ng Trump picking Cabinet at breakneck speed compared to 2016 By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 16:02:16 -0500 President-elect Trump has made six selections to serve in his Cabinet in the week since the election, a faster pace than he set when elected to the presidency in 2016. Full Article 98278b3d-e4ca-528d-9192-16bf8894153f fnc Fox News fox-news/person/donald-trump fox-news/politics/elections/presidential/trump-transition fox-news/politics/elections fox-news/person/marco-rubio fox-news/person/kristi-noem fox-news/politics article
ng Justice Alito plans to remain on Supreme Court, resisting pressure to step aside: report By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 16:54:31 -0500 Trump would face little to no resistance in confirming his picks for Supreme Court justices in the majority-GOP Congress, but Alito has no plans to step down. Full Article 1d64196e-023c-541f-87d2-a212a18f112b fnc Fox News fox-news/politics fox-news/politics/judiciary/supreme-court fox-news/politics/executive fox-news/person/donald-trump fox-news/politics/elections fox-news/politics/judiciary fox-news/politics article
ng No changes involving animals came about in Colorado elections By www.foodsafetynews.com Published On :: Thu, 07 Nov 2024 05:02:00 +0000 On Tuesday, three of nine ballot issues Denver voters had to decide dealt with animals and animal products. But nothing changed because all of them were slaughtered at the ballot box. One of the ballot issues called for prohibiting any slaughterhouse from operating in the City or County of Denver. That... Continue Reading Full Article state legislation Ordinance 308 Ordinance 309 Proposition 127 slaughterhouse ban Superior Farms
ng Israel plans changes to food licensing rules By www.foodsafetynews.com Published On :: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 05:01:00 +0000 Israel has proposed a revised system of food business licensing to ease the regulatory burden on industry and improve sanitary conditions. The Ministry of Health said the current regulation, regarding business licensing in general and food businesses in particular, is outdated and places a heavy regulatory burden on companies. This... Continue Reading Full Article Food Policy & Law World Israel licensing Ministry of Health reform
ng Bird flu study findings have CDC calling for more testing of dairy farm employees By www.foodsafetynews.com Published On :: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 05:02:00 +0000 A new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that some dairy farm employees showed signs of infection, even when they didn’t report feeling sick. The CDC concluded that more bird flu testing of dairy farm employees is required. According to Dr. Nirav Shah, the CDC’s principal... Continue Reading Full Article Foodborne Illness Investigations bird flu CDC Study Dr. Nirav Shah H5N1
ng EU groups raise concerns after Brazil audit findings By www.foodsafetynews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 05:01:00 +0000 Several trade associations have called on European policymakers to reconsider the EU-Mercosur trade deal following findings from an audit in Brazil. The EU-Mercosur deal is an agreement between the European Union and Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. A recently published audit report by DG Sante revealed Brazil’s issues in meeting European food... Continue Reading Full Article Food Politics audit Brazil Copa and Cogeca dg sante European Commission hormone-treated beef official controls trade agreement
ng Experts explain approach to estimating foodborne diseases By www.foodsafetynews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 05:03:00 +0000 Scientists have shared details of how they are going about updating foodborne infection figures that will be published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2025. As part of the process to update estimates on the burden of foodborne diseases published in 2015, WHO is conducting a global source attribution... Continue Reading Full Article For Public Health Professionals World Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group (FERG) foodborne illness estimates source attribution World Health Organization (WHO)
ng CDC investigating 21 outbreaks By www.foodsafetynews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 05:04:00 +0000 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention typically coordinates between 17 and 36 investigations of foodborne illnesses involving multiple states each week. A report is posted weekly, but does not include any information about where the outbreaks are occurring, what foods are involved, or how many patients have been identified.... Continue Reading Full Article Foodborne Illness Investigations Foodborne Illness Outbreaks 2024 outbreaks Campylobacter E. coli Listeria Salmonella
ng Montana officials investigating new outbreak of Salmonella infections at schools By www.foodsafetynews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 23:01:46 +0000 Montana public health officials are investigating an outbreak of infections caused by Salmonella. The Cascade City-County Health Department in Great Falls is reporting that six students at Sacajawea and Valley View elementary schools have tested positive for the pathogen. A staff member at another school has also tested positive. There... Continue Reading Full Article Foodborne Illness Investigations Foodborne Illness Outbreaks 2024 outbreaks Cascade City-County Health Department Montana Salmonella
ng Battle of The Stuffing: Stove Top Versus Homemade By viralnova.com Published On :: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 03:28:51 +0000 When it’s time to make stuffing, whether it’s for Thanksgiving or any other meal, you have a decision to make. Do you make homemade stuffing or go for the shortcut and buy Stove Top? It comes down to the ease of making something right out of a box versus the satisfaction of making the perfect […] Full Article Life
ng What is going on at AIMCo? Find out more at Q&A Wednesday By financialpost.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:25:19 +0000 The surprise firings at Alberta Investment Management raises many questions. We will try to answer them Full Article Finance News
ng Cowboys' Dak Prescott elects to have season-ending surgery to address injured hamstring, Jerry Jones says By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:24:25 -0500 The Dallas Cowboys quarterback got another opinion on his hamstring and decided that surgery would be the best way to address the injury. Full Article f8d4b7f0-229c-5132-b195-d53df731c643 fnc Fox News fox-news/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys fox-news/sports/nfl fox-news/person/dak-prescott fox-news/sports fox-news/health/medical-research/surgery fox-news/sports article
ng British woman busted at Los Angeles airport with meth-soaked T-shirts: police By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:26:36 -0500 Myah Saakwa-Mante, a 20-year-old British university student, was caught at Los Angeles International Airport and arrested after allegedly attempting to smuggle T-shirts soaked with methamphetamine. Full Article 025772a1-a0d2-5169-b96e-07d8919e9f08 fnc Fox News fox-news/us/crime fox-news/us/los-angeles fox-news/travel/general/airports fox-news/us/crime/drugs fox-news/us article
