Computers Math

UBC researchers have trained computers to predict the next designer drugs before they are even on the market, technology that could save lives.
Law enforcement agencies are in a race to identify and regulate new versions of dangerous psychoactive drugs such as bath salts and synthetic opioids, even as clandestine chemists work to synthesize and distribute new molecules with the same psychoactive effects as classical drugs of abuse.
Identifying these so-called “legal highs” within seized pills or powders can take months, during which time thousands of people may have already used a new designer drug.
But new research is already helping law enforcement agencies around the world to cut identification time down from months to days, crucial in the race to identify and regulate new versions of dangerous psychoactive drugs.
“The vast majority of these designer drugs have never been tested in humans and are completely unregulated. They are a major public health concern to emergency departments across the world,” says UBC medical student Dr. Michael Skinnider, who completed the research as a doctoral student at UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories.
A Minority Report for new designer drugs
Dr. Skinnider and his colleagues used a database of known psychoactive substances contributed by forensic laboratories around the world to train an artificial intelligence algorithm on the structures of these drugs. The algorithm they used, known as a deep neural network, is inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. More

As silicon based semiconducting technology is approaching the limit of its performance, new materials that may replace or partially replace silicon in technology is highly desired. Recently, the emergence of graphene and other two-dimensional (2D) materials offers a new platform for building next generation semiconducting technology. Among them, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), such as MoS2, WS2, MoSe2, WSe2, as most appealing 2D semiconductors.
A prerequisite of building ultra-large-scale high-performance semiconducting circuits is that the base materials must be a single-crystal of wafer-scale, just like the silicon wafer used today. Although great efforts have been dedicated to the growth of wafer-scale single-crystals of TMDs, the success was very limited until now.
Distinguished Professor Feng Ding and his research team from the Center for Multidimensional CarbonMaterials (CMCM), within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) at UNIST, in cooperation with researcher at Peking University (PKU), Beijing Institute of Technology, and Fudan University, reported the direct growth of 2-inch single-crystal WS2 monolayer films very recently. Besides the WS2, the research team also demonstrated the growth of single-crystal MoS2, WSe2, and MoSe2 in wafer scale as well.
The key technology of epitaxially grown a large sing-crystal is to ensure that all small single-crystal grown on a substrate are uniformly aligned. Because TMDs has non-centrosymmetric structure or the mirror image of a TMD with respect to an edge of it has opposite alignment, we must break such a symmetry by carefully design the substrate. Based on theoretical calculations, the authors proposed a mechanisms of “dual-coupling-guided epitaxy growth” for experimental design. The WS2-sapphireplane interaction as the first driving force, leading to two preferred antiparallel orientations of the WS2 islands. The coupling between WS2 and sapphire step-edge is the second driving force and it will break the degeneracy of the two antiparallel orientations. Then all the TMD single crystals grown on a substrate with step edges are all unidirectional aligned and finally, the coalescence of these small single-crystals leads to a large single-crystal of the same size of the substrate.
“This new dual-coupling epitaxy growth mechanism is new for controllable materials growth. In principle, it allows us realize to grow all 2D materials into large-area single crystals if proper substrate was found.” Says Dr. Ting Cheng, the co-first author of the study. “We have considered how to choose proper substrates theoretically. First, the substrate should have a low symmetry and, secondly, more step edges are preferred.” emphasizes Professor Feng Ding, the corresponding author of the study.
“This is a major step forward in the area of 2D materials based device. As the successful growth of wafer-scale single-crystal 2D TMDs on insulators beyond graphene and hBN on transition metal substrates, our study provide the required keystone of 2D semiconductors in high-end applications of electronic and optical devices,” explains professor Feng Ding.
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A massive international research effort has led to development of a genetic model for the ‘ultimate’ chickpea, with the potential to lift crop yields by up to 12 per cent.
The research consortium genetically mapped thousands of chickpea varieties, and the UQ team then used this information to identify the most valuable gene combinations using artificial intelligence (AI).
Professor Ben Hayes led the UQ component of the project with Professor Kai Voss-Fels and Associate Professor Lee Hickey, to develop a ‘haplotype’ genomic prediction crop breeding strategy, for enhanced performance for seed weight.
“Most crop species only have a few varieties sequenced, so it was a massive undertaking by the international team to analyse more than 3000 cultivated and wild varieties,” Professor Hayes said.
The landmark international study was led by Dr Rajeev Varshney from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, India. The study confirmed chickpea’s origin in the Fertile Crescent and provides a complete picture of genetic variation within chickpea.
“We identified 1,582 novel genes and established the pan-genome of chickpea, which will serve as a foundation for breeding superior chickpea varieties with enhanced yield, higher resistance to drought, heat and diseases,” Dr Varshney said. More

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory are applying machine learning algorithms to help interpret massive amounts of ground deformation data collected with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) satellites; the new algorithms will improve earthquake detection.
