New Quantum Programming Language

From ETH Zurich


June 15, 2020 -- Several technical advances have been achieved recently in the pursuit of powerful quantum computers. Now, Computer scientists have made an important breakthrough in the field of programming languages: their quantum language is the first of its kind that is as elegant, simple and safe as classical computer language.


Programming quantum computers is becoming easier: computer scientists at ETH Zurich have designed the first programming language that can be used to program quantum computers as simply, reliably and safely as classical computers. "Programming quantum computers is still a challenge for researchers," says Martin Vechev, computer science professor in ETH's Secure, Reliable and Intelligent Systems Lab (SRI), "which is why I'm so excited that we can now continue ETH Zurich's tradition in the development of quantum computers and programming languages."


He adds: "Our quantum programming language Silq allows programmers to utilize the potential of quantum computers better than with existing languages, because the code is more compact, faster, more intuitive and easier to understand for programmers." This week, Vechev will introduce Silq to other experts in the field at PLDI 2020, a conference for programming languages. To facilitate discussion, adoption and further development, he and his team have also released Silq on its own website.


Quantum computing has been seeing increased attention over the last decade, since these computers, which function according to the principles of quantum physics, have enormous potential. Today, most researchers believe that these computers will one day be able to solve certain problems faster than classical computers, since to perform their calculations they use entangled quantum states in which various bits of information overlap at a certain point in time. This means that in the future, quantum computers will be able to efficiently solve problems which classical computers cannot solve within a reasonable timeframe.


This quantum supremacy has still to be proven conclusively. However, some significant technical advances have been achieved recently. In late summer 2019, a quantum computer succeeded in solving a problem -- albeit a very specific one -- more quickly than the fastest classical computer.


For certain "quantum algorithms," i.e. computational strategies, it is also known that they are faster than classical algorithms, which do not exploit the potential of quantum computers. To date, however, these algorithms still cannot be calculated on existing quantum hardware because quantum computers are currently still too error-prone.


Expressing the programmer's intent


Utilizing the potential of quantum computation not only requires the latest technology, but also a quantum programming language to describe quantum algorithms. In principle, an algorithm is a "recipe" for solving a problem; a programming language describes the algorithm so that a computer can perform the necessary calculations.


Today, quantum programming languages are tied closely to specific hardware; in other words, they describe precisely the behaviour of the underlying circuits. For programmers, these "hardware description languages" are cumbersome and error-prone, since the individual programming instructions must be extremely detailed and thus explicitly describe the minutiae needed to implement quantum algorithms.


This is where Vechev and his group come in with their development of Silq. "Silq is the first quantum programming language that is not designed primarily around the construction and functionality of the hardware, but on the mindset of the programmers when they want to solve a problem -- without requiring them to understand every detail of the computer architecture and implementation," says Benjamin Bichsel, a doctoral student in Vechev's group who is supervising the development of Silq.


Computer scientists refer to computer languages that abstract from the technical details of the specific type of computer as high-level programming languages. Silq is the very first high-level programming language for quantum computers. High-level programming languages are more expressive, meaning that they can describe even complex tasks and algorithms with less code. This makes them more comprehensible and easier to use for programmers. They can also be used with different computer architectures.


Eliminating errors through automatic uncomputation


The greatest innovation and simplification that Silq brings to quantum programming languages concerns a source of errors that has plagued quantum programming until now. A computer calculates a task in several intermediate steps, which creates intermediate results or temporary values.


In order to relieve the memory, classical computers automatically erase these values. Computer scientists refer to this as "garbage collection," since the superfluous temporary values are disposed of.


In the case of quantum computers, this disposal is trickier due to quantum entanglement: the previously calculated values can interact with the current ones, interfering with the correct calculation. Accordingly, cleaning up such temporary values on quantum computers requires a more advanced technique of so-called uncomputation.


"Silq is the first programming language that automatically identifies and erases values that are no longer needed," explains Bichsel. The computer scientists achieved this by applying their knowledge of classical programming languages: their automatic uncomputation method uses only programming commands that are free of any special quantum operations -- they are "qfree," as Vechev and Bichsel say.


"Silq is a major breakthrough in terms of optimising the programming of quantum computers; it is not the final phase of development," says Vechev. There are still many open questions, but because Silq is easier to understand, Vechev and Bichsel hope to stimulate both the further development of quantum programming languages and the theory and development of new quantum algorithms.


"Our team of four has made the breakthrough after two years of work thanks to the combination of different expertise in language design, quantum physics and implementation. If other research and development teams embrace our innovations, it will be a great success," says Bichsel.

---

Story Source:


Materials provided by ETH Zurich. Original written by Florian Meyer.


                      https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200615115820.htm

Pandemic Likely Killing off Jobs

Olivia Rockeman and Jill Ward of Bloomberg point out that millions of jobs ended by the pandemic virus may never return.  See:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-14/millions-of-jobs-could-be-permanently-lost-in-reallocation-shock

Ann Selzer – The Best Pollster

J. Ann Selzer is an American political pollster who is the president of the Des Moines, Iowa-based polling firm Selzer & Company, which she founded in 1994. She is known for her polls of Iowa voters, which have a reputation for being highly accurate.


Early Life and Education


Selzer was born in Rochester, Minnesota in 1957, the middle child in a family of five. She was raised in Topeka, Kansas. Selzer attended the University of Kansas, initially as a pre-med student, but eventually lost interest in medicine. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Speech and Dramatics Arts in 1978.  She then earned a Ph.D in Communication Theory and Research from the University of Iowa in 1984.


