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Multinational conglomerate Honeywell said it will combine with Cambridge Quantum Computing in a bid to form the largest standalone quantum computing company in the world.

According to Honeywell, the merger will be completed in the third quarter of 2021 and will set the pace for what is projected to become a $1 trillion quantum computing industry over the next three decades.

In the yet to be named company, Honeywell will invest between $270 million and $300 million, and will own a major stake. It will also engage in an agreement for manufacturing critical ion traps needed to power quantum hardware.

The new company will be led by Ilyas Khan, the CEO and founder of CQC, a company that focuses on building software for quantum computing. Honeywell Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Darius Adamczyk will serve as chairman of the new company while Tony Uttley, currently the president of HQS, will serve as the new company's president.

"Joining together into an exciting newly combined enterprise, HQS and CQC will become a global powerhouse that will develop and commercialize quantum solutions that address some of humanity's greatest challenges, while driving the development of what will become a $1 trillion industry," Khan said in a statement.

With this new company, both firms plan to use Honeywells hardware expertise and Cambridges software platforms to build the worlds highest-performing computer.

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Honeywell joins hands with Cambridge Quantum Computing to form a new company - The Hindu

Trinity College Dublin has joined forces with Microsoft Ireland to accelerate the development of next-generation quantum technologies and support future leaders in the field.

Under the agreement, Microsoft will provide funding to support quantum research PhD students in Trinity College, while also establishing a female scholarship programme for the colleges MSc in Quantum Science and Technology.

The collaboration will support quantum research teams in Trinitys School of Physics and foster links with research teams in the private sector.

Having emerged from fundamental science over the last two decades, quantum research is now blossoming and promises to revolutionise technology in the coming years with discoveries and innovations that promise to power a more sustainable, advanced future, said Prof John Goold, who is directing the new MSc in Quantum Science and Technology course.

Microsoft recently announced a full-stack, open-cloud quantum computing ecosystem, named Azure Quantum. Quantum computers can solve in a matter of seconds problems that would take the fastest computers today thousands of years to solve, presenting the opportunity to address climate change, significant pharmaceutical advancements, and so on.

Quantum computing presents unprecedented possibilities to solve societys most complex challenges and help to secure a sustainable future. At Microsoft, were committed to responsibly turning these possibilities into reality for the betterment of humanity and the planet, Cathriona Hallahan, Managing Director, Microsoft Ireland said.

The introduction of the female scholarship programme is a welcome one and I believe more focused mechanisms such as this will help us to attract more females not only into the area of next-generation quantum technologies but also wider STEM related industries.

Prof Goold also praised support for the female-only scholarship programme.

As diversity has grown in my research team at Trinity, we have been more creative in pursuing and delivering high-quality science. Female uptake in certain STEM subjects remains low but initiatives like this are helping to drive positive change he said.

The Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science Simon Harris welcomed the collaboration. I am delighted to see this strong collaboration between Trinity College Dublin and Microsoft. Quantum computing technology will be instrumental in solving some of societys biggest challenges and seeing Ireland at the forefront of this research is tremendously important, he said.

Continued here:
Trinity College teams up with Microsoft on quantum computing programme - The Irish Times

Linux Foundation with support from IBM and Call for Code hosts Intelligent Supervision Assistant for Construction project from Build Change to help builders identify structural issues in masonry walls or concrete columns, especially in areas affected by disasters

SAN FRANCISCO, June 10, 2021 The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it will host the Intelligent Supervision Assistant for Construction (ISAC-SIMO) project, which was created by Build Change with a grant from IBM as part of the Call for Code initiative. The Autodesk Foundation, a Build Change funder, also contributed pro-bono expertise to advise the projects development.

Build Change helps save lives in earthquakes and windstorms. Its mission is to prevent housing loss caused by disasters by transforming the systems that regulate, finance, build and improve houses around the world.

ISAC-SIMO packages important construction quality assurance checks into a convenient mobile app. The tool harnesses the power of machine learning and image processing to provide feedback on specific construction elements such as masonry walls and reinforced concrete columns. Users can choose a building element check and upload a photo from the site to receive a quick assessment.

ISAC-SIMO has amazing potential to radically improve construction quality and ensure that homes are built or strengthened to a resilient standard, especially in areas affected by earthquakes, windstorms, and climate change, said Dr. Elizabeth Hausler, Founder & CEO of Build Change. Weve created a foundation from which the open source community can develop and contribute different models to enable this tool to reach its full potential. The Linux Foundation, building on the support of IBM over these past three years, will help us build this community.

ISAC-SIMO was imagined as a solution to gaps in technical knowledge that were apparent in the field. The app ensures that workmanship issues can be more easily identified by anyone with a phone, instead of solely relying on technical staff. It does this by comparing user-uploaded images against trained models to assess whether the work done is broadly acceptable (go) or not (no go) along with a specific score. The project is itself built on open source software, including Python through Django, Jupyter Notebooks, and React Native.

Due to the pandemic, the project deliverables and target audience have evolved. Rather than sharing information and workflows between separate users within the app, the app has pivoted to provide tools for each user to perform their own checks based on their role and location. This has led to a general framework that is well-suited for plugging in models from the open source community, beyond Build Changes original use case, said Daniel Krook, IBM Chief Technology Officer for the Call for Code Global Initiative.

