Google is Banning Cryptocurrency Ads in June

Google is cracking down on cryptocurrency-related advertising.

The company is updating its financial services-related ad policies to ban any advertising about cryptocurrency-related content, including initial coin offerings (ICOs), wallets, and trading advice, Google's director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer, told CNBC.

That means that even companies with legitimate cryptocurrency offerings won't be allowed to serve ads through any of Google's ad products, which place advertising on its own sites as well as third-party websites.

This update will go into effect in June 2018, according to a company post.

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Google Announced a 72 qubit quantum computer

Google announced a 72-qubit universal quantum computer that promises the same low error rates the company saw in its first 9-qubit quantum computer. Google believes that this quantum computer, called Bristlecone, will be able to bring us to an age of quantum supremacy.

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Augmented Reality Company Magic Leap Claims Employees Stole Intellectual Property

Artificial reality startup Magic Leap is accusing two Silicon Valley employees of stealing the closely guarded secrets behind its technological tricks.

The allegations of betrayal and skullduggery surfaced in a lawsuit that Magic Leap filed late Thursday in federal court after the two workers, Gary Bradski and Adrian Kaehler, sued the company for wrongful termination earlier this week. An attorney for Bradski and Kaehler denied the company's allegations.

The legal tussle over intellectual property and stock options highlights the rising stakes in artificial reality as more technology companies bet it will produce the industry's next big breakthroughs.

Since its inception six years ago, Magic Leap has emerged as one of artificial reality's most intriguing startups while raising $1.4 billion from a list of investors that include Google and China's Alibaba Group. The last round of financing completed earlier this year valued the Dania Beach, Florida, company at $4.5 billion, even though it hasn't released a product yet and hasn't even disclosed a timetable for doing so.

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Project Aura: Google Glass, Enterprise Edition

You won't have to wait for Google to reveal the next generation of Glass (aka Project Aura) -- regulators just stepped in on its behalf. A newly published FCC filing shows the previously rumored Enterprise Edition headset, and it's clearly a big improvement over the Explorer model from years earlier. The work-focused eyepiece touts a much slicker (and likely more durable) design with both a larger display prism and a hinge that lets you fold it up for travel. The test photos also reveal a spot for a magnetic battery attachment and what looks to be a speedier Atom processor.

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Inside Google's Quantum Computing Lab

John Martinis used the arm of his reading glasses to indicate the spot where he intends to demonstrate an almost unimaginably powerful new form of computer in a few years. It is a cylindrical socket an inch and a half across, at the bottom of a torso-sized stack of plates, blocks, and wires of brass, copper, and gold. The day after I met with him this fall, he loaded the socket with an experimental superconducting chip etched with a microscopic Google logo and cooled the apparatus to a hundredth of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. To celebrate that first day of testing the machine, Martinis threw what he called “a little party” at a brewpub with colleagues from his newly outfitted Google lab in Santa Barbara, California.

That party was nothing compared with the celebration that will take place if Martinis and his group can actually create the wonder computer they seek. Because it would harness the strange properties of quantum physics that arise in extreme conditions like those on the ultracold chip, the new computer would let a Google coder run calculations in a coffee break that would take a supercomputer of today millions of years. The software that Google has developed on ordinary computers to drive cars or answer questions could become vastly more intelligent. And earlier-stage ideas bubbling up at Google and its parent company, such as robots that can serve as emergency responders or software that can converse at a human level, might become real.

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Scott Aaronson Takes on DWave & Google's Quantum Annealing Speed up Claims

In retrospect, I should’ve been suspicious, when more than a year went by with no major D-Wave announcements that everyone wanted me to react to immediately. Could it really be that this debate was over—or not “over,” but where it always should’ve been, in the hands of experts who might disagree vehemently but are always careful to qualify speedup claims—thereby freeing up the erstwhile Chief D-Wave Skeptic for more “rewarding” projects, like charting a middle path through the Internet’s endless social justice wars?

Nope.

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Google Claims D-Wave Quantum Annealing Computer Works, has Significant Speedups Over Classicaly Computers

During the last two years, the Google Quantum AI team has made progress in understanding the physics governing quantum annealers. We recently applied these new insights to construct proof-of-principle optimization problems and programmed these into the D-Wave 2X quantum annealer that Google operates jointly with NASA. The problems were designed to demonstrate that quantum annealing can offer runtime advantages for hard optimization problems characterized by rugged energy landscapes.