Career


After college, Selzer worked for The Des Moines Register. She established her own polling firm, Selzer & Company, in 1994.


Selzer was the only pollster to correctly predict Barack Obama's comfortable victory in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses, and her poll of the 2014 United States Senate election in Iowa also mirrored the actual result exceptionally closely. She has worked as the pollster for the Des Moines Register for many years, and has "overseen nearly every one of the Register’s Iowa Polls since 1987", according to FiveThirtyEight. She has also done polling work for numerous other news organizations, including the Boston Globe and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In 2016, she was dubbed "the best pollster in politics" by Clare Malone of FiveThirtyEight, which also gave Selzer & Company a rare A+ grade for accuracy.


As of January 2016, she works out of an office in West Des Moines, Iowa.


                                   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Selzer


= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =- = = = = =  =


Ann Selzer Is The Best Pollster In Politics

How her old-school rigor makes her uncannily accurate.

By Clare Malone, Five Thirty Eight


January 17, 2016 -- An old “PBS NewsHour” clip, in all its dull, steady glory, pretty much pinpoints the moment that famed Iowa pollster Ann Selzer got hot.


Shot on New Year’s Day 2008, the video features her sitting face to face with reporter Judy Woodruff in what looks like a living room; both women are wearing turtlenecks, Selzer’s underneath a sweater, Woodruff’s a blazer, and while the atmosphere appears cozy, the interview isn’t particularly.

“She’s standing a little too close to me, and I’m a little bit backed up against the wall,” Selzer told me, laughing. We were sitting in her office in West Des Moines in December, only weeks before Iowa’s Feb. 1 first-in-the-nation caucuses, and Selzer had just asked if I wanted to hear about the time she predicted that an upstart senator from Illinois named Barack Obama would win the Iowa caucuses with unprecedented voter turnout, sent the American political universe into an epic tizzy, and became one of Washington’s insider celebrities.


I did want to hear.


The interview starts with Woodruff questioning the methodology of Selzer’s Jan. 1 poll for the Des Moines Register, as Mark Penn, chief strategist for Hillary Clinton, had in a widely circulated email memo.


Woodruff: Today’s Iowa poll, it’s out. You’re assuming that 60 percent of the voters in the Democratic caucuses will be first-time caucus attendees. How did you assume that? Why did you assume it?


Selzer: Well, actually, I assumed nothing. That’s what my data told me. We put our method in place, and we let the voters speak to us.


As Selzer speaks, the camera zooms in close, about the most dramatic shot employed by public television news, until you’re staring directly into the auburn-framed face challenging the conventional wisdom of a Clinton dynasty.


Despite a pleasant affect — she nods and smiles as Woodruff speaks — Selzer betrays a hint of testiness during the exchange about the poll that she now says “pretty much made my career.” (We all know how that story ends — Obama wins Iowa, emerges from the nation’s primary contests victorious, becomes president.)


“We were just doing what we do, minding our own business,” Selzer said to me eight years later.

By the time Selzer puts out her next poll from this small office on a street that boasts not one but two quilting shops, the poll-reading public will be more slavishly devoted to the opinions of the people of Iowa than ever. Selzer, who has overseen nearly every one of the Register’s Iowa Polls since 1987, is almost universally thought to hold the keys to their secret, fickle hearts.


When Homer wrote of his hero Odysseus, he was “that godlike man.” The D.C. poets use the same laudatory epithet-style when they sing of Selzer; she is uniformly “the great” or “most respected” or, as I saw on a book jacket recently while walking through the Des Moines airport, “Iowa’s ‘polling queen.’”


It’s a reputation that is not unearned: She has on more than one occasion foretold an outcome that no one else saw coming, been pilloried for it, and not budged — the polling Cassandra of Des Moines. 

And her rise has come at a show-me-a-hero time in polling, as the industry rapidly loses its grip on 
what has made it tick for so many years: Landline calls are fewer and farther between, and Internet polls might be the wave of the future. Which is why this one question seems so pressing: What makes Ann Selzer so good?


Iowa politics is not Selzer’s birthright. She was born a couple of states away in Topeka, Kansas, the middle child in a still-close family of five. Her father was a Mayo Clinic-trained surgeon. Her mother had a master’s degree in creative writing and had been a reporter at a daily newspaper in Kansas City, “so we were a family about language and grammar,” Selzer said, not numbers. She stayed close to home for her undergraduate degree, attending the University of Kansas and starting off pre-med — her father died when she was in high school, and she worked for his old partner for a time, changing bandages and prepping patients for procedures. She found it too rote. “I’m interested in original ideas,” she said.


Selzer found them in her first semester of college in 1974 when she did a survey project in a communications class that unexpectedly allowed her to combine twin interests in language and data. 

“I was probably born to be a data girl,” she said. (The first poll she did was of neighborhood moms when she was 5, on the question of whether a nickname her family had given her was unflattering. She now accedes that the poll might have been skewed on account of the leading nature of the inquiry.) She finished the semester thinking how fascinating the class was, that there couldn’t possibly be a department in it.


But there was. And there was grad school for it, too — a communications theory and research program at the University of Iowa. She nearly went to the University of Wisconsin, but during a visit to the school, Selzer had trouble “getting two grad students in a room” to talk to her, which if you spend any amount of time with her, you understand would be a problem. She’s simpatico and a joiner; in Des Moines, she belongs to a discussion club, a choral group (she made sure to tell me that it’s an auditioned ensemble), and an executive women’s network, which was having its Christmas party the day I visited her. That’s why “I wore a little sparkly something,” she told me.


