Sponsored By Oxley Developments
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04 Nov 21. New joint statement between UK and US to strengthen quantum collaboration. The United Kingdom and the United States of America have signed a new joint statement of intent to boost collaboration on quantum science and technologies.
- New statement of intent by UK and US to boost collaboration on quantum technologies
- signed by Science Minister George Freeman and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President, Dr Eric Lander
- announcement comes on same day as Innovate UK also announce result of £50m domestic competition to fund 12 projects aiming to commercialise quantum technologies
The United Kingdom and the United States of America have signed a new joint statement of intent to boost collaboration on quantum science and technologies – helping to realise the full potential of the technology and deepen ties between the 2 countries.
Signed today by the Science Minister George Freeman and the US Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President, Dr Eric Lander, the statement sets out shared priorities for continued cooperation between the 2 nations, including promoting joint research, building the global market and supply chain and training the next generation of scientists and engineers.
The agreement builds on the UK and USA’s long history of world-leading research partnerships, including in quantum information science and technology, and follows June’s announcement that the UK and USA will develop a new partnership on technology.
UK Science Minister George Freeman said, “Quantum technologies are set to revolutionise computing with huge opportunities across our economy and society: from everyday functions like medical diagnosis and drug discovery to cyber security and AI.”
The UK and US have been at the forefront of advancing this cutting edge area of science and technology.
Today’s agreement is the latest chapter in the close partnership between our 2 countries in science and innovation, and I look forward to seeing the results for both nations in the years ahead.
US Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President, Dr Eric Lander said, “Science transcends borders, and cooperation with partners accelerates the way we bring technologies to market. I am delighted we can deepen our relationship with the UK on quantum information science. By working together, we can broaden training opportunities, develop new applications for quantum technology, and think globally about how to maximize the benefits of these technologies for everyone. The technologies that have transformed our lives – the building blocks of modern computers, the mobile phone, the laser, the MRI scanner – are all products of quantum science. This involves harnessing the unique ways that light and matter behave at tiny atomic or subatomic levels.”
A new generation of quantum technologies exploit breakthroughs in the way that we are able to precisely manipulate and measure these special properties, to engineer quantum devices with dramatically enhanced functionality and performance.
Today’s agreement will also see the National Physical Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology explore ways to grow their long-standing partnership between quantum programmes through alignment of projects and the exchange of staff and students in key areas, including quantum metrology, computing, clocks and future technical standards.
This statement of intent also aims to facilitate new research partnerships, as well as grow ties between businesses in the UK and US. In the coming months, UK and US industry will meet to establish new connections and explore future opportunities to work together to grow the global quantum industry.
The UK and US have a well-established history of close cooperation on cutting-edge quantum science and technology. In January, the government announced support for 3 projects involving UK and US collaborators to apply quantum technologies to fundamental physics questions about the universe.
An enhanced partnership between UK Research & Innovation and the US National Science Foundation is further intended to help facilitate new research collaborations in quantum.
International partnerships are part of a wider £1bn government and industry investment through the National Quantum Technologies Programme to commercialise quantum innovations and secure the UK’s status as a world-leader in quantum science and technologies.
The signing comes as Innovate UK also announces £50m from their £170m Commercialising Quantum Technologies challenge for 12 projects, including a quantum computing system that can model and predict the properties of drugs, leading to significantly faster and more efficient drug discovery.
The £50m of domestic funding announced today is part of UKRI’s £170m Commercialising Quantum Technologies challenge, which aims to encourage private investment and create economic and societal benefits through driving innovation across a range of sectors including automotive, healthcare, infrastructure, telecommunications, cybersecurity and defence. (Source: https://www.gov.uk/)
03 Nov 21. Airbus evolves its innovation landscape with Airbus Scale. Airbus has launched Airbus Scale, a new innovation unit that brings together corporate innovation, startup engagement and company building activities. This will support Airbus’ recovery and future growth, contributing to the development of future programmes and businesses as part of the Company’s zero-emissions ambition. This new unit strengthens the overall innovation landscape in Airbus and complements other Airbus innovation centres such as Acubed in Silicon Valley, the Airbus China Innovation Centre (ACIC) in Shenzhen and the Airbus UpNext technology demonstrator entity.
