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Showing posts with label Technology and Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology and Science. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

China tops global fintech rankings

China's financial technology (fintech) firms continue to lead globally, securing four positions in the top five in a recent industrial ranking.[Photo: mindai.com]

China's financial technology (fintech) firms continue to lead globally, securing four positions in the top five in a recent industrial ranking.

Alibaba's third-party payment platform Ant Financial tops the global ranking for the 100 best performing fintech companies, with micro-loan firm Qudian, wealth management company Lufax and insurance enterprise Zhong An entering the top five, according to a report by international accounting firm KPMG and investment firm H2 Ventures.

The firms are rated according to their capital raising volume and ratio, geographic and sector diversity, and consumer and marketplace traction.

"It is no surprise to see four Chinese companies in the top five. Fintech in China has seen rapid development, fuelled by the demand to address domestic needs," said James McKeogh, Partner with KPMG China. "It is likely that we will see more of these players move to the international markets in the future."

A total of eight Chinese fintech companies are on the list, a remarkable rise from just one company in the top 100 in the 2014 ranking.

"We have seen significant investment in China's fintech sector in recent years, and an increasing appetite for innovative products, supported by the rapid pace of technology development," according to Raymond Cheong, another KPMG China Partner.

China pledged in October to improve supervision in online finance, including peer-to-peer platforms, to contain risks, improve competitiveness and increase risk awareness.

Companies related to lending and insurance are gaining larger share in the full Fintech 100 list, while the creation of value in new sub-sectors such as regulatory technology as well as data and analytics make the fintech sector more diverse, according to the report.

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Related: China mulls sharing blacklist of telecom scammers

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Thursday, April 14, 2016

Facebook Brings 'Chat bots' to Messenger


SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook on Tuesday extended its reach beyond online socializing by building artificial-intelligence powered “bots” into its Messenger application to allow businesses to have software engage in lifelike text exchanges.

The move announced at the leading online social network’s annual developers conference in San Francisco came as the number of monthly users of Messenger topped 900 million and the Silicon Valley company works to stay in tune with mobile Internet lifestyles.

“We think you should be able to text message a business like you would a friend, and get a quick response,” Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg said as he announced that developers can build bots that could even be better than real people at natural language text conversations.

Bots are software infused with the ability to “learn” from conversations, getting better at figuring out what people are telling them and how best to respond.

The bots could help Facebook over time monetize its messaging applications and get a start on what some see as a new way of interacting with the digital world, potentially shortcutting mobile applications and sidestepping search.

“Our goal with artificial intelligence is to build systems that are better than people at perception -- seeing, hearing, language and so on,” Zuckerberg said while laying out a long-term vision for Facebook.

A look at the number and types of services that titans such as Facebook, Google and Apple have rolled out in the last couple of years, it appears the companies are “trying to dominate the customers’ mobile moments,” Forrester analyst Julie Ask told AFP.

Getting smarter

Artificial intelligence is already used in Messenger to recognize faces in pictures, suggesting recipients for messages and for filtering out spam texts. “Soon, we are going to be able to do even more,” Zuckerberg said.

He promised a future in which Facebook AI would be able to understand what is in pictures, video or news articles and use insights to recommend content members of the social network might like.

Bot-building capabilities will be in a test mode with Facebook approving creations before they are released, according to vice president of messaging products David Marcus.

Some of the latest tools include one for the creation of “high-end, self-learning bots,” along with ways for them to be brought to people’s attention at Messenger, Marcus said.

“If you want to build more complex bots, you can now use our bot engine,“ Marcus told a packed audience of developers.

“You feed it samples of conversation, and it’s better over time. You can build your bot today.”

The list of partners launching Messenger bots included Business Insider, which said it will use the technology to deliver news stories to people in real-time.

“We are excited about this new offering because we know that messaging apps are exploding in popularity,” Business Insider said in a story at its website announcing the move.

