Trains in China have been transformed in recent years as the country has embraced high-speed rail and expanded its network to more than 40,000 km of tracks. The country has more high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined, but the breakthroughs don’t stop there. A study published in the launch issue of the journal High-Speed Railway shows how satellite-based train state perception – for example, using China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) could revolutionize railway signaling.

How does train signaling work?

To understand the benefits of using satellite navigation methods to keep track of trains, it’s useful to consider how railway signaling works today. The governing principle of railway signaling is that no two trains should occupy the same portion of the track. And there are two approaches to managing train movements – fixed block and moving block signaling.

In both cases, the block length (the portion of track reserved for each train) is defined by the stopping distance of the fastest service using that line. And keep in mind that trains in China can take kilometers to come to a standstill when traveling at high speeds.

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Fixed block signaling systems only allow trains to proceed when the next block has become vacant, whereas moving block approaches make sure, dynamically, that there’s sufficient space ahead and behind to accommodate the braking of all units on the line.

Today, the amount of trackside equipment has grown to provide not just signaling data, but also includes systems to monitor train integrity – in other words, whether the front and the back are still attached. There’s other kit too, such as railway infrared hot box detectors that can determine whether wheel bearings are overheating and stop trains before mechanical failures occur.

A #Fuxing #bullettrain, with a designed speed of 350 km/h, departed on Tuesday morning from the Southwest Chinese city of #Guiyang, marking the operation of the Guiyang-Libo section of the Guiyang-Nanning High-speed #Railway. @VisitGuiyang https://t.co/XUSMHTOEiH

— Enterprising China (@sinoprise) August 9, 2023

Key to the implementation of today’s railway management systems is the placement of so-called balises (pronounced /ba-leases/ and named after the French word for ‘marker’), which stand proud a couple of inches above the sleeper below. If you’ve traveled on trains in China and elsewhere in the world, you’ll likely have seen the yellow- or orange-colored units in between the rails.

In their simplest state, balises are kind of like contactless payment points for trains. But rather than record transactions, these track-located transponders – which are powered by looms underneath the locomotive – provide information to the train on its whereabouts and details on the upcoming section of track.

Train transponders: Balises standing proud on a section of track in Europe.

For example, while the train keeps track of its location by counting wheel rotations, this calculation can be checked against the ground truth telegraphed by each balise. This is necessary as wheels slip and wear causes a reduction in diameter that would – if left unchecked – underestimate the distance traveled on long journeys.

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In addition, the beacons tell the train its permitted speed limit for that block of track, as well as information on the geometry and gradient of the upcoming section. Also, balises placed in sequence inform the train of its direction of travel.

However, there are cost implications of having to install and maintain infrastructure over thousands of kilometers of tracks. And to reduce the quantity and complexity of the track-side equipment that’s involved in supporting a modern railway, such as trains running in China and on high-speed networks in other countries, operators are considering approaches that are increasingly train-centric.

In their study, the researchers based at Beijing Jiaotong and Wuhan Universities – with expertise in computer and information technology, and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) approaches – consider the idea of so-called virtual balises.

Trains in China

Leveraging satellite positioning data gathered from BDS, which was constructed to provide independence from GPS, trains in China receive balise information based on their location. The advantage, as the Beijing and Wuhan teams point out, is that existing train control system frameworks could remain the same, as the information formats, etc, would be unchanged. But you could reduce the amount of physical trackside infrastructure that’s required.

Satellite positioning data could also be used for train integrity monitoring, to ensure that the front and back of the formation are where you’d expect them to be. And, based on field tests, the teams conclude that satellite systems could be key technologies in raising the capabilities of train-borne navigation.

Also, trains in China are by no means the only modes of transport to jump on this trend. Buses, trams, and trains elsewhere can be seen fitted with rooftop antennas that have active GPS/GNSS capabilities. But what’s striking about the development of intelligent high-speed rail in China is how it’s competing with short-haul flights, and – by all accounts – winning that competition.

And more trains and fewer flights is important to curb carbon dioxide emissions associated with transportation. On TechHQ we’ve written about the steps that aircraft manufacturers and operators will need to take to make aviation more sustainable. And those plans are based on continued growth in demand for flights, but China is showing that high-speed trains can reduce the environmental impact of aviation – at least when routes are competitive with short-haul flights.

High-speed trains in China can carry hundreds of passengers at a time, sometimes even more. The extra-long version of the Fuxing Hao Series Bullet Train can reportedly accommodate 1,283 passengers in 17 cars. And, if the concept of virtual balises takes off, satellite positioning could reduce the cost of operations and add to the appeal of high-speed rail.

The post What does BeiDou satellite study tell us about trains in China? appeared first on TechHQ.

In 2019, NASA funded a project to sow the seeds for an all-electric aircraft platform that it hoped would put commercial aviation on a more sustainable flight path. At the time, analysts were forecasting that air travel was on track to increase by 90% in the US over the next 20 years. And the aviation industry’s contribution to global emissions – based on Boston Consulting Group analysis – could balloon from single-digit percentages up to as much as 20% by 2050. Sustainable aviation needed some bright ideas.

What’s the flight path to sustainable aviation?

Four years later, the USD $6 million NASA project – dubbed CHEETA, reflecting how its members form a Center for Cryogenic High-Efficiency Electrical Technologies for Aircraft – has cleared the bar set by phase one’s concept stage. And it’s now time for the partners – which include nine academic institutions, Boeing, GE, and the Air Force Research Lab, all based in the US – to develop prototypes of their designs.

At the core of CHEETA’s sustainable aviation plan is the use of cryogenic hydrogen. “Because hydrogen takes up a lot of volume, it’s best kept cold in a liquid state,” said Phillip Ansell, lead researcher on the NASA program and director of the new Center for Sustainable Aviation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Instead of thinking of that as a barrier, we saw it as an opportunity to leverage those unique characteristics.”

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Superconductivity at room temperature has had a rough ride recently, but the approach, which reduces the energy losses in electric circuits, already has an industrial track record at low temperatures. “We saw a great deal of promise in using the 20 Kelvin cryogenic temperature of liquid hydrogen to enable the use of superconducting technology,” Ansell goes on to explain.

And it’s not just organizations in the US that seem keen on this idea. European aviation giant Airbus is also looking to combine liquid hydrogen and the efficiency gains of superconducting low-temperature circuits. Airbus announced a three-year demonstrator program (ASCEND) in 2021, which has the goal of increasing power density in the propulsion chain while keeping the mass of the distribution system low.

The power and stored energy requirements of air travel, particularly over long-haul routes, make sustainable aviation a tough problem to solve. If you plot the maximum power versus stored energy requirements of different modes of transport on a graph, EVs such as the Tesla Model S and Toyota’s Prius would be on the bottom left – with parameters that can be achieved using batteries.

However, wide-bodied airliners such as the Airbus A380 – which need to carry large numbers of passengers to make the economics of flying add up – are all the way up on the top right. Sustainable aviation needs to address both the need for large amounts of power for take-off and cope with the large distances currently traveled without refueling.

