#technology conference 2024

[ldttechnology]

Launch Into an Electronic Journey at Convergence India 2024 with LDT Technology Exhibition!

Come see LDT Technologies at Convergence India 2024, where innovation and influence meet! Examine our creative solutions, see state-of-the-art technology up close, and connect with business leaders. We're revealing an intimate peek at the digital revolution on our exhibition website. Are you prepared to reevaluate your technology choices? Inhale deeply and get started!

[jcmarchi]

Toward a code-breaking quantum computer

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/toward-a-code-breaking-quantum-computer/

Toward a code-breaking quantum computer

The most recent email you sent was likely encrypted using a tried-and-true method that relies on the idea that even the fastest computer would be unable to efficiently break a gigantic number into factors.

Quantum computers, on the other hand, promise to rapidly crack complex cryptographic systems that a classical computer might never be able to unravel. This promise is based on a quantum factoring algorithm proposed in 1994 by Peter Shor, who is now a professor at MIT.

But while researchers have taken great strides in the last 30 years, scientists have yet to build a quantum computer powerful enough to run Shor’s algorithm.

As some researchers work to build larger quantum computers, others have been trying to improve Shor’s algorithm so it could run on a smaller quantum circuit. About a year ago, New York University computer scientist Oded Regev proposed a major theoretical improvement. His algorithm could run faster, but the circuit would require more memory.

Building off those results, MIT researchers have proposed a best-of-both-worlds approach that combines the speed of Regev’s algorithm with the memory-efficiency of Shor’s. This new algorithm is as fast as Regev’s, requires fewer quantum building blocks known as qubits, and has a higher tolerance to quantum noise, which could make it more feasible to implement in practice.

In the long run, this new algorithm could inform the development of novel encryption methods that can withstand the code-breaking power of quantum computers.

“If large-scale quantum computers ever get built, then factoring is toast and we have to find something else to use for cryptography. But how real is this threat? Can we make quantum factoring practical? Our work could potentially bring us one step closer to a practical implementation,” says Vinod Vaikuntanathan, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and senior author of a paper describing the algorithm.

The paper’s lead author is Seyoon Ragavan, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The research will be presented at the 2024 International Cryptology Conference.

Cracking cryptography

To securely transmit messages over the internet, service providers like email clients and messaging apps typically rely on RSA, an encryption scheme invented by MIT researchers Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman in the 1970s (hence the name “RSA”). The system is based on the idea that factoring a 2,048-bit integer (a number with 617 digits) is too hard for a computer to do in a reasonable amount of time.

That idea was flipped on its head in 1994 when Shor, then working at Bell Labs, introduced an algorithm which proved that a quantum computer could factor quickly enough to break RSA cryptography.

“That was a turning point. But in 1994, nobody knew how to build a large enough quantum computer. And we’re still pretty far from there. Some people wonder if they will ever be built,” says Vaikuntanathan.

It is estimated that a quantum computer would need about 20 million qubits to run Shor’s algorithm. Right now, the largest quantum computers have around 1,100 qubits.

A quantum computer performs computations using quantum circuits, just like a classical computer uses classical circuits. Each quantum circuit is composed of a series of operations known as quantum gates. These quantum gates utilize qubits, which are the smallest building blocks of a quantum computer, to perform calculations.

But quantum gates introduce noise, so having fewer gates would improve a machine’s performance. Researchers have been striving to enhance Shor’s algorithm so it could be run on a smaller circuit with fewer quantum gates.

That is precisely what Regev did with the circuit he proposed a year ago.

“That was big news because it was the first real improvement to Shor’s circuit from 1994,” Vaikuntanathan says.

The quantum circuit Shor proposed has a size proportional to the square of the number being factored. That means if one were to factor a 2,048-bit integer, the circuit would need millions of gates.

Regev’s circuit requires significantly fewer quantum gates, but it needs many more qubits to provide enough memory. This presents a new problem.