ng Mark Cuban runs to 'less hateful' social media platform after scrubbing X account of Harris support By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:50:55 -0500 Dallas Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban returned to the Bluesky social media platform with a post after weeks of contentious X posts. Full Article 03659cc7-b9b2-59bb-a83a-a51c4f033588 fnc Fox News fox-news/sports/nba/dallas-mavericks fox-news/sports/nba fox-news/sports fox-news/politics fox-news/sports article
ng Trump's picks so far: Here's who will be advising the new president By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:31:19 -0500 Since winning the election last week, President-elect Trump has begun evaluating and rolling out his Cabinet picks, with dozens of names jockeying for some two dozen positions. Full Article 0b65eed2-fb69-5522-a4e4-eb534bbb05e8 fnc Fox News fox-news/politics/executive/cabinet fox-news/person/donald-trump fox-news/politics/executive/white-house fox-news/politics fox-news/politics article
ng Georgia on outside of College Football Playoff bracket as wild week brings rankings shakeup By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:52:18 -0500 Georgia's loss to Ole Miss Saturday brought a wild shakeup to the college football rankings, and the Bulldogs find themselves out of the playoff picture. Full Article be1a5b1e-e9fd-515d-8deb-af99e8d76913 fnc Fox News fox-news/sports/ncaa-fb fox-news/sports/ncaa fox-news/sports fox-news/sports/ncaa/georgia-bulldogs fox-news/sports/ncaa/oregon-ducks fox-news/sports article
ng Man arrested in NYC strangulation death of woman found outside Times Square hotel By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:55:46 -0500 Authorities arrested a man accused of strangling a woman outside a Times Square hotel who later died from her injuries, police said Tuesday. Full Article d7d30f82-1959-5dbe-99be-c4c6d3d7b418 fnc Fox News fox-news/us/crime fox-news/us/new-york-city fox-news/us fox-news/us article
ng Republican Gabe Evans wins Colorado's 8th Congressional District, beating incumbent Yadira Caraveo By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 22:01:40 -0500 The Associated Press has declared a winner in Colorado's 8th Congressional District which has been one of the most closely watched races in the country. Full Article a466e502-3378-573c-8ecc-0e628d1b45ea fnc Fox News fox-news/politics fox-news/us/us-regions/west/colorado fox-news/politics/elections fox-news/politics/house-of-representatives fox-news/politics article
ng Republican David Valadao wins re-election to US House in California's 22nd Congressional District By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 22:17:03 -0500 Incumbent Republican David Valadao is projected to emerge victorious in California's 22nd Congressional District. The highly contested race was considered to be a tossup. Full Article 4451eb0e-c159-5978-bbc9-ce2be1359320 fnc Fox News fox-news/politics fox-news/us/us-regions/west/california fox-news/us/congress fox-news/politics/elections/house-of-representatives fox-news/politics article
ng Senator-elect Jim Justice's team clarifies report claiming famous pooch Babydog banned from Senate floor By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 22:34:44 -0500 Senator-elect Jim Justice's office has clarified reports that his famous pooch Babydog was banned from the Senate floor, saying Justice never intended to bring the dog onto the floor. Full Article 5e83cc3c-0f20-531a-a467-f5c5e2547352 fnc Fox News fox-news/politics fox-news/politics/senate fox-news/politics/elections/senate fox-news/us/us-regions/southeast/west-virginia fox-news/politics article
ng Mutiny threat sparks House GOP infighting ahead of Trump visit: 'Just more stupid' By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 23:01:51 -0500 House Republicans are once again at odds with one another after conservatives threatened to protest Speaker Johnson's bid to lead the conference again. Full Article 5cfa4a69-f5e8-544b-b124-e66551151a9a fnc Fox News fox-news/politics/house-of-representatives fox-news/politics/house-of-representatives/republicans fox-news/person/mike-johnson fox-news/politics fox-news/politics article
ng Bev Priestman out as Canadian women's head soccer coach following Olympic drone scandal probe By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 23:03:38 -0500 The Canadian women's soccer team was implicated in a drone scandal this past summer. But, an investigation determined drone use against opponents, predated the Paris Olympics. Full Article 784150bb-7367-54e1-a4e5-8ad141b4e55e fnc Fox News fox-news/sports/soccer fox-news/world/world-regions/canada fox-news/sports fox-news/sports article
ng GREG GUTFELD: Trump's incoming 'border czar' doesn't care what people think of him By www.foxnews.com Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 23:27:32 -0500 'Gutfeld!' panelists react to President-elect Trump's choice for 'border czar.' Full Article 9d54a038-0408-5bd5-bf0f-8234ceb4bc2e fnc Fox News fox-news/media/fox-news-flash fox-news/media fox-news/shows/gutfeld fox-news/shows/gutfeld/transcript-gutfeld fox-news/opinion article
ng Delta puts Nine back in ratings By www.theaustralian.com.au Published On :: Sun, 12 Jun 2016 14:00:00 GMT Delta Goodrem and her revolving chair have proved their star power, helping to reverse Nine’s horror start to the year. Full Article
ng Chris Wharton’s starring role By www.theaustralian.com.au Published On :: Sun, 12 Jun 2016 14:00:00 GMT For more two decades Chris Wharton has played a defining role in the lives of West Australians. Full Article
ng Advertising adds up to $40bn By www.theaustralian.com.au Published On :: Tue, 14 Jun 2016 14:00:00 GMT Advertising spending contributes about $40 billion a year to the Australian economy, or 2 per cent of GDP. Full Article
ng How AI Will Change Chip Design By spectrum.ieee.org Published On :: Tue, 08 Feb 2022 14:00:01 +0000 The end of Moore’s Law is looming. Engineers and designers can do only so much to miniaturize transistors and pack as many of them as possible into chips. So they’re turning to other approaches to chip design, incorporating technologies like AI into the process.Samsung, for instance, is adding AI to its memory chips to enable processing in memory, thereby saving energy and speeding up machine learning. Speaking of speed, Google’s TPU V4 AI chip has doubled its processing power compared with that of its previous version.But AI holds still more promise and potential for the semiconductor industry. To better understand how AI is set to revolutionize chip design, we spoke with Heather Gorr, senior product manager for MathWorks’ MATLAB platform.How is AI currently being used to design the next generation of chips?Heather Gorr: AI is such an important technology because it’s involved in most parts of the cycle, including the design and manufacturing process. There’s a lot of important applications here, even in the general process engineering where we want to optimize things. I think defect detection is a big one at all phases of the process, especially in manufacturing. But even thinking ahead in the design process, [AI now plays a significant role] when you’re designing the light and the sensors and all the different components. There’s a lot of anomaly detection and fault mitigation that you really want to consider. Heather GorrMathWorksThen, thinking about the logistical modeling that you see in any industry, there is always planned downtime that you want to mitigate; but you also end up having unplanned downtime. So, looking back at that historical data of when you’ve had those moments where maybe it took a bit longer than expected to manufacture something, you can take a look at all of that data and