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AI tool is built to boost the hunt for gravitational waves

Illustration: Mirrors and lasers in foreground, colliding black holes and gravitational waves in background
An illustration hints at how LIGO uses mirrors and laser beams to detect black hole collisions. (Google DeepMind Illustration)

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, has already won its researchers a Nobel Prize — and now artificial intelligence is poised to take LIGO’s search for cosmic collisions to the next level.

Google DeepMind and the LIGO team say they’ve developed an AI tool called Deep Loop Shaping that has been shown to enhance the observatory’s ability to track gravitational waves — faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are thrown off by smash-ups involving black holes and massive neutron stars.

The researchers describe the technique in a proof-of-concept study published today by the journal Science. They hope to make Deep Loop Shaping part of routine operations at LIGO’s detectors in Louisiana and on the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state.

“Deep Loop Shaping is revolutionary, because it is able to reduce the noise level in the most unstable and most difficult feedback loop at LIGO,” lead author Jonas Buchli, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, told reporters.

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Satellite phone service raises its orbit into the data zone

Photoillustration: Hiker using mobile phone in countryside with magenta-tinged satellites in the sky above
T-Mobile says satellite access will get rid of “dead zones” for mobile phone apps. (T-Mobile Photoillustration)

T-Mobile subscribers who buy one of the phones in Google’s newly announced Pixel 10 lineup will be able to explore a new frontier in mass-market mobile connectivity: satellite access to data-dependent apps, including Google Maps.

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Asteroid hunters make 27,500 new finds in old data

Asteroid orbital tracks
This visualization shows trajectories for scores of asteroids. (B612 Asteroid Institute / UW Dirac Institute / OpenSpace Project)

A team of asteroid hunters that includes researchers at the University of Washington says it has identified 27,500 new, high-confidence asteroid discovery candidates — not by making fresh observations of the night sky, but by sifting through archives of astronomical data.

The weeks-long database search was conducted by the Asteroid Institute, a program of the nonprofit B612 Foundation, in partnership with UW’s DiRAC Institute and Google Cloud.

The two institutes developed a program called THOR, which stands for “Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery.” THOR runs on a cloud-based, open-source platform known as ADAM (“Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping”). The program can analyze the positions of millions of moving points of light observed in the sky over a given period of time, and link those points together in ways that are consistent with orbital paths.

Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO collaborated with the Asteroid Institute to fine-tune its algorithms for Google Cloud. The project analyzed 5.4 billion observations drawn from the NOIRLab Source Catalog Data Release 2.

“What is exciting is that we are using electrons in data centers, in addition to the usual photons in telescopes, to make astronomical discoveries,” Ed Lu, executive director of the Asteroid Institute, said in a news release.

Most of the 27,500 asteroid discovery candidates are in the main belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But the candidates also include more than 100 apparent near-Earth asteroids.

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Amazon and Google make a couple of quantum leaps

Visualization of electric field energy density for metamaterial waveguide, from AWS' Palace simulation
This Palace simulation visualizes the electric field energy density for a metamaterlal waveguide. (AWS Graphic)

Today’s news from the frontier of quantum computing includes Amazon Web Services’ release of cloud-based simulation software for modeling the electromagnetic properties of quantum hardware, Google’s latest technological advance aimed at lowering the error rate of quantum calculations, and new recommendations about the public sector’s role on the frontier.

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Another record for calculating pi: 100 trillion digits!

Illustration: Pi on computer, and pie on table
Calculating 100 trillion digits of pi is a feat worth celebrating with a pie. (Google Graphic / The Keyword)

Three years after Seattle software developer Emma Haruka Iwao and her teammates at Google set the world record for calculating pi precisely, they’ve done it again. Thanks to Iwao and Google Cloud, we now know what pi equals to an incredible precision of 100 trillion digits.

Why pi?

Mathematicians have been working out the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter for millennia, going back at least as far as the Babylonians (who figured it at 3.125). It’s important for scientists and engineers to know the irrational number’s value with a high degree of precision, but beyond a certain point, it’s really all about showing how well an algorithm or a computer network can handle more practical problems.

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Boeing hires three giants to build its billion-dollar cloud

Boeing engineers at computer
Boeing engineers huddle over a computer to work on an aircraft design. (Boeing Photo / Bob Ferguson)

The billion-dollar competition to provide Boeing with cloud computing services is finished, and the winner is … a three-way split. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft are all getting a share of the business, Boeing announced today.

