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New Device Could Greatly Improve Speech and Image Recognition 67

jan_jes writes: Scientists have successfully demonstrated pattern recognition using a magnonic holographic memory device, a development that could greatly improve speech and image recognition hardware. The researchers built a prototype eight-terminal device consisting of a magnetic matrix with micro-antennas to excite and detect the spin waves. The micro-antennas allow the researchers to generate and recognize any input phase pattern, a big advantage over existing practices. It takes about 100 nanoseconds for recognition, which is the time required for spin waves to propagate and to create the interference pattern. The main challenge associated with magnonic holographic memory is the scaling of the operational wavelength, which requires the development of sub-micrometer scale elements for spin wave generation and detection.
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New Device Could Greatly Improve Speech and Image Recognition

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  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @01:56PM (#49684239)
    Could someone please explain this with a car analogy?
    • by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @02:06PM (#49684323) Homepage

      Spinners, a big antenna, and fuzzy dice make for one bitchin' ride.

      Beyond that, I got nothing.

      • by Maow ( 620678 )

        Spinners, a big antenna, and fuzzy dice make for one bitchin' ride.

        Beyond that, I got nothing.

        I think this is the truck nuts to your pimped-out ride.

    • We already have this for accident recognition. Whenever there is a grisly accident scene on the side of a highway, everyone driving past it will spin their heads and look.

      • by WarJolt ( 990309 )

        When it's installed in a google car it will only be a minor accident.

        • by fyngyrz ( 762201 )

          I guess you haven't tried to actually use a Google product from the inside. Fundamentally broken, obvious and repeatable bugs have gone unfixed for years, but as they tell us: "they're working on it." (cough[Shopping]cough)

          If it's in a Google car, they'll claim it isn't evil, while being really underhanded (cough[IP rights]cough), but it won't work right (cough[Shopping]cough), and just as you you commit a significant amount of resources to it, they'll either discontinue it (cough[cough [wikipedia.org]]cough) or sideline

    • If the traditional way of doing pattern recognition was a 1 stroke lawnmower engine, this new way would be a V8.

    • by Rob Riggs ( 6418 )
      This is what will eventually form the basis of the speech and image processing cores in a positronic brain. Shortly after these were developed humans became extinct -- along with their cars.
    • by sycodon ( 149926 )

      Sounds kinda like a Holodeck or the Matrix.

      Either way, I hope a hot redhead is involved.

    • You may remember the bit in The Hitchikers Guide about London based designers driving their Porsche against a tree with their leather jacket strapped at the front of the car to give it the perfect pattern of lines and that air of being-used-fullness.
      TFA describes what is the analogy of doing this with 1000 Porsches on the same leather jacket and later read the license plates of each of them within 100 nanoseconds from the scratches in the jacket.

    • It is like a seven seater with a door for each passenger and everyone gets to sit up front to control the vehicle at the same time while somehow causing it to get to it's destination instantly without any individual passenger know where it was going, but with everyone happy with the outcome.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @01:56PM (#49684245)

    It seems like the kind of thing a random science-word generator would produce.

    • by orasio ( 188021 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @02:29PM (#49684475) Homepage

      This is news for nerds.
      It's a pattern detection strategy that relies on generating waves with input data, interweaving them physically, and using arrays of antennas to detect patterns.
      That's from the first couple of paragraphs.
      I don't know a lot of physics, but I am a nerd, and I like this kind of thing, so I can learn about cool stuff.
      If you don't care about it, you can look at other stories that talk about tesla and bill gates and whatever else. Posting is not mandatory.

      • by jtara ( 133429 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @03:10PM (#49684797)

        It's a pattern detection strategy that relies on generating waves with input data, interweaving them physically, and using arrays of antennas to detect patterns.

        So, it's an analog computer.

        • It's a pattern detection strategy that relies on generating waves with input data, interweaving them physically, and using arrays of antennas to detect patterns.

          So, it's an analog computer.

          Perhaps more like a D-to-A-to-D computer.

      • by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @04:18PM (#49685253) Homepage

        I would come here more often if orasio wrote the summaries.

        The problem with the summary is that it assumes the reader is already familiar with the device. Your summary does not suffer from that problem. For instance "prototype eight-terminal device consisting of a magnetic matrix with micro-antennas to excite and detect the spin waves." WHAT spin waves? What is a terminal in this context and why is the a key thing in the summary? The summary already presupposes too much, even for a technical news site.

        On the flip side, it would be nice if you didn't also insult the person who asked for clarification. The summary is indeed confusing.

        +1 for insightful explanation.
        -1 for being an asshat about it.

      • by Sardaukar86 ( 850333 ) <cam@tod a y stlc.com> on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @04:18PM (#49685255) Homepage

        If you don't care about it, you can look at other stories that talk about tesla and bill gates and whatever else. Posting is not mandatory.

        I'm not sure his point was that he didn't care about it.

        I also found the summary fairly opaque, although that is likely a reflection of my minimal understanding of math and physics. The editors usually provide summaries of complex topics that are a little more approachable for the layman but I suppose I could always flout the law and RTFA.

  • Does the summary consist entirely of real words?
  • by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @02:02PM (#49684289) Homepage

    The researchers built a prototype eight-terminal device consisting of a magnetic matrix with micro-antennas to excite and detect the spin waves. The micro-antennas allow the researchers to generate and recognize any input phase pattern

    Resulting in improved leveraging of synergies and a minty fresh taste.

    Honestly, I hope that makes sense to someone, because it sounds like computer generated gibberish to me. :-P

  • by jeffb (2.718) ( 1189693 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @02:04PM (#49684305)

    ...for this year's "Science or Star Trek Technobabble?" championship!

