AI program predicts shapes of proteins

Human programmed cell death protein 4, molecular model. This protein is involved in apoptosis (programmed cell death).

Google’s DeepMind project has added another feat in its name. The AI program, AlphaFold has been able to predict the 3D shapes of proteins, which is the fundamental unit of any life.

Researchers have found it hard to understand protein folding and it is not easy to stimulate it in even supercomputers because of high computation demands. Now, AI has the potential to aid researchers and scientist to study proteins in details and get few steps to understand and find a cure for diseases like diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer.

DeepMind trained their AI programme which is a neural network on thousands of proteins until it could predict 3D structure from amino acids. Afterwards, when the program was provided with the input, it used the neural network to predict the distances between pairs of amino acids and angles between chemical bonds that connect them.

This new ability of AI will open doors to new research opportunities in medical science and help us understand the fundamental unit of life which has been an arcane subject for long time.

AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery

Operating system

We know that processors are quite complex and not many people in this world really understand what’s happening in it. Imagine if developers of software like Microsoft word need to understand new processors after every couple of years. That would be little short of a nightmare for them, to say the least.

That’s where the operating system comes. It is a software that introduces a level of abstraction and arbitrates the use of the computer system (includes processors, memories and other input-output devices like hard-disk). In other words, operating

Intel to manufacture Quantum chips

Intel has started manufacturing quantum chip, which can handle 17 qubits. It was being developed over the past eighteen months by researchers at a lab in Oregon and manufacturing is taking place at Arizona. Since qubits are quite fragile at normal environmental conditions, so the processor will be working at super low temperature.

Intel will be looking to leverage its fabrication expertise to beat the other players : IBM,

Google unveiled 72 qubits quantum processor

Image source: Techcrunch

Google unveiled the 72 qubits quantum processor, known by name of Bristlecone. The tech giant wants to achieve the quantum supremacy in future i.e a point when quantum processor could run some algorithms faster than the classical one. At present, qubits are

Age of Artificial Intelligence and emerging computing models

Today, we are living in a time where artificial intelligence is gaining importance with every passing second. Instead of programming it to take decisions, the machine will learn from inputs and its own mistakes. There is no paucity of such inputs. For example, Amazon has huge amount of customer data about their preference of items they buy. No wonder, Amazon has also joined the AI party along with Facebook, Microsoft and Google. Similarly, Facebook has immense amount of data of user’s personal data like their

AI chip and supercomputer by Google

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Recently, Google announced the AI processor named as Cloud Tensor Processing Unit, which not only executes program at high speed but can also be trained more efficiently than traditional processors. This move proves the importance tech-giants are giving to artificial intelligence which is expected to be ubiquitous in our daily life.

In addition, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the creation of machine learning supercomputer, Cloud Tensor Processor Unit pods. Google will allow researchers who need high computing resources to use such system, boosting the research in topics like genome analysis, medical image analysis and molecule discovery.