Aurelia Butler

Many of today’s artificial intelligence systems loosely mimic the human brain. In a new paper, researchers suggest that another branch of biology — ecology — could inspire a whole new generation of AI to be more powerful, resilient, and socially responsible.
Published September 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the paper argues for a synergy between AI and ecology that could both strengthen AI and help to solve complex global challenges, such as disease outbreaks, loss of biodiversity, and climate change impacts.
The idea arose from the observation that AI can be shockingly good at certain tasks, but still far from useful at others — and that AI development is hitting walls that ecological principles could help it to overcome.
“The kinds of problems that we deal with regularly in ecology are not only challenges that AI could benefit from in terms of pure innovation — they’re also the kinds of problems where if AI could help, it could mean so much for the global good,” explained Barbara Han, a disease ecologist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, who co-led the paper along with IBM Research’s Kush Varshney. “It could really benefit humankind.”
How AI can help ecology
Ecologists — Han included — are already using artificial intelligence to search for patterns in large data sets and to make more accurate predictions, such as whether new viruses might be capable of infecting humans, and which animals are most likely to harbor those viruses.
However, the new paper argues that there are many more possibilities for applying AI in ecology, such as in synthesizing big data and finding missing links in complex systems. More

A machine-learning algorithm demonstrated the capability to process data that exceeds a computer’s available memory by identifying a massive data set’s key features and dividing them into manageable batches that don’t choke computer hardware. Developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the algorithm set a world record for factorizing huge data sets during a test run on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit, the world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer.
Equally efficient on laptops and supercomputers, the highly scalable algorithm solves hardware bottlenecks that prevent processing information from data-rich applications in cancer research, satellite imagery, social media networks, national security science and earthquake research, to name just a few.
“We developed an ‘out-of-memory’ implementation of the non-negative matrix factorization method that allows you to factorize larger data sets than previously possible on a given hardware,” said Ismael Boureima, a computational physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Boureima is first author of the paper in The Journal of Supercomputing on the record-breaking algorithm. “Our implementation simply breaks down the big data into smaller units that can be processed with the available resources. Consequently, it’s a useful tool for keeping up with exponentially growing data sets.”
“Traditional data analysis demands that data fit within memory constraints. Our approach challenges this notion,” said Manish Bhattarai, a machine learning scientist at Los Alamos and co-author of the paper. “We have introduced an out-of-memory solution. When the data volume exceeds the available memory, our algorithm breaks it down into smaller segments. It processes these segments one at a time, cycling them in and out of the memory. This technique equips us with the unique ability to manage and analyze extremely large data sets efficiently.”
The distributed algorithm for modern and heterogeneous high-performance computer systems can be useful on hardware as small as a desktop computer, or as large and complex as Chicoma, Summit or the upcoming Venado supercomputers, Boureima said.
“The question is no longer whether it is possible to factorize a larger matrix, rather how long is the factorization going to take,” Boureima said.
The Los Alamos implementation takes advantage of hardware features such as GPUs to accelerate computation and fast interconnect to efficiently move data between computers. At the same time, the algorithm efficiently gets multiple tasks done simultaneously. More

New research suggests that hospital electronic health records (EHRs) that are difficult to use are also less likely to catch medical errors that could harm patients.
As clinicians navigate EHR systems, alerts, reminders, and clinical guidelines pop up to steer decision making. Yet a common complaint is that these notifications are distracting rather than helpful. These frustrations could signal that built-in safety mechanisms similarly suffer from suboptimal design, suggests the new study. Researchers found that EHR systems rated as being difficult to operate did not perform well in safety tests.
“Poor usability of EHRs is the number one complaint of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and most health care professionals,” says David Classen, M.D., the study’s corresponding author and a professor of internal medicine at University of Utah Health. “This correlates with poor performance in terms of safety.”
Classen likens the situation to the software problems that led to two deadly Boeing 737 MAX airplane crashes in 2018 and 2019. In both cases, pilots struggling to use the system foretold deeper safety issues.
“Our findings suggest that we need to improve EHR systems to make them both easier to use and safer,” Classen says. He collaborated on the study with senior author David Bates, M.D., at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and scientists at University of California San Diego Health; KLAS Enterprises, LLC; and University of California, San Francisco.
The research appears in the September 11 issue of JAMA Network Open.
Experts estimate that as many as 400,000 people are injured each year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. Medical professionals predicted that widespread use of EHRs would mitigate the problem. But research published by Classen, Bates and colleagues in 2020 showed that EHRs failed to reliably detect medical errors that could harm patients, including dangerous drug interactions. Additional reports have indicated that poorly designed EHRs could be a contributing factor. More