use AI to try to identify the proximate cause or to see something that might jump out even in the processing and design phases. We think of AI oftentimes as a predictive tool, or as a robot doing something, but a lot of times you get a lot of insight from the data through AI.What are the benefits of using AI for chip design?Gorr: Historically, we’ve seen a lot of physics-based modeling, which is a very intensive process. We want to do a reduced order model, where instead of solving such a computationally expensive and extensive model, we can do something a little cheaper. You could create a surrogate model, so to speak, of that physics-based model, use the data, and then do your parameter sweeps, your optimizations, your Monte Carlo simulations using the surrogate model. That takes a lot less time computationally than solving the physics-based equations directly. So, we’re seeing that benefit in many ways, including the efficiency and economy that are the results of iterating quickly on the experiments and the simulations that will really help in the design.So it’s like having a digital twin in a sense?Gorr: Exactly. That’s pretty much what people are doing, where you have the physical system model and the experimental data. Then, in conjunction, you have this other model that you could tweak and tune and try different parameters and experiments that let sweep through all of those different situations and come up with a better design in the end.So, it’s going to be more efficient and, as you said, cheaper?Gorr: Yeah, definitely. Especially in the experimentation and design phases, where you’re trying different things. That’s obviously going to yield dramatic cost savings if you’re actually manufacturing and producing [the chips]. You want to simulate, test, experiment as much as possible without making something using the actual process engineering.We’ve talked about the benefits. How about the drawbacks?Gorr: The [AI-based experimental models] tend to not be as accurate as physics-based models. Of course, that’s why you do many simulations and parameter sweeps. But that’s also the benefit of having that digital twin, where you can keep that in mind—it’s not going to be as accurate as that precise model that we’ve developed over the years.Both chip design and manufacturing are system intensive; you have to consider every little part. And that can be really challenging. It’s a case where you might have models to predict something and different parts of it, but you still need to bring it all together.One of the other things to think about too is that you need the data to build the models. You have to incorporate data from all sorts of different sensors and different sorts of teams, and so that heightens the challenge.How can engineers use AI to better prepare and extract insights from hardware or sensor data?Gorr: We always think about using AI to predict something or do some robot task, but you can use AI to come up with patterns and pick out things you might not have noticed before on your own. People will use AI when they have high-frequency data coming from many different sensors, and a lot of times it’s useful to explore the frequency domain and things like data synchronization or resampling. Those can be really challenging if you’re not sure where to start.One of the things I would say is, use the tools that are available. There’s a vast community of people working on these things, and you can find lots of examples [of applications and techniques] on GitHub or MATLAB Central, where people have shared nice examples, even little apps they’ve created. I think many of us are buried in data and just not sure what to do with it, so definitely take advantage of what’s already out there in the community. You can explore and see what makes sense to you, and bring in that balance of domain knowledge and the insight you get from the tools and AI.What should engineers and designers consider when using AI for chip design?Gorr: Think through what problems you’re trying to solve or what insights you might hope to find, and try to be clear about that. Consider all of the different components, and document and test each of those different parts. Consider all of the people involved, and explain and hand off in a way that is sensible for the whole team.How do you think AI will affect chip designers’ jobs?Gorr: It’s going to free up a lot of human capital for more advanced tasks. We can use AI to reduce waste, to optimize the materials, to optimize the design, but then you still have that human involved whenever it comes to decision-making. I think it’s a great example of people and technology working hand in hand. It’s also an industry where all people involved—even on the manufacturing floor—need to have some level of understanding of what’s happening, so this is a great industry for advancing AI because of how we test things and how we think about them before we put them on the chip.How do you envision the future of AI and chip design?Gorr: It’s very much dependent on that human element—involving people in the process and having that interpretable model. We can do many things with the mathematical minutiae of modeling, but it comes down to how people are using it, how everybody in the process is understanding and applying it. Communication and involvement of people of all skill levels in the process are going to be really important. We’re going to see less of those superprecise predictions and more transparency of information, sharing, and that digital twin—not only using AI but also using our human knowledge and all of the work that many people have done over the years. Full Article Chip fabrication Matlab Moore’s law Chip design Ai Digital twins
ng Andrew Ng: Unbiggen AI By spectrum.ieee.org Published On :: Wed, 09 Feb 2022 15:31:12 +0000 Andrew Ng has serious street cred in artificial intelligence. He pioneered the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) to train deep learning models in the late 2000s with his students at Stanford University, cofounded Google Brain in 2011, and then served for three years as chief scientist for Baidu, where he helped build the Chinese tech giant’s AI group. So when he says he has identified the next big shift in artificial intelligence, people listen. And that’s what he told IEEE Spectrum in an exclusive Q&A. Ng’s current efforts are focused on his company Landing AI, which built a platform called LandingLens to help manufacturers improve visual inspection with computer vision. He has also become something of an evangelist for what he calls the data-centric AI movement, which he says can yield “small data” solutions to big issues in AI, including model efficiency, accuracy, and bias. Andrew Ng on... What’s next for really big models The career advice he didn’t listen to Defining the data-centric AI movement Synthetic data Why Landing AI asks its customers to do the work The great advances in deep learning over the past decade or so have been powered by ever-bigger models crunching ever-bigger amounts of data. Some people argue that that’s an unsustainable trajectory. Do you agree that it can’t go on that way? Andrew Ng: This is a big question. We’ve seen foundation models in NLP [natural language processing]. I’m excited about NLP models getting even bigger, and also about the potential of building foundation models in computer vision. I think there’s lots of signal to still be exploited in video: We have not been able to build foundation models yet for video because of compute bandwidth and the cost of processing video, as