ITNews

When playing with Cozmo, Anki’s  palm-sized artificial intelligence robot , it’s easy to forgot all of the engineering and software running behind the scenes. Every action, from Cozmo’s audible chirps of victory when it wins a game to its childlike mannerisms when it recognizes your face, conceals tens of thousands of lines of code. While Cozmo sleeps, it snores. The small robot — shaped like a miniaturized bulldozer with a CRT monitor for a cockpit — sits in a charging dock, waiting to be awoken. Like Pixar’s adorably anthropomorphic WALL-E, Cozmo falls somewhere between a Mars rover and an animated woodland creature. It’s lifelike enough to evoke sympathy, but still enough of a toy not to teeter too close to the uncanny valley.  With the tap of a smartphone screen, Cozmo comes to life. It makes a subtle motion to indicate it’s shaking off its slumber and begins wheeling over to the edge of the table. When it gets too close, it slams to a halt and looks down over ...

Work on phase change memory (PCM) conducted by a team based at Stanford University in the US suggests the technology could store data far more quickly than previously thought, as well as providing non volatility. Until now, PCM was thought to switch in nanoseconds, however Stanford’s work has brought a new understanding.  IBM announced a more efficient way to use phase-change memory, a breakthrough that could help transition electronic devices from standard RAM and flash to a much faster and more reliable type of storage. Phase-change memory, or PCM, is a type of non-volatile optical storage that works by manipulating the behavior of chalcogenide glass, which is how data is stored on rewriteable Blue-ray discs. A electrical current is applied to change PCM cells from an amorphous to crystalline structure, allowing you to store 0s and 1s in either state while the application of low voltage can read the data back. The issue in the past has been PCM's limited capacity and...

Here comes the terabit per second network,In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has redefined broadband as being at least 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. While some moronic senators think that's too fast, everyone else knows it's way too slow. The technical problem is the demand for broadband has grown ever higher -- thanks Netflix -- while the Internet backbones can't keep up with the demand.  Until now. Today, Internet backbone connections tend to run at 40 Gigabits (Gb) per second, while 100Gb is becoming more common. That's good, but that's not good enough. Fortunately, new research projects point the way to the terabit (Tb) Internet.  First, the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) has developed a laser that can quadruple internet speeds. The project's chief scientist, Amnon Yariv, claims that this new improved laser is "capable of a 4x increase in the number of bytes-per-second carried by each channel...