Researchers in UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi’s lab have proposed a new foundation that can enable high-quality imaging of still objects with only WiFi signals. Their method uses the Geometrical Theory of Diffraction and the corresponding Keller cones to trace edges of the objects. The technique has also enabled, for the first time, imaging, or reading, the English alphabet through walls with WiFi, a task deemed too difficult for WiFi due to the complex details of the letters.
“Imaging still scenery with WiFi is considerably challenging due to the lack of motion,” said Mostofi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. “We have then taken a completely different approach to tackle this challenging problem by focusing on tracing the edges of the objects instead.” The proposed methodology and experimental results appeared in the Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE National Conference on Radar (RadarConf) on June 21, 2023.
This innovation builds on previous work in the Mostofi Lab, which since 2009 has pioneered sensing with everyday radio frequency signals such as WiFi for several different applications, including crowd analytics, person identification, smart health and smart spaces.
“When a given wave is incident on an edge point, a cone of outgoing rays emerges according to the Keller’s Geometrical Theory of Diffraction (GTD), referred to as a Keller cone,” Mostofi explained. The researchers note that this interaction is not limited to visibly sharp edges but applies to a broader set of surfaces with a small enough curvature.
“Depending on the edge orientation, the cone then leaves different footprints (i.e., conic sections) on a given receiver grid. We then develop a mathematical framework that uses these conic footprints as signatures to infer the orientation of the edges, thus creating an edge map of the scene,” Mostofi continued.
More specifically, the team proposed a Keller cone-based imaging projection kernel. This kernel is implicitly a function of the edge orientations, a relationship that is then exploited to infer the existence/orientation of the edges via hypothesis testing over a small set of possible edge orientations. In other words, if existence of an edge is determined, the edge orientation that best matches the resulting Keller cone-based signature is chosen for a given point that they are interested in imaging.
“Edges of real-life objects have local dependencies,” said Anurag Pallaprolu, the lead Ph.D. student on the project. “Thus, once we find the high-confidence edge points via the proposed imaging kernel, we then propagate their information to the rest of the points using Bayesian information propagation. This step can further help improve the image, since some of the edges may be in a blind region, or can be overpowered by other edges that are closer to the transmitters.” Finally, once an image is formed, the researchers can further improve the image by using image completion tools from the area of vision. More

Using laser light, researchers have developed the most robust method currently known to control individual qubits made of the chemical element barium. The ability to reliably control a qubit is an important achievement for realizing future functional quantum computers.
This new method, developed at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), uses a small glass waveguide to separate laser beams and focus them four microns apart, about four-hundredths of the width of a single human hair. The precision and extent to which each focused laser beam on its target qubit can be controlled in parallel is unmatched by previous research.
“Our design limits the amount of crosstalk-the amount of light falling on neighbouring ions-to the very small relative intensity of 0.01 per cent, which is among the best in the quantum community,” said Dr. K. Rajibul Islam, a professor at IQC and Waterloo’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. “Unlike previous methods to create agile controls over individual ions, the fibre-based modulators do not affect each other.
“This means we can talk to any ion without affecting its neighbours while also retaining the capability to control each individual ion to the maximum possible extent. This is the most flexible ion qubit control system with this high precision that we know of anywhere, in both academia and industry.”
The researchers targeted barium ions, which are becoming increasingly popular in the field of trapped ion quantum computation. Barium ions have convenient energy states that can be used as the zero and one levels of a qubit and be manipulated with visible green light, unlike the higher energy ultraviolet light needed for other atom types for the same manipulation. This allows the researchers to use commercially available optical technologies that are not available for ultraviolet wavelengths.
The researchers created a waveguide chip that divides a single laser beam into 16 different channels of light. Each channel is then directed into individual optical fibre-based modulators which independently provide agile control over each laser beam’s intensity, frequency, and phase. The laser beams are then focused down to their small spacing using a series of optical lenses similar to a telescope. The researchers confirmed each laser beam’s focus and control by measuring them with precise camera sensors.
“This work is part of our effort at the University of Waterloo to build barium ion quantum processors using atomic systems,” said Dr. Crystal Senko, Islam’s co-principal investigator and a faculty member at IQC and Waterloo’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. “We use ions because they are identical, nature-made qubits, so we don’t need to fabricate them. Our task is to find ways to control them.”
The new waveguide method demonstrates a simple and precise method of control, showing promise for manipulating ions to encode and process quantum data and for implementation in quantum simulation and computing. More