“In a sense, some types of qubits are like apples or oranges. If you keep them around, they decay over time. You want to minimize the number of qubits you need to keep around,” explains Vaikuntanathan.

He heard Regev speak about his results at a workshop last August. At the end of his talk, Regev posed a question: Could someone improve his circuit so it needs fewer qubits? Vaikuntanathan and Ragavan took up that question.

Quantum ping-pong

To factor a very large number, a quantum circuit would need to run many times, performing operations that involve computing powers, like 2 to the power of 100.

But computing such large powers is costly and difficult to perform on a quantum computer, since quantum computers can only perform reversible operations. Squaring a number is not a reversible operation, so each time a number is squared, more quantum memory must be added to compute the next square.

The MIT researchers found a clever way to compute exponents using a series of Fibonacci numbers that requires simple multiplication, which is reversible, rather than squaring. Their method needs just two quantum memory units to compute any exponent.

“It is kind of like a ping-pong game, where we start with a number and then bounce back and forth, multiplying between two quantum memory registers,” Vaikuntanathan adds.

They also tackled the challenge of error correction. The circuits proposed by Shor and Regev require every quantum operation to be correct for their algorithm to work, Vaikuntanathan says. But error-free quantum gates would be infeasible on a real machine.

They overcame this problem using a technique to filter out corrupt results and only process the right ones.

The end-result is a circuit that is significantly more memory-efficient. Plus, their error correction technique would make the algorithm more practical to deploy.

“The authors resolve the two most important bottlenecks in the earlier quantum factoring algorithm. Although still not immediately practical, their work brings quantum factoring algorithms closer to reality,” adds Regev.

In the future, the researchers hope to make their algorithm even more efficient and, someday, use it to test factoring on a real quantum circuit.

“The elephant-in-the-room question after this work is: Does it actually bring us closer to breaking RSA cryptography? That is not clear just yet; these improvements currently only kick in when the integers are much larger than 2,048 bits. Can we push this algorithm and make it more feasible than Shor’s even for 2,048-bit integers?” says Ragavan.

This work is funded by an Akamai Presidential Fellowship, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a Thornton Family Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship, and a Simons Investigator Award.

[crypto195]

New York Venture Summit 2024: Blockchain & Web3 conference

About Event Join us at NYVS 2024, hosted by Young Startup, on September 4–5, New York City, to dive into the future of blockchain and Web3 technologies. This cutting-edge event brings together blockchain enthusiasts, Web3 innovators, and industry leaders to explore transformative advancements in decentralized technologies. Engage in insightful discussions on the impact of blockchain and Web3 on various industries, attend hands-on workshops, and witness demonstrations of the latest innovations. Network with key players driving the evolution of decentralized applications and smart contracts. Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with pioneers and gain valuable insights into the blockchain and Web3 revolution.

To Know More- crypto events in New York

[ctfksa2024]

Join us at the Construction Tech Conference 2024 to explore cutting-edge innovations shaping the future of building. Connect with industry leaders and discover the latest advancements in construction technology.

[crazydiscostu]

Cosmic Summit 2024

In the realm of intellectual exploration and historical speculation, few events hold as much promise as the Cosmic Summit. This annual gathering attracts some of the brightest minds and most curious souls from around the world, eager to delve into humanity’s mysterious past and the enigmas of Earth’s history. Following a successful debut in Asheville in June 2023, the Cosmic Summit returned with…

[tachyonblu]

Reuploaded! Chris Ferguson and I discussed the politics of GamerGate, the “GG to alt-right pipeline” claim, his interactions with both sides, NotYourShield, queers for Palestine, @petercoffin & Jesse Singal changing their minds on GamerGate, and more! https://youtu.be/4RWmpOk6FPg

[ldttechnology]

Launch Into an Electronic Journey at Convergence India 2024 with LDT Technology Exhibition!

