Microsoft Futuristic Technologies : Quantum Computing (Part 3 of 3)

Why do we need Quantum Computing ?

Quantum Computing will allow us to go  beyond the bounds of Moore's Law . The observation that the number of transistors in a computer chip doubles roughly every two years - by changing the very physics of computing as we know it today, providing get computational power to solve the orld's biggest and most complex problems.

Quantum computing will give us the computational power to cure cancer and effectively address global warming.

Rod Serling's the Twilight Zone likely put it best , " You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are theo o imagination. That's the signpost up aide - your next step, the Twilight zone."

Ordination int the 1980s, quantum computing leverages certain quantum physics perpetrates of atoms or uncle aha allow them 3ow tower together as quantum bit or quit s to be the computer processor an d memory. By interacting with each other while being slated from our environment , quit can perform certain calculations exponentially fast than convention or classical computers.

Quantum computing will utterly transform the physics of computing itself.

While classical computing is bound by its binary code and the laws of physics, quantum computing advances every king of calculation - maths, science and engineering from the linear world of bits to the multidimensional universe of qubit,. Instead of being similar 1 or 0 like the classical but quits can be every combination - a superposition whiten enables many compassion s all at once,. thus ,w e enter world i which many parallel computations can be simultaneously answer.

In a properly constructed quart algorithm , the result is according to one our scientists, a g great massacre in which all or most the wrong answers are cancelled out

Some early supercomputers rain on around 13,00 transistors. Xbox contains 5 billion transistors .

But Intel in recent years has reported that the case of advancement has slowed, creating tremendous demand for alternative ways to provide faster and faster  processing to fuel the  growth of AI.

But the dream is a quantum computer.

The speed and accuracy with which quantum computing could bread todays's highest levels of encryptjon in mind-boggling . It would take a classical computer 1 billion years to break today's RSA-2048 encryption , but a quantum computer could creack it in around a hundred seconds or less than two minutes..

To get there we need 3 scientific and engineering break thoughts, The maths break thought we are working on is a topolological  qubit.

The super conducting breakthrough we need is a fabrication process to yield  thousands of topological qubits that are both higher relatable and stable , the computer  science breakthrough we need is new computation methods for programming the quantum computer. 

What are the possible usages of Quantum Computing?

Quantum computing race as compared to AI and Cloud computing has been gone  largely unnoticed in past because of its complexity  and secrecy.

A worthy target  for quantum will be advancing AI's ability to truly comprehend human speech and then accurately summarize it .

Even more promising, quantum  computing may ultimately save lives through incredible medical breakthrough . For example,, the computational problem for developing a vaccine to target HIV exhausts the present computational resources since the HiV protein coat is highly variable and constantly evolving . As a result  an HiV an has been projected to be 10 years away now for several decades . With a quantum computer, we could approach this problem in new way.

Millions of people around the  world go hungry because of inadequate food production or flawed distribution . One of the biggest problems with food production is that it requires fertilizer which can costly and draining on our environmental resources. Making fertilizer requires converting nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia , which enables the decomposition of bacteria and fungi.

The chemistry known as  Haber process has not been improved upon is Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented int in 1910. The problem is so big and so complex. There simply have not been breakthroughs . A quantum computer is partnership with a classical computer , however can run massive experiments in order to discover a new , artificial catalyst that can mimic the bacterial process and reduce the amount of methane gas and energy required to produce fertilizer, reducing the amount of Methane gas and energy required to produce fertilize r, reducing the threat to our environment.

Leonardo Da Vinci - Walter Isaacson (Book Review)

Walter shows how Lenardo's genius was base on the skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity , careful observation and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.

His  creativity like that of other great communications, cam  from standing at the intersection of the humanities and technology.

He peeled flesh off the faces of the corpses , draw the muscles that move the lips and then painted history's most memorable smile on Monalisa.

He explored the math of optics , showed how light rays strike at the front of the eye and produced illusions of changing perspectives in "The Last Supper."

Author also describes who Leonardo's  lifelong enthusiasm  from staging theatrical productions informed his painting and inventions.

He pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines,optics ,botany geology, water flows and weaponry with a  passion that was both playful and obsessive. Thus he became archetype of the Renaissance man , an inspiration to all won believe that effort works of nature are woven together in a unity filled with marvelous pattern.


His ability to combine art and science , made iconic by his drawing of a perfectly proportional and spread eagle inside a circle and square known as  Vitruvian Man . This made him history's most creative genius..

His scientific exploration informed his art.