“Pioneering sustainable aerospace will be a collective challenge and innovation is at the core of it. By setting up Airbus Scale, we will use our existing internal knowledge and know-how to scale up new companies from underutilised assets. We will also look outside to seek, and inject into Airbus, startups that have relevant technology for our future zero emissions ambition” said Sabine Klauke, Airbus Chief Technical Officer. “This additional lever in our innovation toolkit will help create the ecosystem we need on our road to net-zero.”
The new innovation unit is an evolution on how Airbus approaches its internal and external innovation activities. Building on the experience gained over the past seven years with BizLab, Airbus Scale will converge and diversify intrapreneurship and start-up partnering to build and grow co-funded, profitable, fully-fledged businesses and to further extend Airbus’ competitive advantage.
In this approach, Airbus Scale will promote and identify internal corporate innovation opportunities that can be developed into solutions for the external world, bringing them to market and attracting external investments that could result in spin-offs, in order to generate value for Airbus.
In parallel, Airbus Scale will source and partner with external later stage startups to mature and develop technological innovations and products, coupling in-house concepts and outside startup intelligence for mutually-beneficial collaborations. In both cases Airbus Scale facilitates and enables a more effective innovation ecosystem.
To find out more about Airbus’ Innovation Ecosystem click here: https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/innovation-ecosystem
02 Nov 21. First flight of Chinese J-31 Stealth Fighter for future Type 003 aircraft carrier. According to a tweet published by Rupprecht Deino on October 29, 2021, the People’s Liberation Army J-31 stealth fighter made its first flight. The Shenyang FC-31 Gyrfalcon also known as the J-31 or J-35 is a twin-engine, mid-size fifth-generation jet fighter developed by Shenyang Aircraft Corporation. The J-31 can carry 8,000 kg (18,000 lb) of payload, with four munitions totaling 2,000 kg (4,400 lb) internally, and 6,000 kg (13,000 lb) carried on six external hardpoints; primary armaments include the PL-10 short-range missile and PL-12 medium-range air-to-air missile. 4 PL-21 missiles can also be fitted inside the J-31’s internal weapons bay. It has a combat radius of 648 nmi (746 mi; 1,200 km) and a maximum take-off weight of 25,000 kg (55,000 lb).
The Type 003 aircraft carrier is an aircraft carrier under construction for the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) of China. It will be the first Chinese aircraft carrier to use a CATOBAR system and electromagnetic (EM) launch catapults.
The carrier’s size is expected to be between 85,000-ton and 100,000-ton supercarriers. The Type 003 is approximately 300 meters (984 ft 3 in) long. Commercial satellite imagery indicated that its length was 320 meters and has a flight deck with a width of 78 meters. The Type 003 will be longer than its predecessors and it will also be much wider to allow the transport of more planes. (Source: News Now/https://www.navyrecognition.com/)
19 Oct 21. Kratos Breaks Gigabit Barrier with OpenSpace Virtualized Wideband Receivers for Earth Observation Missions.
Delivering Greater than 1 Gbps of DVB-S2 Downlink Processing Using Only x86 based General-Purpose Computers.
Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc., a leading National Security Solutions provider, announced today that it has broken the gigabit throughput barrier with its OpenSpace™ virtualized wideband receivers delivering over a gigabit per second performance running solely on commercially available, off-the-shelf x86-based computers. This achievement drastically lowers the cost of downlinks, while raising performance for Earth Observation (EO) and Remote Sensing (RS) missions.
More and more high bandwidth EO and RS data is being beamed from satellites and the infrastructure on the ground must keep up. This is particularly driven by the challenge of EO/RS applications that rapidly download data on the fly during the short time periods when satellites are over the ground system, as well as the need to process the data as fast as possible.
Kratos breaking the gigabit milestone demonstrates that the high throughput required by EO/RS satellites can be achieved by software receivers running on x86-based general purpose computers that do not require specialized hardware such as Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs) or Graphics Processing Units (GPU). This level of performance demonstrates that operations can be streamlined by leveraging virtualized solutions or deploying in the cloud without the need for expensive hardware acceleration. It also showcases the performance of Kratos’ OpenSpace software receivers, which are taking advantage of the standard DVB-S2 waveform to make much more efficient use of the spectrum.