Visit LDT Technology at Convergence India 2024, where influence and innovation collide! Investigate our innovative solutions, get a firsthand look at cutting-edge technology, and network with industry experts. Our exhibition website offers an inside look at the digital revolution we're unveiling. Are you ready to reconsider your technological path? Take a deep breath and dive in!

[jcmarchi]

A fast and flexible approach to help doctors annotate medical scans

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-fast-and-flexible-approach-to-help-doctors-annotate-medical-scans/

A fast and flexible approach to help doctors annotate medical scans

To the untrained eye, a medical image like an MRI or X-ray appears to be a murky collection of black-and-white blobs. It can be a struggle to decipher where one structure (like a tumor) ends and another begins. 

When trained to understand the boundaries of biological structures, AI systems can segment (or delineate) regions of interest that doctors and biomedical workers want to monitor for diseases and other abnormalities. Instead of losing precious time tracing anatomy by hand across many images, an artificial assistant could do that for them.

The catch? Researchers and clinicians must label countless images to train their AI system before it can accurately segment. For example, you’d need to annotate the cerebral cortex in numerous MRI scans to train a supervised model to understand how the cortex’s shape can vary in different brains.

Sidestepping such tedious data collection, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and Harvard Medical School have developed the interactive “ScribblePrompt” framework: a flexible tool that can help rapidly segment any medical image, even types it hasn’t seen before. 

Instead of having humans mark up each picture manually, the team simulated how users would annotate over 50,000 scans, including MRIs, ultrasounds, and photographs, across structures in the eyes, cells, brains, bones, skin, and more. To label all those scans, the team used algorithms to simulate how humans would scribble and click on different regions in medical images. In addition to commonly labeled regions, the team also used superpixel algorithms, which find parts of the image with similar values, to identify potential new regions of interest to medical researchers and train ScribblePrompt to segment them. This synthetic data prepared ScribblePrompt to handle real-world segmentation requests from users.

“AI has significant potential in analyzing images and other high-dimensional data to help humans do things more productively,” says MIT PhD student Hallee Wong SM ’22, the lead author on a new paper about ScribblePrompt and a CSAIL affiliate. “We want to augment, not replace, the efforts of medical workers through an interactive system. ScribblePrompt is a simple model with the efficiency to help doctors focus on the more interesting parts of their analysis. It’s faster and more accurate than comparable interactive segmentation methods, reducing annotation time by 28 percent compared to Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM) framework, for example.”

ScribblePrompt’s interface is simple: Users can scribble across the rough area they’d like segmented, or click on it, and the tool will highlight the entire structure or background as requested. For example, you can click on individual veins within a retinal (eye) scan. ScribblePrompt can also mark up a structure given a bounding box.

Then, the tool can make corrections based on the user’s feedback. If you wanted to highlight a kidney in an ultrasound, you could use a bounding box, and then scribble in additional parts of the structure if ScribblePrompt missed any edges. If you wanted to edit your segment, you could use a “negative scribble” to exclude certain regions.

These self-correcting, interactive capabilities made ScribblePrompt the preferred tool among neuroimaging researchers at MGH in a user study. 93.8 percent of these users favored the MIT approach over the SAM baseline in improving its segments in response to scribble corrections. As for click-based edits, 87.5 percent of the medical researchers preferred ScribblePrompt.

ScribblePrompt was trained on simulated scribbles and clicks on 54,000 images across 65 datasets, featuring scans of the eyes, thorax, spine, cells, skin, abdominal muscles, neck, brain, bones, teeth, and lesions. The model familiarized itself with 16 types of medical images, including microscopies, CT scans, X-rays, MRIs, ultrasounds, and photographs.

“Many existing methods don’t respond well when users scribble across images because it’s hard to simulate such interactions in training. For ScribblePrompt, we were able to force our model to pay attention to different inputs using our synthetic segmentation tasks,” says Wong. “We wanted to train what’s essentially a foundation model on a lot of diverse data so it would generalize to new types of images and tasks.”