Cloud computing star Salesforce planned to use the platform to help businesses have “deeper, more personalized and one-to-one customer journeys within the chat experience,” said Salesforce president and chief product officer Alex Dayon.

Bridges, not walls

Zuckerberg laid out a future for Facebook that, aside from Messenger, included ramping up live video streaming and diving into virtual reality.

“We think we are at the edge of the golden age of video,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook opened its Live platform to allow developers to stream video content from their applications to audiences at the social network.

Zuckerberg demonstrated with a drone that flew over those seated, streaming live video to Facebook while he spoke.

Messenger and Live will be built out further in coming years, along with virtual reality technology at Facebook-owned Oculus, according to Zuckerberg.

When his daughter takes her first steps, Zuckerberg said he planned to record it in 360-degree video so family and friends can experience it in virtual reality as if they were there for the moment.

At one point, Zuckerberg’s comments took on a political tone, with the Facebook chief maintaining that the mission to connect the world is more important than ever given rhetoric about building walls and fearing those who are different.

“If the world starts to turn inward, then our community will have to work even harder to bring people together,” Zuckerberg said.

“Instead of building walls, we can build bridges,” he added, in an apparent reference to the fiery rhetoric of Donald Trump. - AFP

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Chinese scientists aim high with space gravitational wave project

Gravitational wave detection proposal in the works



Chinese scientists are proposing a space gravitational wave detection project that could either be a part of the European Space Agency’s eLISA project or a parallel project.

The announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves in the United States on Thursday by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory has encouraged scientists around the world, with China set to accelerate research. Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by violent astronomical events.

Scientists from the pre-research group at the Chinese Academy of Sciences disclosed that the group will finish drafting a plan for a space gravitational wave detection project by the end of this year and will submit it to China’s sci-tech authorities for review.

The Taiji project will include two alternative plans. One is to take a 20 percent share of the European Space Agency’s eLISA project; the other is to launch China’s own satellites by 2033 to authenticate the ESA project.

“Gravitational waves provide us with a new tool to understand the universe, so China has to actively participate in the research,” said Hu Wenrui, a prominent physicist in China and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“If we launch our own satellites, we will have a chance to be a world leader in gravitational wave research in the future. If we just participate in the eLISA project, it will also greatly boost China’s research capacity in space science and technology.

“In either case, it depends on the decision-makers’ resolution and the country’s investment,” he said.

The draft will provide different scenarios with budgets ranging from 160 million yuan ($24.3 million) to more than 10 billion yuan.

“Although I am not sure which plan the decision-makers will finally choose, I think the minimum budget of 160 million yuan should not be a problem for China,” Hu said.

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna’s gravitational wave observatory was the EAS’ cooperative mission with NASA to detect and observe gravitational waves. The project, proposed in 1993, involved three satellites that were arranged in a triangular formation and sent laser beams between each other.

Since NASA withdrew from the project in 2011 because of a budget shortfall, the LISA project evolved into a condensed version known as eLISA.

On Dec 2, the European Space Agency launched the space probe LISA Pathfinder to validate technologies that could be used in the construction of a full-scale eLISA observatory, which is scheduled for launch in 2035.

“Currently, all the operating gravitational wave detection experiments worldwide are ground observatories, which can only detect high-frequency gravitational wave signals,” said Wu Yueliang, deputy president of the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“A space observatory, without any ground interference or limitation to the length of its detection arms, can spot gravitational waves at lower frequency.”

On February 11, scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in the US confirmed they had detected gravitational waves caused by two black holes merging about 1.3 billion years ago. This was the first time this elusive phenomenon was directly detected since it was predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago.

LIGO, currently the most advanced ground facility for gravitational research, includes two gravitational wave detectors in isolated rural areas of the US states of Washington and Louisiana.

“Metaphorically speaking, if the research into gravitational waves is a symphony, the discovery of the LIGO experiment makes a good prelude by proving that the hypothetical wave does exist. But I believe the other movements will mostly be composed of new discoveries from space observatory devices, because the low and middle band — which can only be detected from space — is the most extensive source of gravitational wave,” said Hu, the CAS physicist.

