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The top April 2018 eco architecture ideas offer a look at the future of design from both large and small perspectives, showing the many ways in which natural elements can be used in the making of harmonious creations.
While there are solar-powered tiny homes and other living spaces that can be constructed on a small scale, eco architecture is also being explored through sustainable skyscrapers, energy-positive airports that share surplus energy with surrounding buildings and conference structures made from vegetation.
On the topic of eco-friendly home construction of the future, some companies are offering 3D printing services, while others are assembling A-frame kits to encourage not only self-sufficiency in consumers, but also allow for endless customization options to be made to suit the needs of individual clients.
While there are solar-powered tiny homes and other living spaces that can be constructed on a small scale, eco architecture is also being explored through sustainable skyscrapers, energy-positive airports that share surplus energy with surrounding buildings and conference structures made from vegetation.
On the topic of eco-friendly home construction of the future, some companies are offering 3D printing services, while others are assembling A-frame kits to encourage not only self-sufficiency in consumers, but also allow for endless customization options to be made to suit the needs of individual clients.
Custom Net-Zero Homes
'Bone Structure' Builds Homes That Produce All the Energy They Need
Car-Branded Solar Benches
Audi Italia's Bench Collects Environmental Data
Twin White Houses
The Simple Two White Houses by Bulant & Wailzer Have Identical Exteriors
Energy-Positive City Airports
Haptic & Nordic Office of Architecture Designs a Sustainable Airport
Ultra Sustainable Skyscrapers
The Skyscraper Design by SOM Puts Sustainability to the Forefront
Energy-Positive Wooden Houses
Studio KAW's Design Minimizes the Environmental Impact of a House
Stacked Cubed Learning Centers
Sou Fujimoto Showed Off a Cubic Structure for a University Facility
Re-Imagined Urban Sugar Factories
Brooklyn's Old Domino Sugar Factory is Becoming a Public Park
Conference-Housing Plant Domes
Peter Veenstra Visualizes Plans for a Vegetation-Encompassing Dome
Solar-Powered Tiny Homes
![Top architecture schools of 2018 Top architecture schools of 2018](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125743049/752151359.jpg)
This Tiny Dwelling Uses a Solar Array to Charge Its Electronic Amenities
Tree-Growing Roof Structures
Vo Trong Nghia Architects Created a Nature-Inspired Structure
Respectful House Constructions
Faulkner Architects Build a Getaway Home with Boulders in Mind
Renovated Barn Abodes
mwworks Renovated the Canyon Barn Into a Fully Functioning Home
Transportable Houseboat Designs
The HydroHouse's Modular Structure Can Be Transported By Truck
Horticultural High-Rise Towers
This Mixed-Use Tower Would Produce Fruits and Vegetables
Parasitic House Extensions
Malka Architecture Offers a Proposal for Energy Efficiency Improvement
Biodegradable Construction Materials
'Finite' is Made Out of Desert Sand and is Eco-Friendly
Minimalist Hideaway Homes
The Scavenger Studio is Built from Recycled Materials Found on the Land
Living 3D-Printed Cabins
This Cabin Was Made Using 4,500 Living Plant Tiles
Sustainable Off-Grid Hawaiian Homes
Lifeedited Create a Energy and Water-Positive Design in Maui
3D-Printed Tiny Homes
ICON and New Story Built the First 3D-Printed Home in America
Contemporary Nature-Inspired Homes
MNIM Designed the Eco Modern Ravine Residence in Iowa
Low-Profile Architectural Homes
This Low-Lying Residence Seamlessly Integrates Itself in Nature
Affordable Home-Framing Kits
The Avrame A-Frame Kits Make Quick, Cost-Friendly Constructions
Reimagined Retail Spaces
Retail Design Collective Transform Loft into Hub for Community Engagement
Next Top List: Top 30 Interactive Innovations in April - From Drag Queen Chatbots to AR Home-Buying Apps Stats for Top 25 Eco Architecture Innovations in April Trending: Older & PopularResearch:15,099 clicks in 59 w
Interest: 4 minutes Concept: April 2018 Eco Architecture
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Segment: Neutral Comparison Set: 92 similar articles, including: low-profile architectural homes, minimalist hideaway homes, and affordable home-framing kits. Related Reports:Design Report, Multimedia Report, Fashion Show Report, Cosmetics Report, Home Report
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Nobody likes knockoffs – blockchain and crypto-anchors will help to crack down on counterfeiting as well as ensure security in the food supply chain
With $600 billion a year lost to the global economy through fraud and counterfeiting, blockchain offers the potential to ensure the provenance of everything from food to diamonds and life-saving medicines.
