Month: March 2018

Google’s Bristlecone Quantum Computing Chip

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A few days ago Google previewed its new quantum processor, Bristlecone, a quantum computing chip that will serve as a testbed for research regarding the system error rates and scalability of Google’s qubit technology. In a post on its research blog, Google said it’s “cautiously optimistic that quantum supremacy can be achieved with Bristlecone.”

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72 Qubit Quantum Computing Chip

The purpose of this gate-based superconducting system is to provide a testbed for research into system error rates and scalability of their qubit technology, as well as applications in quantum simulation, optimization, and machine learning. Qubits (the quantum version of traditional bits) are very unstable and can be adversely affected by noise, and most of these systems can only hold a state for less than 100 microseconds. Google believes that quantum supremacy can be “comfortably demonstrated” with 49 qubits and a two-qubit error below 0.5 percent. Previous quantum systems by Google have given two-qubit errors of 0.6 percent, which in theory sounds like an extremely small difference, but in the world of quantum computing remains significant.

However, each Bristlecone chip features 72 qubits, which may help mitigate some of this error, but as Google says, quantum computing isn’t just about qubits. Until now, the most advanced quantum chip, built by IBM, had 50 qubits.  “Operating a device such as Bristlecone at low system error requires harmony between a full stack of technology ranging from software and control electronics to the processor itself,” the team writes in a blog post. “Getting this right requires careful systems engineering over several iterations.”

(via Google Research Blog, Engadget, Forbes)

 

 

Deep learning improves your computer with age

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The researchers at Google have devised a new technique that could let a laptop or smartphone learn to do things better and faster over time. The researchers published a paper which focuses on a common problem. The prefetching problem. Computers process information much faster than they can pull it from memory to be processed. To avoid bottlenecks, they try to predict which information is likely to be needed and pull it in advance. As computers get more powerful, this prediction becomes progressively harder.

In the paper published, Google focuses on using deep learning to improve prefetching. “The work that we did is only the tip of the iceberg,” says Heiner Litz of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a visiting researcher on the project. Litz believes it should be possible to apply machine learning to every part of a computer, from the low-level operating system to the software that users interact with.

Such advances would be opportune. Moore’s Law is finally slowing down, and the fundamental design of computer chips hasn’t changed much in recent years. Tim Kraska, an associate professor at MIT who is also exploring how machine learning can make computers work better, says the approach could be useful for high-level algorithms, too. A database might automatically learn how to handle financial data as opposed to social-network data, for instance. Or an application could teach itself to respond to a particular user’s habits more effectively.

Paper reference: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.02329.pdf

 

(via: MitTechReview)

Baidu Research’s New AI Algorithm Mimics Voice With Very Few Samples

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AI typically needs a plethora of data and a lot of time for something like voice cloning. It needs to listen to hours of recordings. However, a new process could get that down to one minute. Baidu researchers have unveiled an upgraded version of Deep Voice, their text-to-speech synthesis system, that can now, once trained, clone any voice after listening to a few snippets of audio. This capability was enabled by learning shared and discriminative information from speakers. Baidu calls this ‘Voice Cloning’. Voice cloning is expected to have significant applications in the direction of personalization in human-machine interfaces.

bAIDU

Here, Baidu focuses on two fundamental approaches (refer above figure):

  1. Speaker Adaption: Speaker adaptation is based on fine-tuning a multi-speaker generative model with a few cloning samples, by using backpropagation-based optimization. Adaptation can be applied to the whole model or only the low-dimensional speaker embeddings. The latter enables a much lower number of parameters to represent each speaker, albeit it yields a longer cloning time and a lower audio quality.
  2. Speaker Encoding: Speaker encoding is based on training a separate model to directly infer a new speaker embedding from cloning audios that will ultimately be used with a multi-speaker generative model. The speaker encoding model has time-and-frequency-domain processing blocks to retrieve speaker identity information from each audio sample, and attention blocks to combine them in an optimal way.

For detailed information and mathematical explanations, refer the paper by Baidu Research.

However, this technology can also possibly have a downside as this could be tumultuous to people relying upon biometric voice security.

( via MitTechReview, Wiki, BaiduResearch)