These technologies all have staying power. They will affect the economy and our politics, improve medicine, or influence our culture. Some are unfolding now; others will take a decade or more to develop. But you should know about all of them right now.
It’s not all that easy to call KnuEdge a startup. Created a decade ago by Daniel Goldin, the former head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, KnuEdge is only now coming out of stealth mode. It has already raised $100 million in funding to build a “neural chip” that Goldin says will make data centers more efficient in a hyperscale age.
Goldin, who founded the San Diego, California-based company with the former chief technology officer of NASA, said he believes the company’s brain-like chip will be far more cost and power efficient than current chips based on the computer design popularized by computer architect John von Neumann. In von Neumann machines, memory and processor are separated and linked via a data pathway known as a bus. Over the years, von Neumann machines have gotten faster by sending more and more data at higher speeds across the bus as processor and memory interact. But the speed of a computer is often limited by the capacity of that bus, leading to what some computer scientists to call the “von Neumann bottleneck.” IBM has seen the same problem, and it has a research team working on brain-like data center chips. Both efforts are part of an attempt to deal with the explosion of data driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Goldin’s company is doing something similar to IBM, but only on the surface. Its approach is much different, and it has been secretly funded by unknown angel investors. And Goldin said in an interview with VentureBeat that the company has already generated $20 million in revenue and is actively engaged in hyperscale computing companies and Fortune 500 companies in the aerospace, banking, health care, hospitality, and insurance industries. The mission is a fundamental transformation of the computing world, Goldin said.
“It all started over a mission to Mars,” Goldin said.
Above: KnuEdge’s first chip has 256 cores.Image Credit: KnuEdge
Back in the year 2000, Goldin saw that the time delay for controlling a space vehicle would be too long, so the vehicle would have to operate itself. He calculated that a mission to Mars would take software that would push technology to the limit, with more than tens of millions of lines of code.
Above: Daniel Goldin, CEO of KnuEdge.
Image Credit: KnuEdge
“I thought, holy smokes,” he said. “It’s going to be too expensive. It’s not propulsion. It’s not environmental control. It’s not power. This software business is a very big problem, and that nation couldn’t afford it.”
So Goldin looked further into the brains of the robotics, and that’s when he started thinking about the computing it would take.
Asked if it was easier to run NASA or a startup, Goldin let out a guffaw.
“I love them both, but they’re both very different,” Goldin said. “At NASA, I spent a lot of time on non-technical issues. I had a project every quarter, and I didn’t want to become dull technically. I tried to always take on a technical job doing architecture, working with a design team, and always doing something leading edge. I grew up at a time when you graduated from a university and went to work for someone else. If I ever come back to this earth, I would graduate and become an entrepreneur. This is so wonderful.”
Back in 1992, Goldin was planning on starting a wireless company as an entrepreneur. But then he got the call to “go serve the country,” and he did that work for a decade. He started KnuEdge (previously called Intellisis) in 2005, and he got very patient capital.
“When I went out to find investors, I knew I couldn’t use the conventional Silicon Valley approach (impatient capital),” he said. “It is a fabulous approach that has generated incredible wealth. But I wanted to undertake revolutionary technology development. To build the future tools for next-generation machine learning, improving the natural interface between humans and machines. So I got patient capital that wanted to see lightning strike. Between all of us, we have a board of directors that can contact almost anyone in the world. They’re fabulous business people and technologists. We knew we had a ten-year run-up.”
But he’s not saying who those people are yet.
KnuEdge’s chips are part of a larger platform. KnuEdge is also unveiling KnuVerse, a military-grade voice recognition and authentication technology that unlocks the potential of voice interfaces to power next-generation computing, Goldin said.
While the voice technology market has exploded over the past five years due to the introductions of Siri, Cortana, Google Home, Echo, and ViV, the aspirations of most commercial voice technology teams are still on hold because of security and noise issues. KnuVerse solutions are based on patented authentication techniques using the human voice — even in extremely noisy environments — as one of the most secure forms of biometrics. Secure voice recognition has applications in industries such as banking, entertainment, and hospitality.