opposed to tokenized text. So I think that this engine of scaling up deep learning algorithms, which has been running for something like 15 years now, still has steam in it. Having said that, it only applies to certain problems, and there’s a set of other problems that need small data solutions. When you say you want a foundation model for computer vision, what do you mean by that? Ng: This is a term coined by Percy Liang and some of my friends at Stanford to refer to very large models, trained on very large data sets, that can be tuned for specific applications. For example, GPT-3 is an example of a foundation model [for NLP]. Foundation models offer a lot of promise as a new paradigm in developing machine learning applications, but also challenges in terms of making sure that they’re reasonably fair and free from bias, especially if many of us will be building on top of them. What needs to happen for someone to build a foundation model for video? Ng: I think there is a scalability problem. The compute power needed to process the large volume of images for video is significant, and I think that’s why foundation models have arisen first in NLP. Many researchers are working on this, and I think we’re seeing early signs of such models being developed in computer vision. But I’m confident that if a semiconductor maker gave us 10 times more processor power, we could easily find 10 times more video to build such models for vision. Having said that, a lot of what’s happened over the past decade is that deep learning has happened in consumer-facing companies that have large user bases, sometimes billions of users, and therefore very large data sets. While that paradigm of machine learning has driven a lot of economic value in consumer software, I find that that recipe of scale doesn’t work for other industries. Back to top It’s funny to hear you say that, because your early work was at a consumer-facing company with millions of users. Ng: Over a decade ago, when I proposed starting the Google Brain project to use Google’s compute infrastructure to build very large neural networks, it was a controversial step. One very senior person pulled me aside and warned me that starting Google Brain would be bad for my career. I think he felt that the action couldn’t just be in scaling up, and that I should instead focus on architecture innovation. “In many industries where giant data sets simply don’t exist, I think the focus has to shift from big data to good data. Having 50 thoughtfully engineered examples can be sufficient to explain to the neural network what you want it to learn.” —Andrew Ng, CEO & Founder, Landing AI I remember when my students and I published the first NeurIPS workshop paper advocating using CUDA, a platform for processing on GPUs, for deep learning—a different senior person in AI sat me down and said, “CUDA is really complicated to program. As a programming paradigm, this seems like too much work.” I did manage to convince him; the other person I did not convince. I expect they’re both convinced now. Ng: I think so, yes. Over the past year as I’ve been speaking to people about the data-centric AI movement, I’ve been getting flashbacks to when I was speaking to people about deep learning and scalability 10 or 15 years ago. In the past year, I’ve been getting the same mix of “there’s nothing new here” and “this seems like the wrong direction.” Back to top How do you define data-centric AI, and why do you consider it a movement? Ng: Data-centric AI is the discipline of systematically engineering the data needed to successfully build an AI system. For an AI system, you have to implement some algorithm, say a neural network, in code and then train it on your data set. The dominant paradigm over the last decade was to download the data set while you focus on improving the code. Thanks to that paradigm, over the last decade deep learning networks have improved significantly, to the point where for a lot of applications the code—the neural network architecture—is basically a solved problem. So for many practical applications, it’s now more productive to hold the neural network architecture fixed, and instead find ways to improve the data. When I started speaking about this, there were many practitioners who, completely appropriately, raised their hands and said, “Yes, we’ve been doing this for 20 years.” This is the time to take the things that some individuals have been doing intuitively and make it a systematic engineering discipline. The data-centric AI movement is much bigger than one company or group of researchers. My collaborators and I organized a data-centric AI workshop at NeurIPS, and I was really delighted at the number of authors and presenters that showed up. You often talk about companies or institutions that have only a small amount of data to work with. How can data-centric AI help them? Ng: You hear a lot about vision systems built with millions of images—I once built a face recognition system using 350 million images. Architectures built for hundreds of millions of images don’t work with only 50 images. But it turns out, if you have 50 really good examples, you can build something valuable, like a defect-inspection system. In many industries where giant data sets simply don’t exist, I think the focus has to shift from big data to good data. Having 50 thoughtfully engineered examples can be sufficient to explain to the neural network what you want it to learn. When you talk about training a model with just 50 images, does that really mean you’re taking an existing model that was trained on a very large data set and fine-tuning it? Or do you mean a brand new model that’s designed to learn only from that small data set? Ng: Let me describe what Landing AI does. When doing visual inspection for manufacturers, we often use our own flavor of RetinaNet. It is a pretrained model. Having said that, the pretraining is a small piece of the puzzle. What’s a bigger piece of the puzzle is providing tools that enable the manufacturer to pick the right set of images [to use for fine-tuning] and label them in a consistent way. There’s a very practical problem we’ve seen spanning vision, NLP, and speech, where even human annotators don’t agree on the appropriate label. For big data applications, the common response has been: If the data is noisy, let’s just get a lot of data and the algorithm will average over it. But if you can develop tools that flag where the data’s inconsistent and give you a very targeted way to improve the consistency of the data, that turns out to be a more efficient way to get a high-performing system. “Collecting more data often helps, but if you try to collect more data for everything, that can be a very expensive activity.” —Andrew Ng For example, if you have 10,000 images where 30 images are of one class, and those 30 images are labeled inconsistently, one of the things we do is build tools to draw your attention to the subset of data that’s inconsistent. So you can very quickly relabel those images to be more consistent, and this leads to improvement in performance. Could this focus on high-quality data help with bias in data sets? If you’re able to curate the data more before training? Ng: Very much so. Many researchers have pointed out that biased data is one factor among many leading to biased systems. There have been many thoughtful efforts to engineer the data. At the NeurIPS workshop, Olga Russakovsky gave a really nice talk on this. At the main NeurIPS conference, I also really enjoyed Mary Gray’s presentation, which touched