Before settling back in Iowa permanently, Selzer did an academic fellowship for a year in England, a place sometimes incompatible with her casual Midwestern demeanor — she once, “charmingly!” she insists, called her residence hall warden an “old goat” — and a year-long congressional fellowship in Washington working for Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, then a representative now a senator. Selzer was taken with her experience — that “a kid from Iowa can go to Washington and write legislation,” that the cozy office was filled with clacking typewriters, that the other young people were ambitious too. “The thing that was so alive about working on the Hill is that we knew stuff before the world knew it,” she said. “I liked that. That gives me a kick.”


After a couple of jobs in polling and a turn as a jury consultant — “it was so ugly” — Selzer landed a position at the Register running its in-house polling during the halcyon days of print. It was December 1987, and the caucuses were just around the corner.


Polling is a relatively new thing in the 240-year existence of the republic. George Gallup only busted open the field of public opinion surveying in the 1930s (to help his mother-in-law win a race for Iowa secretary of state, in fact). And the attention paid to the Iowa caucuses is even more recent, although to listen to the hype, you would think that the Founding Fathers had glad-handed with every mugwump from Sioux City to Belle Plaine. While the state has been holding caucuses since 1846, it’s only had its first-in-the-nation status since 1972. And not until 1980 did the caucuses truly claim their reputation as the Olympics of pandering, the place where an underdog candidate could become a made man.


And it’s not just politicians whose careers can be made off the caucuses.


Selzer was just weeks into her job at the Register when she spotted a problem with the paper’s poll, which showed George H.W. Bush winning the upcoming Republican caucuses. She smelled a rat. The paper’s in-house polling operation had “figured out some creative ways so they could turn polls around faster,” she said. They were re-contacting previously polled people, a no-no in her book. 

When she asked for a crosstab — a deep dive into the numbers — Selzer found that when isolated out, newly contacted voters showed Bob Dole winning instead: “So I went to the editor and I said, ‘I believe the Register is publishing that George Bush will win the caucus, and I don’t think that’s true.’”


The polling was redone to Selzer’s standards, and Dole did indeed win. Bush came in third. Selzer’s advice for early career advancement (she was 30 when she went to the Register) is to “find something that is a problem and fix it and make the boss look good.” Of course, Selzer has been wrong, too. She pulls a face when the 2004 general election comes up. Selzer wrongly had John Kerry beating George W. Bush in Iowa. “I was at a watch-the-returns party, and I just had to slink out of there when I realized what counties were not yet counted,” she said. “I thought, ‘Ohhh, I’m losing this one. I mean, I don’t care who wins and loses so long as it’s the person who I have winning my poll.” She ended up writing a self-flagellating piece for the Register a few days after the election headlined “Iowa Poll was a miss, and I don’t like it.”


Although Selzer’s firm does polls for private companies and public opinion surveys outside of Iowa, her home state remains her bread and butter. The caucuses are a beast unto themselves. They “have nothing directly to do with presidential politics” but rather “are private business meetings of the political parties,” said Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Drake University. A Jacksonian-era innovation, the caucuses were meetings in which, theoretically, any party member could participate.


In practice, however, party bosses tried to keep them exclusive. In 1948, Emory English, who headed a historical magazine in the state, wrote about a town in northern Iowa where an old shed happened to catch on fire at exactly the scheduled time of a caucus, attracting “nine-tenths of the people in the village, including members of the volunteer fire department.” While the townspeople gawked, party insiders convened, selected a slate of delegates without opposition and then went on their merry ways.


As the years went by, the caucus process became less arson-prone but more entwined with polls. The combination of a 1975 survey and a New York Times article might explain why we all care so much about Iowa nowadays.


In October of that year, the Register held a straw poll at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, where a number of the Democratic candidates were to speak. When the results came back, according to a report by the storied Times political reporter R.W. Apple Jr., the party apparatchiks were stunned. “Mr. Carter, whose Presidential aspirations have been considered laughable by many Washington experts, won 23 percent of the total,” the article said. “His nearest rival was a write-in candidate, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, with 12 percent.”


National papers took note of the Times item, which appeared at the bottom right corner of the front page, and soon set their own reporters out on the Iowa trail to document the Carter phenomenon. The goober-farmer-turned-gubernatorial-officeholder won the state’s contest and went on to the White House. By the time the 1980 caucuses rolled around, candidates were looking to replicate Carter’s success — and America’s greatest media/polling echo chamber was born.


Selzer’s deep hatred for the way high level math was taught in an undergraduate class helps form the philosophical basis of her polling practice. “They would say, ‘Well, make a guess as to what the answer’s going to be,’” she said. “I’m not good at guessing about math. I just think if you’re thinking about a future event, how do you know? And do you want a method that would blind you from it changing?”


This unwillingness to guess lies at the heart of her thinking about polling; Selzer doesn’t want to prejudice herself. “I like to say, “Keep your dirty hands off your data,’” she said. “That’s the making assumptions of what is or isn’t going to happen and then deciding you’re going to weight down the minority vote because you don’t think they’re going to show up.”


Selzer says that how a sample is drawn is “the heart of the science” of polling. That makes pollsters’ models — the mathematical calculations that help them determine this group — the arithmetic aortas of the discipline. George Gallup compared public opinion polling to sampling soup: “As long as it was a well-stirred pot, you only need a single sip to determine the taste.”


The argument that polling is not only a science but also an art is common, and echoes what doctors often say about their profession’s virtuoso elements. “It’s not necessarily guesswork, but there is a large dose of judgment that goes into ultimately picking a model and also risk involved when there is difference across those viable alternatives,” said Jon Cohen, who in 2008 headed the ABC News/Washington Post poll, one of the few surveys other than Selzer’s to show Obama up on Clinton in Iowa.


