Daily Archives: June 6, 2017

Extreme exoplanet: Astronomers discover alien world hotter than … – Phys.Org

Posted: June 6, 2017 at 6:48 am

June 5, 2017 Artist's illustration of star KELT-9 and its super-heated planet KELT-9b. Credit: Robert Hurt / NASA/JPL-Caltech

Imagine a planet like Jupiter zipping around its host star every day and a half, superheated to temperatures hotter than most stars and sporting a giant, glowing gas tail like a comet.

That is what an international research team led by astronomers at Ohio State and Vanderbilt universities think they have found orbiting a massive star they have labeled KELT-9, located 650 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

The discovery is described this week in a paper titled "A giant planet undergoing extreme-ultraviolet irradiation by its hot massive-star host" published by the journal Nature and in a presentation at the spring meeting of American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

With a day-side temperature peaking at 4,600 Kelvin (more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit), the newly discovered exoplanet, designated KELT-9b, is hotter than most stars and only 1,200 Kelvin (about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than our own sun. In fact, the ultraviolet radiation from the star it orbits is so brutal that the planet may be literally evaporating away under the intense glare, producing a glowing gas tail.

The super-heated planet has other unusual features as well. For instance, it's a gas giant 2.8 times more massive than Jupiter but only half as dense, because the extreme radiation from its host star has caused its atmosphere to puff up like a balloon.

Because it is tidally locked to its staras the moon is to Earththe day side of the planet is perpetually bombarded by stellar radiation and, as a result, it is so hot that molecules such as water, carbon dioxide and methane can't form there.

"It's a planet by any of the typical definitions based on mass, but its atmosphere is almost certainly unlike any other planet we've ever seen just because of the temperature of its day side," said Scott Gaudi, professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University and one of the lead authors of the study.

The reason the exoplanet is so hot is because the star it orbits is more than twice as large and nearly twice as hot as our sun. "KELT-9 radiates so much ultraviolet radiation that it may completely evaporate the planet. Or, if gas giant planets like KELT-9b possess solid rocky cores as some theories suggest, the planet may be boiled down to a barren rock, like Mercury," said Keivan Stassun, Stevenson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt, who directed the study with Gaudi.

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On the other hand, the planet's orbit is extremely close to the star so if the star begins to expand it will engulf it. "KELT-9 will swell to become a red giant star in about a billion years," said Stassun. "The long-term prospects for life, or real estate for that matter, on KELT-9b are not looking good."

While Stassun and Gaudi spend a lot of time developing missions, such as the NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, designed to find habitable planets in other solar systems, the scientists said there's a good reason to study worlds that are unlivable in the extreme.

"The astronomical community is clearly focused on finding Earthlike planets around small, cooler stars like our sun. They are easy targets and there's a lot that can be learned about potentially habitable planets orbiting very low-mass stars in general. On the other hand, because KELT-9b's host star is bigger and hotter than the sun, it complements those efforts and provides a kind of touchstone for understanding how planetary systems form around hot, massive stars," Gaudi said.

Stassun added, "As we seek to develop a complete picture of the variety of other worlds out there, it's important to know not only how planets form and evolve, but also when and under what conditions they are destroyed."

How was the new planet found?

"We were pretty lucky to catch the planet while its orbit transits the face of the star," said co-author Karen Collins, a post-doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt. "Because of its extremely short period, near-polar orbit and the fact that its host star is oblate, rather than spherical, we calculate that orbital precession will carry the planet out of view in about 150 years, and it won't reappear for roughly three and a half millennia."

In 2014 astronomers spotted the exoplanet using one of two telescopes specially designed to detect planets orbiting bright starsone in the northern and one in the southern hemispherejointly operated by Ohio State, Vanderbilt and Lehigh universities. The instruments, "Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescopes" or KELTs, fill a large gap in the available technologies for finding extrasolar planets. They use mostly off-the-shelf technology to provide a low-cost means of planet hunting. Whereas a traditional astronomical telescope costs millions of dollars to build, the hardware for a KELT telescope runs less than $75,000. Where other telescopes are designed to look at very faint stars in small sections of the sky at very high resolution, KELTs look at millions of very bright stars at once, over broad sections of sky, at relatively low resolution.

