A team from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain, BarcelonaTech is working with scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US), the Instituto de Desenvolvimento Sustentável Mamirauá (Brazil), and the Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) on a project to develop a technology that will revolutionize the protection of rainforest biodiversity. The project participates in the XPRIZE Rainforest, a 10-million-dollar international competition to transform our understanding of the complexity of rainforests. 

Providence+, a team of scientists led by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC), is the only Spanish team among the 36 international groups from 18 countries selected to participate in the XPRIZE Rainforest. Promoted by the XPRIZE Foundation, the 10-million-dollar XPRIZE Rainforest is a five-year competition that challenges scientists around the world to develop novel technologies to rapidly and comprehensively survey rainforest biodiversity and use that data to improve our understanding of this ecosystem and protect its biodiversity. The XPRIZE Rainforest also promotes business investment to develop new, just, and sustainable bioeconomics.

Teams competing in the XPRIZE Rainforest are required to develop a technological solution to survey the most biodiversity contained in 100 hectares of tropical rainforest in 24 hours and produce impactful insights within 48 hours. The deadline for developing and presenting the entries is spring 2023, then 10 teams will advance to finals. In late April 2024, the winners of the first, second, and third prizes will be announced.

Preserving the value of rainforests

Rainforests are critical to the survival of the human race. They play a key role in stabilizing the climate by absorbing CO2 and releasing the oxygen on which we depend. They cover less than 10% of the Earth’s land surface, but they house some 50 million inhabitants and over 50% of the planet’s biodiversity. Although they are the most biodiverse ecosystems, there is limited knowledge of them. The value of the standing trees and the species that live there is not fully understood and our ability to gain more knowledge is restricted because the rainforest environment is dense, vast, and complex.

Protecting these ecosystems from deforestation is, therefore, more necessary than ever. The rapid disappearance of tropical forests is also leading to the extinction of an alarming number of species. Despite all this, adequate tools and methods have not still been developed to monitor the conditions of most wildlife at the speed and scale required to effectively mitigate their decline. Technology can help expand this knowledge and reveal unknown aspects.

Listening to species with sensors, drones, and robots

Providence+ aims to take the pulse of rainforests using a set of specific bio-indicators to monitor species in real-time. This will help assess population dynamics and the eco-acoustic indices of the biodiversity of these forests.

This project was preceded in 2016 by technology developed by the UPC’s Bioacoustic Applications Laboratory (LAB) and the Instituto de Desenvolvimento Sustentável Mamirauá (Brasil) within the framework of the Providence initiative to monitor and understand wildlife: the Providence nodes, a network of sensors that are currently and constantly monitoring biodiversity under the canopy of tropical forests. The system also identifies, through images and sounds, a large number of species, more than any other technology has been able to so far. With wireless data transmission and low energy consumption, it is designed to operate for long periods with no need for maintenance.

Now the Providence+ scientific team will enhance the function of the current nodes and include computer vision techniques to identify plants in these forests. They will also introduce non-motorized robots and drones to monitor hundreds of species in real-time, for the first time without human input on-site. The new sensor system will incorporate environmental DNA exploration technology (to explore air, water, and soil) to detect the historical presence of both animal and plant species based on samples that may just contain fur, feathers, or tracks.

Researchers also plan to scale up the implementation of Providence nodes in other rainforest regions and other similar biomes. The sustainable use of this new technology, within a responsible bio-economy, will improve research and protect rainforest health.

An investment of more than 1.5 million euros is required to develop the technologies for Providence+. Therefore, the UPC has launched a fundraising program to channel contributions from private investors, sponsors, and donors. It can be accessed at: providenceplus.upc.edu

An interdisciplinary and international team

Providence+ is coordinated by researcher Michel André, director of the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB), a pioneering center in monitoring biodiversity and the effects of climate change and human activities on the planet’s most fragile habitats. Linked to the UPC’s Vilanova i la Geltrú School of Engineering (EPSEVG), the LAB has developed the world’s largest bioacoustic database, from the deep ocean to the Amazon rainforest, allowing real-time visualization and monitoring of wildlife and biodiversity worldwide.

The UPC team working on the Providence+ project is made up of the Image and Video Processing Group; the Wireless Networks Group; the Signal Processing and Communications group; the NanoSat Lab; the Visualisation, Virtual Reality, and Graphic Interaction Research Group; the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics—a joint center of the UPC and the Spanish National Research Council—and the LAB.

The team also involves researcher Antonio Torralba, head of the Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making (AI+D) Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US; Javier Alonso-Mora, director of the Autonomous Multi-Robots Lab at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), The Netherlands; and Emiliano Esterci Ramalho, technical director of the Instituto de Desenvolvimento Sustentável Mamirauá (IDSM), Brazil, which co-leads the Providence project.