Most pollsters’ models involve set cut-offs of how many of this or that group is likely to show up and vote, relying on criteria like past attendance and enthusiasm to try to predict whether a person will caucus. If the neatly delineated poll numbers that we see in news articles are akin to the disembodied head of The Great and Powerful Oz, then the mathematical model that produced them is the little man pulling levers behind a curtain.


Cohen, who is now at SurveyMonkey, said more than one model is typically at play, so pollsters test different variables in order to gain confidence in their final model — pull the red lever and previous caucus attendance becomes more important; pull the blue one and voter enthusiasm takes precedence.


To Selzer, though, there is great hazard in hazarding a guess, and her method for determining who might actually caucus reflects this: Her polls live in the moment, taking into account no history. Polls for 2016, for example, won’t be weighted to reflect the voter turnout of 2012 or 2008 based on a hunch that the elections might see similar demographics come to caucus. She wipes the slate clean every time.


For all the questions about what makes her so good, there is perhaps something to be said for the relative simplicity of Selzer’s methodology. “When Politico says, oh, you know, she’s got a secret sauce, I go, well the saucy part, I’m good with that, but secret, not really,” she said. If you know what to look for, you can find Selzer’s numerical recipe at the top right hand corner of her polling reports. 

For what it’s worth, David Yepsen, a former political columnist for the Register, thinks the saucy part comes from Selzer’s being “closer to the news on a daily basis than someone in Washington, D.C., or New York” and knowing what questions to ask of Iowa voters. Selzer took to the state with the zeal of a convert: “She’s very bordering on boosterism at times,” said her older brother, Tad. “It’s fun to go down there and visit her — she has a vast network of acquaintances in Des Moines, she has a cocktail lounge where she’s immediately recognized, she’ll have new places where we’ll eat. She’s very much an Iowan.”


While it might not be a trade secret, Selzer does have a distinctive method. Her work for the Iowa Poll begins with calls to a list of registered voters that she gets from the Iowa secretary of state’s office. Mark Blumenthal, head of election polling for SurveyMonkey, points out that there has been a split among media pollsters — as opposed to internal campaign pollsters — about whether to seek out respondents from a list such as this or through a process known as random digit dialing — randomly generating phone numbers to call in the hopes of casting nets far and wide to find voters. 

Media pollsters “up until the last few years virtually all favored RDD,” he wrote in an email. “Mostly because of worries about non-coverage of listed voters for whom telephone numbers are not available.”


In other words, pollsters wanted to ensure that they wouldn’t be missing registered voters — especially in general elections — who decided not to make their phone numbers public information, or the newly registered, often young people. Polls done from lists are less expensive, though, and some pollsters, like Amy Simon, writing in 2006, have suggested that they are better at homing in on actual voters. “One hypothesis offered is that samples drawn from voter registration lists by definition consist of actual voters, while RDD studies rely entirely on respondents’ self-reporting about whether they are in fact registered to vote,” she wrote.


The next step in the Selzer process is that respondents are asked a series of questions to determine whether they’re likely to attend a caucus — only about 20 percent of Iowa’s registered voters do. 

They’re also asked who they’ll caucus for. Selzer collects data on all the people she contacts, though, not just the ones who say they’re going to participate. When the calls are done, then the data for all those called is weighted based on the “known population parameters” of the voter list — age, sex and congressional district. The list is not weighted by factors such as past caucus and general election voting activity.


“We are not like many other polling firms that say, ‘Well, we think’ — they begin with a guess about what they think the future is going to look like,” she said. “I don’t think that’s science.”


The “we” of Selzer’s firm — she has been in private practice since 1992 — is the pollster herself and Michelle Yeoman, Selzer’s research assistant of over 10 years. There are no cubicle bays filled with number-crunchers at Selzer & Co., just the two women in a single-story “Little House on the Prairie” structure that was built to Selzer’s exacting standards a couple of years ago. It’s an airy space that still smells new, with unmarred blond wood floors and a thriving crop of houseplants. The focal point of the space is a hallway that cuts horizontally through the building. Selzer and Yeoman have offices at either end of it and will call across the 20 or so feet that separates them to answer a question or finish one of the other’s thoughts.


“We built this on purpose so that there’s constant communication,” Selzer said. Their office doors, though rarely closed, were a pet project — she’s a fan of the show “Damages” (“there’s a lot of killing!”) and asked her builder to replicate the sliding barn doors featured in the Glenn Close character’s office.


“Part of our culture in this office is we have the phrase, ‘I just want to say this out loud,’” Selzer said. “It’s a culture of over-communication, and some day I will write a book called ‘Just Say It Out Loud.’” It’s a nicety that seems in keeping with Selzer’s attention to detail in modes of communications. Her phone bankers receive manners training — “Iowa nice,” she says, grinning. 

And the power of politeness so inspired her, she says, that she stopped swearing years ago.

As Iowa nice and easygoing as Selzer might be, she is also hard-driving. Once, she sued her landlord — Selzer brags about having kept him on the stand for six hours (she is not a lawyer) — and won back her $2,100 deposit; another time, she translated “Amazing Grace” into Vietnamese for a choir performance (she does not speak Vietnamese).


But most of all, Selzer is a fundamentally earnest person operating in one of the more cynical spheres possible. She sent me an email one day with the subject line, “My check list of things I’d like to do.” She’d ticked off a few items already: winning a blue ribbon at the Iowa State Fair (for cheeseless pizza) and a Scrabble tournament, singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The items that remained were by turn ambitious, fame-curious and whimsical: write a funny book, meet Oprah Winfrey and David Brooks, have tea with the Queen of England.


