 of these fires have taken place in the last week alone.

The fires have engulfed several large Amazon states in Northwestern Brazil. NASA, on August 11 noted that the fires were huge enough to be spotted from the space.

The main reason attributable to Amazon fires is widescale deforestation due to policy-level changes made by Bolsonaro regime. Many parts of the forest are now made open for the companies to set up business ventureseven the deeper parts of the forest. This has led to massive deforestation.

NEW DIMENSION TO THE TREATMENT OF EBOLA

Image Courtesy: UN News.

In the past, there had been no drugs that could have cured Ebola.

However, two out of four experimental trials carried out in Democratic Republic of Congo were found to be highly effective in saving patients lives. The new treatment method used a combination of existing drugs and newly developed ones. Named as PALM trial, the new method uses monoclonal antibodies and antiviral agencies.

Monoclonal antibodies are antibodies that are made by identical immune cells that are all clones of a unique parent cell. The monoclonal antibodies bind to specific cells or proteins. The objective is that this treatment will stimulate the patients immune system to attack those cells.

KILOGRAM REDEFINED

Image courtesy: phys.org

Kilogram, the unit to measure mass was defined by a hunk of metal in France. This hunk of metal, also known as the International Prototype Kilogram or Big K, is a platinum-iridium alloy having a mass of 1 kilogram housed at the Bureau of Weights and Measures in France since 1889. The IPK has many copies around the world and are used to calibrate scales to make sure that the whole world follows a standard system of measurement.

But the definition of the Kilogram will no longer be the same. On the International Metrology Day this year, the way a Kilogram has been measured for more than a century has been changed completely. Now, the kilogram would be defined using the Planck constant, something that does not change.

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Year 2019 in Science: History of Humans, Ebola Treatment and Quantum Computing - NewsClick

From the emerge of cognitive intelligence, in-memory-computing, fault-tolerant quantum computing, new materials-based semiconductor devices, to faster growth of industrial IoT, large-scale collaboration between machines, production-grade blockchain applications, modular chip design, and AI technologies to protect data privacy, more technology advancements and breakthroughs are expected to gain momentum and generate big impacts on our daily life.

We are at the era of rapid technology development. In particular, technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and data intelligence are expected to accelerate the pace of the digital economy, said Jeff Zhang, Head of Alibaba DAMO Academy and President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

The following are highlights from the Alibaba DAMO Academy predictions for the top 10 trends in the tech community for this year:

Artificial intelligence has reached or surpassed humans in the areas of perceptual intelligence such as speech to text, natural language processing, video understanding etc. but in the field of cognitive intelligence that requires external knowledge, logical reasoning, or domain migration, it is still in its infancy. Cognitive intelligence will draw inspiration from cognitive psychology, brain science, and human social history, combined with techniques such as cross domain knowledge graph, causality inference, and continuous learning to establish effective mechanisms for stable acquisition and expression of knowledge. These make machines to understand and utilize knowledge, achieving key breakthroughs from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence.

In Von Neumann architecture, memory and processor are separate and the computation requires data to be moved back and forth. With the rapid development of data-driven AI algorithms in recent years, it has come to a point where the hardware becomes the bottleneck in the explorations of more advanced algorithms. In Processing-in-Memory (PIM) architecture, in contrast to the Von Neumann architecture, memory and processor are fused together and computations are performed where data is stored with minimal data movement. As such, computation parallelism and power efficiency can be significantly improved. We believe the innovations on PIM architecture are the tickets to next-generation AI.

In 2020, 5G, rapid development of IoT devices, cloud computing and edge computing will accelerate the fusion of information system, communication system, and industrial control system. Through advanced Industrial IoT, manufacturing companies can achieve automation of machines, in-factory logistics, and production scheduling, as a way to realize C2B smart manufacturing. In addition, interconnected industrial system can adjust and coordinate the production capability of both upstream and downstream vendors. Ultimately it will significantly increase the manufacturers productivity and profitability. For manufacturers with production goods that value hundreds of trillion RMB, if the productivity increases 5-10%, it means additional trillions of RMB.

Traditional single intelligence cannot meet the real-time perception and decision of large-scale intelligent devices. The development of collaborative sensing technology of Internet of things and 5G communication technology will realize the collaboration among multiple agents machines cooperate with each other and compete with each other to complete the target tasks. The group intelligence brought by the cooperation of multiple intelligent bodies will further amplify the value of the intelligent system: large-scale intelligent traffic light dispatching will realize dynamic and real-time adjustment, while warehouse robots will work together to complete cargo sorting more efficiently; Driverless cars can perceive the overall traffic conditions on the road, and group unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collaboration will get through the last -mile delivery more efficiently.