on how data-centric AI is one piece of the solution, but not the entire solution. New tools like Datasheets for Datasets also seem like an important piece of the puzzle. One of the powerful tools that data-centric AI gives us is the ability to engineer a subset of the data. Imagine training a machine-learning system and finding that its performance is okay for most of the data set, but its performance is biased for just a subset of the data. If you try to change the whole neural network architecture to improve the performance on just that subset, it’s quite difficult. But if you can engineer a subset of the data you can address the problem in a much more targeted way. When you talk about engineering the data, what do you mean exactly? Ng: In AI, data cleaning is important, but the way the data has been cleaned has often been in very manual ways. In computer vision, someone may visualize images through a Jupyter notebook and maybe spot the problem, and maybe fix it. But I’m excited about tools that allow you to have a very large data set, tools that draw your attention quickly and efficiently to the subset of data where, say, the labels are noisy. Or to quickly bring your attention to the one class among 100 classes where it would benefit you to collect more data. Collecting more data often helps, but if you try to collect more data for everything, that can be a very expensive activity. For example, I once figured out that a speech-recognition system was performing poorly when there was car noise in the background. Knowing that allowed me to collect more data with car noise in the background, rather than trying to collect more data for everything, which would have been expensive and slow. Back to top What about using synthetic data, is that often a good solution? Ng: I think synthetic data is an important tool in the tool chest of data-centric AI. At the NeurIPS workshop, Anima Anandkumar gave a great talk that touched on synthetic data. I think there are important uses of synthetic data that go beyond just being a preprocessing step for increasing the data set for a learning algorithm. I’d love to see more tools to let developers use synthetic data generation as part of the closed loop of iterative machine learning development. Do you mean that synthetic data would allow you to try the model on more data sets? Ng: Not really. Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re trying to detect defects in a smartphone casing. There are many different types of defects on smartphones. It could be a scratch, a dent, pit marks, discoloration of the material, other types of blemishes. If you train the model and then find through error analysis that it’s doing well overall but it’s performing poorly on pit marks, then synthetic data generation allows you to address the problem in a more targeted way. You could generate more data just for the pit-mark category. “In the consumer software Internet, we could train a handful of machine-learning models to serve a billion users. In manufacturing, you might have 10,000 manufacturers building 10,000 custom AI models.” —Andrew Ng Synthetic data generation is a very powerful tool, but there are many simpler tools that I will often try first. Such as data augmentation, improving labeling consistency, or just asking a factory to collect more data. Back to top To make these issues more concrete, can you walk me through an example? When a company approaches Landing AI and says it has a problem with visual inspection, how do you onboard them and work toward deployment? Ng: When a customer approaches us we usually have a conversation about their inspection problem and look at a few images to verify that the problem is feasible with computer vision. Assuming it is, we ask them to upload the data to the LandingLens platform. We often advise them on the methodology of data-centric AI and help them label the data. One of the foci of Landing AI is to empower manufacturing companies to do the machine learning work themselves. A lot of our work is making sure the software is fast and easy to use. Through the iterative process of machine learning development, we advise customers on things like how to train models on the platform, when and how to improve the labeling of data so the performance of the model improves. Our training and software supports them all the way through deploying the trained model to an edge device in the factory. How do you deal with changing needs? If products change or lighting conditions change in the factory, can the model keep up? Ng: It varies by manufacturer. There is data drift in many contexts. But there are some manufacturers that have been running the same manufacturing line for 20 years now with few changes, so they don’t expect changes in the next five years. Those stable environments make things easier. For other manufacturers, we provide tools to flag when there’s a significant data-drift issue. I find it really important to empower manufacturing customers to correct data, retrain, and update the model. Because if something changes and it’s 3 a.m. in the United States, I want them to be able to adapt their learning algorithm right away to maintain operations. In the consumer software Internet, we could train a handful of machine-learning models to serve a billion users. In manufacturing, you might have 10,000 manufacturers building 10,000 custom AI models. The challenge is, how do you do that without Landing AI having to hire 10,000 machine learning specialists? So you’re saying that to make it scale, you have to empower customers to do a lot of the training and other work. Ng: Yes, exactly! This is an industry-wide problem in AI, not just in manufacturing. Look at health care. Every hospital has its own slightly different format for electronic health records. How can every hospital train its own custom AI model? Expecting every hospital’s IT personnel to invent new neural-network architectures is unrealistic. The only way out of this dilemma is to build tools that empower the customers to build their own models by giving them tools to engineer the data and express their domain knowledge. That’s what Landing AI is executing in computer vision, and the field of AI needs other teams to execute this in other domains. Is there anything else you think it’s important for people to understand about the work you’re doing or the data-centric AI movement? Ng: In the last decade, the biggest shift in AI was a shift to deep learning. I think it’s quite possible that in this decade the biggest shift will be to data-centric AI. With the maturity of today’s neural network architectures, I think for a lot of the practical applications the bottleneck will be whether we can efficiently get the data we need to develop systems that work well. The data-centric AI movement has tremendous energy and momentum across the whole community. I hope more researchers and developers will jump in and work on it. Back to top This article appears in the April 2022 print issue as “Andrew Ng, AI Minimalist.” Full Article Deep learning Artificial intelligence Andrew ng Type:cover
