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Category: engineering – Page 233

Breakthrough Starshot aims to demonstrate proof of concept for ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts, and lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Along the way, the project could generate important supplementary benefits to astronomy, including solar system exploration and detection of Earth-crossing asteroids.

Breakthrough Starshot is a $100 million research and engineering program aiming to demonstrate proof of concept for light-propelled nanocrafts. These could fly at 20 percent of light speed and capture images of possible planets and other scientific data in our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, just over 20 years after their launch.

Nextbigfuture covered the project last month when it was announced. Here is more information from the Breakthrough Initiative website.

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Creating Q-Dots/ QDs (Acronym seems to depend on which reference book, article that you read) more cheaply and efficiently too.

Quantum dots (QDs) are semiconducting nanocrystals prized for their optical and electronic properties. The brilliant, pure colors produced by QDs when stimulated with ultraviolet light are ideal for use in flat screen displays, medical imaging devices, solar panels and LEDs. One obstacle to mass production and widespread use of these wonder particles is the difficulty and expense associated with current chemical manufacturing methods that often requiring heat, high pressure and toxic solvents.

But now three Lehigh University engineers have successfully demonstrated the first precisely controlled, biological way to manufacture quantum dots using a single-enzyme, paving the way for a significantly quicker, cheaper and greener production method. Their work was recently featured in an article in The New York Times called “A curious tale of quantum dots.”

The Lehigh team— Bryan Berger, Class of 1961 Associate Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Chris Kiely, Harold B. Chambers Senior Professor, Materials Science and Engineering and Steven McIntosh, Class of 1961 Associate Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, along with Ph.D. candidate Li Lu and undergraduate Robert Dunleavy—have detailed their findings in an article called “Single Enzyme Biomineralization of Cadmium Sulfide Nanocrystals with Controlled Optical Properties” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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Hmmm; I see a bright future for this. No more surgeries by plastic surgeons? possibly?

Scientists at MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, Living Proof, and Olivo Labs have developed a new material that can temporarily protect and tighten skin, and smooth wrinkles. With further development, it could also be used to deliver drugs to help treat skin conditions such as eczema and other types of dermatitis.

The material, a silicone-based polymer that could be applied on the as a thin, imperceptible coating, mimics the mechanical and elastic properties of healthy, youthful skin. In tests with human subjects, the researchers found that the material was able to reshape “eye bags” under the lower eyelids and also enhance skin hydration. This type of “second skin” could also be adapted to provide long-lasting ultraviolet protection, the researchers say.

“It’s an invisible layer that can provide a barrier, provide cosmetic improvement, and potentially deliver a drug locally to the area that’s being treated. Those three things together could really make it ideal for use in humans,” says Daniel Anderson, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

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Using bacteria to aid in the design of superior biomedical implants capable of resisting colonization by infectious bugs.

Dr. Pushkar Lele, assistant professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is developing novel insights in cellular mechanics with bacteria to aid in the design of superior biomedical implants capable of resisting colonization by infectious bugs. Lele’s group also focuses on unraveling the fundamental principles underlying interactions in biological soft-matter to build bio-nanotechnology-based molecular machines. Lele’s lab currently focuses on a unique electric rotary device found in bacteria — the flagellar motor.

According to Lele, it is well established how motile bacteria employ flagellar motors to swim and respond to chemical stimulation. This allows bacteria to search for nutrients and evade harmful chemicals. However, in his recent work, Lele has now demonstrated that the motor is also sensitive to mechanical stimulation and identified the protein components responsible for the response. Sensing initiates a sensitive control of the assemblies of numerous proteins that combine to form the motor. Control over motor assemblies facilitates fine-tuning of cellular behavior and promotes chances of survival in a variety of environments.

“What is the sense of touch in a bacterium? It is likely that they employ appendages such as the flagella to detect solid substrates, analogous to our use of fingers,” Lele said. “How they recognize the substrate using the flagellum has been a long-standing question in biology with tremendous biomedical significance. Our findings have provided a handle on this important problem. We now know [how] the motor-components [are] involved in sensing the substrate [and] would like to know how these sensors trigger signaling networks that ultimately cause infections. “.

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Making software immortal; Raytheon is trying to make it a reality.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 2, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — A team led by Raytheon BBN Technologies is developing methods to make mobile applications viable for up to 100 years, despite changes in hardware, operating system upgrades and supporting services. The U.S. Air Force is sponsoring the four-year, $7.8 million contract under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems program.

“Mobile apps are pervasive in the military, but frequent operating system upgrades, new devices and changing missions and environments require manual software engineering that is expensive and causes unacceptable delays,” said Partha Pal, principal scientist at Raytheon BBN. “We are developing techniques to eliminate these interruptions by identifying the way these changes affect application functionality and modifying the software.”

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Ask an Information Architect, CDO, Data Architect (Enterprise and non-Enterprise) they will tell you they have always known that information/ data is a basic staple like Electricity all along; and glad that folks are finally realizing it. So, the same view that we apply to utilities as core to our infrastructure & survival; we should also apply the same value and view about information. And, in fact, information in some areas can be even more important than electricity when you consider information can launch missals, cure diseases, make you poor or wealthy, take down a government or even a country.