CHEETA still has to prove itself on the scale of a commercial airliner, but the design concept – which uses hydrogen-fed electricity-generating fuel cells to power electric rotors – is off to a promising start. “We were able to reduce the electrical system losses to below 2 percent, so the whole system is over 98 percent efficient from the output of the fuel cell to turning the rotor of the electric machine,” Ansell reports.

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There’s a raft of projects globally looking at hydrogen as a replacement for jet fuel. Hydrogen burns without the carbon emissions of current jet fuel, and produces just water as a product of combustion. But it’s a very small molecule that’s difficult to contain, and critics may point to how fuel cells in vehicles have been slow to take off.

That being said, there are multiple reasons to believe that sustainable aviation based on hydrogen will succeed despite the struggles experienced in the automotive sector. As mentioned, power density and energy storage requirements make it hard to see how batteries will suit all but the smallest of aircraft, making hydrogen-powered fuel cells a more compelling prospect in aerospace.

And the number of refueling stations required are orders of magnitude less than for road transport. There are in the region of 100,000 gas stations for vehicles in the US, which would be a massive infrastructure challenge for hydrogen. However, considering major airports, you only have around 100 facilities to focus on.

Plus, as reported on by TechHQ, airports can use ground vehicles as a pathfinder for building out hydrogen refueling operations. The area around Toulouse in France, which includes a major Airbus manufacturing facility, has a pilot-scale hydrolyser to supply airport buses. And the longer-term plan is to scale this up to provide green fuel for light aircraft.

@LanzaTech have begun their pre-application consultation on their plans to develop a Sustainable Aviation Fuel (#SAF) facility in Port Talbot.

Find out more about the project and share your views here: https://t.co/bsOrdLCT4u pic.twitter.com/iN5IecMnz8

— Neath Port Talbot Council (@NPTCouncil) August 15, 2023

The global pandemic hit the aviation industry hard, but it is now bouncing back in a leaner and more fuel-efficient form. Older planes were retired as part of cost-cutting during Covid. And the industry has long been adept at making marginal gains on performance that have dampened its emissions despite rising numbers of passengers. But it won’t be able to decouple emissions from a boom in air travel without ditching fossil fuels for good.

There are lots of good news stories about sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which can even be made from food waste, and gives airlines a drop-in replacement. But the use of SAF by airlines globally is currently tiny, and it’s not a zero-emission solution. SAF is said by the International Air Transport Association to reduce CO2 emissions by 80%, as the CO2 absorbed by plants is recycled – for example, when SAF is derived from biomass.

Also, there’s a chicken and egg problem of aviation customers not wanting to pay high prices, but SAF suppliers needing to have a larger market to bring down costs. Given the relatively quick win that SAF offers, it feels likely that biofuels will provide some form of bridge until new technologies, such as those being pursued by CHEETA and other projects, are commercialized.

China, India, and growth in SAF

Experts point to the feasibility of China and India becoming major suppliers of SAF, as the demand for airline travel is expected to grow dramatically in both countries. Producing SAF could utilize concentrations of municipal waste and agricultural residues, as well as creating jobs and driving economic growth.

Considering China, the country is a global force in renewable energy, and producing biofuels to support a path towards sustainable aviation – as well as bolstering energy security – would be a logical move.

What’s also clear is how demand for aviation has weathered developments in communications. Video conferencing capabilities have never been as accomplished as they are today, yet business travel – a profitable revenue stream for airlines – has rebounded. And researchers have shown that the appetite for travel has remained strong over the past 200 years despite the various breakthroughs in communication, such as growth of the postal service, fax machines, and the internet.

This appetite for travel gives confidence to developers of sustainable aviation that passengers will be ready and waiting for future net-zero flights, which cannot come soon enough for the planet.

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The planet would be happier if people bought used electronic devices rather than succumbing to the temptation of new products. But there’s an undeniable joy in buying something new. And device makers with supreme marketing teams know that. However, what if you could give a buy-like-new boost to purchasing refurbished smartphones and other electronics?

On TechHQ we’ve written about how R2V3 – the latest version of the sustainable electronic reuse and recycling standard – provides a ‘trust mark’ to firms looking to dispose of IT assets. But the wheels of the circular electronic economy are only going to pick up speed if more consumers are happy to shop for remanufactured and refurbished devices.

Making buying refurbished smartphones feel like new

And that’s where electronics marketplaces such as Back Market fit in, by making the purchasing of refurbished smartphones – to name the most popular category of used device – feel like buying new.

Device refurbishers and electronics re-manufacturers are doing a great job of breathing new life into products and components that are no longer needed by their original owners. And it’s worth reminding that the amount of resources saved by extending the life of products such as phones and laptops is huge.

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A detailed 181-page report commissioned by ADEME, the French agency for ecological transition, lays out the environmental impact of choosing a refurbished device over a new equivalent – examining smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. Using lifecycle analysis methods, researchers crunched the numbers on the environmental burden presented by different usage scenarios.

Putting devices back on the market still leaves a footprint – used products need to be transported for inspection and re-selling, and screens and batteries may need to be replaced – to give a few examples of where resources are still consumed. But the scale of the environmental impact is tiny relative to the energy and materials that are involved in manufacturing new products.

The ADEME report found that purchasing a refurbished smartphone and using it for 2 years, instead of purchasing a new smartphone and using it for 3 years, reduced the ecological load by 86% – examining the material input per unit of service (MIPS). Carbon dioxide emissions were 87% lower, and the benefits of extending device lifetimes add up across all environmental measures.

Latest from our most comprehensive refurbished report
->Refurbished smartphone sales grew 5% globally but China saw a 17% YoY decline.
->Apple captured 49% of the global refurbished smartphone market in 2022 followed by Samsung at 26%.https://t.co/xt5XaNjMVA pic.twitter.com/2CciP2rrri

— Tarun Pathak (@Tarunpathak) April 24, 2023

What’s more, refurbished devices in excellent condition are indistinguishable from new products. The last hurdle to overcome in convincing shoppers to opt for used over new devices is the buying process. And for sales of refurbished smartphones and other electronic goods to boom, this has to compete with the experience of selecting and purchasing a new product.

Marketplaces for refurbished electronics such as Back Market, which brings together buyers and sellers globally, understand this and are rising to the challenge. Shoppers have 30 days to return purchased devices – for example, if they change their mind about an item. Devices are guaranteed for 12 months, and shoppers have the same payment options that they are used to when buying new.

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“The obsession with buying new is going to diminish over time,” Katy Medlock, General Manager for Back Market in the UK, told TechHQ. “All of our markets are showing the enthusiasm for refurbishment.” Medlock points to the role that marketplaces have in educating consumers on not just the benefits of buying a used device, but emphasizing how the user experience (UX) has developed.

Back Market has 8 million customers worldwide and has recently launched a trade-in service that allows device owners to get an offer on phones, tablets, laptops, and gaming consoles from expert refurbishers. And having operations at scale, providing a badge of trust to buyers and sellers, is great news for the circular electronics economy.

Right to repair movement

At the same time, legislative wheels are turning and putting pressure on electronics firms to design products that are repairable and make it possible for customers to buy parts. “Having a reliable working device is no longer a nice to have; it’s a need,” Medlock adds.