Meanwhile, the Taiji project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has competitors in China. Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, proposed the Tianqin project in July. That project will receive a 300 million yuan startup fund from the local government to initiate a four-step plan to send three satellites in search of gravitational waves and other cosmic mysteries.

Li Miao, director of the Institute of Astronomy and Space Science, said it was still too early to tell the specific direction of the future of the university’s Tianqin project.

“The major gravitational wave research program in China is the cooperation with eLISA, which is led by professor Hu Wenrui,” Li was quoted by Guangdong’s Nanfang Daily as saying.

“The reason that eLISA made progress rather slowly was that the member states in Europe held different opinions as to whether gravitational waves exist. Now this has been proved to be true, which will greatly accelerate the pace of research in and out of China,” Li said.

China Daily/Asia News Network

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China unveils new gravitational wave research plan




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Einstein's gravitational waves took 100 years to prove it right

 

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Einstein's gravitational waves took 100 years to prove it right


Big discovery: When two black holes collided some 1.3 billion years ago, the joining of those two great masses sent forth a wobble that hurtled through space and reached Earth on Sept 14, 2015, when it was picked up by sophisticated instruments - Reuters

 
From Aristotle to Einstein, the world's greatest minds have long theorized about gravity. Here are the highlights, and where the study of gravity is headed next. (Gillian Brockell,Joel Achenbach/TWP)

The “chirp” is bright and bird-like, its pitch rising at the end as though it’s asking a question. To an untrained ear, it resembles a sound effect from a video game more than the faint, billion-year-old echo of the collision of two black holes.

But to the trained ear of experimental physicist, it is the opening note of a cosmic symphony. On Thursday, for the first time in history, scientists announced that they are able to hear the ripples in the space-time continuum that are produced by cosmic events — called gravitational waves. The discovery opens up a new field of scientific research, one in which physicists listen for the secrets of the universe rather than looking for them.

[Everything you need to know about gravitation waves (in gifs)]

“Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and we couldn’t hear the music,” said Columbia University astrophysicist Szabolcs Márka, a member of the discovery team, according to the Associated Press. “The skies will never be the same.”

Scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) announced on Feb. 11 that they have detected gravitational waves, ushering in a new era in the way humans can observe the universe. (Reuters)

Thursday’s moment of revelation has its roots a century earlier, in 1916, when Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves as part of his ground-breaking theory of general relativity. The intervening years included brush-offs and boondoggles, false hope, reversals of opinion, an unlikely decision to take a $272 million risk, and a flash of serendipity that seemed too miraculous to be real — but wasn’t.

Here’s how it all happened.

[LIGO’s success was built on many failures]

In 1915, Einstein gave a series of lectures on his General Theory of Relativity, asserting that space and time form a continuum that gets distorted by anything with mass. The effect of that warping is gravity — the force that compels everything, from light to planets to apples dropping from a tree, to follow a curved path through space.

Gravitational waves, which he proposed the following year, are something of a corollary to that theory. If spacetime is the fabric of the cosmos, then huge events in the cosmos — like a pair of black holes banging into each other — must send ripples through it, the way the fabric of a trampoline would vibrate if you bounced two bowling balls onto it. Those ripples are gravitational waves, and they’re all around us, causing time and space to minutely squeeze and expand without us ever noticing. They’re so weak as to be almost undetectable, and yet, according to Einstein’s math at least, they must be there.

But like the entire theory of general relativity, gravitational waves were just a thought experiment, just equations on paper, still unproven by real-world events. And both were controversial. Some people believe that the initial skepticism about Einstein’s theory, plus blatant anti-Semitism — some prominent German physicists called it “world-bluffing Jewish physics,” according to Discover Magazine — explain why he never got the Nobel Prize for it. (He was eventually awarded the  the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.)