“Applying machine learning to InSAR data gives us a new way to understand the physics behind tectonic faults and earthquakes,” said Bertrand Rouet-Leduc, a geophysicist in Los Alamos’ Geophysics group. “That’s crucial to understanding the full spectrum of earthquake behavior.”
New satellites, such as the Sentinel 1 Satellite Constellation and the upcoming NISAR Satellite, are opening a new window into tectonic processes by allowing researchers to observe length and time scales that were not possible in the past. However, existing algorithms are not suited for the vast amount of InSAR data flowing in from these new satellites, and even more data will be available in the near future.
In order to process all of this data, the team at Los Alamos developed the first tool based on machine learning algorithms to extract ground deformation from InSAR data, which enables the detection of ground deformation automatically — without human intervention — at a global scale. Equipped with autonomous detection of deformation on faults, this tool can help close the gap in existing detection capabilities and form the foundations for a systematic exploration of the properties of active faults.
Systematically characterizing slip behavior on active faults is key to unraveling the physics of tectonic faulting, and will help researchers understand the interplay between slow earthquakes, which gently release stress, and fast earthquakes, which quickly release stress and can cause significant damage to surrounding communities.
The team’s new methodology enables the detection of ground deformation automatically at a global scale, with a much finer temporal resolution than existing approaches, and a detection threshold of a few millimeters. Previous detection thresholds were in the centimeter range.
In preliminary results of the approach, applied to data over the North Anatolian Fault, the method reaches two millimeter detection, revealing a slow earthquakes twice as extensive as previously recognized.
This work was funded through Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development Office.
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A team of researchers led by an Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) faculty member performed the first-ever simulation of baryons — fundamental quantum particles — on a quantum computer.
With their results, the team has taken a step towards more complex quantum simulations that will allow scientists to study neutron stars, learn more about the earliest moments of the universe, and realize the revolutionary potential of quantum computers.
“This is an important step forward — it is the first simulation of baryons on a quantum computer ever,” Christine Muschik, an IQC faculty member, said. “Instead of smashing particles in an accelerator, a quantum computer may one day allow us to simulate these interactions that we use to study the origins of the universe and so much more.”
Muschik, also a physics and astronomy professor at the University of Waterloo and associate faculty member at the Perimeter Institute, leads the Quantum Interactions Group, which studies the quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories. These theories are descriptions of the physics of reality, including the Standard Model of particle physics. The more inclusive a gauge theory is of fields, forces, particles, spatial dimensions and other parameters, the more complex it is — and the more difficult it is for a classical supercomputer to model.
Non-Abelian gauge theories are particularly interesting candidates for simulations because they are responsible for the stability of matter as we know it. Classical computers can simulate the non-Abelian matter described in these theories, but there are important situations — such as matter with high densities — that are inaccessible for regular computers. And while the ability to describe and simulate non-Abelian matter is fundamental for being able to describe our universe, none has ever been simulated on a quantum computer.
Working with Randy Lewis from York University, Muschik’s team at IQC developed a resource-efficient quantum algorithm that allowed them to simulate a system within a simple non-Abelian gauge theory on IBM’s cloud quantum computer paired with a classical computer.
With this landmark step, the researchers are blazing a trail towards the quantum simulation of gauge theories far beyond the capabilities and resources of even the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
“What’s exciting about these results for us is that the theory can be made so much more complicated,” Jinglei Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow at IQC and the University of Waterloo Department of Physics and Astronomy, said. “We can consider simulating matter at higher densities, which is beyond the capability of classical computers.”
As scientists develop more powerful quantum computers and quantum algorithms, they will be able to simulate the physics of these more complex non-Abelian gauge theories and study fascinating phenomena beyond the reach of our best supercomputers.
This breakthrough demonstration is an important step towards a new era of understanding the universe based on quantum simulation.
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People rarely walk at a constant speed and a single incline. We change speed when rushing to the next appointment, catching a crosswalk signal, or going for a casual stroll in the park. Slopes change all the time too, whether we’re going for a hike or up a ramp into a building. In addition to environmental variably, how we walk is influenced by sex, height, age, and muscle strength, and sometimes by neural or muscular disorders such as stroke or Parkinson’s Disease.
This human and task variability is a major challenge in designing wearable robotics to assist or augment walking in real-world conditions. To date, customizing wearable robotic assistance to an individual’s walking requires hours of manual or automatic tuning — a tedious task for healthy individuals and often impossible for older adults or clinical patients.
Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new approach in which robotic exosuit assistance can be calibrated to an individual and adapt to a variety of real-world walking tasks in a matter of seconds. The bioinspired system uses ultrasound measurements of muscle dynamics to develop a personalized and activity-specific assistance profile for users of the exosuit.
“Our muscle-based approach enables relatively rapid generation of individualized assistance profiles that provide real benefit to the person walking,” said Robert D. Howe, the Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering, and co-author of the paper.
The research is published in Science Robotics.