Researchers of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the University of Konstanz in Germany as well as of Tohoku University in Japan have been able to increase the diffusion of magnetic whirls, so called skyrmions, by a factor of ten.
In today’s world, our lives are unimaginable without computers. Up until now, these devices process information using primarily electrons as charge carriers, with the components themselves heating up significantly in the process. Active cooling is thus necessary, which comes with high energy costs. Spintronics aims to solve this problem: Instead of utilizing the electron flow for information processing, it relies on their spin or their intrinsic angular momentum. This approach is expected to have a positive impact on the size, speed, and sustainability of computers or specific components.
Magnetic whirls store and process information
Science often does not simply consider the spin of an individual electron, but rather magnetic whirls composed of numerous spins. These whirls called skyrmions emerge in magnetic metallic thin layers and can be considered as two-dimensional quasi-particles. On the one hand, the whirls can be deliberately moved by applying a small electric current to the thin layers; on the other hand, they move randomly and extremely efficiently due to diffusion. The feasibility of creating a functional computer based on skyrmions was demonstrated by a team of researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), led by Professor Dr. Mathias Kläui, using an initial prototype. This prototype consisted of thin, stacked metallic layers, some only a few atomic layers thick.
Energy efficiency: Tenfold increase in whirl diffusion
In collaboration with the University of Konstanz and Tohoku University in Japan, researchers of Mainz University have now achieved another step towards spin-based, unconventional computing: They were able to increase the diffusion of skyrmions by a factor of about ten using synthetic antiferromagnets, which drastically reduces the energy consumption and increases the speed of such a potential computer. “The reduction of energy usage in electronic devices is one of the biggest challenges in fundamental research,” emphasized Professor Dr. Ulrich Nowak, who led the theoretical part of the project in Konstanz.
But what is an antiferromagnet and what is it used for? Normal ferromagnets consist of many small spins, all coupled together to point in the same direction, thereby creating a large magnetic moment. In antiferromagnets, the spins are aligned alternatingly antiparallel, i.e., a spin and its direct neighbors point in the opposite direction. As a result, there is no net magnetic moment, even though the spins remain antiferromagnetically well-ordered. Antiferromagnets have significant advantages, such as three magnitudes of faster dynamics for switching, better stability, and the potential for higher storage densities. These properties are intensively studied in multiple research projects. More

Using artificial intelligence applications to help craft a message to a friend is not a good idea — at least if your friend finds out about the use of AI, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that people in the study perceived that a fictional friend who used AI assistance to write them a message didn’t put forth as much effort as a friend who wrote a message themselves.
That perception may be understandable, but the effect goes beyond the message itself, said Bingjie Liu, lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at The Ohio State University.
“After they get an AI-assisted message, people feel less satisfied with their relationship with their friend and feel more uncertain about where they stand,” Liu said.
But to be fair to AI, it wasn’t just the use of technology that turned people off. The study also found negative effects when people learned their friend got help from another person to write a message.
“People want their partners or friends to put forth the effort to come up with their own message without help — from AI or other people,” Liu said.
The study was published online recently in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. More

Researchers who created a soft robot that could navigate simple mazes without human or computer direction have now built on that work, creating a “brainless” soft robot that can navigate more complex and dynamic environments.
“In our earlier work, we demonstrated that our soft robot was able to twist and turn its way through a very simple obstacle course,” says Jie Yin, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. “However, it was unable to turn unless it encountered an obstacle. In practical terms this meant that the robot could sometimes get stuck, bouncing back and forth between parallel obstacles.
“We’ve developed a new soft robot that is capable of turning on its own, allowing it to make its way through twisty mazes, even negotiating its way around moving obstacles. And it’s all done using physical intelligence, rather than being guided by a computer.”
Physical intelligence refers to dynamic objects — like soft robots — whose behavior is governed by their structural design and the materials they are made of, rather than being directed by a computer or human intervention.
As with the earlier version, the new soft robots are made of ribbon-like liquid crystal elastomers. When the robots are placed on a surface that is at least 55 degrees Celsius (131 degrees Fahrenheit), which is hotter than the ambient air, the portion of the ribbon touching the surface contracts, while the portion of the ribbon exposed to the air does not. This induces a rolling motion; the warmer the surface, the faster the robot rolls.
However, while the previous version of the soft robot had a symmetrical design, the new robot has two distinct halves. One half of the robot is shaped like a twisted ribbon that extends in a straight line, while the other half is shaped like a more tightly twisted ribbon that also twists around itself like a spiral staircase.
This asymmetrical design means that one end of the robot exerts more force on the ground than the other end. Think of a plastic cup that has a mouth wider than its base. If you roll it across the table, it doesn’t roll in a straight line — it makes an arc as it travels across the table. That’s due to its asymmetrical shape. More