 
A century after Einstein hypothesized that gravitational waves may exist, scientists who have been trying to track such waves are gearing up for a news conference. (Reuters)

So scientists came up with a series of tests of general relativity. The biggest took place in 1919, when British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington took advantage of a solar eclipse to see if light from stars bent as it made its way around the sun (as Einstein said it should). It did, surprising Einstein not in the slightest.

According to Cosmos, when he was asked what he would have done if the measurements had discredited his theory, the famous physicist replied: “In that case, I would have to feel sorry for God, because the theory is correct.”

[Inside LIGO: Physicists detect gravitational waves]

One by one, successive experiments proved other aspects of general relativity to be true, until all but one were validated. No one, not even Einstein, could find evidence of gravitational waves. Eddington, who so enthusiastically demonstrated Einstein’s theory of relativity, declared that gravitational waves were a mathematical phantom, rather than a physical phenomenon. The only attribute the waves seemed to have, he snidely remarked, was the ability to travel “at the speed of thought.” In the end, Einstein himself had doubts. Twice he reversed himself and declared that gravitational waves were nonexistent, before turning another about-face and concluding that they were real.


A small statue of Albert Einstein is seen at the Einstein Archives of Hebrew University in Jerusalem on Feb. 11, 2016, during presentation of the original 100-year-old documents of Einstein’s prediction of the existence of gravitational waves.(Abir Sultan/EPA)

Time passed. A global depression happened, followed by a global war. A reeling and then resurgent world turned its scientific eye toward other prizes: bombs, rockets, a polio vaccine. Then, in the 1960s, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland decided he would try his hand at capturing the waves that had so eluded the man who first conceived of them.

The engineer, Joe Weber, set up two aluminum cylinders in vacuums in labs in Maryland and Chicago. The tiny ripples of gravitational waves would cause the bars to ring like a bell, he reasoned, and if both bars rang at once, then he must have found something.

Weber declared his first discovery in 1969, according to the New Yorker. The news was met with celebration, then skepticism, as other laboratories around the country failed to replicate his experiment. Weber never gave up on his project, continuing to claim new detections until he died in 2000. But others did. It didn’t help that gravitational waves supposedly detected by a South Pole telescope in 2014 turned out to be  merely a product of cosmic dust.

People were inclined to believe, physicist Rainer Weiss told the New Yorker, that gravitational-wave hunters were “all liars and not careful, and God knows what.”

[A brief history of gravity, gravitational waves and LIGO

Weiss would prove them wrong. Now 83, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when Weber first started publishing his purported discoveries.

“I couldn’t for the life of me understand the thing he was doing,” he said in a Q&A for the university website. “That was my quandary at the time, and that’s when the invention was made.”

Weiss tried to think of the simplest way to explain to his students how gravitational waves might be detected, and came up with this: Build an immense, L-shaped tunnel with each leg an equal length and a mirror at the far ends, then install two lasers in the crook of the L. The beams of light should travel down the tunnels, bounce off the mirrors, and return to their origin at the same time. But if a gravitational wave was passing through, spacetime would be slightly distorted, and one light beam would arrive before the other. If you then measure that discrepancy, you can figure out the shape of the wave, then play it back as audio. Suddenly, you’re listening to a recording of the universe.

That idea would eventually become the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the pair of colossal facilities in Washington and Louisiana where the discovery announced Thursday was made.


But not without overcoming quite a few obstacles.

For one thing, even though gravitational waves are all around us, only the most profound events in the universe produce ripples dramatic enough to be measurable on Earth — and even those are very, very faint. For another, an instrument of the size and strength that Weiss desired would require a host of innovations that hadn’t even been created yet: state-of-the-art mirrors, advanced lasers, supremely powerful vacuums, a way to isolate the instruments from even the faintest outside interference that was better than anything that had existed before. The L tunnel would also have to be long — we’re talking miles here — in order for the misalignment of the light beams to be detectable. Building this instrument was not going to be easy, and it was not going to be cheap.