"This result demonstrates that even 'extremely little' telescopes can play an important role in discovery," commented James Neff, astronomical sciences program director at the National Science Foundation, which partially funded the research.

Using the KELT-North telescope at Winer Observatory in Arizona, the astronomers noticed a tiny drop in the star's brightnessonly about half of one percentwhich indicated that a planet may have passed in front of it. The brightness dipped once every 1.5 days, which means the planet completes a "yearly" circuit around its star every 1.5 days. Subsequent observations confirmed that the signal was caused by a transiting planet and revealed that it was what astronomers call a "hot Jupiter"an ideal kind of planet for the KELT telescopes to spot.

The astronomers hope to take a closer look at KELT-9b with other telescopesincluding Spitzer, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and eventually the James Webb Space Telescope after it launches in 2018. Observations with HST would enable them to see if the planet really does have a cometary tail and allow them to estimate how much longer the planet will survive its current hellish condition.

Explore further: New 'styrofoam' planet provides tools in search for habitable planets

More information: B. Scott Gaudi et al, A giant planet undergoing extreme-ultraviolet irradiation by its hot massive-star host, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature22392

Journal reference: Nature

Provided by: Vanderbilt University

Fifth-graders making styrofoam solar system models may have the right idea. Researchers at Lehigh University have discovered a new planet orbiting a star 320 light years from Earth that has the density of styrofoam. This ...

(Phys.org)A "hot Jupiter" exoplanet transiting a rapidly rotating star has been discovered jointly by WASP and KELT survey, a new study reveals. The newly found alien world, designated WASP-167b/KELT-13b, is several times ...

(Phys.org)A large international team of researchers has found that a hot Jupiter called KELT-16b is likely to offer a unique opportunity for research for many years to come. In their paper published in The Astronomical ...

(Phys.org)Using the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) astronomers have detected a new gas giant alien world. The newly discovered exoplanet, designated KELT-18b, turns out to be a highly inflated "hot Jupiter" ...

A team of researchers working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has announced the finding of a triple-star systemone that also as has a stable orbit planet in it. In their paper published in The Astronomical ...

A giant gas planet up to fifty times the mass of Jupiter, encircled by a ring of dust is likely hurtling around a star more than a thousand light years away from Earth, according to new research by an international ...

Imagine a planet like Jupiter zipping around its host star every day and a half, superheated to temperatures hotter than most stars and sporting a giant, glowing gas tail like a comet.

(Phys.org)A new study conducted by an international team of astronomers suggests that a recently discovered alien world, designated HD 131399 Ab, may not be a planet at all, but rather a background star. The researchers ...

The cancer risk for a human mission to Mars has effectively doubled following a UNLV study predicting a dramatic increase in the disease for astronauts traveling to the red planet or on long-term missions outside the protection ...

NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its third year of survey data, with the spacecraft discovering 97 previously unknown celestial objects in the last year. Of those, ...

Is it a case of nature versus nurture when it comes to two "cousin" exoplanets? In a unique experiment, scientists used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study two "hot Jupiter" exoplanets. Because these planets are virtually ...

An ancient, red giant star in the throes of a frigid death has produced the coldest known object in the cosmosthe Boomerang Nebula. How this star was able to create an environment strikingly colder than the natural background ...

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I notice that there is not the usual mention of how this planet formed - could it be that at least some notion of honesty is being entered into by acknowledging that hot jupiters are simply inexplicable challenges for the nebular paradigm? No amount of forming elsewhere and then drifting inwards is going to account for the huge number of these enigmas discovered so far.