Right to repair not only lowers the environmental burden of electronic goods, it makes devices more affordable and available to all. Education has moved online in a big way, and being without a laptop means missing out on lessons. Also, accessing services from banking to managing your energy supplier to booking travel and accommodation is moving to a digital-first model.

Refurbished smartphones, tablets, and other internet-enabled devices keep people connected without having to pay a premium for the latest shiny new thing. There are also supply chain considerations. Giving consumers and businesses other channels to purchase devices builds resilience.

And in some cases, it may be the only way to find parts. In the automotive sector, scrap dealers have embraced the digital age, and the so-called reverse manufacturing of cars and other vehicles is becoming an increasingly slick operation. Vehicles are barcoded as they arrive, booked onto a database, stripped, inspected – with parts photographed – and saleable items prepared for online bids, all within a few hours.

There’s money to be made in keeping useful items out of landfill, and when it’s profitable to do the right thing for the environment, the planet stands a fighting chance of being saved. Sectors such as aviation and fast fashion have come under scrutiny, and companies are realizing that they can no longer bank on sales without demonstrating how there are addressing the environmental impact of the products and services that they provide.

That ecological burden applies to electronics too, but when shopping for refurbished smartphones, laptops, and other products lights up the brain in the same way as buying new – thanks to UX-focused marketplaces – resources are saved for another day.

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Mining Bitcoin on a laptop is a great way to learn more about how decentralized cryptocurrencies work. But it won’t make you rich. Crypto hobbyists report Bitcoin earnings equivalent to just a few cents a day. And even if you scale this up by adding tens of GPUs to your home setup, you’ll still only push those takings into single dollar digits. The reality is that crypto mining has entered its industrial phase. And that begs the question – will market forces make BTC data centers more efficient?

Phil Harvey – CEO and founder of Sabre56, a hosting provider and digital asset project management consultant – remembers the early days of crypto when mining was done in the basement. And, as the sector has scaled up, he’s been working with clients to make their operations more efficient, applying lessons in project planning and implementation learned from a previous career in the military.

Harvey remains intrigued by the possibilities of distributed ledger technology and appreciates that more needs to happen to bring the concept into the mainstream. “We should definitely try to understand its use case better and not be afraid of the change,” he told TechHQ.

Enabling Bitcoin technology

Sabre56 sees itself as an enabler of Bitcoin technology, helping customers to build Bitcoin mining farms by bringing design, project, and cost management expertise to the table. And the company has delivered installations at sites across North America and in the Nordics.

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What’s more, the Dubai headquartered firm has taken things a step further and is establishing hosting facilities of its own. “The plan was always to evolve from being a consultant to practicing what we preach,” Harvey explained.

Speaking with TechHQ it was clear that he wants to change the perception of crypto mining as an activity that’s wasteful of energy and causes damage to the environment. Having people align to standards and run Bitcoin mining operations more professionally will help.

Sabre56 is looking at ways of implementing benchmarks that both itself and others can follow – examining how operations can become more efficient with what they have. As mentioned, there are market forces to consider too, which could end up putting all but the most energy-efficient and well-optimized operations out of business.

Popularity of BTC data centers

The popularity of BTC data centers comes down to the odds of successfully mining Bitcoin. When miners solve the puzzle of finding a low-numbered hash of the next-in-line block of digital cryptocurrency transactions, they are rewarded with a few Bitcoin for their efforts. But the chances of success are incredibly low, so much so that winning the lottery feels like a done deal by comparison.

Bitcoin miners can boost their odds of receiving a reward by running multiple machines and taking trillions of guesses. However, while the chance of success goes up, so does the electricity bill. And when Bitcoin miners shop for hosting facilities for their rigs, one of the major items on their wish list is cheap power.

Last month, Sabre 56 announced that it had been awarded a five-year deal with Bootstrap Energy to provide miner operations at the 300MW Saxet Energy Park in southern Texas, US. The area is home to gigawatts of wind power, and energy management at the site will be designed to pass electricity cost savings onto clients.

Neat and tidy operations: Sabre56-hosted crypto mining facility in Wyoming, US. Image credit: Sabre56.

But it’s not just crypto miners that may benefit from state-of-the-art BTC data centers. Large-scale Bitcoin mining facilities give power companies a buyer of last resort when wind and solar energy generation surges. Rather than having to dump the electricity, energy firms can be confident that crypto miners will be glad of the windfall.

Also, because it’s possible to pause crypto mining operations, BTC data centers can help to buffer the grid. For example, if electricity demand spikes in the neighborhood, the computing processes could, in principle, spin down to reduce the facility’s energy footprint and free up power. And this points to a key operational difference between crypto mining sites and regular data centres, which need to be up 24/7.

In fact, there’s an argument to be made that mining farms motivate energy suppliers to upgrade infrastructure, with everyone benefiting from a more stable power grid. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has reportedly been thinking along these lines, but it’d be wide of the mark to say that everyone is happy to open their arms to crypto miners.

Longer term, excess power could be used to drive electrolyzers and create green hydrogen rather than support blockchain calculations that have less tangible benefits for society. Also, crypto mining is noisy and unpopular with residents looking for peace and quiet. And the objections don’t stop there.

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But when it comes to the energy mix consumed by BTC data centers and other crypto mining operations, there’s evidence that facilities are ahead of the curve compared with local averages. For example, the Bitcoin Mining Council – which claims to represent 43% of the cryptocurrency’s global mining network – writes that the electricity being used comprises a 63.1% sustainable power mix, according to its H1 2023 member survey.

Using Electricity Maps, which visualizes the carbon intensity of electricity being used worldwide, it’s possible to compare crypto mining to electricity consumption in general. For example, at the time of writing, 51% of electricity being consumed in the UK is from renewable sources. In the US, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas is providing 28% renewable power. And the only regions with a sustainable power mix above crypto mining’s 63.1% are Austria; the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Iceland; Germany; Canada; Brazil; Uruguay; plus pockets of the US, such as the City of Tacoma, and sources of Federal Hydropower.

Given the importance of cheap power to the economics of crypto mining and noting that the falling cost of wind and solar are fueling the rise of renewables as the world’s cheapest source of energy, Electricity Maps could just as easily function as a guide on where to site your next BTC data center.

And there are some pioneering examples. We’ve already highlighted Sabre56’s mission to make the sector more efficient. But it’s not the only industry player to recognize where the cryptocurrency sector needs to get to. TeraWulf – a vertically integrated Bitcoin miner – has multiple zero-carbon sites, which target places with an excess supply of energy, not much demand, and limited transmission opportunities.

Its Lake Mariner facility serves as a sink for abundant hydropower and its Nautilus Cryptomine is said to be North America’s first nuclear-powered Bitcoin mining facility.

The company points to the role that BTC data centers can play in giving power firms a guaranteed buyer at the time of energy production, as well as helping to meet other expenses. “That customer adds to the denominator and allows you to amortize the fixed costs of the system over a larger base,” said Nazar Khan, one of TeraWulf’s co-founders and its COO.