And there would need to be two of them. The principles of good scientific inquiry, which requires that results be duplicated, demanded it.

It took a few decades and a number of proposals, but in 1990 the National Science Foundation finally bit. Weiss and his colleagues could have $272 million for their research.

“It should never have been built,” Rich Isaacson, a program officer at the National Science Foundation at the time, told the New Yorker. “There was every reason to imagine [LIGO] was going to fail,” he also said.

But it didn’t. Twenty-one years and several upgrades after ground was broken on the first LIGO lab, the instruments finally found something on Sept. 14, 2015.

Like most scientific discoveries, this one started not with a “Eureka,” but a “Huh, that’s weird.”

That’s what Marco Drago, a soft-spoken post-doc sitting at a desk in Hanover, Germany, thought when he saw an email pop up in his inbox. It was from a computer program that sorts through data from LIGO to detect evidence of gravitational waves. Drago gets those messages almost daily, he told Science Magazine — anytime the program picks up an interesting-seeming signal.

This was a big one. Almost too big, considering that Sept. 14 was the very first day of official observations for the newly revamped LIGO instruments. Drago could only assume that the pronounced blip in his data was a “blind injection,” an artificial signal introduced to the system to keep researchers on their toes, make sure that they’re able to treat an apparently exciting development with the appropriate amount of scrutiny.

But the injection system wasn’t supposed to be running yet, since research had just started. After about an hour of seeking some other explanation, Drago sent an email to the whole LIGO collaboration, he told Science: Was there an injection today? No, said an email sent that afternoon. Something else must have caused it.

But no one had an explanation for the signal. Unless, of course, it was what they were looking for all along.
 
An aerial photo shows Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Hanford laboratory detector site near Hanford, Washington in this undated photo released by Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory on Feb. 8, 2016. (Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory/Handout via Reuters)

Chad Hanna, an assistant professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University who was also part of the LIGO team, blanched as he read the successive emails about the weird signal. He and his colleagues had joked about their instruments detecting something on Day One, he wrote for  the Conversation, but no one imagined that it could really happen.

“My reaction was, ‘Wow!’” LIGO executive director David Reitze said Thursday, as he recalled seeing the data for the first time. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Yet, as the weeks wore on and after an exhaustive battery of tests — including an investigation to make sure that the signal wasn’t the product of some ill-conceived prank or hoax — all the other possible sources of the signal were rejected. Only one remained: Long ago and far from Earth, a pair of black holes began spiraling around one another, getting closer and closer, moving faster and faster, whirling the spacetime around them, until, suddenly, they collided. A billion years later, a ripple from that dramatic collision passed through the two LIGO facilities, first in Louisiana, then, after 7 milliseconds, in Washington.

The realization of what they’d found hit the LIGO collaborators differently. For some, it was a vindication — for themselves as well as the men who inspired them: “Einstein would be beaming,” Kip Thorne, a Cal-Tech astrophysicist and co-founder of the project with Weiss, said at the news conference Thursday.

After the briefing, he also credited Weber, the UMD professor: “It does validate Weber in a way that’s significant. He was the only person in that era who thought that this could be possible.”


Thorne told Scientific American that he’s feeling a sense of “profound satisfaction” about the discovery. “I knew today would come and it finally did,” he said.

For Weiss, who had invested half his life in the search for gravitational waves, there’s just an overpowering sense of relief.

“There’s a monkey that’s been sitting on my shoulder for 40 years, and he’s been nattering in my ear and saying, ‘Ehhh, how do you know this is really going to work? You’ve gotten a whole bunch of people involved. Suppose it never works right?'” he told MIT. “And suddenly, he’s jumped off.”

But the mood Thursday was mostly one of awe, and joy, and excitement to see what comes next.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and celebrity astrophysicist, joined a gathering of Columbia University scientists who had been involved in the LIGO project. They cheered as they watched the Washington, D.C., news conference where Reitze announced the find.


