Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

July 23, 2026

Researchers successfully create Room-Temperature Quantum Material

Filed under: Quantum Computing,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:33 PM

Quantum Computing has tremendous potential to change the world of computing forever but there are significant challenges that need to be addressed. One of the challenges is that in order to function as a superconductor the system has to be kept between 0.01 to 0.015 Kelvin or -273.14°C. As you can imagine this is hard to do and obviously impractical for consumer / commercial devices.

We are a step closer to solving this problem as Researchers from Louisiana State University have developed a material that can demonstrate quantum weirdness at room temperature. This material is basically a thin layer of gold on a glass chip and is carved with microscopic patterns that act like artificial atoms which carry Quantum states. The crystal chip can distinguish them and move them from one point to another without requiring cryogenic cooling. Which opens the door to practical quantum technologies.

Crucial to the new material’s room-temperature operation is the way it shifts the focus from electrons and atoms to photons (particles of light). This overcomes the usual atomic-level disruption that heat brings with it. The material is what’s known as a plasmonic metacrystal: ‘Plasmonic’ because the light traveling over it makes ripples of electrons known as plasmons, and ‘metacrystal’ because it’s an artificially created crystal. The tiny slit patterns etched into the material act as artificial atoms (meta-atoms), which dictate how different photon groups pass through (the quantum behavior).

“By engineering the distribution of meta-atoms in the plasmonic metacrystal, we can systematically dictate which quantum statistics are allowed to pass through the structure,” says physicist Riley Dawkins. “So, our crystal essentially acts as a statistical filter on quantum states.” That means as light enters the chip and travels across the gold surface, it’s manipulated by the meta-atoms — and by tweaking the size, shape, and spacing of the slits, different end results can be produced at the quantum level. In practice, this means that certain quantum states of light can be transported with less disruption.

The findings have been published in Nature Journal earlier this month.

Source: Slashdot: LSU Physicists Create First Room-Temperature Quantum Material

– Suramya

July 22, 2026

Screens that can simultaneously work as a Camera are now potentially possible

Filed under: Emerging Tech — Suramya @ 11:55 PM

A camera is a camera and a screen is a screen, till recently they couldn’t be both simultaneously. But last month researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, have created a new type of pixel that can do both at the same time. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel, can generate and sense arbitrary light fields and tap into a pixel’s full potential for carrying information by manipulating light’s intensity, oscillation phases, and polarization. Meaning it can display an image and act as a camera at the same time. The paper on the team’s findings was published in Nature.

This technology when matured could pave the way for camera–display devices that both display images and act as a camera. One interesting use case would be full functional invisibility. For years we have seen invisibility cloaks, invisible cars and cloaking tech on the movie/TV screens, but most efforts to recreate them have not been successful so far. With this new technology it might soon be possible to have cloaking tech available for use. (At least on the visual spectrum)

Digital cameras and displays use picture elements (pixels3) that perform a single function: detecting or emitting light intensity. To exploit the full information content of electromagnetic waves, more advanced elements are required. This has driven the development of multifunctional components that, for example, simultaneously detect and emit intensity or extract intensity and spectral information. However, no pixel exists that both senses and generates optical wavefronts with full control over amplitude, phase and polarization, limiting bidirectional control and feedback of sophisticated light fields. Here we present a route to such pixels by demonstrating a versatile platform of miniaturized diffractive elements based on Fourier optics. We use plasmonic surface waves, which propagate coherently and efficiently across metallic surfaces. When these plasmons are launched towards wavy microstructures designed with simple Fourier analysis, arbitrary and background-free optical wavefronts are generated. Conversely, incoming light can be sensed, and its amplitude, phase and polarization can be fully characterized. By combining or superposing several such components, we create multifunctional ‘Fourier pixels’ that provide compact and accurate control over the optical field. Our approach, which we extend to photonic waveguide modes, establishes a scalable, universal architecture for vectorially programmable pixels with applications in adaptive optics, holographic displays, optical communication and quantum information processing.

