Telco infrastructure provider Nokia launched a new service aimed at helping operators use artificial intelligence and automation to better manage their 5G networks and avoid network and service-level failures.

"Traditional network and service management approaches are no longer sustainable," Nokia said in a press release announcing its AVA 5G Cognitive Operations. The new framework, pitched at communications service providers (formerly called mobile network operators), relies on virtualization and network slicing to improve wireless network performance.

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Silicon microchip maker Arm is working on a new semiconductor design that it says will enable machine learning, at scale, on small sensor devices. Arm has completed testing of the technology and expects to bring it to market next year.

Artificial intelligence, implemented locally on "billions and ultimately trillions" of devices is coming, the company says in a press release. Arm Holdings, owned by Japanese conglomerate Softbank, says its partners have shipped more than 160 billion Arm-based chips to date, and that 45 million of its microprocessor designs are being placed within electronics every day.

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IoT sensors that don't require power sources could be coming soon. Researchers from University of California, San Diego, claim they've figured out how to optimize lab-based modules to such an extent that a Wi-Fi radio, used in IoT for communications with a network, could soon be using 5,000-times less energy and yet still feature enough bandwidth to send video.

The technique being exploited takes advantage of backscattering. That's a way of parasitically using radio signals inherent in everyday environments. In this case, the chip piggybacks on existing Wi-Fi transmissions to send its data. This method of sending data is power-light, because the carrier needed for the radio transmission is already created—it doesn’t need new energy for the message to be sent.

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Scientists have long envisioned brain-sensing technology that can translate thoughts into digital commands, eliminating the need for computer-input devices like a keyboard and mouse. One company is preparing to ship its latest contribution to the effort: a $399 development package for a noninvasive, AI-based, brain-computer interface.

The kit will let "users control anything in their digital world by using just their thoughts," NextMind, a commercial spinoff of a cognitive neuroscience lab claims in a press release.

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IoT equipment designers shooting for efficiency should explore the potential for using buildings as antennas, researchers say.

Environmental surfaces such as walls can be used to intercept and beam signals, which can increase reliability and data throughput for devices, according to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Researchers at CSAIL have been working on a smart-surface repeating antenna array called RFocus. The antennas, which could be applied in sheets like wallpaper, are designed to be incorporated into office spaces and factories. Radios that broadcast signals could then become smaller and less power intensive.

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Biologically created computing devices could one day be as commonplace as today’s microprocessors and microchips, some scientists believe. Consider DNA, the carrier of genetic information and the principal component of chromosomes; it's showing promise as a data storage medium.

A recent study (PDF) suggests taking matters further and using microbes to network and communicate at nanoscale. The potential is highly attractive for the Internet of Things (IoT), where concealability and unobtrusiveness may be needed for the technology to become completely ubiquitous.

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One of Britain’s principal mobile networks, O2, has just announced that it intends to deploy Open Radio Access Network technology (O-RAN) in places.

O-RAN is a wireless industry initiative for designing and building radio network solutions using “a general-purpose, vendor-neutral hardware and software-defined technology,” explains Telecom Infra Project, the body responsible, on its website.

TIP is the trade body that, along with Intel and Vodafone, conceived of the technology alternative – an attempt at toppling the dominance of Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia, which provide almost all mobile telco infrastructure now.

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With the conceivable exhaustion of Moore’s Law – that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years – the search is on for new paths that lead to reliable incremental processing gains over time.

One possibility is that machines inspired by how the brain works could take over, fundamentally shifting computing to a revolutionary new tier, according to an explainer study released this month by Applied Physics Reviews.

“Today’s state-of-the-art computers process roughly as many instructions per second as an insect brain,” say the paper’s authors Jack Kendall, of Rain Neuromorphics, and Suhas Kumar, of Hewlett Packard Labs. The two write that processor architecture must now be completely re-thought if Moore’s law is to be perpetuated, and that replicating the “natural processing system of a [human] brain” is the way forward.

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Sending information instantly between two computer chips using quantum teleportation has been accomplished reliably for the first time, according to scientists from the University of Bristol, in collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Data was exchanged without any electrical or physical connection – a transmission method that may influence the next generation of ultra-secure data networks.

Teleportation involves the moving of information instantaneously and securely. In the “Star Trek” series, fictional people move immediately from one place to another via teleportation. In the University of Bristol experiment, data is passed instantly via a single quantum state across two chips using light particles, or photons. Importantly, each of the two chips knows the characteristics of the other, because they’re entangled through quantum physics, meaning they therefore share a single physics-based state.

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Researchers at Purdue University have made progress towards an elusive goal: building a transistor that can both process and store information. In the future, a single on-chip component could integrate the processing functions of transistors with the storage capabilities of ferroelectric RAM, potentially creating a process-memory combo that enables faster computing and is just atoms thick.

The ability to cram more functions onto a chip, allowing for greater speed and power without increasing the footprint, is a core goal of electronics design. To get where they are today, engineers at Purdue had to overcome incompatibilities between transistors – the switching and amplification mechanisms used in almost all electronics – and ferroelectric RAM. Ferroelectric RAM is higher-performing memory technology; the material introduces non-volatility, which means it retains information when power is lost, unlike traditional dielectric-layer-constructed DRAM.

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Hard drives aren’t going to be capacious enough for future data archiving and retrieval requirements, scientists believe, as applications such as artificial intelligence, wide-scale Internet of Things connectivity, and virtual and augmented reality take hold. Glass could be the answer.