In this context of ongoing work, the UPC will confer an honorary doctoral degree on MIT researcher Antonio Torralba on Friday 11 March. Torralba is a graduate of the UPC’s Barcelona School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSETB). The ceremony will take place within the framework of the 50th anniversary of the School.

Radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity

The XPRIZE Foundation is a non-profit organization that aims to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. Through large-scale competition, it attracts investment from outside the sector to inspire research and technological development that will help to solve the world’s grand challenges.

So far, XPRIZE challenges have dealt with space exploration, life sciences, energy, education, and, more recently, the creation of fast and inexpensive COVID-19 tests.

A Bocconi University, Milan, Italy study on couple dissolution shows that an ML approach can advance demographic research, detecting complex patterns in relatively small datasets

The life satisfaction of both partners and the woman’s percentage of housework turned out to be the most important predictors of union dissolution, when scholars affiliated to Bocconi’s Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy used a machine learning (ML) technique to analyze data on 2,038 married or cohabiting couples who participated in the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey. 
 
The couples were observed, on average, for 12 years, leading to a total of 18,613 observations. During the observation period, 914 couples (45%) split up.

In their article, newly published online on Demography, Bruno Arpino (University of Florence), Marco Le Moglie (Catholic University, Milan), and Letizia Mencarini (Bocconi), used an ML technique called Random Survival Forests (RSF) to overcome the difficulty to manage a large number of independent variables in conventional models.
 
“A clear-cut example of the potential difficulties of considering all variables and their possible interactions concerns the ‘big five personality traits,” Professor Mencarini said. “To account for both partners’ traits (10 variables) and all their two-way interactions (25 variables), one would need to include 35 independent variables, which would be very problematic in a regression model.” ML tools are, on the contrary, capable of detecting complex patterns in relatively small datasets.
 
Another advantage of ML is supposed to be its superior predictive power compared to conventional models, more attuned to explaining how certain mechanisms work than to predict the future behavior of the variables. When the authors divided their sample into two parts and used the results of the first half to predict the outcomes of the second half, they found that the predictive accuracy of RSF was considerably superior to that of conventional models. Nonetheless, the predictive accuracy of RSF was limited despite the use, as input variables, of all the most important predictors of union dissolution identified in the literature.

Among the variables with the greatest predictive ability, the authors found the life satisfaction of both partners, woman’s percentage of housework, marital status (i.e., married vs. cohabiting), woman’s working hours, woman’s level of openness, and man’s level of extraversion.
 
The analysis also found that many variables interact in complex ways. For instance, when a man’s life satisfaction was high, a higher woman’s life satisfaction constantly increased the union’s chances of surviving. But when man’s life satisfaction was low, the association between woman’s life satisfaction and union survival was negative after a given threshold.
 
The authors, though, did not detect any interaction effect when considering personal traits: a woman’s openness and a man’s extraversion make union dissolution more likely, irrespective of their partner’s personality.

For decades now, the world has become increasingly reliant on computers and sensors to do just about everything, and the technologies themselves are getting smaller, faster, and more efficient. Take your smartphone as an example: a pocket-sized piece of mostly aluminum, iron, and lithium that is millions of times more powerful than the computers that guided the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

Advancements in quantum technologies, which deploy the properties of quantum physics, promise to take a step further and revolutionize virtually all of industry and daily life. The result could yield more powerful and energy-efficient devices. But to do so requires that physicists get creative about how they exploit the weird ways atoms interact with each other. 

It turns out that atomic defects in certain solid crystals may be key to unleashing the potential of the quantum revolution, according to discoveries by Northeastern researchers. The defects are essentially irregularities in the way that atoms are arranged to form crystalline structures. Those irregularities could provide the physical conditions to host something called a quantum bit, or qubit for short—a foundational building block for quantum technologies, says Arun Bansil, university distinguished professor in the Department of Physics at Northeastern. 

Qubits are fundamentally different from classical computer bits, which are the most basic units of information in computing. But because both are made out of incredibly small material, they are subject to the forces operating in the enigmatic and elusive world of nanoparticles. 

Bansil and colleagues found that defects in a certain class of materials, specifically two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides, contained the atomic properties conducive to making qubits. Bansil says the findings amount to something of a breakthrough, particularly in quantum sensing, and may help accelerate the pace of technological change. 

“If we can learn how to create qubits in this two-dimensional matrix, that is a big, big deal,” Bansil says. 

Transition metal dichalcogenides have a diverse range of quantum properties, making them especially attractive for scientific investigation, Bansil says. Researchers in the field have said that the unique materials have “virtually unlimited potential in various fields, including electronic, optoelectronic, sensing, and energy storage applications.” 