KnuEdge says it is now possible to authenticate to computers, web and mobile apps, and Internet of Things devices (or everyday objects that are smart and connected) with only a few words spoken into a microphone — in any language, no matter how loud the background environment or how many other people are talking nearby. In addition to KnuVerse, KnuEdge offers Knurld.io for application developers, a software development kit, and a cloud-based voice recognition and authentication service that can be integrated into an app typically within two hours.
And KnuEdge is announcing KnuPath with LambdaFabric computing. KnuEdge’s first chip, built with an older manufacturing technology, has 256 cores, or neuron-like brain cells, on a single chip. Each core is a tiny digital signal processor. The LambdaFabric makes it possible to instantly connect those cores to each other — a trick that helps overcome one of the major problems of multicore chips, Goldin said. The LambdaFabric is designed to connect up to 512,000 devices, enabling the system to be used in the most demanding computing environments. From rack to rack, the fabric has a latency (or interaction delay) of only 400 nanoseconds. And the whole system is designed to use a low amount of power.
All of the company’s designs are built on biological principles about how the brain gets a lot of computing work done with a small amount of power. The chip is based on what Goldin calls “sparse matrix heterogeneous machine learning algorithms.” And it will run C++ software, something that is already very popular. Programmers can program each one of the cores with a different algorithm to run simultaneously, for the “ultimate in heterogeneity.” It’s multiple input, multiple data, and “that gives us some of our power,” Goldin said.
Above: KnuEdge’s KnuPath chip.
Image Credit: KnuEdge
“KnuEdge is emerging out of stealth mode to aim its new Voice and Machine Learning technologies at key challenges in IoT, cloud based machine learning and pattern recognition,” said Paul Teich, principal analyst at Tirias Research, in a statement. “Dan Goldin used his experience in transforming technology to charter KnuEdge with a bold idea, with the patience of longer development timelines and away from typical startup hype and practices. The result is a new and cutting-edge path for neural computing acceleration. There is also a refreshing surprise element to KnuEdge announcing a relevant new architecture that is ready to ship… not just a concept or early prototype.”
Today, Goldin said the company is ready to show off its designs. The first chip was ready last December, and KnuEdge is sharing it with potential customers. That chip was built with a 32-nanometer manufacturing process, and even though that’s an older technology, it is a powerful chip, Goldin said. Even at 32 nanometers, the chip has something like a two-times to six-times performance advantage over similar chips, KnuEdge said.
“The human brain has a couple of hundred billion neurons, and each neuron is connected to at least 10,000 to 100,000 neurons,” Goldin said. “And the brain is the most energy efficient and powerful computer in the world. That is the metaphor we are using.”
KnuEdge has a new version of its chip under design. And the company has already generated revenue from sales of the prototype systems. Each board has about four chips.
As for the competition from IBM, Goldin said, “I believe we made the right decision and are going in the right direction. IBM’s approach is very different from what we have. We are not aiming at anyone. We are aiming at the future.”
In his NASA days, Goldin had a lot of successes. There, he redesigned and delivered the International Space Station, tripled the number of space flights, and put a record number of people into space, all while reducing the agency’s planned budget by 25 percent. He also spent 25 years at TRW, where he led the development of satellite television services.
KnuEdge has 100 employees, but Goldin said the company outsources almost everything. Goldin said he is planning to raised a round of funding late this year or early next year. The company collaborated with the University of California at San Diego and UCSD’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.
With computers that can handle natural language systems, many people in the world who can’t read or write will be able to fend for themselves more easily, Goldin said.
“I want to be able to take machine learning and help people communicate and make a living,” he said. “This is just the beginning. This is the Wild West. We are talking to very large companies about this, and they are getting very excited.”
A sample application is a home that has much greater self-awareness. If there’s something wrong in the house, the KnuEdge system could analyze it and figure out if it needs to alert the homeowner.
Goldin said it was hard to keep the company secret.