Her sincerity makes the fact that she’s become a Washington in-crowd “it girl” all the more paradoxical, since her celebrity is based on something fundamentally disingenuous; Washington perversely inserts Selzer into the news cycle by calling into doubt her polls and then just as quickly embraces her again after she’s proved the political elite wrong.


That’s what happened during the 2014 midterm elections. It was a tough cycle for polls generally, but not for Selzer. “Once again it is Ann Selzer’s polling world in Iowa, we’re just lucky to live in it,” Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press,” tweeted after Republican Joni Ernst’s surprise defeat of Democrat Bruce Braley by more than 8 percentage points in the state’s Senate race. Three days earlier, Selzer had anticipated that outcome in a Register poll, while others were showing the race neck and neck.

But while Selzer has so far thrived in an industry in crisis, it’s safe to say that she’s not immune from the problems accompanying its rapidly shifting landscape — polling calls to cell phones are a more complicated business, and online polls are gaining in popularity but remain untested. She declined to say where she sees her practice in five years, but it’s not difficult to guess that it will look radically different given these changes.


What will not change is that for Selzer, politics is a solo sport. It’s ironic, given that polls are devoted to tracking the electoral movements of history’s neediest megalomaniacs, that the pollster’s gratification comes from sitting alone in a room and finding that her numbers have correctly predicted waves of thought and movement, that the opinions shared over the phone that are then tabulated and aggregated have come together to predict perhaps even a moment in history.


The night of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, Selzer wanted to see whether the massive turnout she had predicted would bear out on the ground. So she drove to the nearest caucus site.


“And it’s lit up like a Norman Rockwell painting, there’s snow on the ground,” she said. “It’s a middle school, so there’s not a big parking lot, and it’s on a part of Grand Avenue where there really aren’t side streets. So in order for people to get there — and both Republicans and Democrats are there, there’s 1,000 people coming into this school — they are parking six, seven, eight, blocks away and walking on icy sidewalks to get there. And there they are, their arms linked, kind of two by two, three by three.” It was then, without the numbers in front of her, that Selzer knew her poll would be OK.


“It just honestly — it kind of made my heart melt a little bit because here’s democracy, here they come.”


[Clare Malone is a senior political writer for FiveThirtyEight.]


                                 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/selzer/

A.I. Sharpens Fuzzy Photographs

This AI turns even the blurriest photo into realistic computer-generated faces in HD

From Duke University


June 12, 2020 -- Duke University researchers have developed an AI tool that can turn blurry, unrecognizable pictures of people's faces into eerily convincing computer-generated portraits, in finer detail than ever before.


Previous methods can scale an image of a face up to eight times its original resolution. But the Duke team has come up with a way to take a handful of pixels and create realistic-looking faces with up to 64 times the resolution, 'imagining' features such as fine lines, eyelashes and stubble that weren't 
there in the first place.


"Never have super-resolution images been created at this resolution before with this much detail," said Duke computer scientist Cynthia Rudin, who led the team.


The system cannot be used to identify people, the researchers say: It won't turn an out-of-focus, unrecognizable photo from a security camera into a crystal clear image of a real person. Rather, it is capable of generating new faces that don't exist, but look plausibly real.


While the researchers focused on faces as a proof of concept, the same technique could in theory take low-res shots of almost anything and create sharp, realistic-looking pictures, with applications ranging from medicine and microscopy to astronomy and satellite imagery, said co-author Sachit Menon '20, who just graduated from Duke with a double-major in mathematics and computer science.


The researchers will present their method, called PULSE, next week at the 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), held virtually from June 14 to June 19.


Traditional approaches take a low-resolution image and 'guess' what extra pixels are needed by trying to get them to match, on average, with corresponding pixels in high-resolution images the computer has seen before. As a result of this averaging, textured areas in hair and skin that might not line up perfectly from one pixel to the next end up looking fuzzy and indistinct.


The Duke team came up with a different approach. Instead of taking a low-resolution image and slowly adding new detail, the system scours AI-generated examples of high-resolution faces, searching for ones that look as much as possible like the input image when shrunk down to the same size.


The team used a tool in machine learning called a "generative adversarial network," or GAN, which are two neural networks trained on the same data set of photos. One network comes up with AI-created human faces that mimic the ones it was trained on, while the other takes this output and decides if it is convincing enough to be mistaken for the real thing. The first network gets better and better with experience, until the second network can't tell the difference.


PULSE can create realistic-looking images from noisy, poor-quality input that other methods can't, Rudin said. From a single blurred image of a face it can spit out any number of uncannily lifelike possibilities, each of which looks subtly like a different person.


Even given pixelated photos where the eyes and mouth are barely recognizable, "our algorithm still manages to do something with it, which is something that traditional approaches can't do," said co-author Alex Damian '20, a Duke math major.


The system can convert a 16x16-pixel image of a face to 1024 x 1024 pixels in a few seconds, adding more than a million pixels, akin to HD resolution. Details such as pores, wrinkles, and wisps of hair that are imperceptible in the low-res photos become crisp and clear in the computer-generated versions.


The researchers asked 40 people to rate 1,440 images generated via PULSE and five other scaling methods on a scale of one to five, and PULSE did the best, scoring almost as high as high-quality photos of actual people.


See the results and upload images for yourself at http://pulse.cs.duke.edu/.

This research was supported by the Lord Foundation of North Carolina and the Duke Department of Computer Science.


                https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200612111409.htm

Reduced Speed Limits Save Lives

From the University of Illinois


June 11, 2020 -- Traffic accidents are the leading cause of non-natural deaths worldwide. Lower speed limits may help prevent accidents. But speed-reduction policies can be controversial and effects are not well documented.

