How fast is quantum computing? By some estimates, quantum computers may be 158 million times faster than the fastest current supercomputer. Many of us may think such power is destined to be a tool used solely for complex scientific calculations, but it may soon play a significant role in functions and industries that impact our everyday lives. Further, while quantum technology could play a tremendous role in improving everything from human health to energy exploration, in unscrupulous hands, our increasingly digital work and personal lives could be at added risk. Tech experts are clear: The time to prepare for the impacts of quantum computing (both good and bad) is now.

The discovery of new catalysts is one of the significant topics of computational chemistry as it has the potential to accelerate the adoption of renewable energy sources. Recently developed deep learning approaches such as graph neural networks (GNNs) open new opportunity to significantly extend scope for modelling novel high-performance catalysts. Nevertheless, the graph representation of particular crystal structure is not a straightforward task due to the ambiguous connectivity schemes and numerous embeddings of nodes and edges. Here we present embedding improvement for GNN that has been modified by Voronoi tesselation and is able to predict the energy of catalytic systems within Open Catalyst Project dataset. Enrichment of the graph was calculated via Voronoi tessellation and the corresponding contact solid angles and types (direct or indirect) were considered as features of edges and Voronoi volumes were used as node characteristics. The auxiliary approach was enriching node representation by intrinsic atomic properties (electronegativity, period and group position). Proposed modifications allowed us to improve the mean absolute error of the original model and the final error equals to 651 meV per atom on the Open Catalyst Project dataset and 6 meV per atom on the intermetallics dataset. Also, by consideration of additional dataset, we show that a sensible choice of data can decrease the error to values above physically-based 20 meV per atom threshold.

Approximate computing Approximate computing (AxC) has been long accepted as a design refers to techniques that exploit the inherent error resilience alternative for efficient system implementation at the cost of relaxed of several applications to achieve improvements in efficiency (e.g., accuracy requirements. Despite the AxC research activities energy and performance) at all layers of the computing stack [60]. in various application domains, AxC thrived the past decade when For example, prior analysis on a benchmark suite of 12 recognition, it was applied in Machine Learning (ML). The by definition approximate mining and search applications showed that 83% of the runtime is notion of ML models but also the increased computational spent in tasks that are amenable to approximation [15, 60]. The origins overheads associated with ML applications-that were effectively of approximate computing (AxC) can be traced back to various mitigated by corresponding approximations-led to a perfect matching fields including computer arithmetic (floating point representation) and a fruitful synergy. AxC for AI/ML has transcended beyond [63], arithmetic units (adders [54] and multipliers [80]), digital academic prototypes. In this work, we enlighten the synergistic signal processing (filter design) [27], algorithms (approximation nature of AxC and ML and elucidate the impact of AxC in designing algorithms) [62], and networking (best-effort packet delivery) [9].

Wireless networked control system (WNCS) connecting sensors, controllers, and actuators via wireless communications is a key enabling technology for highly scalable and low-cost deployment of control systems in the Industry 4.0 era. Despite the tight interaction of control and communications in WNCSs, most existing works adopt separative design approaches. This is mainly because the co-design of control-communication policies requires large and hybrid state and action spaces, making the optimal problem mathematically intractable and difficult to be solved effectively by classic algorithms. In this paper, we systematically investigate deep learning (DL)-based estimator-control-scheduler co-design for a model-unknown nonlinear WNCS over wireless fading channels. In particular, we propose a co-design framework with the awareness of the sensor's age-of-information (AoI) states and dynamic channel states. We propose a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based algorithm for controller and scheduler optimization utilizing both model-free and model-based data. An AoI-based importance sampling algorithm that takes into account the data accuracy is proposed for enhancing learning efficiency. We also develop novel schemes for enhancing the stability of joint training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed joint training algorithm can effectively solve the estimation-control-scheduling co-design problem in various scenarios and provide significant performance gain compared to separative design and some benchmark policies.

A semi-autonomous prosthesis control based on computer vision can be used to improve performance while decreasing the cognitive burden, especially when using advanced systems with multiple functions. However, a drawback of this approach is that it relies on the complex processing of a significant amount of data (e.g., a point cloud provided by a depth sensor), which can be a challenge when deploying such a system onto an embedded prosthesis controller. In the present study, therefore, we propose a novel method to reconstruct the shape of the target object using minimal data. Specifically, four concurrent laser scanner lines provide partial contours of the object cross-section. Simple geometry is then used to reconstruct the dimensions and orientation of spherical, cylindrical and cuboid objects. The prototype system was implemented using depth sensor to simulate the scan lines and vibrotactile feedback to aid the user during aiming of the laser towards the target object. The prototype was tested on ten able-bodied volunteers who used the semi-autonomous prosthesis to grasp a set of ten objects of different shape, size and orientation. The novel prototype was compared against the benchmark system, which used the full depth data. The results showed that novel system could be used to successfully handle all the objects, and that the performance improved with training, although it was still somewhat worse compared to the benchmark. The present study is therefore an important step towards building a compact system for embedded depth sensing specialized for prosthesis grasping.