As with all technologies there is potential for misuse as well because every screen becomes a unobtrusive camera which increases the ability for performing surveillance. Imagine having a TV with this functionality. Then imagine hackers gaining control of the screen to record personal movements. Then imagine an authoritarian government doing the same constantly. This was explored in the novel 1984 by George Orwell.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.

Source: Schneier on Security: A Video Screen That Is Also a Camera

– Suramya

July 21, 2026

Suramya’s Blog now auto-publishes to BlueSky in addition to Mastodon and Linkedin

Filed under: My Thoughts,Website Updates — Suramya @ 12:39 PM

People who know me know that I am not really active on Social Media, and by Social Media I am referring to the sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Instead I use Mastodon which is an open source equivalent of Twitter and Pixel which is an Opensource version of Instagram. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter because it doesn’t show me what I want to see, which is updates from friends.

Facebook is basically trying to show you stuff that keeps you on the site for as long as possible and it also tries to push Incel, misogynist, white supremacy and Flat earth conspiracy theories to you. You might think that I am yet another doomsayer who is ‘anti-capitalist’, anti-tech etc but this statement is based on personal experience. I have a Facebook account that I created over a decade ago for testing scripts that would push posts to Facebook automatically. I have never used it for surfing content or liked any account/post etc from it. A few days ago  I was changing the passwords on all my accounts and logged into the site for the first time in a while using this account. What I noticed was that the site was pushing accounts that were either trying to teach you to pick up girls, posts on flat earth, Cockroach Janta Party and then pro-trump posts. It shows you how they are pushing a certain agenda and a majority of the posts seem to be auto generated AI slop.

In any case, as I have posted earlier all posts on this blog are auto published on Mastodon and all comments/likes etc are synced back here automatically. Basically the site is a full fledged node on Mastodon. I use the official plugin called ActivityPub to achieve this and it has worked fantastically so far. The same folks have recently released a plugin called ATmosphere that does the same thing for BlueSky. BlueSky is the unofficial successor/replacement for Twitter and a lot of folks who were active on Twitter migrated to BlueSky when Twitter was taken over by Musk.

I do have a blue sky account but am not super active over there. I keep the account alive because a lot of folks I like to follow are active there. Till recently the only way I could Federate the blog posts to BlueSky was to push the post to Mastodon, where a bridge account posted it to BlueSky and then I would manually republish it. But all that is in the past now. With the new plugin I installed yesterday the Blog posts are auto posted to BlueSky directly under my account there automatically and when people on Bluesky reply, like, or repost what you shared, those reactions show up as comments on the post you made and approved comments left here on this Blog are sent right back to Bluesky as replies under the original post. This way I can remove the manual steps for BlueSky and hopefully this will showcase the stuff I post to a wider audience and get more visitors to the Blog :).

This post will be the first (non-test) post that gets published to BlueSky and Mastodon simultaneously.

– Suramya

July 20, 2026

Skyroot successfully becomes the first private Indian company to launch a payload into orbit on 1st attempt

Filed under: Astronomy / Space,My Thoughts,Science Related — Suramya @ 11:17 PM

In a historic first, on 18th July India’s first private orbital launch named Vikram-I, successfully lifted off from Sriharikota and has successfully placed multiple technology demonstration payloads into orbit. These payloads include two satellites named SCOPE & Grahaa which were injected to a Low Earth Orbit along with others that carry out various in-orbit experiments.