The software receiver speeds were achieved by two different virtual receivers that are part of the OpenSpace family: OpenSpace ORX and OpenSpace quantumRX. OpenSpace ORX is deployed as an integrated part of the OpenSpace Platform for highly dynamic operations to provide fully orchestrated and automated end-to-end EO and RS mission downlinks. OpenSpace quantumRX provides greater agility at the device level by replacing traditional hardware with individual virtualized products. Compared to today’s traditional hardware infrastructure, these software receivers offer much faster deployment times, smaller physical footprints, highly optimized resource utilization, and scalability on demand.
“It’s been difficult for many in the industry to envision a virtualized software receiver handling the growing level of performance needed by Earth Observation missions using only off-the-shelf x86-based computers,” said Christopher Boyd, Senior Director of Product Management from Kratos. “With OpenSpace quantumRX and OpenSpace ORX we have enhanced our support for the DVB-S2 waveform and performance in software, achieving greater than 1.2 Gbps throughput at 32 APSK on a 270 Symbol per second RF carrier running on x86-based generic compute.”
OpenSpace is a family of solutions that enable the digital transformation of satellite ground systems to become a more dynamic and powerful part of the space network. The OpenSpace family includes OpenSpace SpectralNet® for digital IF, OpenSpace quantum™ for individual virtualized products, and the OpenSpace Platform for fully dynamic, service-oriented, and orchestrated satellite operations. (Source: ASD Network)
29 Oct 21. Rugged AI Platform from Elma Enhances Inference Computing in Complex, Data-driven Embedded Systems. High-performance NVIDIA® GPU processing in low power, compact form factor.
Technology Highlights:
- Powerful NVIDIA Jetson™ TX2i SoM
- Complex computation for AI-based applications
- Rugged and compact for use in autonomous, harsh and mobile environments
The new Jetsys-5320 from Elma Electronic Inc. meets the growing data processing needs of extremely rugged and mobile embedded computing applications by easily handling data-intensive computation tasks. It provides complex GPGPU inference computing at the edge for deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) operations in artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
Used for high performance intelligent video analytics (IVA), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and AI at the edge, as well as in unmanned or autonomous vehicles and robots, the new system combines the power of NVIDIA-based computation with unmatched ruggedization in a compact, low-power platform.
The new Jetsys-5320 increases visual intelligence throughout transportation and defense applications including high-resolution sensor systems, movement tracking security systems, automatic target recognition, threat location detection and prediction as well as machine condition-based monitoring and predictive maintenance, semi-autonomous driving and driver advisory systems.
Ram Rajan, vice president of engineering at Elma Electronic Inc., noted, “AI-based computing is enabling multiple levels of intelligence and safety advancements throughout the embedded computing industry. We’re seeing a huge increase in object detection and tracking, video surveillance, target recognition and condition-based monitoring, so we built an AI platform that could handle the processing requirements for these kinds of applications used in challenging environments.”
At the heart of the JetSys-5320 is the NVIDIA Jetson TX2i System-on-Module (SoM), enabling real-time AI inferencing and DL/ML capabilities. Paired with a dual-core Denver 2 64-bit CPU and quad-core ARM A57 Complex and 256 CUDA cores, NVIDIA’s Pascal™ architecture delivers 1.3 TFLOP of performance.
The rugged system also provides HD-SDI, Gigabit Ethernet with Power-over-Ethernet, USB 3.0 interfaces for video capture and miniPCIe expansion slots. The JetSys-5320 operates in temperatures from -40°C to 71°C, offers IP67 rated ingress protection and meets MIL-STD-810G for harsh environments.
Elma’s other SFF modular embedded computing systems include the ComSys family for communication-based computing and NetSys series for networking applications.
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Oxley Group Ltd
Oxley specialises in the design and manufacture of advanced electronic and electro-optic components and systems for air, land and sea applications within the military sector. Established in 1942, Oxley has manufacturing facilities in the UK and USA and enjoys representation worldwide. The company’s products include night vision and LED lighting, data capture systems and electronic components. Oxley has pioneered the development of night vision compatible lighting. It offers a total package incorporating optical filters, equipment modification, cockpit and external lighting along with fleet wide upgrade services including engineering, installation, support, maintenance and training. The company’s long experience of manufacturing night vision lighting and LED indicators, coupled with advances in LED technology, has enabled it to develop LED solutions to replace incandescent and fluorescent lighting in existing applications as well as becoming the lighting option of choice in new applications such as portable military hospitals, UAV control stations and communication shelters.
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