A new study from University of Illinois shows that speed reductions in São Paulo, Brazil, dramatically reduced fatal accidents and increased travel times only minimally.

"We estimated that the social benefits of accident reductions greatly outweighed the social costs of increased travel time. Not only that, but it's also a pro-poor policy that mainly benefits low-income residents," says Peter Christensen, environmental economist in the U of I Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE), and one of the study's authors.

The city of São Paulo reduced speed limits on highways from 90 to 70 km/h in 2015. The controversial policy became a major focal point of the mayoral election in 2017, and the new mayor reversed the policy. This allowed the researchers to compare accidents at three points: before, during, and after the reduction in speed limits.

They found that over a period of 18 months, accidents decreased by 21.7% on roads affected by the policy. That equals approximately 1,889 averted accidents and 104 averted fatalities. Furthermore, they found that 86% of the benefits from reduced accident damages involved low-income residents; primarily pedestrians and motorcyclists.

"Our results indicate that speed limit reduction can be a very efficient life-saving policy," Christensen points out. "In São Paulo, gun violence is the other major cause of unnatural death. It's about the same magnitude as road accidents. Our study shows speed-reduction policies have a much bigger effect in terms of reducing fatalities than any policy we're aware of to reduce violent crime," he says.


"And motorcycle transport is a widely used transport option for low-income households in many developing countries, giving us reason to believe that these policies will disproportionately benefit poor households in urban areas around the world," Christensen adds.

Speed-reduction impacts have rarely been studied in developing country cities, because the work is very data intensive. This is particularly problematic because the World Health Organization cites actions in developing countries as the key to reducing fatal accidents worldwide, Christensen notes.


His research group specializes in analyzing large data sets, which allowed them to conduct the first available study on this topic. The researchers compiled information about accidents from the São Paulo Traffic Agency. The data included details about each accident such as victim demographics, severity of injury, and type of vehicle. The study covered 125,000 traffic accidents and 38 million traffic tickets issued by monitoring cameras, the primary means of enforcing the speed-reduction policy.


"We identify the exact location of every accident, as well as information on travel times and congestion in the areas impacted by this rotating policy. The data that are becoming available for analyzing these policies are completely transforming the precision of analysis and recommendations coming from the research community," Christensen says.


"Our first study question was whether the lower speed limit would reduce accidents. It¬ does -- by a lot. The second question is whether the reduction in accidents outweighs the social cost of increasing travel time in the highly congested city," he adds.


The researchers spent nine months developing software that allowed them to analyze trip durations using data from Google Directions API.


"With this methodology we can measure precisely how conditions change on arterials affected by the policy because it's coming from real-time information; from cars moving on the road," Christensen says.


The study included 1.4 million trip observations in 2017, before and after the speed limit was reversed. Overall, the researchers found travel times were 5.5% higher when the reduced speed limit was in effect.


Next, they estimated the impact of trip delays by multiplying the increased time with the value of each person's time.


"If my normal trip takes 20 minutes to get from my house to the downtown area in São Paulo, and now it takes 24 minutes, then that's four extra minutes of my time. Economists estimate that value for all of the people who are impacted. So even relatively small impacts per capita can add up since over 20 million people are living in South Paulo and using transport," Christensen explains.

The researchers estimate the benefit of accident prevention is 1.32 greater than the social cost of longer travel times.


"The benefits certainly exceeded the costs in São Paulo. Given the magnitudes, we think it's likely that they'll exceed the costs elsewhere, though of course this depends on a number of factors," he concludes. "Other governments should do their due diligence with planning before implementation, but our findings indicate that this is a tool that can be used to dramatically and cost-effectively mitigate the primary cause of unnatural deaths in the world today."


The study's co-authors are Amanda Ang and Renato Vieira, former graduate students in the U of I Department of ACE. Vieira, a Brazilian native, now works as an economist in Brazil and is sharing the study's findings with local authorities.


Story Source:


Materials provided by University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. Original written by Marianne Stein


              https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200611183912.htm

Liquid Phase of Crystals Found

From C.U. Boulder Today


June  10, 2020 -- Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Soft Materials Research Center (SMRC) have discovered an elusive phase of matter, first proposed more than 100 years ago and sought after ever since.


The team describes the discovery of what scientists call a “ferroelectric nematic” phase of liquid crystal in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The discovery "opens a door to a new universe of materials," said co-author Matt Glaser, a professor in the Department of Physics. 


Nematic liquid crystals have been a hot topic in materials research since the 1970s. These materials exhibit a curious mix of fluid- and solid-like behaviors, which allow them to control light. Engineers have used them extensively to make the liquid crystal displays (LCDs) in many laptops, TVs and cellphones.


Think of nematic liquid crystals like dropping a handful of pins on a table. The pins in this case are rod-shaped molecules that are “polar”—with heads (the blunt ends) that carry a positive charge and tails (the pointy ends) that are negatively charged. In a traditional nematic liquid crystal, half of the pins point left and the other half point right, with the direction chosen at random. 


A ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal phase, however, is much more disciplined. In such a liquid crystal, patches or “domains” form in the sample in which the molecules all point in the same direction, either right or left. In physics parlance, these materials have polar ordering. 


Noel Clark, a professor of physics and director of the SMRC, said that his team’s discovery of one such liquid crystal could open up a wealth of technological innovations—from new types of display screens to reimagined computer memory.


“There are 40,000 research papers on nematics, and in almost any one of them you see interesting new possibilities if the nematic had been ferroelectric,” Clark said.