What is information? Is it energy, matter, or something completely different? Although we take this word for granted and without much thought in today’s world of fast Internet and digital media, this was not the case in 1948 when Claude Shannon laid the foundations of information theory. His landmark paper interpreted information in purely mathematical terms, a decision that dematerialized information forever more. Not surprisingly, there are many nowadays that claim — rather unthinkingly — that human consciousness can be expressed as “pure information”, i.e. as something immaterial graced with digital immortality. And yet there is something fundamentally materialistic about information that we often ignore, although it stares us — literally — in the eye: the hardware that makes information happen.

As users we constantly interact with information via a machine of some kind, such as our laptop, smartphone or wearable. As developers or programmers we code via a computer terminal. As computer or network engineers we often have to wade through the sheltering heat of a server farm, or deal with the material properties of optical fibre or copper in our designs. Hardware and software are the fundamental ingredients of our digital world, both necessary not only in engineering information systems but in interacting with them as well. But this status quo is about to be massively disrupted by Artificial Intelligence.

A decade from now the postmillennial youngsters of the late 2020s will find it hard to believe that once upon a time the world was full of computers, smartphones and tablets. And that people had to interact with these machines in order to access information, or build information systems. For them information would be more like electricity: it will always be there, and always available to power whatever you want to do. And this will be possible because artificial intelligence systems will be able to manage information complexity so effectively that it will be possible to deliver the right information at the right person at the right time, almost at an instant. So let’s see what that would mean, and how different it would be from what we have today.

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Cambridge University spin-out Optalysys has been awarded a $350k grant for a 13-month project from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The project will see the company advance their research in developing and applying their optical co-processing technology to solving complex mathematical equations. These equations are relevant to large-scale scientific and engineering simulations such as weather prediction and aerodynamics.

The Optalysys technology is extremely energy efficient, using light rather than electricity to perform intensive mathematical calculations. The company aims to provide existing computer systems with massively boosted processing capabilities, with the aim to eventually reach exaFLOP rates (a billion billion calculations per second). The technology operates at a fraction of the energy cost of conventional high-performance computers (HPCs) and has the potential to operate at orders of magnitude faster.

In April 2015 Optalysys announced that they had successfully built a scaleable, lens-less optical processing prototype that can perform mathematical functions. Codenamed Project GALELEO, the device demonstrates that second order derivatives and correlation pattern matching can be performed optically in a scaleable design.

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I do love Nvidia!

During the past nine months, an Nvidia engineering team built a self-driving car with one camera, one Drive-PX embedded computer and only 72 hours of training data. Nvidia published an academic preprint of the results of the DAVE2 project entitled End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars on arXiv.org hosted by the Cornell Research Library.

The Nvidia project called DAVE2 is named after a 10-year-old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project known as DARPA Autonomous Vehicle (DAVE). Although neural networks and autonomous vehicles seem like a just-invented-now technology, researchers such as Google’s Geoffrey Hinton, Facebook’s Yann Lecune and the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio have collaboratively researched this branch of artificial intelligence for more than two decades. And the DARPA DAVE project application of neural network-based autonomous vehicles was preceded by the ALVINN project developed at Carnegie Mellon in 1989. What has changed is GPUs have made building on their research economically feasible.

Neural networks and image recognition applications such as self-driving cars have exploded recently for two reasons. First, Graphical Processing Units (GPU) used to render graphics in mobile phones became powerful and inexpensive. GPUs densely packed onto board-level supercomputers are very good at solving massively parallel neural network problems and are inexpensive enough for every AI researcher and software developer to buy. Second, large, labeled image datasets have become available to train massively parallel neural networks implemented on GPUs to see and perceive the world of objects captured by cameras.

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Hmmm;

The latest figures are a clear sign that India’s largest outsourcing firms are succeeding at ‘non-linear’ growth, where revenues increase disproportionately compared with hiring.

While the numbers are good news for an industry that is trying to defend profit margins, it raises concerns over the future of hiring and the availability of engineering jobs in a sector that employs over three million people.

“What you’re seeing now is about 200,000 people being hired in the IT industry — it’s not the 4–5 lakhs that they used to hire 10 years ago. And that’s because the growth has shrunk from 35–40% and the competition was for resources. Even now the competition is for resources, but it’s for slightly more experienced resources — people who can work on automation, artificial intelligence, machine languages, data sciences. So, it’s not hiring for Java coding anymore,” said Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan in a recent interview.

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Excellent news!!!!!

The Quantum Innovation Center or Qubiz has been launched in Copenhagen with the goal of translating quantum physics into practical quantum technology. The Danish project involves the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, the Technical University of Denmark DTU, and Aarhus University, along with 18 industrial partners. Qubiz will be building on the very strong Danish research platform within quantum technology, a platform that has its origin in Niels Bohr’s pioneering work 100 years ago.

The CEO for the new Center is Søren Isaksen, who previously served as the CTO of the NKT Group and is a member and chairmen of various research councils. In addition to leading the center, his job will be to reach out to Danish and foreign companies and, with the researchers, to help find out where there is potential for starting new businesses. A 2-year seed funding grant of 11M EUR from the Innovation Fund Denmark enables the hiring of new employees with business and engineering backgrounds, as well as researchers.

According to Isaksen, the Center will engage with existing businesses, Danish as well as international companies, to develop new products and lay the foundation for new businesses. On April 15, Qubiz held a kick-off event that included seven elevator-pitches presenting potential startups—two of these have now being established and more are on the way.

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