“One hundred years feels like a lifetime, but over the course of scientific exploration it’s not that long,” Tyson told Scientific American  about the long search for gravitational waves. “I lay awake at night wondering what brilliant thoughts people have today that will take 100 years to reveal themselves.”

Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyond

View Photos
New discoveries about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and the latest images of Pluto.


New discoveries about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and the latest images of Pluto.

The collision of two black holes holes - a tremendously powerful event detected for the first time ever by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is seen in this still image from a computer simulation released on Feb. 11. Scientists have for the first time detected gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesized by Albert Einstein a century ago, in a landmark discovery that opens a new window for studying the cosmos. Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory/Reuters

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Monday, February 8, 2016

North Korea: launched a long-range rocket, cannot repeat China’s nuclear weapons path




North Korea launched a long-range rocket on Sunday morning. Pyongyang authorities said they had successfully launched the Kwangmyongsong-4 earth observation satellite, while the US, South Korea and Japan considered the launch to be a long-range missile test.

Pyongyang has made progress in long-range rocket and missile technology, but it is far from mastering mature long-range missile system and building a strategic deterrence. North Korea hopes it can effectively threaten the US homeland, but it views the matter too simply. Washington regards Pyongyang’s rocket launch as “severe provocation.” The majority of the international community doesn’t believe that in the foreseeable future, Pyongyang can miniaturize warheads and have the long-range nuclear strike ability to coerce Asia-Pacific countries and the US.

Long-range missile technology is similar to rocket technology, but there are differences. The deterrence of long-range missiles using liquid propellant is limited due to their restrained mobility and slow response times. According to analysis from the US and South Korean side, Pyongyang's liquid propellant is backward and unreliable. North Korea has no successful record in long-range missile launch. As long as the Kwangmyongsong-4 enters the target orbit, it can be considered successful. But after all, the launch of a rocket and a missile is different.

Long-range missiles need a huge supportive system, for instance, the ability to measure flight attitude, orbit accuracy and landing location, but Pyongyang doesn’t have any of this. Washington and Seoul believe that North Korea has a rather limited missile testing ability. With the missile and rocket launched by the North landing in the ocean with little possibility of it being retrieved, it is extremely difficult for Pyongyang to collect the test data. Its industry is also not able to manufacture all the materials necessary for developing long-range missile and nuclear bomb.

Some believe Pyongyang's research into nuclear weapons and long-range missiles is similar to China's atomic and hydrogen bomb development in the 1960s. Since China succeeded, so will North Korea.

This is a serious misreading. China faced a different environment than North Korea today in developing nuclear weapons. It was before the Non-Proliferation Treaty was adopted in 1968. Plus, China has a vast territory, and has nuclear test sites in the desert, while North Korea’s limited space makes this impossible.

China’s strategic deterrent power of nuclear bomb and missile, limited at the beginning, were enhanced as science and technology improved in the country. It has become even more credible with the mobility of land-based ICBMs and the upgrading of sea-based missile launching system.

Pyongyang is at the stage of developing nuclear equipment and long-range rockets, which however has developed far from the reality of the country's technology and economic development. So far, it is hard to tell whether it brings more strategic security or strategic harm to Pyongyang.

How far can Pyongyang’s nuclear bomb and missile develop? It is not up to the political determination of Pyongyang, since it involves complicated geopolitical forces which North Korea can hardly harness. Pyongyang must think carefully how to extricate itself from the increasingly grave situation. - Global Times

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Discussion of THAAD deployment is shortsighted move of Seoul and Washington

However, China’s determination to safeguard its national security should be clearly shown, so that the other stakeholders will have to think carefully before they make any decision that might challenge China’s position.

Beijing won’t allow war on Peninsula

China will “by no means allow war on the Korean Peninsula” a foreign ministry spokesperson said Wednesday, stressing Beijing was deeply concerned over Pyongyang’s announced plan to launch a satellite later this month, only weeks after it tested a nuclear bomb in defiance of international sanction