After taking in so much data, the team evaluated ScribblePrompt across 12 new datasets. Although it hadn’t seen these images before, it outperformed four existing methods by segmenting more efficiently and giving more accurate predictions about the exact regions users wanted highlighted.

“​​Segmentation is the most prevalent biomedical image analysis task, performed widely both in routine clinical practice and in research — which leads to it being both very diverse and a crucial, impactful step,” says senior author Adrian Dalca SM ’12, PhD ’16, CSAIL research scientist and assistant professor at MGH and Harvard Medical School. “ScribblePrompt was carefully designed to be practically useful to clinicians and researchers, and hence to substantially make this step much, much faster.”

“The majority of segmentation algorithms that have been developed in image analysis and machine learning are at least to some extent based on our ability to manually annotate images,” says Harvard Medical School professor in radiology and MGH neuroscientist Bruce Fischl, who was not involved in the paper. “The problem is dramatically worse in medical imaging in which our ‘images’ are typically 3D volumes, as human beings have no evolutionary or phenomenological reason to have any competency in annotating 3D images. ScribblePrompt enables manual annotation to be carried out much, much faster and more accurately, by training a network on precisely the types of interactions a human would typically have with an image while manually annotating. The result is an intuitive interface that allows annotators to naturally interact with imaging data with far greater productivity than was previously possible.”

Wong and Dalca wrote the paper with two other CSAIL affiliates: John Guttag, the Dugald C. Jackson Professor of EECS at MIT and CSAIL principal investigator; and MIT PhD student Marianne Rakic SM ’22. Their work was supported, in part, by Quanta Computer Inc., the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute, the Wistron Corp., and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health, with hardware support from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.

Wong and her colleagues’ work will be presented at the 2024 European Conference on Computer Vision and was presented as an oral talk at the DCAMI workshop at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference earlier this year. They were awarded the Bench-to-Bedside Paper Award at the workshop for ScribblePrompt’s potential clinical impact.

[crypto195]

Tech Coast Conference 2024 crypto news: Blockchain event

About Event The Tech Coast Conference 2024 is the premier tech event, uniting innovators, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders. This year’s conference promises an exciting lineup of keynote speakers, panel discussions, and workshops covering emerging technologies, startups, and digital transformation . Attendees will gain valuable insights, network with top professionals, and explore groundbreaking solutions shaping the future of tech. With a focus on actionable strategies and industry trends, Tech Coast Conference 2024 is a must-attend for anyone looking to stay ahead in the tech world. For more details and registration, visit the Tech Coast Conference website.

To Know More- Upcoming Crypto Event

[digitalconfex]

Unlock the Power of Storytelling in Digital Marketing at Dubai Tech Expo & Summit 2024

Join us at the Dubai Tech Expo 2024 and the Dubai Tech Summit 2024 on October 17-18 in Dubai, UAE, organized by DIGITALCONFEX. Discover how compelling storytelling can transform digital marketing, capturing audience attention and building meaningful connections. Learn from industry leaders about the latest trends and techniques. Elevate your digital marketing strategy with storytelling insights at this must-attend event!

[nicholasandriani]

Welcome to ‘Learn Play Innovate’ - Navigating the Convergence of Educational Technology, Game Design, and Learning Through Storytelling

Unveiling the Synergy Between Learning, Tech Innovations, and Interactive Design Twitter Patreon GitHub LinkedIn YouTube Introduction: Greetings and a warm welcome to Learn Play Innovate! It’s an exhilarating moment to begin this journey with you, delving into the intricate blend of educational technology (EdTech), game design, and the profound influence of cultural narratives. Allow me to…

[healconferences]

Healthcare conferences in Las Vegas

HEaL Conferences pivotal forums where professionals, innovators, and thought leaders converge to advance the future of healthcare. Healthcare conferences in Las Vegas by HEal catalyze discussions on cutting-edge technologies, medical breakthroughs, and evolving trends, shaping the landscape of patient care

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"The Food and Drug Administration approved new mRNA coronavirus vaccines Thursday [August 22, 2024], clearing the way for shots manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to start hitting pharmacy shelves and doctor’s offices within a week.