We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10^8.

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What is the Computational Value of Finite Range Tunneling?

Authors:

Denchev et al

Abstract:

Quantum annealing (QA) has been proposed as a quantum enhanced optimization heuristic exploiting tunneling. Here, we demonstrate how finite range tunneling can provide considerable computational advantage. For a crafted problem designed to have tall and narrow energy barriers separating local minima, the D-Wave 2X quantum annealer achieves significant runtime advantages relative to Simulated Annealing (SA). For instances with 945 variables this results in a time-to-99\%-success-probability that is ∼108 times faster than SA running on a single processor core. We also compared physical QA with Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC), an algorithm that emulates quantum tunneling on classical processors. We observe a substantial constant overhead against physical QA: D-Wave 2X runs up to ∼108 times faster than an optimized implementation of QMC on a single core. To investigate whether finite range tunneling will also confer an advantage for problems of practical interest, we conduct numerical studies on binary optimization problems that cannot yet be represented on quantum hardware. For random instances of the number partitioning problem, we find numerically that QMC, as well as other algorithms designed to simulate QA, scale better than SA and better than the best known classical algorithms for this problem. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of next generation quantum annealers.

Robopocalypse Report #28: Digital Hormones for Robots...greeeeeeaaaaat...

Drones:

Google's latest delivery drone prototype has been spotted.  Google has also registered its delivery drones for testing in the US.

Amazon appears to have gotten permission for its drone delivery tests in the US, amongst others.

The FAA is going to require everyone who buys a drone will have to register that drone.  There are lots of negative responses to the FAA Plans requiring everyone must register a drone when bought.

Legislation fencing in drones from aircraft is looming.

Researchers are working on drones to automatically repair cities in the future.

A Japanese company has developed an origami-like orinthopter drone, the skeleton of which is 3d printed.

NOAA Fisheries is using a hexacopter to monitor the health of southern resident killer whales.

A new virtual reality app allows for flying your drone.

 

Self Driving Cars:

Why self driving cars must be 'programmed to kill.'

Self driving cars might map our cities in the future.

A road rally enthusiast took the Tesla S largely hands off from coast-to-coast using the new Autopilot software in under 58 hours. On the other hand, many people are using it beyond what its capable of doing and nearly getting themselves killed.

Honda is planning a partially self driving car in 2020.

One opinion on how close are we - really - to self driving cars and how far we have come in the past 11 years.

Google's self driving car may hit production in the next few years.

Japan is putting together the regulations for self driving cars.

Mother Nature Network claims self driving cars won't replace mass transit.

Uber needs self driving cars to prevent becoming just another taxi company.

Will self driving cars kill motor sports?

Rio Tinto's mine trucks are already self driving (and remotely monitored).

German researchers has a self driving car drive from Nogales to Mexico City without human intervention.

Wired calls out a Scientific American article claiming hacking cars is nearly impossible for its inaccuracy.

3d Printing:

A University of Colorado student 3d printed high heels as her "final thesis."

A Torontoan has developed a solar powered 3d printer for medical device production in remote locations.

Caterpillar, the heavy equipment company, is adopting 3d printing for manufacturing.

Medical science is one of the areas 3d printing has a potential to transform the industry.  3d printing life-like prosthetics is now possible and 3d printing cartilage is now possible, too.  Scottish researchers are 3d printing stem cells.  3d printed organs may face issues with patent law.  Researchers in the Netherlands have developed a 3d printed tooth made from resin that can kill 99% of mouth bacteria.

Robotics:

Harvard has improved their robotic bee so it can swim and fly.

Cornell has developed 'soft actuators.'

Bristol Robotics Lab has developed the Row Bot, a swimming bot that uses microbial fuel cells to swim, well, the claim is forever because the microbes produce energy from the water and its organics for the robot to keep going.  In other words, this robot is the equivalent of a jelly fish, folks: it eats for energy.

How do you teach a robot to fall down gracefully?

Can studying the spider cricket help improve robotic hopping design?

DARPA's jazz playing bots are meant to explore ways people and robots can interact.

Dubai based Digi Robotics is branching out into several areas other than just industrial bots.  This includes a self driving car (Carbot), food service and fire fighting bots.