He studied lights and optics . He used it to waste the uses of shading and perspective to model objects on a 2 dimensional surface  so that they look like 3D. The first intention of the painter is to make flat surface display a body if modeled an separate from this plane.Dimensionality became the supreme innovation of Renaissance art due to his work.


What made Leonardo a genius , what set him apart for people who were  extraordinarily smart , was creativity , the ability to apply imagination to intellect.

His facility for combing  observation with fantasy allowed him to make unexpected leaps that related things seen  to thing unseen like other creative geniuses.

The German Philosopher said
"Talent hits a target that no one else can hit . Genius hits a target no one else can see."

Steve Jobs Said
"While some may see them a s the crazy one, we see genus . Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are then whose do. "



What also distinguished  Leonardo' s genius was its universal nature. The world has produced other thinkers who were more profound o folic and many whom more practical  but none was  as c creative in so many fields. Some people were geniuses in particular arena, such as Mozart in music and Euler in Math. But Leonardo's brilliance spanned multiple disciplines which gave him a profound feel for natures's patterns and crosscurrent.

His curiosity impelled him to  become  among the handful people in history who tried to know all there was to know about everything that could be known.

Leonardo painted the Monalisa, produced unsurpassed anatomy drawing baed on multiple dissections  coming up with schemes to diver rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon , opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to shown how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants , using fissile to dispute the biblical account the of the deluge an then drawing th deluge.

Leonardo was a genius but more : he was the epitome of the  universal mind who sought to understand all of  creation, including  who  we fit into it.


Reference :
Leonardo Da Vinci
(Walter Isaacson)

Microsoft's Future Technology - Artificial Technology (Part 2 of 3)

What is Microsoft's vision on AI

AI will change our world. It will augment and assist humans.
A confluence of three breakthroughs - Big Data , massive computing power and sophisticated algorithms - is accelerating AI from sci-fi to reality. At astonishing rate , data is being gathered and made available thanks to the exponential growth of cameras and sensors in or everyday life. AI needs data to learn . The cloud has made tremendous computing power available to everyone an complex algorithms can now be written to discern insight and intelligence from the mountains of data.

AI is some ways away from becoming what's known as artificial general intelligence(AGI) , the point at which a computer matches or even surpasses human intellectual capabilities. 

Like human intelligence , artificial intelligence can be categorized by layer . The bottom layer is simple pattern recognition . the middle late is perception, sensing more ad more complex scenes . it's estimated that 99 percent of human perception is through speech and vision , Finally, the highest level of intelligence is  cognition - deep understanding of human language.


These are building blocks of AI and for many years Microsoft has invested in advancing each of these tiers - statistical machine learning tools to make swans of data na recognize patterns; computers that can see, hear and move and even begin to learn and understand human language. Microsoft set the accuracy record with a computer system that can transcribe the content s of a phone call mor accurately than a human professional trained in transcription. On the computer sions dn learning from, in late 2015 our AI group swept first prize across five challenges event though we only trained ours system for one of those challenges. In the common Object s in Context challenge , an AI system attempts to solve several visual recognition tasks .  We trained our system to accomplish the other tasks on its won . It not only could explain the photograph, but it was also sable to dra a circle around every distinct object int he photograph , but it was also able to draw a circle around every distance object in the photograph and product an English sentence that described the action it saw in the photo.

Satya Nadella believes in 10 years, AI speech recognition and visual recognition will be better than a human's. But just because a machine can see and hear doesn't mean it can truly learn and
understand. Natural language understanding, the interaction between computers and human is the next frontier.

How will Microsoft empower its clients to take advantage of AI

Microsoft's approach is to put the tools for building AI in the hands of everyone .

Microsoft vision  is to build tools that have true artificial intelligence infused across agents, applications, services and infrastructure .


1. We are harnessing artificial intelligence to fundamentally change how people interact with agents like Cortana which will become more and more common in our lives.

2. Application life Office 365 and Dynamics 365 will have AI baked in so that they can help us focus on things that matter the most and get more of  every moment.

3. We will make the underlying intelligence capabilities of our services - the pattern recognition , perception and cognitive capabilities - available to every application developer in the world .

4. Microsoft is building the world's most powerful AI supercomputer and making that infrastructure available to anyone.

How is AI being used by Microsoft's Clients?

McDonald's is creating  an AI System that can help its workers to take your order to in the drive-through line , making ordering food simpler , more efficient and more accurate .
Uber is using cognitive services tools to prevent fraud and improve passenger safety by matching the drivers's photograph to ensure the right driver at the wheel.
Volvo is using  AI tools to help recognize when drivers are distracted to warn them and prevent accidents.

