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Category: innovation – Page 251

Augmented Reality Transforms Worker Safety and Efficiency

AR working ; I cannot wait to see what we do with AR in many of the other enterprise apps.

Augmented reality is transforming field maintenance. With DAQRI Smart Helmet™, workers get real-time visual instructions, equipment diagnostics, and operational data, turning every user into a maintenance expert.

By combining DAQRI’s innovative design with Intel’s powerful technology, DAQRI Smart Helmet helps workers be more productive and less error-prone. As an example of how powerful augmented reality can be, Kazakhstan Seamless Pipe (KSP Steel) used the helmet to achieve a 40% increase in worker productivity and a 50% reduction in factory downtime.

Paper contributed by Intel.

EU startups should not obsess over Silicon Valley: Ken Gabriel

I agree. Look at Australia or Canada as well as Israel or other companies rising up across Asia. In the next few years, Australia, China, and Israel will be key areas that folks should pay attention to as part of the “vNext Tech Valley” standard. Granted Silicon Valley will still be a leader; however, these other areas will be closing that gap.

Tech.eu contributor Jennifer Baker caught up with Ken Gabriel at the EIT Innovation Forum to talk about the difference between EU and US startups.

Consortium sets out to build European laser plasma accelerator

The result is a compact accelerator that is not much larger than the laser used to create the plasma. That means that a laser plasma accelerator can be housed in a small building, rather than stretching over hundreds of metres or even several kilometres.

High-quality beam

While laser plasma accelerators exist at several laboratories around the world, EuPRAXIA steering-committee member Carsten Welsch says that “no infrastructure exists where the quality of the accelerated beam satisfies the requirements of industry”. Welsch, who is at the UK’s Cockcroft Institute of Accelerator Science and Technology, adds that “creating such a facility would be a major breakthrough and would attract users from many different sectors”.

Welsch told physicsworld.com that an important goal of EuPRAXIA is to develop technology to “sharpen” the energy spectrum of the electron beam produced by laser plasma accelerators. Today’s accelerators produce electrons with a very wide range of energies, and this spread would have to be reduced significantly before a facility could be used as a source of electrons for scientific and industrial applications.

Squad X Program Envisions Dismounted Infantry Squads of the Future

“Through Squad X, we want to vastly improve dismounted squad effectiveness in all domains by integrating new and existing technologies into systems that squads can bring with them,” said Maj. Christopher Orlowski, DARPA program manager. “The squad is the formation with the greatest potential for impact and innovation, while having the lowest barrier to entry for experimentation and system development. The lessons we learn and the technology we create could not only transform dismounted squads’ capabilities, but also eventually help all warfighters more intuitively understand and control their complex mission environments.”

Squad X intends to combine off-the-shelf technologies and new capabilities under development through DARPA’s Squad X Core Technologies (SXCT) program, which was launched specifically to develop novel technologies that Squad X could integrate into user-friendly systems. SXCT shares Squad X’s overarching goal of ensuring that Soldiers and Marines maintain uncontested tactical superiority over potential adversaries by exploring capabilities in four areas: precision engagement, non-kinetic engagement, squad sensing and squad autonomy. In an important step toward that goal, SXCT recently awarded Phase 1 contracts to nine organizations.

The U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps have expressed interest in future Squad X capabilities and plan to support the experimentation efforts with testing in simulated operational environments as the program progresses.

Here’s Why A Universal Basic Income Is The Key To Human Progress

I believe Richard Feynman was one of our greatest scientific minds. He had a very particular way of looking at the world thanks to his father, and it was to look at the world around him as if he were a Martian. Like a fish born into water, it’s hard to actually see water as being water, because it’s all a fish ever knows. And so as humans, it’s a good idea to try and step outside of our usual frame of mind, to see what it is we as humans think and do, from the perspective of a mind totally alien to our everyday environment. With that in mind, here’s what humans are doing right now, from the perspective of someone from far, far away…

What an interesting place and an interesting time it is for a visit. Earth’s most intelligent primates are busy creating technologies that allow them all to do less work, freeing themselves from millennia of senseless toil and drudgery. Strangely, however, they are using such technologies to force each other to work longer and harder. In one area called the United States, responsible for so much of the world’s technological innovation, at a time when productivity has never been higher, the number of hours spent working for others in exchange for the means to live is now just shy of 50 hours per week, where it was once 40 and soon supposed to be 20 on its way to eventually approaching zero.

Humans are even performing work that doesn’t actually need to be done at all, even by a machine. One of the craziest examples of such completely unnecessary work is in Europe where an entire fake economic universe has been created under the label of “Potemkin companies” like Candelia.

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