In a global economy, goods pass through many different sets of hands between their point of production and the end consumer. This leaves them open to tampering and theft problems which blockchain technology could help to eliminate.
In order to work, however, there needs to be a tamper-proof link between the physical products and the digital records on the blockchain. This is where crypto-anchors come in – microscopic codes or identifiers which can serve as “digital fingerprints” to ensure security at every stage of the journey.
“The challenge here is that the blockchain can record all the transactions but somewhere you’ve got to link the transactions to the actual physical object itself – so that you know the banana that got scanned is the actual banana that got to you,” Welser tells me.
“What crypto anchors do is they basically embed tiny codes, like microscopic QR codes, in a way that makes it so that if you tried to replace it with a similar one, you could tell it had been tampered with. When you put those codes onto the blockchain, the supply chain is then protected.”
- Lattice cryptography will discourage even quantum-powered hackers
Complex algebraic structures called lattices will become a valuable tool in the age of quantum computers. With more and more sensitive data being collected and stored online, security measures will need to keep pace with the growing capability of hackers, as virtually unlimited amounts of computing power become cheaper and more available.
Until now ever-more complex cryptography – from 64-bit encryption to 128 bit and 256 bit – has been the standard response to the increasing amount of CPU power available to hackers. As quantum computing becomes mainstream, this will no longer be enough.
“The reality is there’s constantly a battle on with cybersecurity, we need to make sure we continue to have cryptography and encryption that can keep the bad guys out, and all of that relies on the fact that the maths is so hard to do that trying to solve it with a computer takes an unreasonable amount of time,” Welser says.
“We have to make sure that as computers get faster, we can continue to keep ahead of them. In particular, this is a concern with the quantum computers that are coming up.”
Lattice cryptography involves encoding data within high-dimensional algebraic structures which even theoretical million-qubit quantum computers will find tough to crack. It also opens up the possibility of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which will enable computers to operate on data while it is still in an encrypted state – eliminating the security flaw inherent in existing systems whereby data has to be decrypted (and thus made vulnerable to hackers) in order to be processed. This could, for example, mean credit reference systems which can make credit scoring decisions without personal data ever being exposed.
- AI bias will explode, but only unbiased AI will survive
The most sophisticated AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on, and if that data has been collected in a biased or compromised way, then results are unlikely to fit with the real world which we are attempting to model.
Devising new ways to monitor for bias, and eliminate it at the source, are keys to creating AI software which accurately reflects reality, rather than the biased human view of reality that AI promises to help us transcend.
Welser tells me “One of the hopes of AI is that it will help us make decisions in less biased ways, because AI won’t have human biases. So if you’re making decisions on mortgages, or who should get bail, or who you should recruit, all of those things have biases built into them.
“AI systems would hopefully be able to make those decisions with less bias, but the challenge is that the AI gets trained on data, and if that data has a bias then your AI will be biased.
“We spend a lot of time right now working on how the systems we’re training aren’t inadvertently learning bias, and also protecting them from players who might be trying to teach them bias that we don’t want them to have.”
AI systems trained in this way to provide an unbiased, objective model of the world are likely to be the most successful. This will help us to tackle moral and ethical problems which will be encountered by any industries or fields of research attempting to use AI to tackle social issues or make decisions that will affect human lives.
- Quantum computing will move from the research labs into the real world
Half a decade from now, quantum computing will be an essential element of any computer engineering degree, IBM researchers are today predicting. Rather than a technology shrouded in mystery, it will be fundamentally understood and a practical tool in use solving problems in many disciplines and industries.
“We’re doing a lot with quantum computers,” Welser says. “We have a 15 qubit system on the cloud which anyone can go and use and we’re seeing a lot of interesting things.
There’s over 100,000 hits on it now which are people going and writing programs on it.
“But it’s still a toy at the moment – a researcher’s playground. I think that in the next five years we will have systems that are both large enough and have low enough error rates that we will see some really interesting things that have real value.
“The most likely area is things like quantum chemistry – simulations of things like molecules or chemical bonds.
“Right now we use very large high-performance computing systems but even with those, once we go beyond simulating a few molecules or atoms it becomes very difficult because there are too many variables. And of course, as we are working at the sub-atomic level those are quantum variables. They can be simulated very directly with a quantum computer.”
An understanding of quantum computing will be essential for those looking for careers in any scientific field, and students will leave university with hands-on experience of running practical experiments on quantum powered machines. And just as most engineers or scientists could today outline what is meant by the computing term “bit”, in five years’ time, the term “qubit” will be widely understood.
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