Fetch Robotics' warehouse bot is ready for the early adopters.  I think they are targeting the wrong market: this robot follows people around is really meant to be a shopping cart at the grocery store.  Seriously.  The elderly and parents with kids would LOVE this thing.  However, sell it to the market, not the consumer.

Robots are now making very high end furniture.

UC San Diego has developed a bot that can explore and clean air ducts.

Dyson, the vacuum cleaner company, has their own vacuum bot, but it is pricey and delayed.

Robots may not be the machines of logic alone (sorry, Data).  It seems some are working on giving robots the digital equivalent of hormones.  Greeeaaaaat.  Teenager bots.  Just what we need in the Robopocalypse.

Deepfield Robotics has developed a bot to go out into the field and weed.

Robotics has already had an impact on farming.

Cyborgism:

The Japanese have been working on artificial skin for robotic prosthetics to provide touch sensation.

Software Bots:

A new algorithm can predict human behavior better than people can.

Japanese researchers have developed software for bots to change their tone if people are not paying attention to what they are saying.

Google is apparently rethinking its method for machine learning.

Economics:

Some governments are subsidizing the robopocalypse.

Robopocalypse #20: The Sharing Economy is Doomed by the Bots, Just Watch Uber

Welcome to the Robopocalypse Report!  This is my news update on the onrushing robotic revolution in our economy.   I'll sometimes make editorial comments about the links, but for now this is larger a list of the news rather than a lot of commentary.

In the age of the drones,  the laws have not caught up.
 The FAA is the gating factor for drone based deliveries.

Drones are continuing to be a problem for commercial and medical flights.

On the other hand, Alaska has embarked on a major push to make drones an important part of its economy and Hawaii is wondering if it ought to as well.

On the self driving cars side, CNET dedicates an issue to "Riding in cars with bots."

The Washington Post gushes over Google's self driving cars.

The insurance industry thinks the manufacturers of self driving cars ought to bear the costs of liability.

Related to the self driving cars, Google will start delivering groceries in San Francisco this next year.

Why is Uber betting big on self driving cars?  hmm.  Maybe it has to do with the fact Uber wants to get rid of those drivers who are sharing their cars?  heh.  Pretty funny that they are financing directly their own replacement.  Doubly so since Uber's drivers are not classified as employees in California. 

The Woz thinks self driving cars could be the next big thing for Apple.

In 3d printing, a whole new technique, Laser-based Direct Metal Deposition, has been unveiled.  

A new 3d fabrication technique has been inspired by Japanese origami.

XYZ Printing has a new 3d scanner.

An American construction company owner has 3d printed a suite in a hotel he owns in the Philippines.

Navies may start 3d printing ships.

3d Systems' Fabricate is designed specifically for textile manufacturing.

The market for 3d printed medical devices is expected to be $2.13 billion by 2020.

The entire global market for 3d printing in 2014 was $3.8 billion.

On the robotics side, a Dutch company has created a vending machine that makes fresh french fries.

NEATO releases a new robotic vacuum cleaner that joins up via the buzzwordy the Internet of Things.  Just wait for the hacker to start chasing you around with the vacuum!  Kinda like this...

SAM, brick laying bot, is doing a job in DC for those of you interested in checking it out.

There's an interesting essay on building enthusiasm for bots in construction.

At Fort Bragg, they are testing out building an aerial gunnery range with bots.

Agriculture wishes they had bots for certain crops in a big way.

Just where how are the bots going to be used on the farm?

Where are the bots working in the diary and fishing industries?

How much fast will the agri bot industry grow through 2019?

In Australia three $150k bots replaced 60 welders.

In general software bots, not even IT workers are going to be safe.

Is the robopocalypse coming for the accountants?

On the artificial intelligence side, Scientific American asks the question of whether or not AI will ever be smarter than people.

They also ponder what will happen when AI gets involved with healthcare. 

On the economics of the robopocalypse, the financial sector seems to be unhappy with the idea of the robopocalypse.  Or at least some folks in thre are.

What does the robopocalypse have in common with the industrial revolution?

Why haven't the bots already taken our jobs?

On the legal side, a would-be Japanese John Connor was arrested.

Is it legal to go John Connor on that drone bugging you? 

