Skip to main content

White House Earmarks New Money For AI and Quantum Computing

The Trump administration on Monday unveiled its $4.8 trillion budget proposal which, among other things, includes plans to increase federal funding for the development of AI and quantum computing. "The technologies are expected to become an important part of national security, and some worry the United States is behind China in their development," reports The New York Times. From the report: The funding [...] would direct more money for A.I. research to the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation. The administration also wants to spend $25 million on what it calls a national "quantum internet," a network of machines designed to make it much harder to intercept digital communication. For several years, technologists have urged the Trump administration to back research on artificial intelligence -- which could affect things as diverse as weapons and transportation -- and quantum computing, a new way to build super-powerful computers. China's government, in particular, has made building these machines a priority, and some national security experts worry that the United States is at risk of falling behind.

The proposed spending follows earlier administration moves. In 2018, President Trump signed a law that earmarked $1.2 billion for quantum research. The Energy Department recently began distributing its portion of that money -- about $625 million -- to research labs in industry, academia and government. [...] The new budget proposal would increase funding for artificial intelligence research at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research arm of the Defense Department, to $249 million from $50 million, and at the National Science Foundation to $850 million from about $500 million. The administration also vowed to double funding for A.I. and quantum computing research outside the Defense Department by 2022. Big tech companies have invested heavily in A.I. research over the last decade. But many experts have worried that universities and government labs have lost much of their talent to businesses. Under the new funding plan, the National Science Foundation would apply $50 million to help train A.I. experts.


from Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters https://ift.tt/31N4L5t
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One of the Most Destructive Botnets Can Now Spread To Nearby Wi-Fi Networks

The sophistication of the Emotet malware's code base and its regularly evolving methods for tricking targets into clicking on malicious links has allowed it to spread widely. "Now, Emotet is adopting yet another way to spread: using already compromised devices to infect devices connected to nearby Wi-Fi networks ," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Last month, Emotet operators were caught using an updated version that uses infected devices to enumerate all nearby Wi-Fi networks. It uses a programming interface called wlanAPI to profile the SSID, signal strength, and use of WPA or other encryption methods for password-protecting access. Then, the malware uses one of two password lists to guess commonly used default username and password combinations. After successfully gaining access to a new Wi-Fi network, the infected device enumerates all non-hidden devices that are connected to it. Using a second password list, the malware then tries to guess credentials for each...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better?

Recently a well-respected UI consulting firm (the Nielsen Norman Group) published their analysis of academic studies on the question of whether Dark Mode or Light Mode was better for reading? Cosima Piepenbrock and her colleagues at the Institut für Experimentelle Psychologie in Düsseldorf, Germany studied two groups of adults with normal (or corrected-to-normal) vision: young adults (18 to 33 years old) and older adults (60 to 85 years old). None of the participants suffered from any eye diseases (e.g., cataract)... Their results showed that light mode won across all dimensions : irrespective of age, the positive contrast polarity was better for both visual-acuity tasks and for proofreading tasks... Another study, published in the journal Human Factors by the same research group, looked at how text size interacts with contrast polarity in a proofreading task. It found that the positive-polarity advantage increased linearly as the font size was decreased: namely, the smaller the fon...
Post a Comment
Read more

500 Chrome Extensions Secretly Uploaded Private Data From Millions of Users

More than 500 browser extensions downloaded millions of times from Google's Chrome Web Store surreptitiously uploaded private browsing data to attacker-controlled servers , researchers said on Thursday. Ars Technica reports: The extensions were part of a long-running malvertising and ad-fraud scheme that was discovered by independent researcher Jamila Kaya. She and researchers from Cisco-owned Duo Security eventually identified 71 Chrome Web Store extensions that had more than 1.7 million installations. After the researchers privately reported their findings to Google, the company identified more than 430 additional extensions. Google has since removed all known extensions. "In the case reported here, the Chrome extension creators had specifically made extensions that obfuscated the underlying advertising functionality from users," Kaya and Duo Security Jacob Rickerd wrote in a report . "This was done in order to connect the browser clients to a command and control a...
Post a Comment
Read more