Month: December 2021

The latest RISC-V specifications open new AI and IoT possibilities

RISC-V International has announced the ratification of 15 new specifications for the for the RISC-V ISA that it says will speed the pace of adoption in a variety of markets. The organization highlighted three of those specifications — Vector, Scalar Cryptography, and Hypervisor — in a press release issued just ahead of this year’s RISC-V […]

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RISC-V International has announced the ratification of 15 new specifications for the for the RISC-V ISA that it says will speed the pace of adoption in a variety of markets.

The organization highlighted three of those specifications — Vector, Scalar Cryptography, and Hypervisor — in a press release issued just ahead of this year’s RISC-V summit in San Francisco.

The Vector specification brings a simplified and flexible way for developers to leverage vector designs. It’s perfectly suited for machine learning and computer vision projects, enabling rapid processing of complex datasets. That’ a crucial task for the onboard computer in an autonomous vehicle and one that RISC-V is now ready to handle with ease.

Virtualization gets a boost with the Hypervisor specification. The spec will allow RISC-V chips to more efficiently host both type-1 (bare-metal) and type-2 (hosted) hypervisors. CTO Mark Himelstein says that the Virtualization specification “is a key piece in accelerating the adoption of RISC-V in data center and desktop environments enabling virtualization capabilities.”

That’s an important takeaway. Virtualization has long played a key role in datacenters, but it’s becoming increasingly important at the desktop level. On desktops, virtualization is rapidly becoming an important part of malware defense.

Cryptography plays a major role in secure computing, too. The RISC-V Scalar Cryptography specification makes it easier and much faster for developers to add cryptographic functions to their applications.

RISC-V Technical Steering Committee member Ben Marshall says that the new Scalar Cryptography extensions allows developers to “[implement] standard cryptographic hash and block cipher algorithms that are an order of magnitude faster than using standard instructions in some cases.”

That’s just the sort of news that could convince developers (and C-level decision makers) to build encrypted apps and systems by default.

Marshall adds that “these new extensions are very cheap to implement so companies can integrate popular cryptography algorithms in even the smallest connected devices.” That could very well make RISC-V an attractive option for companies working in the $1.5 trillion IoT market.

The post The latest RISC-V specifications open new AI and IoT possibilities appeared first on Liliputing.

Selbstzensur beim Staatsballett – eine PR-Kampagne?

Das Staatsballett Berlin will seinen “Nussknacker” überarbeiten, bevor es ihn wieder tanzt. Auch “La Bayadère” verschwand vom Spielplan. Der Grund sind folkloristische Elemente

Das Staatsballett Berlin will seinen "Nussknacker" überarbeiten, bevor es ihn wieder tanzt. Auch "La Bayadère" verschwand vom Spielplan. Der Grund sind folkloristische Elemente

Getting software to “hallucinate” reasonable protein structures

Process resembles repeatedly asking the software “does this look like a protein?”

Four images of spiraling ribbons.

Enlarge / Top row: the hallucination and actual structure. Bottom row: the two structures superimposed. (credit: Anishchenko et. al.)

Chemically, proteins are just a long string of amino acids. Their amazing properties come about because that chain can fold up into a complex, three-dimensional shape. So understanding the rules that govern this folding can not only give us insights into the proteins that life uses but could potentially help us design new proteins with novel chemical abilities.

There's been remarkable progress on the first half of that problem recently: researchers have tuned AIs to sort through the evolutionary relationships among proteins and relate common features to structures. As of yet, however, those algorithms aren't any help for designing new proteins from scratch. But that may change, thanks to the methods described in a paper released on Wednesday.

In it, a large team of researchers describes what it terms protein "hallucinations." These are the products of a process that resembles a game of hotter/colder with an algorithm, starting with a random sequence of amino acids, making a change, and asking, "Does this look more or less like a structured protein?" Several of the results were tested and do, in fact, fold up like they were predicted to.

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Encrochat-Hack: “Damit würde man keinen Geschwindigkeitsverstoß verurteilen”

Der Anwalt Johannes Eisenberg hat sich die Daten aus dem Encrochat-Hack genauer angesehen und viel Merkwürdiges entdeckt. Ein Interview von Moritz Tremmel (Encrochat, Interview)

Der Anwalt Johannes Eisenberg hat sich die Daten aus dem Encrochat-Hack genauer angesehen und viel Merkwürdiges entdeckt. Ein Interview von Moritz Tremmel (Encrochat, Interview)