Health officials encourage annual vaccination against the coronavirus, similar to yearly flu shots. Everyone 6 months and older should receive a new vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends.

The FDA has yet to approve an updated vaccine from Novavax, which uses a more conventional vaccine development method but has faced financial challenges.

Our scientific understanding of coronavirus vaccines has evolved since they debuted in late 2020. Here’s what to know about the new vaccines.

Why are there new vaccines?

The coronavirus keeps evolving to overcome our immune defenses, and the shield offered by vaccines weakens over time. That’s why federal health officials want people to get an annual updated coronavirus vaccine designed to target the latest variants. They approve them for release in late summer or early fall to coincide with flu shots that Americans are already used to getting.

The underlying vaccine technology and manufacturing process are the same, but components change to account for how the virus morphs. The new vaccines target the KP.2 variant because most recent covid cases are caused by that strain or closely related ones...

Do the vaccines prevent infection?

You probably know by now that vaccinated people can still get covid. But the shots do offer some protection against infection, just not the kind of protection you get from highly effective vaccines for other diseases such as measles.

The 2023-2024 vaccine provided 54 percent increased protection against symptomatic covid infections, according to a CDC study of people who tested for the coronavirus at pharmacies during the first four months after that year’s shot was released...

A nasal vaccine could be better at stopping infections outright by increasing immunity where they take hold, and one is being studied in a trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

If you really want to dodge covid, don’t rely on the vaccine alone and take other precautions such as masking or avoiding crowds...

Do the vaccines help prevent transmission?

You may remember from early coverage of coronavirus vaccines that it was unclear whether shots would reduce transmission. Now, scientists say the answer is yes — even if you’re actively shedding virus.

That’s because the vaccine creates antibodies that reduce the amount of virus entering your cells, limiting how much the virus can replicate and make you even sicker. When vaccination prevents symptoms such as coughing and sneezing, people expel fewer respiratory droplets carrying the virus. When it reduces the viral load in an infected person, people become less contagious.

That’s why Peter Hotez, a physician and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said he feels more comfortable in a crowded medical conference, where attendees are probably up to date on their vaccines, than in a crowded airport.

“By having so many vaccinated people, it’s decreasing the number of days you are shedding virus if you get a breakthrough infection, and it decreases the amount of virus you are shedding,” Hotez said.

Do vaccines prevent long covid?

While the threat of acute serious respiratory covid disease has faded, developing the lingering symptoms of “long covid” remains a concern for people who have had even mild cases. The CDC says vaccination is the “best available tool” to reduce the risk of long covid in children and adults. The exact mechanism is unclear, but experts theorize that vaccines help by reducing the severity of illness, which is a major risk factor for long covid.

When is the best time to get a new coronavirus vaccine?

It depends on your circumstances, including risk factors for severe disease, when you were last infected or vaccinated, and plans for the months ahead. It’s best to talk these issues through with a doctor.

If you are at high risk and have not recently been vaccinated or infected, you may want to get a shot as soon as possible while cases remain high. The summer wave has shown signs of peaking, but cases can still be elevated and take weeks to return to low levels. It’s hard to predict when a winter wave will begin....

Where do I find vaccines?

CVS said its expects to start administering them within days, and Walgreens said that it would start scheduling appointments to receive shots after Sept. 6 and that customers can walk in before then.

Availability at doctor’s offices might take longer. Finding shots for infants and toddlers could be more difficult because many pharmacies do not administer them and not every pediatrician’s office will stock them given low demand and limited storage space.

This year’s updated coronavirus vaccines are supposed to have a longer shelf life, which eases the financial pressures of stocking them.

The CDC plans to relaunch its vaccine locator when the new vaccines are widely available, and similar services are offered by Moderna and Pfizer."

-via The Washington Post, August 22, 2024