Using super-advanced computations, Bansil and his colleagues sifted through hundreds of different material combinations to find those capable of hosting a qubit. 

“When we looked at a lot of these materials, in the end, we found only a handful of viable defects—about a dozen or so,” Bansil says. “Both the material and type of defect are important here because in principle there are many types of defects that can be created in any material.”

The key finding of the study is that the so-called “antisite” defect in films of the two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides carries something called “spin” with it. Spin, also called angular momentum, describes a fundamental property of electrons defined in one of two potential states: up or down, Bansil says.

To get a better sense of what a qubit is and how it can be applied to future computers and sensors, it’s important to understand how data is processed in existing “classical” computers. Classical computers use bits to perform computations. When you’re doing almost anything on a computer, you’re sending it a set of instructions that engages a central processing unit, or CPU. The CPU is made of circuitry that uses electrical signals to direct the whole computer to carry out program instructions that are stored in the system’s memory.

These signals communicate using information that’s encoded or packaged, into bits. The information is represented numerically in one of two values: 0 or 1, which describe the states of various circuits as being either on or off. All modern electronic devices operate through circuit components that send and receive information by essentially manipulating these 0s and 1s, Bansil says. 

Qubits behave quite differently from existing bits, thanks to not-well-understood quantum mechanical properties. What makes a qubit different is that its values are fluid, meaning—and here’s where things get weird—they can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. This is because of something called superposition, a core principle of quantum mechanics that states that a quantum system can exist in multiple states at a given time until it is measured. 

Quantum information systems instead can use the probability that a qubit will be in one or another state when measured, or observed, to make calculations. 

“What is unique about a quantum bit is that it can essentially code two different states at the same time,” Bansil says. “You are in a position to actually in principle store a very large number of possibilities in a very small number of qubits simultaneously.”

The challenge for researchers has been how to find qubits that are stable enough to use, given the difficulties in finding the precise atomic conditions under which they can be materially realized. 

“The current qubits available—especially those involved in quantum computing—all operate at very low temperatures, making them incredibly fragile,” Bansil says. That’s why the discovery of transition metal dichalcogenides’ defects holds such promise, he adds. 

Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics (Fraunhofer IAF) to lead the development of a spin-photon, diamond-based quantum supercomputer demonstrator

Quantum Brilliance, a German-Australian manufacturer of innovative quantum supercomputing hardware, is the commercialization partner in a $17.5 million research project funded by the German government to develop a compact, scalable quantum supercomputer demonstrator with spin-photon qubits leveraging synthetic diamonds.

Led by the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF, the goal of the three-year project is to develop a demonstrator that delivers low error rates and reliable operation at cryogenic temperatures so it can be used adjacent to classical computer systems. Researchers believe the quantum processor will be able to calculate the results of highly complex quantum chemical reactions in the future, among other applications.

Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Spinning – Spin-Photon-based Quantum Computer based on Diamond project will include the participation of 28 experts from science and industry. As a commercialization partner, Quantum Brilliance will be providing input regarding the economics of producing the system and the broad, practical applications that will benefit from its development.

"The aim of our work is, among other things, to ensure reliable operation of such an innovative quantum computer and to create a peripheral system to make computing power available to a broad group of users, for example via cloud computing," said Prof. Rüdiger Quay, Ph.D., project coordinator and managing director of Fraunhofer IAF.

To develop the quantum processor with spin qubits made of synthetic diamonds, nitrogen atoms (NV centers) are specifically implanted in the diamond lattice. These act as computer nodes between quantum properties transmitted by light, laying the foundation for later scaling. The first demonstrator model is planned to deliver up to 10 qubits, a later model with 100 qubits or more while offering maximum connectivity and configuration. 

"We are delighted to be part of this exciting BMBF-funded project led by Fraunhofer IAF. Quantum computing is one of the key industries of the future – with a potential that is second to none,” said Mark Mattingley-Scott, European Head of Quantum Brilliance. “With its research landscape, local industry, and the support of the public sector, Germany has the perfect conditions to be a leader in this promising industry.”

In addition to Quantum Brilliance, six universities, two non-profit research institutions, four industrial companies, and fourteen associated partners are working on the project under the direction of Fraunhofer IAF. All participants are highly active in the field of pre-competitive hardware, firmware, and software development and include:

• Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF (Coordinator)
• Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Systems and Device Technology IISB
• Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH
• Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
• University of Konstanz
• Heidelberg University
• Technical University of Munich
• University of Ulm
• Diamond Materials GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau
• NVision Imaging Technologies GmbH, Ulm
• Qinu GmbH, Karlsruhe
• University of Stuttgart
• Quantum Brilliance GmbH, Stuttgart
• Swabian Instruments GmbH, Stuttgart