If you are a business owner  or  manager, imagine if you had AI system that could literally see your entire operation, understand what's happening and notify you about that things that you care most about . Prism Skylabs has innovated on top  of cognitive services so that computers monitor video surveillance cameras that analyze what' s happening. I you have construct company, the system will tell you when it sees the cement truck arrive at one of you work sites. For retailers , it can keep track of inventory to help you find a manager in one  of your stores. One day, in a hospital setting, it might watch the surgeon and supporting staff to warn the team , before it's too late, if it sees a medical error.

Reference:
Hit Refresh - Satya Nadella

Future Technologies that Microsoft wants to master(Insights from Microsoft Envision)

Microsoft looked beyond the PC and the server to drive success in the cloud.
Microsoft is investing to lead in three key technologies that will shape our industry
and others in the years to come - mixed reality , artificial intelligence , and quantum computing .
These technologies will inevitably lead to massive shifts in our economy and society.

Mixed Reality
With mixed reality Microsoft is building the ultimate computing experience one in which field of view becomes  a computing surface and the digital world  and our physical world become one.
The data , apps , and even the colleagues and friends you think of as being on your phone or tablet are now available anywhere you want to access them - while you are working in your office.
Mixed reality will become an essential tool in medicine, education and manufacturing.

Stay Nadella tried HoloLens device , a small head-mounted computer that is completely self-contained. HoloLens transported him - virtually - of course -  onto the surface of the Red Planet , 250 million miles away, thanks to a feed  from NASA's Mars rover,Curiosity. Through HoloLens , he could see his two street shoes  walking , in the most convincing  and baffling  way, on the dusty Martian near a rocky waypoint called Kimberley along the rover's journey to Murray Buttes. HoloLens made it  possible for him both to walk around the actual room - to see a desk and tot interact with people around him - and to inspect the rocks on Mars's surface. That's that amazing , unprecedented nature oh what we call mixed reality . The experience was so inspiring , so moving , that one member of his leadership  team cried during the virtual excursion.

Stay Nadella saw and experienced the day was a glimpse of Microsoft's future. May be this moment will be remembered as the advent of a mixed reality revolution , one in which everyone works and plays in an immersive environment that blends the really works and a virtual world.


While HoloLens has obvious applications in video gaming , he instantly saw its potential in video gaming, I instantly saw its potential in classrooms , hospitals and yes, space exploration. NASA was , in fact , one the first organizations to see the value of HoleLens, adopting an early version  to enable astronauts  on Earth to collaborate with astronauts in space.




HoloLens as a  platform
5000 Developers submitted data for applications that they wanted to build for HoloLens after it was released.
Lowe's Home improvement stores , for example, are using HoloLens to allow their customers to stand in their own kitchens and bathrooms , and superimpose holograms of new cabinets , appliances and accessories so that they can see exactly what the remodel will look like.



Technologies can increasingly see , speak and analyze but it cannot yet feel.  But mixed reality may help machine empathize with humans. Though these technologies , we will be able increasingly to experience what  a refugee or a crime victim experiences , potentially enhancing our ability to make connections across barriers.
Students from Australia built an MR application that helps certain caregivers  to see the world  through the eyes of someone with autism.


Reference:
Hit Refresh - Satya Nadella

A period of stability

Rocky says

In both those cases there was a 5-6 year window when the platforms were slow-changing, the dev tools were mature, and disruption was around the fringes, not in the mainstream. From a "learn new tech" perspective those were probably pretty boring periods of time. But from a "solve big business problems" perspective they were amazing periods of time, because everyone felt pretty comfortable using the platforms/tools at hand to actually do something useful for end users.

The iPad turned the world on its ear, and we're just now back to a point where it is clear that the platform is .NET/Java on the server and Angular on the client (regardless of the client OS). The server tooling has been fine for years, but I think we can see real stability for client development in the near future - whew!

http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/APeriodOfStability.aspx


My thoughts

1. There is lot of fun on databases and cloud computing side.

F12 Developer Tool is your friend.

I was recently debugging Web Site functionality issue with a client. We were not able to reproduce the issues at our end. I saw that the client has disable F12 developer Tool on user computer. I requested them to enable the F12 developer tool. They did and send amazing information. IE11 was hanging on one missing web trend file and was taking 10 - 15 minutes before hanging. Chrome was working fine. Chrome was taking only 2-3 seconds.


F12 Developer Tool vs Fiddler
https://windowsdebugging.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/fiddler-vs-ie-developer-tool/