The planet's temperament is not dependent on the star's star temperature. From: http://www.svemir...Universe Planet.. Mass of Jupiter ..Temperature K ....Distance AU GQ Lupi b ................ 1-36 ...... 2650 100 ........ 100 ROXs 42Bb .................. 9 ..... 1,950-2,000 ....... 157 HD 106906 b ............... 11 ...... 1.800 ............... ~ 650 DH Tauri b ................... 12 ...... 2.750 ................. 330 CT Chamaeleontis b.10.5-17...2.500 ............... 440 HD 44627 ................. 13-14 ...... 1.600-2.400 ..... 275 1RXS 1609 b .............. 14 ........ 1.800 ................ 330 USCENT 108 b ........ 14 ........ 2.600 ................ 670 Oph 11 B ..................... 21 ........ 2.478 ................ 243

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MIT students propose Apophis asteroid mission | Astronomy.com – Astronomy Magazine

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Asteroid Apophis is going to have a close encounter with Earth in 2029 and astronomers arent the only ones preparing for the event.

20 students at MIT are designing a space mission to get close to the asteroid as it comes within about 21,770 miles (35,040km) from Earth. The mission will get more information on the asteroid, as well as measure the effects of Earth and other planetary bodies on it.

MIT faculty members Richard Binzel, professor of planetary sciences, and David Miller, the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, are advising the students as they design their missions.

The approaching asteroid is about 1,066 feet (325m) across and weighs 20 million metric tons. An asteroid passing this close to Earth is a rarity, so the students are working hard to get their calculations just right.

Binzel said in a press release that this project is the kick-starter that he hopes will encourage space agencies to study the asteroid.

There have been plenty of missions to comets and asteroids, so why is this unique? Binzel said. Apophis is coming so close that Earths gravity is going to tug and redirect its path. The Earth is going to give it a big thunk.

The proposed spacecraft would carry instruments to study Apophis shape, size, density, surface topography, rotation rate, and spin rate. The craft will have to launch by August 2026 to cross paths with the asteroid in March 2028, and then follow it until the missions end in 2033.

The students presented their work to NASA scientists and engineers, who asked direct questions that will help shape a future proposal for the mission. NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson said the students made a really good effort and stated that the project is almost ready for a NASA proposal.

While China and the European Space Agency are both considering missions to Apophis, should this proposal remain in budget and successfully beat out other competition, theres a real chance it could be approved for an official NASA mission.

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Starry, starry, nights: Amateur astronomer, whose day job is lattice quantum chromodynamics, has introduced … – Vancouver Sun

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Howard Trottiers day job concerns the teeny-tiniest stuff in the universe.

His night gig takes in the whole cosmos.

From the subatomic to the big, Trottier, a physics professor at Simon Fraser University, said. Theyre intricately linked, as it turns out.

He is a theoretical subatomic physicist by training research interests include lattice quantum chromodynamics and heavy-flavour physics but his passion is the night sky.

Intrigued as a boy by the experiments carried out by his older brother,Lorne, who built a crystal radio before Trottier was even born, he was always fascinated by science.

Lorne, 11 years Trottiers senior, still has a huge influence. Co-founder of a Montreal tech company, Lorne donated $2.7 million of the $4.4-million cost in effect, fronting the capital cost of the two-year-old Trottier Observatory and Science Courtyard at SFU.

He was my inspiration, hes the biggest science nerd Ive ever met, Trottier said. Theres enough of an age gap that when I was younger we didnt hang around together a whole lot, but I could see what he was doing. He was always in the basement soldering together stuff.

When Trottier was growing up in Montreal, around 11 years old, and on an overnight camping trip in the Laurentians outside Quebec City, a camp counsellor introduced him to the night sky.

He took 30 of the nerdiest kids to look at the stars and thats what really pushed me into astronomy. I had never seen the night sky like that or had any understanding of it before that.

I went home and had to buy a telescope. I used my paper route to save money and bought a telescope. When I saw the rings of Saturn I was screaming in the street, Oh my gosh, look at the rings!

This is really what pushed me forward.

Howard Trottier is a physics professor at Simon Fraser University, where hes pictured at the Trottier Observatory and Science Courtyard on June 2. Jason Payne / PNG

Trottiers enthusiasm carries over into public outreach, bringing the joys and wonders of the cosmos to children, youth and adults. Starry Nights is a public-participation event held on clear Friday nights that Trottier initiated a decade ago.