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Bitcoin (BTC) has its fans and critics. And to understand what makes this cryptocurrency so polarizing, it’s worth investing a small amount of time in unpacking the concept of money. By doing so, you can appreciate the opportunities and concerns on both sides of the digital coin, as well as gain a perspective on potential BTC trends over the longer term.

Going back centuries, civilizations have purchased goods and services using various means, including exchanging livestock and paying in shells. Fast forward to today, and we have trusted fiat currencies such as the US dollar, EURO, British Pound, and Chinese Yuan.

And while digital payments increasingly dominate, technically – for example, in the case of the British Pound issued by the Bank of England – it is the physical notes and coins that represent the promise of payment from the central bank to the bearer of the currency.

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This begs the question as to why people are so happy to give their money to retail banks and send funds electronically – if those numbers in the various accounts aren’t, strictly speaking, legal tender. And the answer is that those traditional financial services have government backing.

“Making a deposit into a bank or building society account is like giving your trust to that organisation,” writes the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), which monitors banks and building societies in the UK. “You trust that it will look after your money and, when you want to access that money again, it will be there.”

Customers of conventional financial institutions have protection up to a certain value. And while this oversight and government backing is mostly successful in keeping the wheels of traditional finance turning – the promise of payment is only directly tied to the cash in your pocket.

Plus – as wobbles throughout history have shown – if confidence in the ability of the government to control its finances dips, so does the value of that promise to pay the bearer. And when times are shaky, investors reach instead for gold, which has been seen to hold its value during turbulent times.

And this brings the discussion to the idea of cryptocurrency, specifically Bitcoin’s main fork, dubbed Bitcoin Core (BTC), which some advocate has the potential to become a kind of ‘digital gold’.

How does BTC work and what is crypto mining?

The best way to understand crypto mining is to simply look at a block in the BTC blockchain. And there are a couple of key details to focus on. The first is the hash, indicated in the screengrab below by a green arrow, and the second is the so-called ‘nonce’.

Screenshot of BTC details (block #802502) grabbed from Blockchain.com’s explorer page.

A hash digest is a fixed-length code that’s commonly used as an integrity check on digital files. The one-way function generates a unique fingerprint of a file’s contents. And, if the hash function is truly collision-proof, then no two inputs will produce the same output.

For example, if you apply a SHA256 hash (the function used to digest blocks when crypto mining BTC) to the phrase ‘Helloworld’ you get –

5ab92ff2e9e8e609398a36733c057e4903ac6643c646fbd9ab12d0f6234c8daf

But if we re-run the SHA256 hash on ‘Helloworld+1’, the one-way function generates a different code, or fingerprint –

4865d2b4b49f88cc5a721fdc7ff210878f657219d5a768e317134b66a18a4605

And this tells us quickly that the input (which, rather than our simple example, could instead be a GB-sized file and hence enable rapid integrity checks for software such as large operating system updates) has been modified. Also, while the fingerprint is impossible to predict, we can engineer patterns in the output by adding random values to the input.

In our case and sticking with the SHA256 algorithm, if we try ‘Helloworld+1580358748’, we get –

5a0506dd28159d6d8bb1e1e2a3edc4d10e1fa2519193726e9bff6960887a2aa2

And you’ll notice that adding ‘1580358748’ to the list of cryptocurrency transactions comprising BTC block #802502 (plus a hash of the previous block, to secure the blockchain) produces a string of zeros at the front of the hash digest –

00000000000000000001a3c8e6069d5a7d7c7236c91953bfd356794211151b04

Finding a suitable ‘nonce’, which can be added to a block so that its hash has a string of preceding zeros, gets to the heart of bitcoin mining. And although the exercise may sound a little abstract, it gives BTC coins – which are issued to the crypto miner that’s first to solve the challenge for each block – their scarcity.

With the blocks themselves representing sequences of transactions, stamped with an integrity check thanks to the hash functions, we now have the makings of a digital currency. What’s more, if a bad actor wanted to rewrite history and change any of the entries on the digital ledger, the hash would fail to match due to the modified contents.

Plus, coming up with new ‘nonces’ – which is a trial and error process – represents too big a challenge were adversaries to try and cover their tracks.

Digital gold, or not?

Likening BTC to gold serves as a useful comparison in picturing a possible role for future cryptocurrencies. Although, time has yet to pass the same degree of judgement on BTC, with gold having been accepted for thousands of years as a trusted store of value.

“Bitcoin and gold are similar from both a psychological perspective and, especially, as a resource,” write the economists Wolfgang Härdle, Campbell Harvey, and Raphael Reule in a useful discussion paper on ‘Understanding Cryptocurrencies’ [PDF]. “Neither can be created arbitrarily: each must be mined and each has a finite supply (at least on planet Earth)”.

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Similarly, just as it takes energy to extract gold from rock buried underground, it typically requires a vast number of guesses before crypto miners discover a suitable nonce. The probability of an input generating an output with zero as the first digit is 1 in 16 (the hash digest is hexadecimal). But to find 19 leading zeros, as in the hash digest of BTC block #802502, drops that likelihood to just (1/16)¹⁹ – an incredibly small number.

The probability of successfully hashing a new block is many times less than winning a national lottery. But, of course, crypto miners can (sticking with the example of a lottery) buy trillions of tickets per second to boost their chances of hitting upon a valid guess.

Looking at the hash rate for BTC – the number of guesses being made on finding a suitable nonce value – that figure is more than 382 million per second, and it’s measured in units of terahashes (1 trillion guesses).

In the physical world, mining equipment is big and bulky and requires industrial scale power. And the analogy holds for digital crypto mining rigs too. To be competitive, crypto miners need pools of computing hardware that’s been designed specifically for the task.

Units such as Bitmain’s popular S19 model, which is specified as delivering a hashrate of 151 terahashes per second (TH/s) and consumes more than 3kW of power at the wall, are whirring away all over the world (where allowed) to validate BTC transactions on a decentralized digital ledger.

Long-term BTC trends

Critics of such a consensus mechanism, dubbed proof-of-work, point to the power that’s consumed. But, without coming down on either side of the fence, it should be noted that managing traditional currencies consumes energy too. There’s a vast amount of backend services supporting modern banking operations, and it’s the price to pay for running systems that customers trust.

As mentioned, the use of gold goes back thousands of years, which is ages long compared with the not-yet two-decade-old practice of BTC crypto mining. We live in interesting times with ambitious projects to deliver zero-knowledge proof, privacy-preserving World IDs, and the boom in AI.

There’s an element of the unknown when new technologies emerge, and it’s fair to say that cryptocurrencies occupy that space. Parallels with the utility of gold may serve as a guide on how the story of BTC plays out, but time will tell whether Bitcoin has similar appeal, and that clock has only just started ticking.

The post Exploring BTC trends – is Bitcoin entering its industrial phase? appeared first on TechHQ.

Operating systems have a huge bearing on our relationship with technology and appeal to personal preferences – for example, try getting Linux, Mac, and MS Windows users to swap machines! And one of the most significant operating systems in our daily lives is a platform type that many of us never consider – the terminal operating system, which is critical to transporting goods efficiently around the world.