ng Teens Gain Experience at IEEE’s TryEngineering Summer Institute By spectrum.ieee.org Published On :: Tue, 29 Oct 2024 19:00:03 +0000 The future of engineering is bright, and it’s being shaped by the young minds at the TryEngineering Summer Institute (TESI), a program administered by IEEE Educational Activities. This year more than 300 students attended TESI to fuel their passion for engineering and prepare for higher education and careers. Sessions were held from 30 June through 2 August on the campuses of Rice University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of San Diego.The program is an immersive experience designed for students ages 13 to 17. It offers hands-on projects, interactive workshops, field trips, and insights into the profession from practicing engineers. Participants get to stay on a college campus, providing them with a preview of university life.Student turned instructorOne future innovator is Natalie Ghannad, who participated in the program as a student in 2022 and was a member of this year’s instructional team in Houston at Rice University. Ghannad is in her second year as an electrical engineering student at the University of San Francisco. University students join forces with science and engineering teachers at each TESI location to serve as instructors.For many years, Ghannad wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a pediatric neurosurgeon. As a high school junior in Houston in 2022, however, she had a change of heart and decided to pursue engineering after participating in the TESI at Rice. She received a full scholarship from the IEEE Foundation TESI Scholarship Fund, supported by IEEE societies and councils. “I really liked that it was hands-on,” Ghannad says. “From the get-go, we were introduced to 3D printers and laser cutters.” The benefit of participating in the program, she says, was “having the opportunity to not just do the academic side of STEM but also to really get to play around, get your hands dirty, and figure out what you’re doing.” “Looking back,” she adds, “there are so many parallels between what I’ve actually had to do as a college student, and having that knowledge from the Summer Institute has really been great.”She was inspired to volunteer as a teaching assistant because, she says, “I know I definitely want to teach, have the opportunity to interact with kids, and also be part of the future of STEM.”More than 90 students attended the program at Rice. They visited Space Center Houston, where former astronauts talked to them about the history of space exploration.Participants also were treated to presentations by guest speakers including IEEE Senior Member Phil Bautista, the founder of Bull Creek Data, a consulting company that provides technical solutions; IEEE Senior Member Christopher Sanderson, chair of the IEEE Region 5 Houston Section; and James Burroughs, a standards manager for Siemens in Atlanta. Burroughs, who spoke at all three TESI events this year, provided insight on overcoming barriers to do the important work of an engineer.Learning about transit systems and careersThe University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, hosted the East Coast TESI event this year. Students were treated to a field trip to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Association (SEPTA), one of the largest transit systems in the country. Engineers from AECOM, a global infrastructure consulting firm with offices in Philadelphia that worked closely with SEPTA on its most recent station renovation, collaborated with IEEE to host the trip. The benefit of participating in the program was “having the opportunity to not just do the academic side of STEM but also to really get to play around, get your hands dirty, and figure out what you’re doing.” — Natalie GhannadParticipants also heard from guest speakers including Api Appulingam, chief development officer of the Philadelphia International Airport, who told the students the inspiring story of her career.Guest speakers from Google and MetaStudents who attended the TESI camp at the University of San Diego visited Qualcomm. Hosted by the IEEE Region 6 director, Senior Member Kathy Herring Hayashi, they learned about cutting-edge technology and toured the Qualcomm Museum.Students also heard from guest speakers including IEEE Member Andrew Saad, an engineer at Google; Gautam Deryanni, a silicon validation engineer at Meta; Kathleen Kramer, 2025 IEEE president and a professor of electrical engineering at the University of San Diego; as well as Burroughs.“I enjoyed the opportunity to meet new, like-minded people and enjoy fun activities in the city, as well as get a sense of the dorm and college life,” one participant said.Hands-on projectsIn addition to field trips and guest speakers, participants at each location worked on several hands-on projects highlighting the engineering design process. In the toxic popcorn challenge, the students designed a process to safely remove harmful kernels. Students tackling the bridge challenge designed and built a span out of balsa wood and glue, then tested its strength by gradually adding weight until it failed. The glider challenge gave participants the tools and knowledge to build and test their aircraft designs.One participant applauded the hands-on activities, saying, “All of them gave me a lot of experience and helped me have a better idea of what engineering field I want to go in. I love that we got to participate in challenges and not just listen to lectures—which can be boring.” The students also worked on a weeklong sparking solutions challenge. Small teams identified a societal problem, such as a lack of clean water or limited mobility for senior citizens, then designed a solution to address it. On the last day of camp, they pitched their prototypes to a team of IEEE members that judged the projects based on their originality and feasibility. Each student on the winning teams at each location were awarded the programmable Mech-5 robot.Twenty-nine scholarships were awarded with funding from the IEEE Foundation. IEEE societies that donated to the cause were the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society, the IEEE Industry Applications Society, the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, the IEEE Power & Energy Society, the IEEE Power Electronics Society, the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. Full Article Ieee member news Type:ti
ng Why the Art of Invention Is Always Being Reinvented By spectrum.ieee.org Published On :: Fri, 01 Nov 2024 14:00:03 +0000 Every invention begins with a problem—and the creative act of seeing a problem where others might just see unchangeable reality. For one 5-year-old, the problem was simple: She liked to have her tummy rubbed as she fell asleep. But her mom, exhausted from working two jobs, often fell asleep herself while putting her daughter to bed. “So [the girl] invented a teddy bear that would rub her belly for her,” explains Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson MIT Program. Its mission is to nurture the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs. Anyone can learn to be an inventor, Couch says, given the right resources and encouragement. “Invention doesn’t come from some innate genius, it’s not something that only really special people get to do,” she says. Her program creates invention-themed curricula for U.S. classrooms, ranging from kindergarten to community college. This article is part of our special report, “Reinventing Invention: Stories from Innovation’s Edge.” We’re biased, but we hope that little girl grows up to be an engineer. By the time she comes of age, the act of invention may be something entirely new—reflecting the adoption of novel tools and the guiding forces of new social structures. Engineers, with their restless curiosity and determination to optimize the world around them, are continuously in the process of reinventing invention. In this special issue, we bring you stories of people who are in the thick of