Establishing a data-driven pipeline for the discovery of novel materials requires the engineering of material features that can be feasibly calculated and can be applied to predict a material's target properties. Here we propose a new class of descriptors for describing crystal structures, which we term Robust One-Shot Ab initio (ROSA) descriptors. ROSA is computationally cheap and is shown to accurately predict a range of material properties. These simple and intuitive class of descriptors are generated from the energetics of a material at a low level of theory using an incomplete ab initio calculation. We demonstrate how the incorporation of ROSA descriptors in ML-based property prediction leads to accurate predictions over a wide range of crystals, amorphized crystals, metal-organic frameworks and molecules. We believe that the low computational cost and ease of use of these descriptors will significantly improve ML-based predictions.

Control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) and control barrier functions (CBFs) are widely used tools for synthesizing controllers subject to stability and safety constraints. Paired with online optimization, they provide stabilizing control actions that satisfy input constraints and avoid unsafe regions of state-space. Designing CLFs and CBFs with rigorous performance guarantees is computationally challenging. To certify existence of control actions, current techniques not only design a CLF/CBF, but also a nominal controller. This can make the synthesis task more expensive, and performance estimation more conservative. In this work, we characterize polynomial CLFs/CBFs using sum-of-squares conditions, which can be directly certified using convex optimization. This yields a CLF and CBF synthesis technique that does not rely on a nominal controller. We then present algorithms for iteratively enlarging estimates of the stabilizable and safe regions. We demonstrate our algorithms on a 2D toy system, a pendulum and a quadrotor.

In this paper, we develop four spiking neural network (SNN) models for two static American Sign Language (ASL) hand gesture classification tasks, i.e., the ASL Alphabet and ASL Digits. The SNN models are deployed on Intel's neuromorphic platform, Loihi, and then compared against equivalent deep neural network (DNN) models deployed on an edge computing device, the Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 (NCS2). We perform a comprehensive comparison between the two systems in terms of accuracy, latency, power consumption, and energy. The best DNN model achieves an accuracy of 99.93% on the ASL Alphabet dataset, whereas the best performing SNN model has an accuracy of 99.30%. For the ASL-Digits dataset, the best DNN model achieves an accuracy of 99.76% accuracy while the SNN achieves 99.03%. Moreover, our obtained experimental results show that the Loihi neuromorphic hardware implementations achieve up to 20.64x and 4.10x reduction in power consumption and energy, respectively, when compared to NCS2.

Apple's Watch Ultra, with its 2000-nit digital display and GPS capabilities, is a far cry from its Revolutionary War-era self-winding forebears. What sorts of wondrous body-mounted technologies might we see another hundred years hence? In his new book, The Skeptic's Guide to the Future, Dr. Steven Novella (with assists from his brothers, Bob and Jay Novella) examines the history of wearables and the technologies that enable them to extrapolate where further advances in flexible circuitry, wireless connectivity and thermoelectric power generation might lead. Excerpted from the book The Skeptics' Guide to the Future: What Yesterday's Science and Science Fiction Tell Us About the World of Tomorrow by Dr. Steven Novella, with Bob Novella and Jay Novella. As the name implies, wearable technology is simply technology designed to be worn, so it will advance as technology in general advances.

As humans, we perceive the three-dimensional structure of the world around us with apparent ease. Think of how vivid the three-dimensional percept is when you look at a vase of flowers sitting on the table next to you. You can tell the shape and translucency of each petal through the subtle patterns of light and shading that play across its surface and effortlessly segment each flower from the background of the scene (Figure 1.1). Looking at a framed group por- trait, you can easily count (and name) all of the people in the picture and even guess at their emotions from their facial appearance. Perceptual psychologists have spent decades trying to understand how the visual system works and, even though they can devise optical illusions1 to tease apart some of its principles (Figure 1.3), a complete solution to this puzzle remains elusive (Marr 1982; Palmer 1999; Livingstone 2008).