Experience goes a long way when it comes to implementing a terminal operating system that’s going to achieve its full potential. And, as customers soon discover, one size doesn’t fit all. The selection process begins with the nature of the shipping terminal as break bulk – goods such as steel, lumber, and agricultural products, which are not shipped in containers – processes deviate from general cargo operations.

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David Trueman, MD of TBA Group, points out that container processing involves standard dimensions – so much so that operations can run efficiently with little knowledge of what’s inside. Container terminals also benefit from a standardized format of electronic data interchange (EDI) and suit optical character recognition – with agreement on the type and position of container numbers.

However, break bulk cargo comes in various shapes and sizes. Plus, it’s vital to know the nature of the goods to manage unloading, warehousing, and transport. And cargo identification markings are more varied, both in design and location.

“It’s really important to understand where the data sources are going to be,” Trueman responds, when asked about the single most important thing to consider in the design of a bulk handling terminal operating system. “Where are you going to get your real-time information? The location of weighbridges in the operational workflow is vital.”

What is a terminal operating system?

One way of picturing terminal operating systems is to think of them as an enterprise resource planning solution (ERP) for port operators. The systems are essential for optimizing labor allocation and equipment usage and managing the way that port areas are utilized. And Thetius, a maritime technology analyst firm, estimates that the terminal operating system market is currently worth over half a billion dollars.

Day 20 of the #30DayMapChallenge – My Favourite. I think it is the prettiest visualisation I have and indeed, will ever make!
Made with #Python using #matplotlib and #Numpy. #DataScience #DataVisualization #Map #shipping #Geography #dataviz #data #DataScientist pic.twitter.com/8iZiCfib62

— Python Maps (@PythonMaps) November 20, 2022

Features offered by vendors include fleet management, autogate systems, and video analytics. Terminal operating systems can build off industrial IoT frameworks to gather even more data on real-time operations – which expands the possibilities for machine learning and AI. And modules can service billing and other related activities to streamline business operations.

Also, given that vessel plans involve multiple parties, including the next port of call, collaboration is key. And terminal operating systems can help to manage that complex process, carry out better planning, and compile all of the necessary information into the right format, noting EDI requirements.

List of TOS vendors

• Contpark
• CyberLogitec (OPUS Terminal)
• DP World (CARGOES)
• Envision
• GullsEye
• Hogia
• Inform
• iPortman
• IT Partner
• Kaleris (Navis)
• MarineBerth
• Orbita TMEIC
• TBA Group
• TGI
• Tideworks (Mainsail)

Clearly, the world is becoming more automated. And port terminals are no exception from discharging and loading machinery handling vessels at the berth area to yard operations and gate management.

It’s commonplace – for example, in giant terminals such as the Port of Long Beach in the US (the country’s first fully automated port) or the Port of Rotterdam (Europe’s largest seaport) – to see self-driving container trucks (terminal tractors) shuttling back and forth. And reports suggest that smart ports brimming with IoT sensors could accommodate autonomous ships by 2030.

China too has been busy automating its port facilities, including Qingdao – a major seaport in the east of the country and one of the top 10 in the world based on traffic. Qingdao harbor has four zones, which handle cargo and container goods, including oil and petrol tankers, as well as vessels carrying iron ore.

Logical upgrade to supply chain planning

The scale of traffic, diversity of goods, and multiple modes of transport, including road and rail freight, highlight the demands that terminal operating systems have to meet. And getting to grips with this complexity helps to explain why ports are becoming a magnet for the latest technology.

On TechHQ we’ve written about how quantum computers are being used to plan the loading of trucks to reduce the distance traveled by RTG cranes and dramatically reduce maintenance and operating costs.

Private 5G networks are also helping to boost the efficiency of shipping terminals where mobile coverage may otherwise be patchy and feature dead spots. And there are gains beyond connectivity, as operators benefit from being fully in control of communications.

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Having a terminal operating system to measure and record port activity gives management a dashboard view on whether operations are achieving their key performance indicators (KPIs). And, particularly if KPIs are not being met, analysts can dive in – aided by data insights – and identify where the bottlenecks are.

Systems also provide a suite of reporting tools – for example, showing terminal inventory, gate movements, vessel movements, crane productivity, truck turnaround time, and much more.

The scale of modern freight shipping is mind-blowing. If you put all of the containers from a large category vessel onto a freight train – that freight train would be over 70 miles long.

And, typically, all of that cargo will be unloaded and replaced with waiting goods in less than 48 hours, which is a tribute to numerous advances, including developments in terminal operating systems.

The post Supply chain planning – the importance of terminal operating systems appeared first on TechHQ.

Worldcoin, founded by Alex Blania and Sam Altman – who are both still involved – and Max Novendstern, who left the company in 2021, has some lofty ambitions. As CEO of OpenAI, Altman has brought advanced chatbots powered by generative AI into the mainstream. And Blania, Worldcoin’s CEO, brings an intriguing mix of theoretical physics and protocol development skills to the project, which sets its sights on creating the biggest financial and identity network imaginable. However, its popularity encountered a speedbump this week, with Worldcoin going down on Monday 7^th August.

But if Worldcoin being overwhelmed by demand is a measure of the global interest in the project, then Blania and Altman would have reason to view Worldcoin being down as another milestone in their journey. And the end goal is to solve the problem of verified humanness, which tackles the issue of identity in a world where telling the difference between human-generated and machine-made output is getting harder.

Why do we need a World ID?

Picturing a world where conversing with advanced chatbots – such as descendants of OpenAI’s game-changing ChatGPT – is indistinguishable from human interactions, having proof of personhood feels like a smart idea. In principle, interactions could then be labeled as human in origin to help people navigate what is likely to be a very confusing existence as generative AI becomes increasingly lifelike. But that raises the question, how do you verify a human?

Maxed out: Worldcoin was down on Monday 7th August, 2023, and returned minus the capability to claim grants as developers worked to restore services.

Worldcoin’s approach is based on liveness detection, biometrics, and so-called zero-knowledge proofs that allow systems to validate whether something is genuine while preserving the privacy of that information. And privacy-preserving validation of personhood opens the door – Blania and Altman hope – to some radical concepts such as universal basic income (UBI), as signposted in the Worldcoin whitepaper.

In fact, according to that whitepaper, every human is eligible for a share of Worldcoin simply for being human. But distributing those tokens fairly is only possible if users can verify their humanness – asserting that they are real people and different from other real people.

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Worldcoin and World ID – identity security against generative AI bots?

Conventionally – for example, when interacting with regular institutions – that happens using know-your-customer (KYC) processes such as providing a birth certificate or passport. But the founding team’s concern is that this approach doesn’t scale. There’s also the issue of what happens if you don’t have those documents.

Considering alternative approaches, Worldcoin has opted for biometrics – specifically, iris recognition. And having a digital primitive based on the pattern of a user’s eye opens up the concept to a truly global audience.

Recall that Apple’s Face ID device unlocking feature carries a probability that one person in a million, other than you, could look at the infrared camera and gain access to the smartphone or tablet. And, although that probability sounds small – if you wanted to use that method as a proof of personhood on a global scale for billions of Worldcoin accounts, the risk of fraud would be too high.