This is a phenomenal achievement by Skyroot Aerospace Private Limited which was founded in 2018 by two ISRO scientists. Skyroot became the first private Indian company to successfully reach the space in first attempt making India the third country in world after USA and China to have rocket launch by private company. The really cool fact about this is that the average age of the company staff is 28. So much for the youth today not doing anything new…

Skyroot Aerospace had earlier conducted a sub-orbital launch of a test rocket, Vikram-S from Sriharikota on November 18, 2022. Subsequently, Vikram-I was developed as a 4-stage rocket with 3 solid stages and a liquid stage, which can launch small satellites to LEO. ISRO& IN-SPACE provided handholding and support to this venture by facilitating this launch. ISRO provided access to the solid motor casting and static test facilities at SDSC, Sriharikota. The first stage solid motor was cast and tested at the facilities in SDSC. The second stage motor was also validated at the static test facility in SDSC.

The liquid engine used in the VIKRAM-I upper stage (RAMAN-I)was also tested at the LPSC test facility. During the pre-launch operations, all support was provided for the vehicle stage preparation, material handling, transport of stages to launch pad, trajectory analysis and vehicle integration on the First Launch Pad (FLP). ISRO’s safety team was ensuring safe operations by the Skyroot team at SDSC on a 24×7 basis.

IN-SPACe, the regulation & promotion agency for space activities in the country, played a major role in establishing a seamless mechanism for Non-Governmental Entities (NGEs) like Skyroot Aerospace to access the facilities of ISRO and provide the necessary technical consultancy, mission readiness reviews and launch clearances. ISRO & IN-SPACe congratulates the team at Skyroot Aerospace for the successful maiden launch of Vikram-I launcher. This launch has paved the way for similar ventures and opens up the gates to global commercial opportunities.

Hats off to the team at Skyroot and looking forward to more such achievements from them in the near future.

Source: ISRO: First private orbital launch lifts off from Sriharikota

– Suramya

July 5, 2026

Cheaters complain about use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:49 AM

AI (or rather LLM’s) use is becoming more & more common and one of the issues with it (amongst many) is that when you ask it to summarize/process/or whatever something you have to upload that content to servers that are outside your control, then to make things worse a lot of these services use the data uploaded to further train their models. It is not illegal because they have put it in the user agreement that you allow them to use the data in anyway they want. Once the model is trained on data you have uploaded then it is possible for others to extract this data with a specific prompt. This happened to Samsung back in 2023 where an engineer uploaded internal source code to ChatGPT and another user was able to download it.

So the stakes are quite high when scientists are asked to peer-review papers that can contain significant breakthrough’s. Secondly a good peer review evaluates a paper and a lot of times identify issues that the author needs to address before publishing. Using AI for this can significantly degrade the quality of the review and this was identified as an issue by multiple publications.

The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) has strict rules banning peer reviewers from uploading papers they are reviewing to AI chatbots but they are allowed to use AI chatbots for background research. This is pretty normal nowadays but they went a step further to enforce this policy and catch illicit AI use by deliberately concealing instructions for large language models (LLMs) in papers sent out for peer review. These instructions instruct LLM’s to use specific phrases in the review report allowing the organizers to identify the reviewers who breached policy.

The instructions tell an LLM to use telltale phrases—such as “This work addresses the central challenge” and “The claims of the paper”—in a peer-review report. Some researchers have already been caught trying to sneak secret messages into their papers in a bid to game AI tools into giving them favorable referee reports. Many publishers ban the use of AI in peer review.

Most people are in favor of this action but there are some who have been pretty vocal about not liking this action. They claim that “Designing a trap that presumes bad faith corrodes the relationship the whole system depends on,” and “You do not build a healthy reviewing culture by treating your reviewers as suspects.” I have a feeling that folks in this group are the ones who were previously using LLM’s in their review and are not happy about being caught. Is this a perfect method to catch folks who are cheating? Of-course not, but it is better than what we had earlier.

Some of the justified criticism against this method is coming from reviewers who found the embedded prompts in the paper and assumed that they were put in by the paper authors (there have been multiple cases where authors put in hidden prompts in their papers to give them favorable reviews).

Source: Scientists decry conference’s use of hidden prompts to snare AI peer reviews

– Suramya

Powered by WordPress