Previous bioinspired attempts at developing individualized assistance profiles for robotic exosuits focused on the dynamic movements of the limbs of the wearer. The SEAS researchers took a different approach. The research was a collaboration between Howe’s Harvard Biorobotics Laboratory, which has extensive experience in ultrasound imaging and real-time image processing, and the Harvard Biodesign Lab, run by Conor J. Walsh, the Paul A. Maeder Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS, which develops soft wearable robots for augmenting and restoring human performance. More

Our brains are incredibly adaptive. Every day, we form new memories, acquire new knowledge, or refine existing skills. This stands in marked contrast to our current computers, which typically only perform pre-programmed actions. At the core of our adaptability lies synaptic plasticity. Synapses are the connection points between neurons, which can change in different ways depending on how they are used. This synaptic plasticity is an important research topic in neuroscience, as it is central to learning processes and memory. To better understand these brain processes and build adaptive machines, researchers in the fields of neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) are creating models for the mechanisms underlying these processes. Such models for learning and plasticity help to understand biological information processing and should also enable machines to learn faster.
Algorithms mimic biological evolution
Working in the European Human Brain Project, researchers at the Institute of Physiology at the University of Bern have now developed a new approach based on so-called evolutionary algorithms. These computer programs search for solutions to problems by mimicking the process of biological evolution, such as the concept of natural selection. Thus, biological fitness, which describes the degree to which an organism adapts to its environment, becomes a model for evolutionary algorithms. In such algorithms, the “fitness” of a candidate solution is how well it solves the underlying problem.
Amazing creativity
The newly developed approach is referred to as the “evolving-to-learn” (E2L) approach or “becoming adaptive.” The research team led by Dr. Mihai Petrovici of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Bern and Kirchhoff Institute for Physics at the University of Heidelberg, confronted the evolutionary algorithms with three typical learning scenarios. In the first, the computer had to detect a repeating pattern in a continuous stream of input without receiving feedback about its performance. In the second scenario, the computer received virtual rewards when behaving in a particular desired manner. Finally, in the third scenario of “guided learning,” the computer was precisely told how much its behavior deviated from the desired one.
“In all these scenarios, the evolutionary algorithms were able to discover mechanisms of synaptic plasticity, and thereby successfully solved a new task,” says Dr. Jakob Jordan, corresponding and co-first author from the Institute of Physiology at the University of Bern. In doing so, the algorithms showed amazing creativity: “For example, the algorithm found a new plasticity model in which signals we defined are combined to form a new signal. In fact, we observe that networks using this new signal learn faster than with previously known rules,” emphasizes Dr. Maximilian Schmidt from the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Tokyo, co-first author of the study. The results were published in the journal eLife.
“We see E2L as a promising approach to gain deep insights into biological learning principles and accelerate progress towards powerful artificial learning machines,” says Mihai Petrovoci. “We hope it will accelerate the research on synaptic plasticity in the nervous system,” concludes Jakob Jordan. The findings will provide new insights into how healthy and diseased brains work. They may also pave the way for the development of intelligent machines that can better adapt to the needs of their users.
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When sound was first incorporated into movies in the 1920s, it opened up new possibilities for filmmakers such as music and spoken dialogue. Physicists may be on the verge of a similar revolution, thanks to a new device developed at Stanford University that promises to bring an audio dimension to previously silent quantum science experiments.
In particular, it could bring sound to a common quantum science setup known as an optical lattice, which uses a crisscrossing mesh of laser beams to arrange atoms in an orderly manner resembling a crystal. This tool is commonly used to study the fundamental characteristics of solids and other phases of matter that have repeating geometries. A shortcoming of these lattices, however, is that they are silent.
“Without sound or vibration, we miss a crucial degree of freedom that exists in real materials,” said Benjamin Lev, associate professor of applied physics and of physics, who set his sights on this issue when he first came to Stanford in 2011. “It’s like making soup and forgetting the salt; it really takes the flavor out of the quantum ‘soup.'”
After a decade of engineering and benchmarking, Lev and collaborators from Pennsylvania State University and the University of St. Andrews have produced the first optical lattice of atoms that incorporates sound. The research was published Nov. 11 in Nature. By designing a very precise cavity that held the lattice between two highly reflective mirrors, the researchers made it so the atoms could “see” themselves repeated thousands of times via particles of light, or photons, that bounce back and forth between the mirrors. This feedback causes the photons to behave like phonons — the building blocks of sound.
“If it were possible to put your ear to the optical lattice of atoms, you would hear their vibration at around 1 kHz,” said Lev.
A supersolid with sound
Previous optical lattice experiments were silent affairs because they lacked the special elasticity of this new system. Lev, young graduate student Sarang Gopalakrishnan — now an assistant professor of physics at Penn State and co-author of the paper — and Paul Goldbart (now provost of Stony Brook University) came up with the foundational theory for this system. But it took collaboration with Jonathan Keeling — a reader at the University of St. Andrews and co-author of the paper — and years of work to build the corresponding device. More