A bridge to the real world

Hearing Blania and Altman speak, it’s clear that they can imagine a future where looking at pictures or video, or considering intelligence alone, won’t be sufficient to determine humanness. And they see World ID’s proof of personhood as a bridge to the real world, which is a good time to mention the Worldcoin Orb.

Shoreditch sign-up: it takes just a few minutes for users to download the Worldcoin app, agree to the T&C’s, and verify that they are human by standing in front of a Tools for Humanity Orb, which takes an infrared measurement to determine liveness and performs an iris scan. Image credit: JT.

Last week, when Worldcoin wasn’t down, this author gazed briefly into one of 2000 Orbs that have been produced by Tools For Humanity – a technology company building tools for the Worldcoin project. Custom designed, Worldcoin’s Orbs feature a range of sensors, an iris scanner, and contain local compute that turns images of the colored part of the eye surrounding the pupil into device-signed World IDs.

By presenting a digital World ID, users can assert that they are a unique human who has stood in front of a Worldcoin Orb, and for signing up they receive – depending on where they reside – a nominal amount of Worldcoin tokens. And this goes back to the idea that by offering rewards, users will be incentivized to make the network a success.

However, not everyone is so keen on the idea of a new global currency – notably, the US – and restrictions are in place that stop Worldcoin from issuing tokens to US residents. Also, in Europe, governments appear to share some concerns about the collection of sensitive information.

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For example, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK advises that “Organisations must conduct a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) before starting any processing that is likely to result in high risk, such as processing special category biometric data.” And, “Where they identify high risks that they cannot mitigate, they must consult the ICO.”

However, while the ICO has said in a statement on Worldcoin that it will be making enquiries, the independent body has dodged the question – based on the details of a freedom of information request – as to whether it has asked Worldcoin for a copy of its DPIA.

Worldcoin is processing biometric data, but the processing – the conversion of the iris scan into a unique World ID – takes place locally on the Orb via a neural network embedding. And it’s interesting to note that the hardware, while custom-designed to capture sufficiently high-resolution images capable of preserving uniqueness on a global scale, has been engineered to be resistant to physical attacks.

Blania, who has knowledge of how the Orbs have been engineered, revealed that the units make use of multi-spectral imaging and time-of-flight measurements to confirm that they are looking at real humans. And when proof of personhood takes place, it’s using an iris code that he describes as providing extreme privacy.

The zero-knowledge proofs in the protocol are intended to separate a user’s identity from any requests made to the World App for human verification.

How do I sign up for a World ID?

Practically, users need to book an appointment where they can visit a Worldcoin Orb near them and download the World App on their smartphone. The World App generates a QR code, which – in effect – says that the user is (potentially) the rightful owner of the World ID. And showing the QR code to the Worldcoin Orb initiates the final stage of the enrolment process – proving the person signing up is human.

Under the hood is the generation of key pairs – one pair for the World ID and another for a cryptocurrency wallet. And the zero-knowledge proof rests on whether the digital codes are part of a known set – in other words, proof of inclusion.

Considering use cases, solutions like World ID – and it should be said that there are other projects too, developing proof of personhood tools (Quadrata, Humanbound, and Proof of Humanity are just a few examples) – pave the way for authors to identify content as human-created. And others could use their proof of personhood to endorse human-badged creations.

Real deal: Orb verified users receive a proof of personhood, which can be viewed digitally on the World App and is linked to their World ID.

The Worldcoin project has attempted to design the protocol so that it can be scaled to all of humanity. However, until that backend becomes decentralized – for example, to piggyback on the benefits of federated computing – there will no doubt be growing pains to keep pace with interest in the project. And that’s been seen this week with Worldcoin down, and having to throttle functionality.

At the time of writing, the World App remains at capacity, according to a warning notification displayed on the World ID page of this author’s device.

The post Worldcoin down but not out appeared first on TechHQ.

Nature has no shortage of lessons for device makers looking to make better products with a host of properties that come easily in the natural world. Many thousands of years of evolution have yielded computing systems such as the human brain, which can operate on the power of a dim lightbulb. And Circuits of Life – a UK-based project featuring experts in computational biology and other disciplines – is taking inspiration from the protein-based electronics necessary for life on Earth and aims to build key components to order.

On TechHQ we’ve written about how slime mold has an incredible ability to solve mazes and perform optimizations that would challenge conventional computers. And nature turns out to be rich in computational capabilities.

In his book ‘Quantum Supremacy’, Michio Kaku points out that plants have quantum computing-like properties. For example, leaves are incredibly efficient in photosynthesizing light into chemical energy – much more so than classical physics would suggest.

And Kaku describes to readers how photons of light incident on the leaf surface are channeled counterintuitively like golf balls being hit in all directions yet still finding their way to the hole. Considering leaves as quantum solvers may feel peculiar, but biology is no stranger to properties that have device appeal.

Circuits of life as a molecular toolkit

“The flow of electrons within protein-based circuitry is essential to life, underpinning cellular energy generation and photosynthesis,” writes the Circuits of Life team, introducing its latest findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

In the paper, Ross Anderson and his co-authors describe how to make conductive, biodegradable wires from designed proteins, which could – the researchers believe – open up a new era of environmentally friendly programmable bioelectronics.

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The molecular wires, which are comparable in size to features found on silicon chips, are said to be compatible with conventional electronic components made from copper or iron. And, thanks to their protein origins, these nanostructures may also provide a bridge to the biological machinery responsible for generating energy in all living organisms.

Circuits of Life got the go-ahead in 2022 when the proposal to create and comprehend the way that nature builds its electronics was awarded GBP 4.9 million in funding, as part of the BBSRC’s flagship Strategic Longer and Larger (sLoLa) grant scheme. And the support provides five years of funding to build completely new protein-based circuitry, catalysts, and light-harvesting assemblies.

For example, it’s thought that the dynamic nature of proteins could help lower the energy barrier to substrate entry and product exit – offering catalytic support to bioreactions. Artificial bio-inspired electron-conducting circuitry could also lead to novel sensors for diagnosing disease and detecting environmental pollutants.

@uwaterloo Scientists create 'artificial leaf' that turns carbon dioxide into fuel.The "artificial leaf" technology mimics photosynthesis by taking carbon dioxide and converting it into methanol and oxygenhttps://t.co/OjQ34YiLND pic.twitter.com/7QmgkXGdX5

— R+T PARK (@RTPARKUW) November 4, 2019

Nature’s ability to transport electrons is fundamental to cellular respiration – the method by which living organisms obtain energy from food – and photosynthesis. And understanding in more detail how proteins and other related structures enable these bioengineering marvels has benefits for cleantech and building better medical devices.

Artificial leaves capable of turning carbon dioxide into fuel could solve the dual problem of providing green energy and consuming products that would otherwise contribute to global warming.

Bioelectronic medicine – exploring novel neural interfaces

In medicine, there’s great interest in being able to selectively modulate the autonomic nervous system. Neural engineering studies have indicated how it’s possible to act on the internal state of the body and compensate for damaged or dysfunctional elements.