I went into university thinking I was going to be an astronomer, but thats not what I ended up doing, he said.

Astronomy when Trottier was an undergrad was not, shall we say, what it is today. Particle physics, meanwhile, was in its heyday.

If you know (the TV show) the Big Bang Theory, think Sheldon, same general area (theoretical physics), only Im not remotely as smart as he is, but I have better social skills, he said.

If I was going into science now, it would be astronomy and astro physics, without a doubt. Were in this golden age of discovery in all areas of science, but nowhere more so than in astronomy.

Put it this way: When Trottier was a grad student, Pluto was still a planet and for all we knew, it was the farthest planet from Earth. Now we have this survey that tells us there are millions of terrestrial planets in our galaxy.

The Trottier Observatory and Science Courtyard is tucked beautifully into what for 50 years was sacred empty space because SFU architect Arthur Erickson didnt build on it. Today, its an award-winning plaza (best Canadian small-scale, public landscape).

Trottier also has his Cabin in the Sky Observatory, a little private place on a hill overlooking Osoyoos.

The 27-inch SFU telescope can peer back about two billion years. His much smaller telescope in Osoyoos can see almost as far in the absence of Vancouvers light pollution, he said.

We go to the cabin, I never get over how many stars are in the sky. They crush down on you.

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How to approach cloud computing and cyber security in 2017 – Information Age

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IDC predicts that the cloud computing market in 2017 will be worth $107 billion and, according to Gartner, by 2020 a corporate no-cloud policy will be as unusual as a no-internet policy would be today

The adoption of cloud computing has been on the up since as far back as 2008, when a survey conducted by the Pew Research Institute found that cloud services were used by nearly 69% of Americans. Since then, the industry has experienced hyper-growth and exceeded the already vast predictions of how big it would become.

IDC predicts that the cloud computing market in 2017 will be worth $107 billion and, according to Gartner, by 2020 a corporate no-cloud policy will be as unusual as a no-internet policy would be today. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine an organisation in 2017 that did not use webmail, file sharing and storage, and data backup.

As the use of cloud computing spreads so does awareness of the associated risks. At the time of writing, there have been 456 data breaches worldwide this year according to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). The ITRC also noted a 40% increase in data breaches in 2016 compared to the previous year. Yet, despite the well-documented cases of data breaches, organisations continue to invest in and adopt cloud computing services because the benefits usually outweigh the risks.

To understand why the growth of cloud computing has continued in the face of high-profile data breaches, look first to what it can offer an organisation.

>See also: Building trust in cloud security is crucial to UKs digital future

Cloud computing is a virtual environment that can adapt to meet user needs. It is not constrained by physical limits, and is easily scalable making it an obvious choice for start-ups. Cloud computing makes state-of-the-art capability available to anyone with an internet connection and a browser, reducing hardware and IT personnel costs.

Cloud services and software applications are managed and upgraded off-site by the provider, meaning organisations can access technology they would not have been able to afford to install and manage on their own. The popularity of the cloud essentially comes down to its provision of advanced, next-generation IT resources in an environment that is cheaper and more scalable than local networks.

The risks involved with cloud computing are mostly security-based. Clouds are often made up of multiple entities, which means that no configuration can be more secure than its weakest link. The link between separate entities means that attacks to multiple sites can occur simultaneously. When cloud providers do not employ adequate cyber security measures, those clouds become a target for cybercriminals.

Yet, its not all bad news. A user survey conducted by one cloud service provider found that concerns about security fell to 25% compared to 29% last year. And as more becomes known about security risks so too does our knowledge around what organisations can do to protect themselves.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) released its Treacherous Twelve in March 2016 detailing the top 12 threats to cloud security based on responses from their members. At the top of this list was data breaches.

Any leak or exposure of sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, social security and health records constitutes a data breach. The organisation, and not the cloud service provider, is ultimately accountable for keeping their data secure.