Under the microscope


The discovery is years in the making. 


Nobel Laureates Peter Debye and Max Born first suggested in the 1910s that, if you designed a liquid crystal correctly, its molecules could spontaneously fall into a polar ordered state. Not long after that, researchers began to discover solid crystals that did something similar: Their molecules pointed in uniform directions. They could also be reversed, flipping from right to left or vice versa under an applied electric field. These solid crystals were called “ferroelectrics” because of their similarities to magnets. (Ferrum is Latin for “iron”).


In the decades since, however, scientists struggled to find a liquid crystal phase that behaved in the same way. That is, until Clark and his colleagues began examining RM734, an organic molecule created by a group of British scientists several years ago.


That same British group, plus a second team of Slovenian scientists, reported that RM734 exhibited a conventional nematic liquid crystal phase at higher temperatures. At lower temperatures, another unusual phase appeared.


When Clark’s team tried to observe that strange phase under the microscope they noticed something new. Under a weak electric field, a palette of striking colors developed toward the edges of the cell containing the liquid crystal. 


“It was like connecting a light bulb to voltage to test it but finding the socket and hookup wires glowing much more brightly instead,” Clark said.  


Stunning results


So, what was happening?


The researchers ran more tests and discovered that this phase of RM734 was 100 to 1,000 times more responsive to electric fields than the usual nematic liquid crystals. This suggested that the molecules that make up the liquid crystal demonstrated strong polar order.   


“When the molecules are all pointing to the left, and they all see a field that says, ‘go right,’ the response is dramatic,” Clark said.  


The team also discovered that distinct domains seemed to form spontaneously in the liquid crystal when it cooled from higher temperature. There were, in other words, patches within their sample in which the molecules seemed to be aligned.

“That confirmed that this phase was, indeed, a ferroelectric nematic fluid,” Clark said. 


That alignment was also more uniform than the team was expecting. 

“Entropy reigns in a fluid,” said Joe MacLennan, a study coauthor and a professor of physics at CU Boulder. “Everything is wiggling around, so we expected a lot of disorder.”


When the researchers examined how well aligned the molecules were inside a single domain, “we were stunned by the result,” MacLennan said. The molecules were nearly all pointing in the same direction.


The team’s next goal is to discover how RM734 achieves this rare feat. Glaser and SMRC researcher Dmitry Bedrov of the University of Utah, are currently using computer simulation to tackle this question.


“This work suggests that there are other ferroelectric fluids hiding in plain sight,” Clark said. “It is exciting that right now techniques like artificial intelligence are emerging that will enable an efficient search for them.”


Coauthors on the new paper include CU Boulder researchers Leo Radzihovsky, professor of physics; David Walba, professor of chemistry; and Xi Chen, Eva Korblova and Renfan Shao. Dengpan Dong and Xiaoyu Wei of the University of Utah were also coauthors. 


https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/06/10/after-century-searching-scientists-find-new-liquid-phase

List of Lawsuits Involving Donald Trump

The following is a list of notable lawsuits involving United States President Donald Trump. The list excludes cases naming the president as a matter of course, including habeas corpus requests.


Lawsuits around the United States Constitution

• Lawsuit alleging violations of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
• Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump
• PEN America v. Trump
• CNN v. Trump
• Lawsuit alleging violations of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
• Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California (the DACA lawsuit)
• New York v. Trump (another DACA lawsuit)
• Vidal v. Nielsen (another DACA lawsuit)
• Lawsuit alleging violations of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
• Stone v. Trump
• Lawsuits alleging violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the United States Constitution
• CREW v. Trump
• D.C. and Maryland v. Trump
• Blumenthal v. Trump
• U.S. Constitutional case law lawsuit filed by the United States House Committee on the Judiciary to compel the testimony of former White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn, Jr. under subpoena.
• In re: Don McGahn

Lawsuits around Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations


Legal challenges to Executive Order 13768, regarding sanctuary cities


City and County of San Francisco v. Trump


City of Chelsea v. Trump


Legal challenges to Executive Order 13769, regarding temporary immigration restrictions


Aziz v. Trump


Darweesh v. Trump


Doe v. Trump


Louhghalam v. Trump


Mohammed v. United States


Sarsour v. Trump


Washington v. Trump


Legal challenges to Executive Order 13780, a revised order on temporary immigration restrictions


Hawaii v. Trump


International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump


Washington v. Trump


Legal challenges to Temporary Protected Status changes


Bhattarai v. Nielsen


Ramos v. Nielsen


Legal challenge to Presidential Proclamation "Addressing Mass Migration Through the Southern Border of the United States" ("Proclamation") 83 Fed. Reg. 57,661, which expressly invokes 8 U.S.C. § 1182


East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Trump


Lawsuits around anti-LGBT policies


Lawsuits regarding Presidential Memorandum on Military Service by Transgender Individuals by Donald Trump (August 25, 2017)


Jane Doe v. Trump


Stone v. Trump


Karnoski v. Trump


Stockman v. Trump


Lawsuits around potential legal violations


Lawsuit alleging violations of compliance with a grand jury empaneled by Robert Mueller in the Special Counsel investigation


In re Grand Jury Subpoena


Lawsuit alleging violations of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, 44 U.S.C. §§ 2201–2207


CREW and National Security Archive v. Trump and EOP


Lawsuits challenging Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity alleging violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act


ACLU v. Trump and Pence


Joyner v. Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity


NAACP v. Trump


Lawsuit alleging violation of 12 U.S.C. § 5491(b)(5)(B), a component of the Dodd–Frank Act of 2010


English v. Trump


Lawsuit requesting grand jury materials from the Special Counsel investigation by Robert Mueller

In re Application of the Committee on the Judiciary


New York state lawsuit against the Trump administration for its policy to exclude New Yorkers from enrolling in federal Trusted Traveler programs.