Traditional model of chip design cannot efficiently respond to the fast evolving, fragmented and customized needs of chip production. The open source SoC chip design based on RISC-V, high-level hardware description language, and IP-based modular chip design methods have accelerated the rapid development of agile design methods and the ecosystem of open source chips. In addition, the modular design method based on chiplets uses advanced packaging methods to package the chiplets with different functions together, which can quickly customize and deliver chips that meet specific requirements of different applications.

BaaS (Blockchain-as-a-Service) will further reduce the barriers of entry for enterprise blockchain applications. A variety of hardware chips embedded with core algorithms used in edge, cloud and designed specifically for blockchain will also emerge, allowing assets in the physical world to be mapped to assets on blockchain, further expanding the boundaries of the Internet of Value and realizing multi-chain interconnection. In the future, a large number of innovative blockchain application scenarios with multi-dimensional collaboration across different industries and ecosystems will emerge, and large-scale production-grade blockchain applications with more than 10 million DAI (Daily Active Items) will gain mass adoption.

In 2019, the race in reaching Quantum Supremacy brought the focus back to quantum computing. The demonstration, using superconducting circuits, boosts the overall confidence on superconducting quantum computing for the realization of a large-scale quantum computer. In 2020, the field of quantum computing will receive increasing investment, which comes with enhanced competitions. The field is also expected to experience a speed-up in industrialization and the gradual formation of an eco-system. In the coming years, the next milestones will be the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computing and the demonstration of quantum advantages in real-world problems. Either is of a great challenge given the present knowledge. Quantum computing is entering a critical period.

Under the pressure of both Moores Law and the explosive demand of computing power and storage, it is difficult for classic Si based transistors to maintain sustainable development of the semiconductor industry. Until now, major semiconductor manufacturers still have no clear answer and option to chips beyond 3nm. New materials will make new logic, storage, and interconnection devices through new physical mechanisms, driving continuous innovation in the semiconductor industry. For example, topological insulators, two-dimensional superconducting materials, etc. that can achieve lossless transport of electron and spin can become the basis for new high-performance logic and interconnect devices; while new magnetic materials and new resistive switching materials can realize high-performance magnetics Memory such as SOT-MRAM and resistive memory.

Abstract: The compliance costs demanded by the recent data protection laws and regulations related to data transfer are getting increasingly higher than ever before. In light of this, there have been growing interests in using AI technologies to protect data privacy. The essence is to enable the data user to compute a function over input data from different data providers while keeping those data private. Such AI technologies promise to solve the problems of data silos and lack of trust in todays data sharing practices, and will truly unleash the value of data in the foreseeable future.

With the ongoing development of cloud computing technology, the cloud has grown far beyond the scope of IT infrastructure, and gradually evolved into the center of all IT technology innovations. Cloud has close relationship with almost all IT technologies, including new chips, new databases, self-driving adaptive networks, big data, AI, IoT, blockchain, quantum computing and so forth. Meanwhile, it creates new technologies, such as serverless computing, cloud-native software architecture, software-hardware integrated design, as well as intelligent automated operation. Cloud computing is redefining every aspect of IT, making new IT technologies more accessible for the public. Cloud has become the backbone of the entire digital economy.

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AI, ML and quantum computing to cement position in 2020: Alibabas Jeff Zhang - Tech Observer

David Gunkel's "Perspective" (January 8, 2020).

The holiday shopping is over and everyone is busy playing with their new toys. But what was remarkable about Christmas 2019 might have been the conspicuous absence of such toys.

Previous holiday seasons saw the introduction of impressive technological wonders -- tablet computers, the iPhone, Nintendo Wii and the X-box. But this year, there was no stand-out, got-to-have technological object.

On the one hand, this may actually be a good thing. The amount of waste generated by discarded consumer electronics is a massive global problem that we are not even close to managing responsibly. On the other hand however, this may be an indication of the beginning of the end of an era -- the era of Moores Law.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, then CEO of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, meaning that computer chip performance would develop at an almost exponential rate. But even Moore knew there was a physical limit to this dramatic escalation in computer power, and we are beginning to see it top out. That may be one reason why there were no new, got-to-have technological gizmos and gadgets this holiday season.

Sure, quantum computing is already being positioned as the next big thing. But it will be years, if not decades, before it finds its way into consumer products. So for now, do not ask Santa to fill your stocking with a brand-new quantum device. It will, for now at least, continue to be lumps of increasingly disappointing silicon.

Im David Gunkel, and thats my perspective.

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Perspective: End Of An Era | WNIJ and WNIU - WNIJ and WNIU