Publications

This report summarizes the first year’s effort on the Enceladus project, under which Sandia was asked to evaluate the potential advantages of adiabatic quantum computing for analyzing large data sets in the near future, 5-to-10 years from now. We were not specifically evaluating the machine being sold by D-Wave Systems, Inc; we were asked to anticipate what future adiabatic quantum computers might be able to achieve. While realizing that the greatest potential anticipated from quantum computation is still far into the future, a special purpose quantum computing capability, Adiabatic Quantum Optimization (AQO), is under active development and is maturing relatively rapidly; indeed, D-Wave Systems Inc. already offers an AQO device based on superconducting flux qubits. The AQO architecture solves a particular class of problem, namely unconstrained quadratic Boolean optimization. Problems in this class include many interesting and important instances. Because of this, further investigation is warranted into the range of applicability of this class of problem for addressing challenges of analyzing big data sets and the effectiveness of AQO devices to perform specific analyses on big data. Further, it is of interest to also consider the potential effectiveness of anticipated special purpose adiabatic quantum computers (AQCs), in general, for accelerating the analysis of big data sets. The objective of the present investigation is an evaluation of the potential of AQC to benefit analysis of big data problems in the next five to ten years, with our main focus being on AQO because of its relative maturity. We are not specifically assessing the efficacy of the D-Wave computing systems, though we do hope to perform some experimental calculations on that device in the sequel to this project, at least to provide some data to compare with our theoretical estimates.

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This report describes the laboratory directed research and development work to model relevant areas of the brain that associate multi-modal information for long-term storage for the purpose of creating a more effective, and more automated, association mechanism to support rapid decision making. Using the biology and functionality of the hippocampus as an analogy or inspiration, we have developed an artificial neural network architecture to associate k-tuples (paired associates) of multimodal input records. The architecture is composed of coupled unimodal self-organizing neural modules that learn generalizations of unimodal components of the input record. Cross modal associations, stored as a higher-order tensor, are learned incrementally as these generalizations form. Graph algorithms are then applied to the tensor to extract multi-modal association networks formed during learning. Doing so yields a novel approach to data mining for knowledge discovery. This report describes the neurobiological inspiration, architecture, and operational characteristics of our model, and also provides a real world terrorist network example to illustrate the model's functionality.

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