Lawsuits around the United States Census


Regarding the 2020 United States Census


Department of Commerce v. New York


New York Immigration Coalition v. United States Department of Commerce


Lawsuits around Trump political campaigns


Lawsuit alleging that the Trump Campaign used mass, unsolicited communication of promotional messages that the plaintiffs did not consent to receive


Thorne v. Donald J Trump for President Inc.


Lawsuit alleging Russian interference in the 2016 Federal Elections, the Trump campaign was accused of engaging in a racketeering enterprise in conjunction with Russia and WikiLeaks


Democratic National Committee v. Russian Federation (dismissed)


Lawsuit regarding a pattern of persistent illegal conduct, occurring over more than a decade, that includes extensive unlawful political coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing transactions to benefit Mr. Trump’s personal and business interests, and violations of basic legal obligations for non-profit foundations


State of New York v. The Trump Foundation


Lawsuit in which plaintiffs alleged Trump's security team assaulted them during a 2015 peaceful protest based around Trump's campaign comments about Black Lives Matter and Mexican immigrants


Galicia v. Trump


Lawsuit alleging Trump encouraged an atmosphere of violence and anti-Trump protesters were subjected to attacks and racial slurs being led out of a campaign rally in 2016


Nwanguma v. Trump


Lawsuit alleging that Trump and the Republican National Committee colluded to prevent any competition to Trump’s re-election campaign.


Roque De La Fuente v. Trump & Republican National Committee


Roger Stone (Roger J. Stone Jr.) found guilty by a jury in November 2019 of on obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and tampering with a witness in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. He was later sentenced to 40 months in prison.


Lawsuits around potential sexual misconduct and assault


Further information: Donald Trump sexual misconduct allegations


Lawsuit by Katie Johnson which alleges that Trump and Jeffrey Epstein sexually and physically abused her under threats to physically harm her and her family while a 13-year-old minor from June–September 1994


Katie Johnson v. Donald J Trump and Jeffrey E Epstein (dismissed)


Lawsuit by Jane Doe which alleges Trump and Epstein engaged in forcible rape, imprisonment and assault while she was 13-year-old minor and another 12-year-old girl in 1994


Jane Doe v. Donald Trump & Jeffrey E Epstein (dismissed by Doe)


Lawsuit by former campaign staffer, Alva Johnson, who claims that Trump forcibly kissed her at a rally in Florida in August 2016, the lawsuit also alleges unequal pay standards for her an African-

American woman compared to others on the team


Johnson v. Trump


Defamation lawsuit raised by Summer Zervos which arose from Trump's statement that she lied about sexual assault allegations against him


Zervos v. Trump


Defamation lawsuit raised by E. Jean Carroll which arose from Trump's denials of her accusation that he sexually assaulted her more than 20 years ago damaged her reputation


Carroll v. Trump


Lawsuits around financial manipulation and employee payment


Lawsuit alleging violations of employee payment regarding not paying him for "thousands of hours of overtime" to which he was legally entitled during his more than two decades of service


Cintron v. Trump Organization


Lawsuit alleging that Trump and his adult children had made a large amount of money by encouraging unsophisticated investors to join fraudulent schemes


Doe et al. v. Trump Corp. et al.


Lawsuits around Trump's financial and tax information


Appeal lawsuit against the Mazars accounting firm, in an effort to have Trump's financial information kept private


Trump et al v. Mazars et al


Appeal lawsuit against the Deutsche Bank and Capital One Bank from fulfilling the subpoenas issued to the company by the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees for Trump's, his adult children's, and his businesses' financial records


Trump et al v. Deutsche Bank et al


Case before the Supreme Court of the United States: Does a grand-jury subpoena by a state District Attorney for the President's financial records violate Article II and the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution? Oral arguments were scheduled to be heard by telephone on May 12, 2020.


Trump v. Vance


Case in D.C. court challenging the New York TRUST Act, which gives Congress the right to obtain tax information on New York residents. Case dismissed November 11, 2019.


Donald J. Trump v. Committee on Ways and Means, et al.


Lawsuits around environmental concerns


Lawsuit brought by Our Children's Trust using the public trust doctrine to address the effects of 
global warming.


Juliana v. United States


League of Conservation Voters lawsuit challenging Trump's attempt to undo a ban on oil and gas drilling in certain areas of the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. District court ruled that Trump overstepped his constitutional authority and violated federal law.[43] Appeal ongoing.


League of Conservation Voters v. Trump


Lawsuits around COVID-19


Lawsuit brought against Trump's alleged denial of stimulus checks to spouses of undocumented immigrants


John Doe v. Trump


Lawsuit brought by Trump against a Wisconsin TV station for airing an advertisement criticizing his COVID-19 response


All current pending prosecution


Pending prosecution of former Paul Manafort associate Gregory B. Craig for lying to the Justice 

Department about work he did for the government of Ukraine by the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia


Pending criminal prosecution of Paul Manafort on state mortgage fraud charges by the New York County District Attorney


Orestes Fintiklis, majority owner of former-Trump International Hotel & Tower Panama regarding tax evasion.


ACN Inc. (American Communications Network)


Amazon Web Services v. United States of America regarding Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure


Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. WP Company LLC d/b/a Washington Post


Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. CNN


Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. New York Times

                 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits_involving_Donald_Trump