When a data breach does occur, a company could be fined or face criminal changes, regardless of whether it was intentional or not. Even though cloud service providers will deploy a high level of security measures, the CSA advises organisations to implement a multifactor authentication and encryption system on the user end to protect against data breaches. This could involve single-use passwords, smartcards, or phone-based authentication.

These multifactor authentication processes can also work to prevent the occurrence of compromised credentials, which can expose an organisation to a data breach. Commonly, data breaches and cyber security attacks rely on lax security systems like predictable passwords and poor certificate management.

Allocating permissions within an organisation is another area where credentials could be compromised if they are misallocated or not removed when a user leaves or changes roles. As well as multifactor authentication, companies should prohibit the sharing of account credentials and ensure permissions are allocated or removed as soon as is necessary.

Organisations can also increase their chances of avoiding a data breach by implementing proper training. Innocent mistakes can often look like deliberately harmful insider activity. Would your data administrators ever unintentionally copy sensitive customer information over to a publicly accessible server? The only way to be truly confident in a workforce and prevent mistakes happening in the cloud is to implement correct training and management.

While the cloud may differ to local networks in many ways, its data centres remain just as susceptible to damage or destruction by natural disasters. To avoid losing data to fires and floods, distribute data and applications across more than one zone. Implement appropriate data backup procedures, and adopt best practices in business continuity and disaster recovery.

Consider using off-site storage for data that, if lost, would result in its own kind of disaster. As the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) start date approaches, protecting your data is more important than ever. GDPR sees both data destruction and corruptions as serious breaches.

>See also: What to do when it comes to cloud security?

It would be unwise and certainly a bad business decision for an organisation to not take advantage of the technological advances made by the cloud. More than that, however, cloud computing services and applications also support growth in a way that traditional IT hardware cannot. Whether it is a start-up with a handful of staff, or a multinational corporation with a headcount of thousands, the cloud continues to be the way of the future.

Over the next years and decades, the regulations and laws around data in the cloud will come into maturity. Like many times in the past, governments are moving slower than the technology when it comes to implementing policies and law. Decisions made in the courts will instead set the precedent of who is ultimately responsible for the security of information stored within the cloud. In the meantime, organisations around the world can focus on self-regulation as they tackle cyber security in the cloud.

Sourced from Dean Sappey, president and co-founder, DocsCorp

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Meet The Cloud Wars Top 10: The World’s Most-Powerful Cloud-Computing Vendors – Forbes

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Meet The Cloud Wars Top 10: The World's Most-Powerful Cloud-Computing Vendors
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(Note: After an award-winning career in the media business covering the tech industry, Bob Evans was VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle from 2012 to 2016. He now runs his own firm, Evans Strategic ...

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Belfast IT firm celebrates cloud computing success in 57 countries – Belfast Telegraph

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Belfast IT firm celebrates cloud computing success in 57 countries

BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

A Belfast-based IT firm has said it has grown its team in Northern Ireland as its software customer numbers hit six million.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/news/belfast-it-firm-celebrates-cloud-computing-success-in-57-countries-35790730.html

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A Belfast-based IT firm has said it has grown its team in Northern Ireland as its software customer numbers hit six million.

CloudMigrator365, which was founded by Antrim man Darren Mawhinney, offers cloud migration services and software to customers across the globe.

The company has said it has now doubled its sales and tripled its headcount in Belfast over the last year.

It added it has "successfully migrated over six million people to the cloud in 57 countries".

The business helps companies migrate their email and data across to Microsoft Office 365 cloud.

It is expanding its workforce and global partnership network to support this growth, and is "continuing to scale its operations including recruiting for a number of new positions".

Mr Mawhinney said: "The international response to CloudMigrator365 has been phenomenal.

"From our base in Belfast we have so far helped companies in 57 countries to migrate while ensuring the safety and sovereignty of their data.

"We are delighted to be working with world-class organisations including LinkedIn, YMCA and the University of Bristol.

"We are currently recruiting a number of new positions in response to increasing demand from companies such as these, who are keen to invest in a simple, secure and cost-effective cloud migration solution.