In a LinkedIn post, Susan Doniz, Boeing’s chief information officer and senior VP for information technology and data analytics, called it a “multi-cloud partnership.”

“This represents a significant investment in the digital tools that will empower Boeing’s next 100 years,” she wrote. “These partnerships strengthen our ability to test a system — or an aircraft — hundreds of times using digital twin technology before it is deployed.”

Doniz said that becoming more cloud-centric will provide Boeing with “global scalability and elasticity without having to predict, procure, maintain and pay for on-premises servers.” Financial details relating to the multi-cloud partnership were not disclosed.

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Cloud titans reportedly battle for Boeing’s business

Boeing offices in Chicago
The Boeing Co. won't be headquartered in Chicago much longer. (Boeing Photo)

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are involved in a bidding process to provide Boeing with cloud computing services, a contract that’s expected to be worth at least $1 billion over several years, The Information reports.

Today’s report is attributed to four people with knowledge of the matter. We’ve reached out to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud as well as Boeing, but this is typically something such companies doesn’t talk about publicly during negotiations — as The Information found out. (For what it’s worth, Google Cloud sent us a “no comment” email.)

The Information says AWS considers the Boeing contract “a must-win deal.” Andy Jassy, who’s currently in charge of AWS’ cloud business and is due to take over as Amazon’s CEO on July 5, is reportedly directly involved in the process.

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Google’s ‘quantum supremacy’ feat earns respect

Quantum computing chip
The Sycamore processor is at the heart of Google’s quantum computing project. (Google Photo / Erik Lucero)

Word that a Google-led team of researchers had achieved “quantum supremacy” with a new type of computer chip leaked out weeks ago, but today’s publication of the team’s study in the journal Nature gave outsiders their first good look at what was done. And most of them were impressed.

There were the usual caveats, of course: The project focused on a specific problem in random number generation that’s doesn’t relate directly to everyday applications, and it could be years before the technology behind Google AI Quantum’s Sycamore chip becomes commercially available.

Nevertheless, the computational demonstration provided evidence that quantum computers can do some tasks far more quickly than classical computers.

“This is an exciting scientific achievement for the quantum industry, and another step on a long journey towards a scalable, viable quantum future,” Microsoft, one of Google’s competitors in the realm of quantum computing, said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.

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Tech experts weigh in on the future of AI

AI panel
SalesPal CEO Ashvin Naik, Google Cloud’s Chanchal Chatterjee, Audioburst’s Rachel Batish and T-Mobile’s Chip Reno discuss the future of artificial intelligence at the Global AI Conference in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Artificial intelligence can rev up recommendation engines and make self-driving cars safer. It can even beat humans at their own games. But what else will it do?

At today’s session of the Global Artificial Intelligence Conference, a panel of techies took a look at the state of AI applications — and glimpsed into their crystal balls to speculate about the future of artificial intelligence.

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Celebrate Pi Day with 31.4 trillion digits

Emma Haruka Iwao writes down pi
Google’s Emma Haruka Iwao dashes across a whiteboard to write down the first digits of pi. She used Google Compute Engine, powered by Google Cloud, to calculate pi to an accuracy of 31.4 trillion digits. (Google via YouTube)

What’s the best way to celebrate Pi Day? That’s the geeky holiday that takes place on 3/14 … in other words, today. For some, it’s a day for baking geeky pies, or getting a $3.14 deal on slices of pizza. For Google, it’s a day for breaking a world record, by calculating the irrational number’s value to 31.4 trillion digits of precision.

31,415,926,535,897 digits, to be exact.

Pi enters into every walk of life, if that walk happens to be circular. On one level, it’s the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. On another level, it’s a mystical number to contemplate, because the digits just go on, and on, and on …

Physicist Larry Shaw invented a ritual to celebrate that mystical value, and that ritual was first celebrated at San Francisco’s Exploratorium for the first time 30 years ago. It involves walking in a circular procession on 3/14 at 1:59 p.m. (in honor of 3.14159), singing happy birthday to Albert Einstein, and reveling in a pie feast (fruit and/or pizza). The ritual is celebrated at the Exploratorium to this day.

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