Encoding in glass would have advantages over hard drives and other mediums, experts suggest. Holding capacity is greater, and the slivers of quartz being experimented with don’t need cooling or dehumidifying environments.

Microsoft Research, working in the UK along with the University of Southampton, announced that it has been able to store an entire movie on a quartz, glass-based storage medium. The team stored and retrieved a full-length Superman film on a small slab of the special material that measures about 3 inches square and less than a tenth of an inch thick.

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For the Internet of Things to become ubiquitous, many believe that inefficiencies in the powering of sensors and radios has got to be eliminated. Battery chemistry just isn’t good enough, and it’s simply too expensive to continually perform truck-rolls, for example, whenever batteries need changing out. In many cases, solar battery-top-ups aren’t the solution because that, usually-fixed, technology isn’t particularly suited to mobile, or impromptu, ad hoc networks.

Consequently, there’s a dash going on to try to find either better chemistries that allow longer battery life or more efficient chips and electronics that just sip electricity. An angle of thought being followed is to wake-up network radios only when they need to transmit a burst of data. Universities say they are making significant progress in this area.

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Space communications start-up Swarm Technologies will begin delivering commercial, bi-directional Internet of Things (IoT) data early next year, according to the company, which has just received its regulatory go-ahead to launch its satellites and transmit.

“Swarm will begin rolling out its commercial, two-way data offerings in early 2020,” Sara Spangelo, co-founder and CEO told me in a recent e-mail. The company aims to deploy 150 satellites before the end of 2020, she says. The FCC, in October, granted Part 25 approval for the startup to deploy and operate 150 non-geostationary, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, for non-voice purposes.

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The effective range of Wi-Fi, and other wireless communications used in Internet of Things networks could be increased significantly by adding wireless noise, say scientists.

This counter-intuitive solution could extend the range of an off-the-shelf Wi-Fi radio by 73 yards, a group led by Brigham Young University says. Wireless noise, a disturbance in the signal, is usually unwanted.

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Petabit-class networks will support more than 100-times the capacity of existing networks, according to scientists who have just demonstrated an optical switching rig designed to handle the significant amounts of data that would pour through future petabit cables. One petabit is equal to a thousand terabits, or a million gigabits.

Researchers at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan routed signals with capacities ranging from 10 terabits per second to 1 petabit per second through their node. Those kinds of capacities, which could send 8K resolution video to 10 million people simultaneously, are going to be needed for future broadband video streaming and Internet of Things at scale, researchers believe. In-data-center applications and backhaul could benefit.

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The Internet of Things and 5G could be among the benefactors of an upcoming $20 million U.S. government cash injection designed to come up with new architectures to replace existing public internet.

FABRIC, as the National Science Foundation-funded umbrella project is called, aims to come up with a proving ground to explore new ways to move, keep and compute data in shared infrastructure such as the public internet. The project “will allow scientists to explore what a new internet could look like at scale,” says the lead institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in a media release. And it “will help determine the internet architecture of the future.”

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Current wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, won’t provide enough support for the billions of internet of things (IoT) sensors and networks that are expected to come on stream in the next few years, say researchers. More speed, efficiency and bandwidth will be needed. Plus, the equipment must cost significantly less than existing gear, including upcoming 5G equipment.

To address the issue, scientists at University of Waterloo are developing a stripped-down version of millimeter wave technology.

“A growing strain will be placed on requirements of wireless networks,” the researchers say in an article announcing a new low-power, low-cost 5G network technology that it calls mmX. They say the technology is specifically geared towards IoT.

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Test results from recent Low Earth Orbit internet satellite launches are starting to come in—and they're impressive. 

OneWeb, which launched six Airbus satellites in February, says tests show throughput speeds of over 400 megabits per second and latency of 40 milliseconds. 

Partnering with Intellian, developer of OneWeb user terminals, OneWeb streamed full high-definition video at 1080p resolution. The company tested for latency, speed, jitter, handover between satellites, and power control.

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We all know that blocking incoming sunlight helps cool buildings and that indoor thermal conditions can be improved with the added shade. More recently, though, scientists have been experimenting with ways to augment that passive cooling by capturing any superfluous, unwanted solar heat and expelling it, preferably into outer space, where it can’t add to global warming.

Difficulties in getting that kind of radiative cooling to work are two-fold. First, directing the heat optimally is hard.

“Normally, thermal emissions travel in all directions,” says Qiaoqiang Gan, an associate professor of electrical engineering at University at Buffalo, in a news release. The school is working on radiative concepts. That’s bad for heat spill-over and can send the thermal energy where it’s not wanted—like into other buildings.

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Data centers running artificial intelligence (AI) will be significantly more efficient than those operating with hand-edited algorithm schedules, say experts at MIT. The researchers there say they have developed an automated scheduler that speeds cluster jobs by up to 20 or 30 percent, and even faster (2x) in peak periods.

The school’s AI job scheduler works on a type of AI called “reinforcement learning” (RL). That’s a trial-and-error-based machine-learning method that modifies scheduling decisions depending on actual workloads in a specific cluster. AI, when done right, could supersede the current state-of-the-art method, which is algorithms. They often must be fine-tuned by humans, introducing inefficiency.

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Breakthroughs in the manipulation of light are making it more likely that we will, in due course, be seeing a significantly faster and more secure Internet. Adoption of optical circuits in chips, for example, to be driven by quantum technologies could be just around the corner.

Physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), have just announced a dramatic leap forward in the methods used to accurately place light sources in atom-thin layers. That fine positioning has been one block in the movement towards quantum chips.

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