Robopocalypse Report 2

Checking an aircraft for damage can be arduous and meticulous work, but last week’s issue of The Economist highlights an experimental commercial approach. In simple terms, the Remote Intelligent Survey Equipment for Radiation (RISER) drone is a quadcopter with LIDAR and forms the basis for a system to use lasers to automatically detect damage to airliners.

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Google's Self Driving Cars are Driving in Austin and DC now.

Google self-driving cars have hit the road in Austin, Tex., the first time the project’s testing program has expanded beyond the streets around its hometown in California.

Google said late Monday one of the company’s Lexus RX450h SUVs has been cruising around a few square miles north and northeast of downtown Austin for a few weeks. The car, outfitted with cameras and sensors, is creating a detailed map of the streets, lane markers, traffic signals, curb heights, “keep clear” zones, and other information that helps the driverless software understand where the car is in the world.

In recent days, the software and sensors have started doing the driving after being guided by drivers, Google said. Two safety drivers will be in the car to take over if needed and provide feedback to Google engineers about how the car is behaving, suggesting things like smoother cornering.

Since the self-driving car project began in 2009, Google has mostly tested the technology in Mountain View, Calif., near its headquarters. The company has taken cars to other places like Austin and Washington D.C. in the past to give demos for a day or two.

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Uber Wants Over 500k Driverless Teslas (that's not a sharing economy!)

Tesla Motors is one of several automakers planning to put a self-driving car on sale sometime in the next few years, and it already seems to have at least one big fan.

This person isn't a celebrity owner or safety advocate, but rather the CEO of preeminent ride-sharing company Uber.

If Tesla can build a fully-autonomous car by 2020, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick says his company would it. In fact, he'd buy every one Tesla builds.

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Difference Between Self Driving Cars, Driver Assistance Systems and how Self Driving Cars see the Roads

Google Takes 3rd Gen Self Driving Car to Roads

In a post today on its Google+ page, the Google Self-Driving Car Project announced that its latest cars were being tested on public roads starting today. The odd-shaped little cars are the third generation of self-driving car technology that Google has been testing since 2012.

Drivers around Mountain View might see the little cars rolling around suburban streets and the Google campus, joining the existing fleet of modified Lexus RX450h and Toyota Prius models. Each car will have a "safety driver," although Google's ultimate vision is to do away with standard controls such as the steering wheel and accelerator.

The cars are part of an ongoing project to develop self-driving cars that could potentially be safer than human drivers. Automotive equipment supplier Delphi Labs, also in Mountain View, has been testing its own self-driving car technology on public roads, making the area a hotbed for this type of technology. Automakers, such as Nissan and Ford, have predicted that autonomous cars will become available to the public by 2020.

Google notes that its new self-driving cars, which use electric propulsion, have a top speed of 25 mph. The Google+ post asks "to hear what our neighbors think," seeming to elicit comment from drivers who encounter the cars.

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Google Launching Experimental Patent Market Place

Google announced this morning the launch of an experimental program that will allow it to purchase patents from businesses and other patent holders who wish to sell. The company says its new “Patent Purchase Promotion,” opening next month, is an effort to “remove friction” from a patent market that currently fraught with patent trolls, lawsuits and other wasted efforts.

On its new online portal, patent holders will be able to essentially list the patents they have for sale, and set their own prices. The marketplace will not remain open indefinitely, however – instead, Google says that it will go live on May 8, 2015, and will be available through May 22, 2015. The decision to keep it open only for a limited time means Google will have to work quickly to determine which patents it wants to buy, which benefits sellers in need of a more immediate decision.

If Google decides to buy a patent, it says it will work through due diligence with the company, and close the transaction “in short order.” In fact, the company says it anticipates that all patent sellers will be paid by late August by way of ACH bank transfer.

The portal is only open to U.S. patent submissions, it should be noted.

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Digital Assistant Wars Have Begun: MicroSoft Porting Cortana to IOS, Android

Microsoft is working on an advanced version of its competitor to Apple's Siri, using research from an artificial intelligence project called "Einstein."

Microsoft has been running its "personal assistant" Cortana on its Windows phones for a year, and will put the new version on the desktop with the arrival of Windows 10 this autumn. Later, Cortana will be available as a standalone app, usable on phones and tablets powered by Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iOS and Google Inc's (GOOG.O) Android, people familiar with the project said.

