Science Policy Around the Web February 13th, 2020

By Thomas Dannenhoffer-lafage PhD

Image credit: stevepb from pixabay

Trump Proposes a Cut in Research Spending, but a Boost for AI

On Monday, February 10^th, President Trump released his budget request for the 2021 fiscal year. The proposed budget calls for cuts in research across almost all federal agencies, with the notable exception of NASA. While the total budget of most federal agencies is planned to be cut, the budget also requests that a larger amount of the remaining money be directed towards research in artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing.  The call for more research funding in AI has been recommended in reports and requested in legislation. The budget would call for an overall 9% percent reduction in research spending and will likely be modified by Congress, who usually oppose cuts to research spending. 

The pushes for more research funding in the fields of AI and quantum computing were prioritized because the administration claims that these technologies “underpin the Industries of the Future.” The technologies of AI and quantum computing have also received substantial investment from China. Insiders have claimed that the president has acted responsibly, as these areas have been identified as areas of great competition. Dario Gil has also claimed that the investment in AI will accelerate discovery and that it is “going to permeate every sector of the economy and national defense.”

However, others have pointed out that the new budget may actually harm the development of new technologies by limiting the scope and funding of basic research. As Martijn Rasser points out: “[w]e don’t know where the next breakthrough will come from.” Others worry that an exclusive focus on AI research may actually hamper overall progresses of the field since inspiration for new ideas can come from different fields. Subbarao Kambhampati claims that “[n]euroscience will be really relevant to AI in over the longer term [sic].” This is exemplified by Neural Networks, an important component of many AI technologies, whose creation was inspired by the connections of neurons in brains. 

(Will Knight, Wired)

Science Policy Around the Web August 16th, 2019

By Neetu M. Gulati PhD

Image by vegasita from Pixabay 

How Eating Less Meat Could Help Protect the Planet from Climate Change

A recent report by the United Nations climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Science (IPCC), warns that now is a moment of reckoning for how humans use the planet. The report highlights how the planet has been impacted by land-use practices, deforestation, agriculture, and other activities. These threaten our ability to limit the global temperature increase as outlined by the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The report further outlines how humans can help stop the impacts of climate change by drastically changing what food we eat as well as how it is produced.

Explaining this logic, Debra Roberts, the co-chair of the IPCC Working Group II, commented, “some dietary choices require more land and water, and cause more emissions of heat-trapping gases than others.” If people eat more sustainably grown and produced foods, as well as more plant-based diets, this could provide opportunities to adapt and mitigate the potential climate issues. Meats like beef and lamb are particularly taxing on the environment for the amount of meat obtained, partially because such livestock require a large space to graze. Reducing the amount of land to produce meat and also using that land more efficiently through sustainable farming practice will be imperitive to ensure that land remains usable as the planet warms. 

While a lot of the world already eats majority plant-based diets, the countries that eat a lot of meat tend to be wealthier countries. As countries with lesser meat consumption gain wealth, there is a risk that they will eat more meat and put a greater strain on the environment. While not every country will stop eating meat, the recent popularity of meatless products is encouraging, and hopefully the public will begin to focus on the fact that food and agriculture are important in the fight against climate change.

(Abigail Abrams, Time)

“Qutrit” Experiments are a First in Quantum Teleportation

Many believe that quantum information science is a key avenue of research for future technologies. Now, for the first time, researchers have used this technology to teleport a qutrit, a tripartite unit of quantum information. This is an important advance for the field of quantum teleportation, previously limited to the quantum equivalent of binary bits of information known as qubits. The two research teams who independently achieved this feat first had to create qutrits from photons, a challenge in and of itself. Because qutrits can carry more information and have more resistance to noise than qubits, these experiments may mean that qutrits become an important part of future quantum networks.

In quantum science, the states of entangled particles have a connection. Thus, in quantum teleportation, the state of one entangled particle, for example the spin of an electron particle, influences the second particle instantaneously, even if far apart. While this sounds like something out of a science-fiction story, this milestone may have important real-world implications. Quantum teleportation may be important for secure communications in the future. In fact, much of the quantum teleportation research is funded because of its importance for the future of cybersecurity.

The qutrit teleportation experiments were independently performed by two research teams. One team, led by Guang-Can Guo at the University of Science and Technology of China (UTSC), reported their results in a preprint paper in April 2019. The other team, co-led by Anton Zeilinger of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Jian-Wei Pan at the UTSC, reported their findings in a preprint paper in June 2019 that has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. The two teams agree that each has successfully teleported a qutrit, and both have plans to go beyond qutrits, to at least ququarts (four level systems). Other researchers are less convinced, saying the methods used by the two teams are slow and inefficient, and therefore not suited for practical purposes. In response, one of the authors of the paper by Zeilinger and Pan’s team, Chao-Yang Lu, said, “science is step by step. First, you make the impossible thing possible. Then you work to make it more perfect.”

(Daniel Garisto, Scientific American)