IBM and The Linux Foundation have a rich history of deploying projects that fundamentally make change and progress in society through innovation and remain committed during COVID-19. The winner of the 2018 Call for Code Global Challenge, Project OWL, contributed its IoT device firmware in March 2020 as the ClusterDuck Protocol, and since then, twelve more Call for Code deployment projects like ISAC-SIMO that address disasters, climate change, and racial justice, have been open sourced for communities that need them most.

The project encourages new users to contribute and to deploy the software in new environments around the world. Priorities for short term updates include improvements in user interface, contributions to the image dataset for different construction elements, and support to automatically detect if the perspective of an image is flawed. For more information, please visit: https://www.isac-simo.net/docs/contribute/.

For more information on IBMs role in this work, please visit: https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/blogs/call-for-code-app-uses-ai-to-make-homes-safer-and-more-resilient/.

About The Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the worlds leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. The Linux Foundations projects are critical to the worlds infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundations methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact

Jennifer Cloerfor the Linux Foundation503-867-2304jennifer@storychangesculture.com

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New Open Source Project Uses Machine Learning to Inform ...

Discovering better theories

Theories of human decision-making have proliferated in recent years. However, these theories are often difficult to distinguish from each other and offer limited improvement in accounting for patterns in decision-making over earlier theories. Peterson et al. leverage machine learning to evaluate classical decision theories, increase their predictive power, and generate new theories of decision-making (see the Perspective by Bhatia and He). This method has implications for theory generation in other domains.

Science, abe2629, this issue p. 1209; see also abi7668, p. 1150

Predicting and understanding how people make decisions has been a long-standing goal in many fields, with quantitative models of human decision-making informing research in both the social sciences and engineering. We show how progress toward this goal can be accelerated by using large datasets to power machine-learning algorithms that are constrained to produce interpretable psychological theories. Conducting the largest experiment on risky choice to date and analyzing the results using gradient-based optimization of differentiable decision theories implemented through artificial neural networks, we were able to recapitulate historical discoveries, establish that there is room to improve on existing theories, and discover a new, more accurate model of human decision-making in a form that preserves the insights from centuries of research.

Original post:
Using large-scale experiments and machine learning to discover theories of human decision-making - Science Magazine

PARIS, June 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --ManpowerGroup (NYSE: MAN) joins the biggest names in tech as HR partner of the world-famous Viva Technology (VivaTech) conference held inParis and online this week. ManpowerGroup will share innovation that improves people's lives and solves one of the world's most pressing social issues - how to provide meaningful, sustainable employment for all. The hybrid event will attract more than 8,000 attendees and ManpowerGroup has partnered since its launch five years ago to support start-ups and accelerate tech for good.

"Our innovations are driven by impact - upskilling people at speed and scale and matching people to jobs with better accuracy than either humans or machines could do on their own," said Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup Chairman & CEO. "We're excited to return to VivaTech to showcase how we'reusing AI, people analytics and human expertise to createa more resilient, future-ready workforce. Building a better, brighter future of work requires bold, disruptive ideas and collaboration across business, government and education this is how we will create sustainable skills, resilient communities, and greater prosperity for all."

ManpowerGroup will host 30 game-changing start-ups and showcase innovation and digital workforce transformation on its #FutureofWork lab including:

ManpowerGroup will host its Talent Center for the fifth year, an online and in-person space where in-demand tech workers can experience coaching, assessment and skills development and match with open positions in the world's leading tech companies.

Human Expertise: On Wednesday June 16ManpowerGroup's Chairman & CEOJonas Prisingwill be joined by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, ManpowerGroup's Chief Talent Scientist for Human Age Reconnected a discussion moderated by CNN's Margot Haddad on CEO takeaways from the crisis and AI, bias and ethics in recruitment.

Follow @ManpowerGroup at Viva Tech on Twitter and join the conversation using #sustainableskills #FutureofWork #VivaTech. https://vivatechnology.com/partners/manpower-group

To find out more about ManpowerGroup's Future for Workers insight series read The Skills Revolution Rebooton the impact of COVID-19 on digitization and skills and The Future for Workers, By Workers.

ABOUT MANPOWERGROUPManpowerGroup (NYSE: MAN), the leading global workforce solutions company, helps organizations transform in a fast-changing world of work by sourcing, assessing, developing and managing the talent that enables them to win. We develop innovative solutions for hundreds of thousands of organizations every year, providing them with skilled talent while finding meaningful, sustainable employment for millions of people across a wide range of industries and skills. Our expert family of brands Manpower, Experis and Talent Solutions creates substantially more value for candidates and clients across more than 75 countries and territories and has done so for over 70 years. We are recognized consistently for our diversity - as a best place to work for Women, Inclusion, Equality and Disability and in 2021 ManpowerGroup was named one of the World's Most Ethical Companies for the 12th year - all confirming our position as the brand of choice for in-demand talent.

SOURCE ManpowerGroup

http://www.manpowergroup.com

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ManpowerGroup Returns to Viva Technology as HR Partner, Showcasing New AI, Machine-Learning and Data-Driven Predictive Performance Tools - PRNewswire