“I’ve been biting my lip for ten years,” he said.
As for whether KnuEdge’s technology could be used to send people to Mars, Goldin said. “This is available to whoever is going to Mars. I tried twice. I would love it if they use it to get there.”
The use of drones is on the rise these days for lots of fun reasons, but when it comes to unmanned aerial vehicles, there are also security issues to consider: what happens if an one enters a flight path, or takes photos of things it's not supposed to? What if it carries a bomb over a crowded event? How do you take it down safely?
Well, the solution to this high-tech problem could be... eagles, according to a Dutch company that's training these keen-eyed birds of prey to take down drones on command. And we kind of love the idea.
It's definitely not the first time that eagles have gone after unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) - attacks have been happening in the wild ever since amateur drone use became popular.
But now Netherlands-based company, Guard from Above, is taking things one step further, by training the birds with food rewards to attack small drones, just like guard dogs.
They call it a "low-tech solution for a high-tech problem", and you can see it in action below:
Right now, there are regulations in each country that state how drones can and can't be used. But as good as these rules are, there aren't a whole lot of ways of enforcing them.
Eagles, on the other hand, habitually snatch their prey and drag it off somewhere to eat it, which is exactly what they do with drones, meaning there's no risk of a crash landing.
That's enough for police to get interested in what at first sounds like a pretty crazy idea.
That doesn't mean they were going to do anything wrong, but last year someone was prosecuted for flying a drone over busy football stadiums and tourist attractions - something that's strictly prohibited by international regulations, due to the risk that a drone could fall, or potentially even be carrying a weapon.
"We have seen a number of incidents around airfields, and, in the end, we want to be prepared should anyone want to use a drone for an attack of some sort," detective chief superintendent of the Dutch police, Mark Wiebes, told Castle.
The problem, of course, is whether or not the eagles can be hurt by this kind of work. That's unfortunately a possibility, but as risky as the whole thing sounds for the eagles, one of the security consultants who started Guard From Above, Sjoerd Hoogendoorn, told The New York Times that safety was the top priority for the animals, and no birds have been seriously harmed so far.
They're now looking into ways they could make the birds even more secure, with the potential for protective gear to be worn on their talons, and maybe even body armour.
Scientists are exploiting the laws of quantum mechanics to create computers with an exponential increase in computing power.
Quantum computing
Since their creation in the 1950s and 1960s, digital computers have become a mainstay of modern life. Originally taking up entire rooms and taking many hours to perform simple calculations, they have become both highly portable and extremely powerful. Computers can now be found in many people’s pockets, on their desks, in their watches, their televisions and their cars. Our demand for processing power continues to increase as more people connect to the internet and the integration of computing into our lives increases.
Video source: In a nutshell - Kurzgesagt / YouTube. .View video details.
When Moore’s Law meets quantum mechanics
In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, one of the world’s largest computer companies, first described what has now become known as Moore’s Law. An observation rather than a physical law, Moore noticed that the number of components that could fit on a computer chip doubled roughly every two years, and this observation has proven to hold true over the decades. Accordingly, the processing power and memory capacity of computers has doubled every two years as well.
Starting from computer chips that held a few thousand components in the 1960s, chips today hold several billion components. There is a physical limit to how small these components can get, and as they get near the size of an atom, the quirky rules that govern quantum mechanics come into play. These rules that govern the quantum world are so different from those of the macro world that our traditional understanding of binary logic in a computer doesn’t really work effectively any more. Quantum laws are based on probabilities, so a computer on this scale no longer works in a ‘deterministic’ manner, which means it gives us a definite answer. Rather, it starts to behave in a ‘probablistic’ way—the answer the computer would give us is based on probabilities, each result could fluctuate and we would have to try several times to get a reliable answer.
So if we want to keep increasing computer power, we are going to have to find a new way. Instead of being stymied or trying to avoid the peculiarities of quantum mechanics, we must find ways to exploit them.