“For decades, several devices known as neural prostheses have used electrical pulses to communicate with the nervous system to improve health and save lives,” writes Marina Cracchiolo and colleagues from the BioRobotics Institute of Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, based in Italy. “These devices act by substituting or modifying the activity of a dysfunctional or injured nerve or a neural circuit, which in turn directly controls muscles or sensory organs.”

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However, circuits of life – such as the computer-simulated building blocks proposed by Anderson and co-workers in the UK – could zoom in and take bioelectronic medicine to a whole new level. Biocompatible, miniaturized devices raise the prospect of targeting individual nerves to modulate and decipher neural signaling patterns, paving the way for advances in bioelectronic medicine.

Galvani Bioelectronics – a joint venture between pharmaceuticals firm GSK and Google X spinout Verily – is an example of one med-tech developer aiming to transform patient lives through precision neuromodulation. And it’s clear that being able to lean on not just conventional electronics, but also to learn from how nature manages electron flow will pay dividends.

Returning to the idea of circuits of life – bioelectronics inspired by nature – computers play a major role in proposing how to build nanoscale protein wires for long-range electron transfer. The first step is to devise a modular protein platform for creating well-folded variants that can then be extended as part of a computational design strategy.

Techniques such as NMR spectroscopy and cryogenic electron microscopy allow workers to visualize their creations and gather structural insight that can’t be simulated in the digital world. And physical experiments provide confidence in the fidelity of the design process.

“To fully unlock the diverse functional repertoire of the natural oxidoreductases, it will be necessary to integrate molecular dynamics simulations and continuum electrostatics calculations, and other prediction tools, into the design process to define and modulate biophysical properties,” concludes the Circuits of Life team in their write-up.

The group’s comments point to the direction of travel in the project, which still has plenty more to offer the field on top of its early breakthrough in creating a microscopic toolkit of ‘green’ tuneable electrical components.

The post Circuits of life – what can tech learn from nature? appeared first on TechHQ.

Twelve months ago, Frost & Sullivan made the case for why private 5G networks will be game-changing for some companies. And Troy Morley, an Industry Principal at the business consulting firm, believes that over the next decade private 5G networks will evolve to support the needs of smaller businesses in almost all industries.

What makes a private 5G network the right choice for firms?

Installing a private 5G network addresses a series of pain points that businesses may face. The first is network coverage. Cell towers in public mobile networks are primarily located based on demand – for example, across urban sites with large populations and alongside transport routes.

And this arrangement is fine for companies based in metropolitan areas or near the highway. But what if firms have business interests in remote locations that need to be connected locally and to headquarters? Extreme examples are underground operations such as mining and activities out at sea.

Telecoms trend: 5G antennas being installed on a building in South Korea. Image credit: Ericsson.

It may also be the case that firms near a public mast have great coverage outside, but experience dead spots when trying to use the cell network inside. Morley notes that factories and warehouses can have problems in this area, with buildings and their contents acting as potential sources of signal interference.

Given these network coverage concerns, it’s easy to understand why early adopters of private 5G networks have been operators in mining, energy, and manufacturing industries. There’s also data security to consider, which is another reason for firms to opt for a private setup rather than build solutions using public mobile network infrastructure.

5G performance gains

5G brings faster download speeds and low-latency performance to devices. And high-definition video and mobile gaming are well-advertised as reasons for mobile customers to ditch their old smartphones and buy new 5G handsets. But this is just scratching the surface.

“While most consumers think that 5G is all about them, the truth is 5G is ideal for addressing the networking needs of business and enterprise,” writes Morley.

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For example, 5G brings significant edge capabilities. Private 5G networks don’t just connect staff, they enable industrial IoT communications too. And wireless networks provide flexibility to make businesses more agile and composable – in other words, tools and teams are easier to reconfigure for different projects.

Cellnex’s Catherine Gull lists automation, worker safety, and situational awareness as the top three benefits that private networks can bring to operations. Enterprises can use 5G systems to automate indoors and outdoors, from self-driving vehicles to factory robots.

“They do it to increase safety, and they do it to increase reliability,” she told UPTIME attendees in June 2023. “The more of these robots that you put in one single space, the more other mechanisms of connectivity fall down and become unreliable or unsafe.”

Gull makes a strong case that systems such as private 5G networks give users reliable bandwidth and, for firms, can be ‘where they want them, when they want them, and how they want them’. And companies are no longer held back by the downsides of basing their operations on a public mobile network.

Laying the tracks to 5G-powered industries! Hungary's EWG Intermodal Terminal partnered with #Huawei to deploy a powerful private #5G network to manage freight, automated cranes, and staff management, completely changing the game in rail industry safety and efficiency.… pic.twitter.com/k0rh0JGm1b

— Huawei (@Huawei) July 26, 2023

Adding to the appeal of being in full control, firms may find that they are able to stack multiple use cases on private 5G networks. Beyond automation, systems can also enable asset tracking, help with training, streamline maintenance, and provide ERP integration – to give just a few additional applications.

Once businesses have the fat bandwidth that 5G offers, there’s a lot that they can do. And low latency (plus video over wireless) opens the door to accurate remote control, which has broad appeal across a wide range of industries – from logistics to healthcare.

“Most enterprises start with something that is really key to them and that’s oftentimes connectivity availability,” Gull points out. “And once that’s resolved, you can build on that.” Cellnex, headquartered in Spain, has more than 138,000 sites on which mobile network operators (MNOs) put their infrastructure. And it has cell towers located in 12 countries.

What private 5G network architecture do you need?

The multiple antennas associated with 5G infrastructure enable powerful beamforming capabilities. Signals from multiple 5G radios can be purposefully overlapped and grouped together. And regions of constructive interference in the emissions can even be steered toward devices by adjusting the phase of each of those broadcasts.

As the name suggests, mobile networks are ideal for maintaining connections on the move, and beamforming adds further precision to the technology. Using beamforming methods, signals can be tuned to follow devices. Buildings can be utilized too, as reflective surfaces to bounce mobile signals to recipients.

One of the trade-offs of using much higher frequencies, which offer more bandwidth, is that these shorter wavelength mobile signals don’t travel as far. But beamforming has been shown to compensate for this, putting suitably configured 5G systems on par with longer wavelength 4G networks, in terms of coverage – at least at the lower end of the 5G spectrum.

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Technically, to use 3GPP (the standards group for mobile broadband) terminology, a private 5G network is dubbed a ‘5G non-public network’, highlighting the absence of commercial MNO subscribers. And, as mentioned, such networks could be providing industrial control or replacing enterprise Wi-Fi.

Radio access requires physical hardware, but core network elements can be virtualized and made available in the cloud. Also, circling back to the security advantage for businesses running private 5G networks, enterprise systems will only be visible to authorized user equipment.

Devices belonging to the 5G non-public network will look for a standalone non-public network (SNPN) ID. In contrast, consumer devices latch onto mobile services based on a public land mobile number (PLMN) ID – a combination of a mobile country code and a mobile network code – which is one of the details contained on a handset’s SIM.