that reinvention today. IEEE Spectrum is marking 60 years of publication this year, and we’re celebrating by highlighting both the creative act and the grindingly hard engineering work required to turn an idea into something world changing. In these pages, we take you behind the scenes of some awe-inspiring projects to reveal how technology is being made—and remade—in our time. Inventors Are Everywhere Invention has long been a democratic process. The economist B. Zorina Khan of Bowdoin College has noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has always endeavored to allow essentially anyone to try their hand at invention. From the beginning, the patent examiners didn’t care who the applicants were—anyone with a novel and useful idea who could pay the filing fee was officially an inventor. This ethos continues today. It’s still possible for an individual to launch a tech startup from a garage or go on “Shark Tank” to score investors. The Swedish inventor Simone Giertz, for example, made a name for herself with YouTube videos showing off her hilariously bizarre contraptions, like an alarm clock with an arm that slapped her awake. The MIT innovation scholar Eric von Hippel has spotlighted today’s vital ecosystem of “user innovation,” in which inventors such as Giertz are motivated by their own needs and desires rather than ambitions of mass manufacturing. But that route to invention gets you only so far, and the limits of what an individual can achieve have become starker over time. To tackle some of the biggest problems facing humanity today, inventors need a deep-pocketed government sponsor or corporate largess to muster the equipment and collective human brainpower required. When we think about the challenges of scaling up, it’s helpful to remember Alexander Graham Bell and his collaborator Thomas Watson. “They invent this cool thing that allows them to talk between two rooms—so it’s a neat invention, but it’s basically a gadget,” says Eric Hintz, a historian of invention at the Smithsonian Institution. “To go from that to a transcontinental long-distance telephone system, they needed a lot more innovation on top of the original invention.” To scale their invention, Hintz says, Bell and his colleagues built the infrastructure that eventually evolved into Bell Labs, which became the standard-bearer for corporate R&D. In this issue, we see engineers grappling with challenges of scale in modern problems. Consider the semiconductor technology supported by the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, a policy initiative aimed at bolstering domestic chip production. Beyond funding manufacturing, it also provides US $11 billion for R&D, including three national centers where companies can test and pilot new technologies. As one startup tells the tale, this infrastructure will drastically speed up the lab-to-fab process. And then there are atomic clocks, the epitome of precision timekeeping. When researchers decided to build a commercial version, they had to shift their perspective, taking a sprawling laboratory setup and reimagining it as a portable unit fit for mass production and the rigors of the real world. They had to stop optimizing for precision and instead choose the most robust laser, and the atom that would go along with it. These technology efforts benefit from infrastructure, brainpower, and cutting-edge new tools. One tool that may become ubiquitous across industries is artificial intelligence—and it’s a tool that could further expand access to the invention arena. What if you had a team of indefatigable assistants at your disposal, ready to scour the world’s technical literature for material that could spark an idea, or to iterate on a concept 100 times before breakfast? That’s the promise of today’s generative AI. The Swiss company Iprova is exploring whether its AI tools can automate “eureka” moments for its clients, corporations that are looking to beat their competitors to the next big idea. The serial entrepreneur Steve Blank similarly advises young startup founders to embrace AI’s potential to accelerate product development; he even imagines testing product ideas on digital twins of customers. Although it’s still early days, generative AI offers inventors tools that have never been available before. Measuring an Invention’s Impact If AI accelerates the discovery process, and many more patentable ideas come to light as a result, then what? As it is, more than a million patents are granted every year, and we struggle to identify the ones that will make a lasting impact. Bryan Kelly, an economist at the Yale School of Management, and his collaborators made an attempt to quantify the impact of patents by doing a technology-assisted deep dive into U.S. patent records dating back to 1840. Using natural language processing, they identified patents that introduced novel phrasing that was then repeated in subsequent patents—an indicator of radical breakthroughs. For example, Elias Howe Jr.’s 1846 patent for a sewing machine wasn’t closely related to anything that came before but quickly became the basis of future sewing-machine patents. Another foundational patent was the one awarded to an English bricklayer in 1824 for the invention of Portland cement, which is still the key ingredient in most of the world’s concrete. As Ted C. Fishman describes in his fascinating inquiry into the state of concrete today, this seemingly stable industry is in upheaval because of its heavy carbon emissions. The AI boom is fueling a construction boom in data centers, and all those buildings require billions of tons of concrete. Fishman takes readers into labs and startups where researchers are experimenting with climate-friendly formulations of cement and concrete. Who knows which of those experiments will result in a patent that echoes down the ages? Some engineers start their invention process by thinking about the impact they want to make on the world. The eminent Indian technologist Raghunath Anant Mashelkar, who has popularized the idea of “Gandhian engineering”, advises inventors to work backward from “what we want to achieve for the betterment of humanity,” and to create problem-solving technologies that are affordable, durable, and not only for the elite. Durability matters: Invention isn’t just about creating something brand new. It’s also about coming up with clever ways to keep an existing thing going. Such is the case with the Hubble Space Telescope. Originally designed to last 15 years, it’s been in orbit for twice that long and has actually gotten better with age, because engineers designed the satellite to be fixable and upgradable in space. For all the invention activity around the globe—the World Intellectual Property Organization says that 3.5 million applications for patents were filed in 2022—it may be harder to invent something useful than it used to be. Not because “everything that can be invented has been invented,” as in the apocryphal quote attributed to the unfortunate head of the U.S. patent office in 1889. Rather, because so much education and experience are required before an inventor can even understand all the dimensions of the door they’re trying to crack open, much less come up with a strategy for doing so. Ben Jones, an economist at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, has shown that the average age of great technological innovators rose by about six years over the course of the 20th century. “Great innovation is less and less the provenance of the young,” Jones concluded. Consider designing something