In the computer that sits on your desk, your smartphone, or the biggest supercomputer in the world, information, be it text, pictures or sound is stored very simply as a number. The computer does its job by performing arithmetic calculations upon all these numbers. For example, every pixel in a photo is assigned numbers that represents its colour or brightness, numbers that can then be used in calculations to change or alter the image.
The computer saves these numbers in binary form instead of the decimal form that we use every day. In binary, there are only two numberss: 0 and 1. In a computer, these are known as ‘bits’, short for ‘binary digits’. Every piece of information in your computer is stored as a string of these 0s and 1s. As there are only two options, the 1 or the 0, it’s easy to store these using a number of different methods—for example, as magnetic dots on a hard drive, where the bit is either magnetised one way (1) or another (0), or where the bit has a tiny amount of electrical charge (1) or no charge (0). These combinations of 0s and 1s can represent almost anything, including letters, sounds and commands that tell the computer what to do.
Instead of binary bits, a quantum computer uses qubits. These are particles, such as an atom, ion or photon, where the information is stored by manipulating the particles’ quantum properties, such as spin or polarisation states.
In a normal computer the many steps of a calculation are carried out one after the other. Even if the computer might work on several calculations in parallel, each calculation has to be done one step at a time. A quantum computer works differently. The qubits are programmed with a complex set of conditions, which formulates the question, and these conditions then evolve following the rules of the quantum world—Schrödinger’s wave equation—to find the answer. Each programmed qubit evolves simultaneously; all the steps of the calculation are taken at the same time. Mathematicians have found that this approach can solve a number of computational tasks that are very hard or time consuming on a classical computer. Thespeed advantage is enormous—and grows with the complexity we can program (i.e. the number of qubits the quantum computer has).
Superposition
Individually, each qubit has its own quantum properties, such as spin. This has two values +1 and -1, but can also be in what’s called a superposition: partly +1 and partly -1. If you think of a globe, you can point to the North Pole (+1) or the South Pole (-1) or any other point in between: London, or Sydney. A quantum particle can be a in a state that is part North Pole and part South Pole.
A qubit with superposition is in a much more complex state than the simple 1 or 0 of a binary bit. More parameters are required to describe that state, and this translates to the amount of information a qubit can hold and process.
Entanglement
Even more interesting is the fact that we can link many particles, each in their state of superposition, together. We can create a link, called entanglement, where all of these particles are dependent upon each other, all their properties exist at the same time. All the particles together are in one big state that evolves, according to the rules of quantum mechanics, as a single system. This is what gives quantum computers their power of parallel processing—the qubits all evolve, individual yet linked, simultaneously.
Imagine the complexity of all these combinations, all the superpositions. The number of parameters needed to fully describe N qubits grows as 2 to the power N. Basically, this means that for each qubit you add to the computer, the information required to describe the assembly of qubits doubles. Just 50 qubits would require more than a billion numbers to describe their collective states or contents. This is where the supreme power of a quantum computer lies, since the evolution in time of these qubits corresponds to a bigger calculation, without costing more time.
For the particular tasks suited to quantum computers, a quantum computer with 30 qubits would be more powerful than the world’s most powerful supercomputer, and a 300 qubit quantum computer would be more powerful than every computer in the world connected together.
A delicate operation
An important feature of these quantum rules is that they are very sensitive to outside interference. The qubits must be kept completely isolated, so they are only being controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics, and not influenced by any environmental factors. Any disturbance to the qubits will cause them to leave their state of superposition—this is called decoherence. If the qubits decohere, the computation will break down. Creating a totally quiet, isolated environment is one of the great challenges of building a quantum computer.
Another challenge is transferring information from the quantum processor to some sort of quantum memory system that can preserve the information so that we can then read the answer. Researchers are working on developing ‘non-demolition’ readouts—ways to read the output of a computation without breaking the computation.
What are quantum computers useful for?