Private 5G network starter kit

AWS is trying to bridge the knowledge gap for business users who are thinking about experimenting with private 5G services. The cloud giant has a kit that’s priced based on network traffic rather than the number of connected devices. And, based on the AWS demo video, the setup process is straightforward – comparable to configuring a Wi-Fi network.

Taking a kit-based first step gives firms the chance to run small-scale pilot schemes ahead of making larger investments in mobile infrastructure. And AWS is by no means the only vendor offering easy to navigate solutions. Firecell’s Orion Private 5G dashboard requires no knowledge of a 5G network architecture and configuration.

And the French firm, which aims to democratize private networks and believes in open source as the way forward in telecoms, can supply clients with a rack server, access point, ten pre-configured SIM cards, and one omnidirectional antenna to see how a private 5G network can improve company performance.

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If the idea of private 5G networks sounds appealing and you want to run the numbers on whether it’s an investment that’s worthwhile for your organization, Nokia has made available a 5G business modeling tool. The web application allows users to compare the total cost of ownership of Wi-Fi versus 5G wireless and is based on more than 220+ customer use cases.

Returning to the Frost & Sullivan observations at the top of the story, businesses could end up being the big winners from 5G, as telecoms firms will be highly motivated to tailor their solutions to industrial clients.

“Communications Service Providers (CSPs) have invested significantly in 5G,” emphasizes Morley. “The stark truth is those CSPs depending just on the consumer market for a return on investment will fail.”

The post Is a private 5G network the right choice for your business? appeared first on TechHQ.

If somebody told you that a refurbished laptop could eclipse the performance of an NVIDIA A100 GPU when training a 200 million-parameter neural network, you’d want to know the secret. Running AI routines on CPUs is supposed to be slow, which is why GPUs are in high demand, and NVIDIA shareholders are celebrating. But maybe it’s not that simple.

Part of the issue is that the development and availability of GPUs, which can massively parallelize matrix multiplications, has made it possible to brute force progress in AI. Bigger is better when it comes to both the amount of data used to train neural networks and the size of the models, reflected in the number of parameters.

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Considering state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, the number of parameters is now measured in the billions. And training what is, in effect, a vast, multi-layered equation – by first specifying model weights at random and then refining those parameters through backpropagation and gradient descent – is now firmly GPU territory.

Nobody runs high-performance AI routines on CPUs, or at least that’s the majority view. The growth in model size, driven by the gains in accuracy, has led users to overwhelmingly favor much faster GPUs to carry out billions of calculations back and forth.

But the scale of the latest generative AI models is putting this brute force GPU approach to the test. And many developers no longer have the time, money, or computing resources to compete – fine-tuning billions of artificial neurons that comprise the many-layered networks.

ThirdAI's new PocketLLM app is free to use and completely secure. https://t.co/e9uEfj1LmZ

— InnovationMap (@InnoMapHou) May 16, 2023

Experts in the field are asking if there’s another, more efficient way of training neural networks to perform tasks such as image recognition, product recommendation, and natural language processing (NLP) search.

Artificial neural networks are compared to the workings of the human brain. But the comparison is a loose one as the human brain operates using the power of a dim light bulb, whereas state-of-the-art AI models require vast amounts of power, have worryingly large carbon footprints, and require large amounts of cooling.

That being said, the human brain consumes a considerable amount of energy compared with other organs in the body. But its orders of magnitude GPU-beating capabilities stem from the fact that the brain’s chemistry only recruits the neurons that it needs – rather than having to perform calculations in bulk.

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AI developers are trying to mimic those brain-like efficiencies in computing hardware by engineering architectures known as spiking neural networks. Neurons behave more like accumulators and fire only when repeatedly prompted. But it’s a work in progress.

However, it’s long been known that training AI algorithms could be made much more efficient. Matrix multiplications assume dense computations, but researchers have shown a decade ago that just picking the top ten percent of neuron activations will still produce high-quality results.

The issue is that to identify the top ten percent you would still have to run all of those sums in bulk, which would remain wasteful. But what if you could look up a list of those most active neurons based on a given input?

And it’s the answer to this question that opens up the path to running AI on CPUs, which is potentially game-changing – as the observation that a refurbished laptop can eclipse the performance of an NVIDIA A100 GPU hints at.

How to run AI on CPUs

So what is this magic? At the heart of the approach is the use of hash tables, which famously run in constant time (or thereabouts). In other words, searching for an entry in a hash table is independent of the number of locations. And Google puts this principle to work on its web search.

For example, if you type ‘Best restaurants in London’ into Google Chrome, that query – thanks to hashing, which turns the input into a unique fingerprint – provides the index to a list of topical websites that Google has filed away at that location. And it’s why, despite having billions of websites stored in its vast index, Google can deliver search results to users in a matter of milliseconds.

And, just as your search query – in effect – provides a lookup address for Google, a similar approach can be used to identify which artificial neurons are most strongly associated with a piece of training data, such as a picture of a cat.

In neural networks, hash tables can be used to tell the algorithm which activations need to be calculated, dramatically reducing the computational burden to a fraction of brute force methods, which makes it possible to run AI on CPUs.

In fact, the class of hash functions that turn out to be most useful are dubbed locally sensitive hash (LSH) functions. Regular hash functions are great for fast memory addressing and duplicate detection, whereas locally sensitive hash functions provide near-duplicate detection.

Dynamic sparsity

LSH functions can be used to hash data points that are near to each other – in other words, similar – into the same buckets with high probability. And this, in terms of deep learning, dramatically improves the sampling performance during model training.

Hash functions can also be used to improve the user experience once models have been trained. And computer scientists based in the US at Rice University, Texas, Stanford University, California, and from the Pocket LLM pioneer ThirdAI, have proposed a method dubbed HALOS: Hashing Large Output Space for Cheap Inference, which speeds up the process without compromising model performance.

As the team explains, HALOS reduces inference into sub-linear computation by selectively activating only a small set of likely-to-be-relevant output layer neurons. “Given a query vector, the computation can be focused on a tiny subset of the large database,” write the authors in their conference paper. “Our extensive evaluations show that HALOS matches or even outperforms the accuracy of given models with 21× speed up and 87% energy reduction.”

Field test

Commercially, this approach is helping merchants such as Wayfair – an online retailer that enables customers to find millions of products for their homes. Over the years, the firm has worked hard to improve its recommendation engine, noting a study by Amazon that even a 100-millisecond delay in serving results can put a noticeable dent in sales.

And, sticking briefly with online shopping habits, more recent findings published by Akamai report that over half of mobile website visitors will leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load – food for thought as half of consumers are said to browse for products and services on their smartphones.

All of this puts pressure on claims that clever use of hash functions can enable AI to run on CPUs. But the approach more than lived up to expectations, as Wayfair has confirmed in a blog post. “We were able to train our version three classifier model on commodity CPUs, while at the same time achieve a markedly lower latency rate,” commented Weiyi Sun – Associate Director of Machine Learning at the company.

Plus, as the computer scientists described in their study, the use of hash-based processing algorithms accelerated inference too.

The post Is running AI on CPUs making a comeback? appeared first on TechHQ.