Lifeboat Foundation

Prof. Aleks Farseev is an entrepreneur, research professor, keynote speaker, and the CEO of SoMin.ai, a long-tail ad optimization platform.

Not too long ago, I was asked to present a tool to some of my clients. It was a simple prototype, where a person would type in a few things (i.e., advertising channel, product and occasion), and in turn, the machine would give a number of sample ads. When I clicked the button, in just a few seconds, the machine spat out several ads complete with images and text. The first comment was, “Wow, that was really fast.” What would take a person a few hours to do, this machine did in but a fraction. There were a lot of other interesting comments, some even pointing out that this machine was really creative. Then one person spoke out, a comment that put the room into an uncomfortable silence, “This thing is going to take my job.”

We are in a time of uncertainty. As AI applications become more visible and popular, many will start wondering how they will impact our society. There are the “doomsayers” who think AI will take over the world. Then there are the more “sane” people who think that AI will never be able to replicate humans. After all, how can a machine copy something so intricate and complex? But then again, day by day, the advancements in AI continue to surprise us, as if to challenge our very humanity.

Veteran actor Mark Hamill said in an interview that he has sent at least 500 drones to Ukraine through the country’s fundraising platform, as Ukraine’s ongoing conflict with Russia enters its ninth month.

During an appearance on Bloomberg Radio’s “Sound On”, Hamill, widely known for his role as Luke Skywalker in the acclaimed “Star Wars” film franchise, told host Joe Mathieu that he only sent the equipment to Ukraine because they desperately need it.

As sales of battery electric vehicles (BEV) increase, OEMs need to focus on R&D excellence, flexible manufacturing, and value-chain integration to improve profitability.

Even in countries where BEV sales are picking up, many automotive executives are concerned about profitability. Some EV OEMs have already begun investigating changes to their go-to-market models that may increase sales and reduce costs quickly. Over the midterm, however, they will need to apply additional measures to be profitable, and our recent research shows that three levers will be particularly important in this respect:

Most OEMs do not have all the required capabilities, such as the ability to develop software for both batteries and e-drive, to move BEV production completely in-house. Consequently, they often need to form strategic partnerships across the ecosystem, including those for BEV design, manufacturing, and component sourcing. These partnerships will also allow them to share the burden of capex spending until they achieve sufficient scale.

Continue reading “Improving battery-electric-vehicle profitability through reduced structural costs” »

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has announced a collaborative study with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the research hub of central US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to study the impact of microorganisms aboard the International Space Station. Observations from the research project will help create medical solutions to aid astronauts in long term human missions in space.

Explaining the observations, Karthik Raman, assistant professor at the department of biotechnology, IIT Madras, said that the collection of microbes, which includes a variety of bacteria and fungi, have occurred over time due to the astronauts that have been aboard the ISS over the past decades.

“Even though the ISS is a highly sterile environment, these microbes can play a big role in the way human presence in a space environment works — which our research work sought to highlight,” Raman said.

Advancing Space For Humanity — Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Ph.D. — Assistant Director for Space Policy, Office of Science and Technology Policy, The White House.

Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Ph.D. is Assistant Director for Space Policy, Office of Science and Technology Policy, at the White House (https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/) where she focuses on determining civil and commercial space priorities for the President’s science advisor, and her portfolio includes a wide range of disciplines including Orbital Debris, On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM), Earth Observations, Space Weather, and Planetary Protection.

Continue reading “Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Ph.D. — Space Policy — Office of Science & Technology Policy, White House” »

From pv magazine Australia

Volt Solar Tile, a Leeson Group subsidiary, says its Australian-designed building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) roof tile has the highest wattage of any solar tile on the global market, with a maximum power output of 115 W and a solar efficiency of up to 19.3%.

Peter Leeson, managing director of Leeson Group and the director of Volt Solar Tile, said the Volt Planum and Lodge mono PERC solar tiles are the first in the world that can generate the same amount of energy as a standard PV panel.

CERN’s “irradiation station” will investigate the effect of radiation on commercial materials, such as lubricants and gaskets, that are used regularly in accelerator beamlines and other radiation environments.

A fundamental principle in statistical mechanics called microscopic reversibility has been extended to the quantum world.

Resistive switching random-access memories (RRAMs) integrate information storage and processing into the same device, enabling faster and more energy-efficient computing. However, RRAMs are challenging to fabricate and suffer from inconsistent on-off switching. Now Zheng Jie Tan, Vrindaa Somjit, and collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that adding dopants to the RRAMs dramatically improves their performance and the yield of their fabrication [1]. The researchers say their results provide an additional “knob” to optimize RRAMs, helping position them as one of the leading technologies for so-called in-memory computation.

An RRAM comprises an insulating material sandwiched between two metallic layers. The bits are defined by the amount of current that passes through the device via conduction paths in the insulator under a voltage. If the voltage is strong enough, it can induce the formation or destruction of conduction paths, thus controlling information processing.

While fabricating their device, the researchers added electronegative dopants, such as gold atoms, to the insulating material. The electron redistribution induced by the dopants facilitated the formation of conduction paths, which became more stable and showed increased on-off switching consistency compared with their undoped counterparts. Moreover, doped RRAMs were consistently fabricated with conducting paths already established before the device was used. Undoped RRAMs are often fabricated without such paths, and the postfabrication process required to create them—“electroforming,” involving the application of a very strong voltage—can result in irreparable device damage.