    • Captain Janeway: Time travel. Since my first day on the job as a Starfleet captain I swore I'd never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes - the future is the past, the past is the future.. it all gives me a headache.

  • ... I don't see how this would be an improvement over replicating the same structure in silicon with a comparator per RAM bit with as many inputs as there are bits. Compare 8 bits or a thousand bits in a single compare operation for a "pattern" match and a giant AND gate for a single 1/0 match/no match result by supplying all the input data at once....
    • I could be wrong (can't make much sense of it either), but it may scale up exponentially rather than linearly as opposed to traditional circuits. I don't really see any proof that this is true, other than they highlighted how this would somehow be an improvement.

  • by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @02:05PM (#49684319) Homepage

    The only thing I can gather from the article is that this enables a massively parallel comparator. And then somehow that translates to someday faster pattern recognition for speech / image. Very scarce on details.

    • by fche ( 36607 )

      ... it better be massively parallel if it is to have an advantage over a software emulation of same.

  • But can it do better than: "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all."?
  • by wcrowe ( 94389 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @02:14PM (#49684373)

    After reading that summary I feel like a juggalo. "...F*cking magnonics, how do they work?.."

    • After reading that summary I feel like a juggalo. "...F*cking magnonics, how do they work?.."

      Same... but I'm sure if the operation of a CPU was explained at that level of detail it would be equally opaque.

  • by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @02:37PM (#49684549) Homepage Journal

    Most of the time I gripe about press releases that massively overpromise, and don't contain enough real information to figure out what was actually done.

    In this case they at least put the word "could" rather than "will" in the headline. And while the barrage of jargon that followed is incomprehensible to me, it's at least pretty clear that it's real work rather than science-by-press-release.

    Now I'd appreciate it if somebody would come along and dumb it down to my level, which is still considerably higher than the fourth-grade education they usually target. So, in all seriousness: thanks to the PR team.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Article is less confusing than summary:

    "The researchers built a prototype eight-terminal device consisting of a magnetic matrix with micro-antennas to excite and detect the spin waves. Experimental data they collected for several magnonic matrixes show unique output signatures correspond to specific phase patterns. The microantennas allow the researchers to generate and recognize any input phase pattern, a big advantage over existing practices. ...
    The most appealing property of this approach is that all of

  • by JustNiz ( 692889 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @03:16PM (#49684843)

    I tried this out in the lab but it melted my interocitor.

  • by astro ( 20275 )

    I am just going to straight call BS here. Go RTFA and look at the "figures". This is some straight made-up stuff. I wonder if there is a purpose, such as exposing the garbage you can get published in accepted scientific venues. The article is complete Quatsch.

  • I need an XKCD to explain this to me. Perhaps an entry for Randall's new book, "Thing Explainer"?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Aren't "spin waves" what Foxnews generates?

  • Ok I'll try: (Score:5, Informative)

    by tomxor ( 2379126 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @04:13PM (#49685223)

    From what i can quickly gather from the article:

    This is all based on magnonics [wikipedia.org], which in short - is the use of magnetic spin for binary storage and or logic. This device focuses on the later...

    It does this by constructing a matrix of magnetic nodes that are effectively interconnected to neighbours (moor?) via spatial magnetic-spin sensitivity, these interconnects form the dynamic logic processing ability of the matrix.

    I think that this is somewhat like a (soft) convolutional artificial neural network for image recognition, these are constructed out of a 2d or 3d matrix of nodes with weighted interconnects in a moor-neighbourhood arrangement. The difference here i guess is that a) it's done with magnetic spin (i really have no idea why this is an advantage, maybe i'm all wrong about this) and b) being an application specific piece of hardware each node works in parallel (this is trumped as the primary reason for the speed potential in the article).

    ... Big disclaimer: I am massively speculating because the use case is not made super clear.

    • From what i can quickly gather from the article:

      This is all based on magnonics [wikipedia.org], which in short - is the use of magnetic spin for binary storage and or logic. This device focuses on the later...

      From what I could tell from the article, it appears to focus on both. The device allows them to quickly create and store a pattern. It then allows another pattern to be created and quickly compare the patterns.

      It does this by constructing a matrix of magnetic nodes that are effectively interconnected to neighbours (moor?) via spatial magnetic-spin sensitivity, these interconnects form the dynamic logic processing ability of the matrix.

      I think that this is somewhat like a (soft) convolutional artificial neural network for image recognition, these are constructed out of a 2d or 3d matrix of nodes with weighted interconnects in a moor-neighbourhood arrangement. The difference here i guess is that a) it's done with magnetic spin (i really have no idea why this is an advantage, maybe i'm all wrong about this) and b) being an application specific piece of hardware each node works in parallel (this is trumped as the primary reason for the speed potential in the article).

      ... Big disclaimer: I am massively speculating because the use case is not made super clear.

      From what I could tell, the advantage of the magnetic spin is that with an 8 terminal node, it can quickly create a matrix of 1,000 bits of data. It can then compare that matrix with a stored matrix. With several nodes working in parallel, it takes the same time to compare 1,000 bits of data as 10,000

    • It does this by constructing a matrix of magnetic nodes that are effectively interconnected to neighbours (moor?) via spatial magnetic-spin sensitivity, these interconnects form the dynamic logic processing ability of the matrix.

      Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

  • Now we only need the corresponding video.

    I hope it can rival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    From the summary, it looks promising.

  • (Sorry, somebody had to ask.)

Avoid strange women and temporary variables.

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