"I'm extremely proud this is being developed and delivered in Northern Ireland, where we have been able to build a highly skilled global technology team alongside support from Invest NI, which has made a difference as we continue to significantly scale our operations."

And Steve Harper, Invest NI's executive director of international business, said: "Having benefited from Invest NI employment and trade support, CloudMigrator365 has been able to capitalise on new market opportunities and growing sales.

"Our employment support is enabling the company to scale its business to support an increase in productivity and export sales," he added.

Last year, welcoming the new Belfast jobs, former Economy Minister Simon Hamilton said that the firm was a "leader in its field".

Belfast Telegraph

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A deeper dive into cloud security as a service: Advantages and issues – Cloud Tech

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In a recent article which focused on cloud security I presented a comparison between security-as-a-service and traditional style security tooling in the cloud. This installment is a deeper dive into the security as a service (SECaaS) paradigm.

It would seem to me that a natural outgrowth of the cloud computing and 'everything as a service' paradigm that the technology world is undergoing, would be that the tools and services we use to manage and secure our cloud environments also move into an as a service mode.

In much the way one would expect, SECaaS works under the principle of a small agent controlled from an external service provider. It is not so different conceptually from controlling a number of firewalls (virtual or physical) from an external management console.

Heres how it works. A security administrator sets the policy for the service in the SECaaS provider cloud, using online management tools, and sets what policy or policies applies to a group of VMs classified by any number of criteria.

Then, the SECaaS services governs the security activity within and around the VM via a lightweight, generic, agent installed within the VM. When a new VM is created out of a template the agent is included in the image.

Finally, the agent executes various security functions according to the direction/policy communicated from within the providers cloud environment.

For example, the security administrator creates a segmentation policy that all webserver VMs will only accept traffic on ports 80 and 443. The administrator creates a policy in the SECaaS cloud which is transmitted to the agents on all webserver VMs in the environment. The agent then acts to block and/or allow traffic as per this and other policies that apply to this type of VM.

The advantages of using a SECaaS solution include:

As more organisations continue to adopt and move to the public cloud it becomes even more critical to secure those environments, applications and services. SECaaS providers continue to enhance their offerings and continue to add specific security services to their portfolios. As SECaaS matures it becomes an even more viable option for securing enterprise public and hybrid cloud deployments.

Read more: Cloud security best practice: Security as a service or cloud security tooling?

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Here Are The Key Drivers That Are Pushing Cloud To The Edge – Forbes

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Here Are The Key Drivers That Are Pushing Cloud To The Edge
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Today's cloud computing architecture resembles 70s mainframes. The heavy lifting happens in dense data centers that act as the central point of gravity. In both the scenarios, applications share the underlying infrastructure. While this architecture ...

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Quantum computers to drive customer insights, says CBA CIO – CIO – CIO Australia

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Potential use cases in risk management and secure communications too, says CIO David Whiteing

Commonwealth Bank of Australia hopes to one day use quantum computers to drive insights for its customers.

Speaking at a Vivid event in Sydney last week, CIO David Whiteing said the technology could also be used within the bank for risk management and secure communications.

Appearing alongside Telstra chief scientist Hugh Bradlow, who said the telco aimed to offer customers quantum computing-as-a-service, Whiteing said: "We also think...less about providing a service for customers but more about using it to drive insights for customers."

Providing customers with analytics has become a priority for the bank, which in Aprillaunched a new analytics platform Daily IQ 2.0 which draws on data including the CBAs 1.2 billion monthly transaction records, industry data, and a customers account and point-of-sale information for its small and medium business customers.

"Our customers are becoming more and more integrated into the global network and there are a variety of problems that they face that if we start to automate and drive machine learning and cognitive across it, it frees them up to be more creative and solve other problems," Whiteing explained.

Risk path

In 2014 CBA committed $5 million to the UNSWs Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) in Sydney, where scientists are racing to build the worlds first scalable silicon-based quantum computer. CBA topped up that investment witha further $10 millionin December 2015.