"This kind of technology, which can read and understand email, will play a central role in the next roll out of Cortana, which we are working on now for the fall time frame," said Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research and a part of the Einstein project, in an interview at the company's Redmond, Washington, headquarters. Horvitz and Microsoft declined comment on any plan to take Cortana beyond Windows.

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Some see a deeper game.

Google's Architectual Plans for Mountain View

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Google and Uber Racing to Taxi Cab Robopocalypse?

Uber faces an ever-growing cast of adversaries that includes dubious regulators, litigious drivers, hostile members of the press, and some well-funded rivals. But the most significant threat to the app-based transportation company may be much closer to home: one of its biggest investors, Google.

Google Ventures, the search giant's venture capital arm, invested $258 million in Uber in August 2013. It was Google Ventures' largest investment deal ever, and the company put more money into Uber's next funding round less than a year later. Back then, it was easy for observers to imagine Google teaming closely with Uber, or even one day acquiring it. David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development, joined the Uber board of directors in 2013 and has served on it ever since.

Now there are signs that the companies are more likely to be ferocious competitors than allies. Google is preparing to offer its own ride-hailing service, most likely in conjunction with its long-in-development driverless car project. Drummond has informed Uber's board of this possibility, according to a person close to the Uber board, and Uber executives have seen screenshots of what appears to be a Google ride-sharing app that is currently being used by Google employees. This person, who requested not to be named because the talks are private, said the Uber board is now weighing whether to ask Drummond to resign his position as an Uber board member.

Uber is also teaming up with Carnegie Mellon University for a research facility in Pittsburgh, Pa., to develop its own autonomous vehicle technology, the company announced on Monday.

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Google Debuts Next Revision Self Driving Car

In May, Google released a teaser image showing a mock-up of the autonomous vehicle it planned to build. Today, the company followed up with an image showing the finished product, which looks just as silly as the original mockup.

Google’s previous autonomous car was a modified Toyota Prius, which used a combination of cameras, sensors, and software to drive itself around California. The modified Prius was very successful, reportedly driving more than 700,000 miles with minimal issues.

Google says the first edition of its self-made self-driving car will feature “temporary manual controls as needed while we continue to test and learn.” When Google introduced its prototype back in May, the company claimed its self-driving cars “won’t have a steering wheel, accelerator pad, or brake pedal…because they don’t need them.” Apparently, it still has yet to reach that point.

Even at a glance, the new self-driving car doesn’t look like anything that Google might introduce to the market. With room for two passengers and little else, it currently looks like a less-convenient Smart car. While the bare-bones prototype should make it useful for testing, what a Google-brand car might look like at a dealership remains to be seen.

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Is Google Glass a Failure?

After two years of popping up at high-profile events sporting Google Glass, the gadget that transforms eyeglasses into spy-movie worthy technology, Google co-founder Sergey Brin sauntered bare-faced into a Silicon Valley red-carpet event on Sunday.

He'd left his pair in the car, Brin told a reporter. The Googler, who heads up the top-secret lab which developed Glass, has hardly given up on the product -- he recently wore his pair to the beach.

But Brin's timing is not propitious, coming as many developers and early Glass users are losing interest in the much-hyped, $1,500 test version of the product: a camera, processor and stamp-sized computer screen mounted to the edge of eyeglass frames. Google Inc itself has pushed back the Glass roll out to the mass market.

While Glass may find some specialized, even lucrative, uses in the workplace, its prospects of becoming a consumer hit in the near future are slim, many developers say.

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SCH-SCH-SCH-SCHAFT! Robotics, erm, Google Robotics Schafted Division

Details of Google's Self Driving Car Tests in Nevada Revealed by IEEE Spectrum

Regulations governing Google’s experimental self-driving cars will come into effect on California’s roads starting 16 September. They have driven more than 1 million kilometers since the company started secretly developing them in 2009, but they have been tested only once by a government body on open roads—by Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) officials in May 2012.

IEEE Spectrum has now obtained the driving log of this test, and e-mails referring to it, under Freedom of Information legislation. Some of this information is not new. For example, Nevada officials shared that the Google’s autonomous Toyota Prius passed the test almost immediately. What has not been revealed until now, however, is that Google chose the test route and set limits on the road and weather conditions that the vehicle could encounter, and that its engineers had to take control of the car twice during the drive.

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