A lot of coverage of the applications of quantum computers talk about the huge gains in processing power over classical computers. Many statements have been made about being able to effortlessly solve hard problems instantaneously but it’s not clear if all the promises will hold up. Rather than being able to solve all of the world’s financial, medical and scientific questions at the press of a button, it’s much more likely that, as with many major scientific projects, the knowledge gain that comes from building the computers will prove just as valuable as their potential applications.
The nearest term and most likely applications for quantum computers will be within quantum mechanics itself. Quantum computers will provide a useful new way of simulating and testing the workings of quantum theory, with implications for chemistry, biochemistry, nanotechnology and drug design. Search engine optimisation for internet searches, management of other types of big data and optimising other systems, such as fleet routing and manufacturing processes could also be impacted by quantum computing.
Another area where large scale quantum computers are predicted to have a big impact is that of data security. In a world where so much of our personal information is online, keeping our data—bank details or our medical records—secure is crucial. To keep it safe, our data is protected by encryption algorithms that the recipient needs to ‘unlock’ with a key. Prime number factoring is one method used to create encryption algorithms. The key is based on knowing the prime number factors of a large number. This sounds pretty basic, but it’s actually very difficult to figure out what the prime number factors of a large number are.
Classical computers can very easily multiply two prime numbers to find their product. But their only option when performing the operation in reverse is a repetitive process of checking one number after another. Even performing billions of calculations per second, this can take an extremely long time when the numbers get especially large. Once numbers reach over 1000 digits, figuring out its prime number factors is generally considered to take too long for a classical computer to calculate—the data encryption is ‘uncrackable’ and our data is kept safe and sound.
However, the superposed qubits of quantum computers change everything. In 1994, mathematician Peter Shor came up with an algorithm that would enable quantum computers to factor large prime numbers significantly faster than by classical methods. As quantum computing advances we may need to change the way we secure our data so that quantum computers can’t access it.
Beyond these applications that we can foretell, there will undoubtedly be many new applications appearing as the technology develops. With classical computers, it was impossible to predict the advances of the internet, voice recognition and touch interfaces that are today so commonplace. Similarly, the most important breakthroughs to come from quantum computing are likely still unknown.
Two teams from the University of NSW (UNSW) are using silicon to create extremely coherent qubits in new ways, which opens the door to creating quantum computers using easy to manufacture components. One team is focussing on using silicon transistors like those in our laptops and smartphones.
The other UNSW-led team is working to create qubits from phosphorus atoms embedded in silicon. In 2012, this team created atom-sized components ten years ahead of schedule by making the world’s smallest transistor.
They placed a single phosphorus atom on a sheet of silicon with all the necessary atomic-sized components that would be needed to apply a voltage to the phosphorus atom, giving it its spin state in order to function as a qubit.
The nuclear spins of single phosphorus atoms have been shown to have
the highest fidelity (>99%) and
longest coherence time (>35 seconds)
of any qubit in the solid state making them extremely attractive for a scalable system.
A team at the University of Queensland is working to develop quantum computing techniques using single photons as qubits. In 2010, this team has also conducted the first quantum chemistry simulation. This sort of a task involves computing the complex quantum interactions between electrons and requires such complicated equations that performing the calculations with a classical computer necessarily requires a trade-off between accuracy and computational feasibility. Qubits, being in a quantum state themselves, are much more capable of representing these systems, and so offer great potential to the field of quantum chemistry.
This group has also performed a demonstration of a quantum device using photons capable of performing a task that is factorially difficult – i.e. one of the specific tasks that classical computers get stuck with.
Large sums of money are being invested into Australian quantum computing research. In 2014, the Commonwealth Bank made an investment of $5 million towards the .Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales. Microsoft has invested more than $10M in engineered quantum systems at University of Sydney, also in 2014.
It’s not very likely that in 20 years we’ll all be walking around with quantum devices in our pockets. Most likely, the first quantum computers will be servers that people will access to undertake complex calculations. However, it is not easy to predict the future, who would have thought fifty years ago, that we would enjoy the power and functionality of today’s computers, like the smartphones that so many of us now depend upon? Who can tell what technology will be at our beck and call if the power of quantum mechanics can be harvested?