The CQC2T which hasalso received funding from the federal government and Telstra is part ofa global race to build a quantum computer, and is pursuing a silicon-based approach.

While the computers we use today represent information in binary bits on/off, 0/1 while a quantum computer's qubit can, in simple terms,be both on and off the same time. That means many computations can be performed in parallel; a quality that, when fully realised, will give quantum computers a huge speed advantage over classical computers in solving certain problems.

The simple problems we have just to run our business, the end of financial year planning and budgeting cycle, we wont use a quantum computer for that, Whiteing said. But, we deal essentially in our business with risk, and risk is a multivariant problem where if you are able to get bigger data sets, if youre able to run more computations, you have an advantage. So thats a very obvious path for us.

Security concerns

Another potential uses for quantum computing CBA is considering concern secure communications, which Whiteing described as a here and now problem.

Everyone today, when youre transferring money around the world its based on encryption which is really prime number calculations, very large keys. Quantum computers will be able to break those in seconds how do you communicate in a quantum state so only the people that receive it are able to decode it?

CBA is not the only bank pursuing quantum solutions to security problems. In January, Westpac upped its stake in Canberra-based quantum cyber security company QuintessenceLabs.

QuintessenceLabs, founded a decade ago, offers an encryption key and policy management system backed byquantum generated true random numbers. Its product's highly secure data encryption capabilities are being used extensively by Westpac to reduce the risk of identity theft and customer data breaches.

CIO Dave Curransaid at the time the investment showed the importance of quantum technologies to the banks data security capabilities.

As a major financial institution, data security and protecting our customers is of paramount importance, Curran said.

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Tags cqc2tCBAfinanceDavid WhiteingCommonwealth Bank of Australiaencryptionquantum computingMichelle SimmonsTelstraanalyticssecuritybankinginsights

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Quantum Physics and Love are Super Weird and Confusing, but This Play Makes Sense of Them Both – LA Magazine

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Hear us out

June 5, 2017 Marielle Wakim Theater

In The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost wrote, Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both. But what if you could travel both? What if an alternate version of you is traveling the other road right now, except youre wearing cleaner jeans and went with cereal, not eggs, for breakfast? That mind-melting concept is the basis of Constellations, a two-character play opening June 6 at the Geffen Playhouse.

Photograph by Luke Fontana

Playwright Nick Payne conceived his career-launching 2012 drama after stumbling on The Elegant Universe, a documentary by physicist Brian Greene. It turned Payne onto the Quantum Multiverse, the idea that different scenarios play out in endless parallel realities. Constellations zooms in on the infinite loop lived by beekeeper Roland (Downton Abbeys Allen Leech) and cosmologist Marianne (Once Upon a Times Ginnifer Goodwin). Take, for instance, the pairs introduction at a barbecue, a meeting that is repeated a few times over to various ends: In one version, Roland has a girlfriend. In another, hes married. Theres a round in which Marianne wins him over with small talk and another when she doesnt. Over 70 minutes, they break up and stay together, marry and divorce, cheat on and stay true to each other. The effect is engrossing, fueling daydreams about what couldve been if only wed taken the red pill instead of the blue. Chance is our saving grace and our Achilles heel, Payne once wrote. We are both wildly autonomous and utterly powerless.

Goodwin, for whom quantum physics is a pastime (really), calls the plays structure enrapturing. She may be biased, but audiences were smitten when the production ran in London and, three years later, on Broadway, where Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson (The Affair) starred. Critics felt the same, if not a little mystified; The New Yorkers John Lahr described it as a singular astonishment but also admitted that he hadnt grasped for certain what it means. Payne is in the same boat. I dont really know what its meaning is, he says. Im very happy not to know and to allow audiences to take from it what they wish. I suspect it might be more about death and love, though, than it is about theoretical physics.

Tags: Allen Leech, Constellations, Downton Abbey, Ginnifer Goodwin, Once Upon A Time, The Geffen Playhouse

This article originally appeared in the June 2017 issue.

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Quantum Physics and Love are Super Weird and Confusing, but This Play Makes Sense of Them Both - LA Magazine

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