as complex as a nuclear fusion reactor, as Tom Clynes describes in “An Off-the-Shelf Stellarator.” Fusion researchers have spent decades trying to crack the code of commercially viable fusion—it’s more akin to a calling than a career. If they succeed, they will unlock essentially limitless clean energy with no greenhouse gas emissions or meltdown danger. That’s the dream that the physicists in a lab in Princeton, N.J., are chasing. But before they even started, they first had to gain an intimate understanding of all the wrong ways to build a fusion reactor. Once the team was ready to proceed, what they created was an experimental reactor that accelerates the design-build-test cycle. With new AI tools and unprecedented computational power, they’re now searching for the best ways to create the magnetic fields that will confine the plasma within the reactor. Already, two startups have spun out of the Princeton lab, both seeking a path to commercial fusion. The stellarator story and many other articles in this issue showcase how one innovation leads to the next, and how one invention can enable many more. The legendary Dean Kamen, best known for mechanical devices like the Segway and the prosthetic “Luke” arm, is now trying to push forward the squishy world of biological manufacturing. In an interview, Kamen explains how his nonprofit is working on the infrastructure—bioreactors, sensors, and controls—that will enable companies to explore the possibilities of growing replacement organs. You could say that he’s inventing the launchpad so others can invent the rockets. Sometimes everyone in a research field knows where the breakthrough is needed, but that doesn’t make it any easier to achieve. Case in point: the quest for a household humanoid robot that can perform domestic chores, switching effortlessly from frying an egg to folding laundry. Roboticists need better learning software that will enable their bots to navigate the uncertainties of the real world, and they also need cheaper and lighter actuators. Major advances in these two areas would unleash a torrent of creativity and may finally bring robot butlers into our homes. And maybe the future roboticists who make those breakthroughs will have cause to thank Marina Umaschi Bers, a technologist at Boston College who cocreated the ScratchJr programming language and the KIBO robotics kit to teach kids the basics of coding and robotics in entertaining ways. She sees engineering as a playground, a place for children to explore and create, to be goofy or grandiose. If today’s kindergartners learn to think of themselves as inventors, who knows what they’ll create tomorrow? Full Article Invention Patents R&d Startups Type:cover
ng Boston Dynamics’ Latest Vids Show Atlas Going Hands On By spectrum.ieee.org Published On :: Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:00:03 +0000 Boston Dynamics is the master of dropping amazing robot videos with no warning, and last week, we got a surprise look at the new electric Atlas going “hands on” with a practical factory task. This video is notable because it’s the first real look we’ve had at the new Atlas doing something useful—or doing anything at all, really, as the introductory video from back in April (the first time we saw the robot) was less than a minute long. And the amount of progress that Boston Dynamics has made is immediately obvious, with the video showing a blend of autonomous perception, full body motion, and manipulation in a practical task.We sent over some quick questions as soon as we saw the video, and we’ve got some extra detail from Scott Kuindersma, senior director of Robotics Research at Boston Dynamics.If you haven’t seen this video yet, what kind of robotics person are you, and also here you go: Atlas is autonomously moving engine covers between supplier containers and a mobile sequencing dolly. The robot receives as input a list of bin locations to move parts between. Atlas uses a machine learning (ML) vision model to detect and localize the environment fixtures and individual bins [0:36]. The robot uses a specialized grasping policy and continuously estimates the state of manipulated objects to achieve the task. There are no prescribed or teleoperated movements; all motions are generated autonomously online. The robot is able to detect and react to changes in the environment (e.g., moving fixtures) and action failures (e.g., failure to insert the cover, tripping, environment collisions [1:24]) using a combination of vision, force, and proprioceptive sensors.Eagle-eyed viewers will have noticed that this task is very similar to what we saw hydraulic Atlas (Atlas classic?) working on just before it retired. We probably don’t need to read too much into the differences between how each robot performs that task, but it’s an interesting comparison to make.For more details, here’s our Q&A with Kuindersma:How many takes did this take?Kuindersma: We ran this sequence a couple times that day, but typically we’re always filming as we continue developing and testing Atlas. Today we’re able to run that engine cover demo with high reliability, and we’re working to expand the scope and duration of tasks like these. Is this a task that humans currently do?Kuindersma: Yes.What kind of world knowledge does Atlas have while doing this task?Kuindersma: The robot has access to a CAD model of the engine cover that is used for object pose prediction from RGB images. Fixtures are represented more abstractly using a learned keypoint prediction model. The robot builds a map of the workcell at startup which is updated on the fly when changes are detected (e.g., moving fixture).Does Atlas’s torso have a front or back in a meaningful way when it comes to how it operates?Kuindersma: Its head/torso/pelvis/legs do have “forward” and “backward” directions, but the robot is able to rotate all of these relative to one another. The robot always knows which way is which, but sometimes the humans watching lose track. Are the head and torso capable of unlimited rotation?Kuindersma: Yes, many of Atlas’s joints are continuous. How long did it take you folks to get used to the way Atlas moves?Kuindersma: Atlas’s motions still surprise and delight the team. OSHA recommends against squatting because it can lead to workplace injuries. How does Atlas feel about that?Kuindersma: As might be evident by some of Atlas’s other motions, the kinds of behaviors that might be injurious for humans might be perfectly fine for robots. Can you describe exactly what process Atlas goes through at 1:22?Kuindersma: The engine cover gets caught on the fabric bins and triggers a learned failure detector on the robot. Right now this transitions into a general-purpose recovery controller, which results in a somewhat jarring motion (we will improve this). After recovery, the robot retries the insertion using visual feedback to estimate the state of both the part and fixture. Were there other costume options you considered before going with the hot dog? Kuindersma: Yes, but marketing wants to save them for next year.How many important sensors does the hot dog costume occlude?Kuindersma: None. The robot is using cameras in the head, proprioceptive sensors, IMU, and force sensors in the wrists and feet. We did have to cut the costume at the top so the head could still spin around. Why are pickles always causing problems?Kuindersma: Because pickles are pesky, polarizing pests. Full Article Boston dynamics Atlas Humanoid robots Robotics
ng Millimeter Waves May Not Be 6G’s Most Promising Spectrum By spectrum.ieee.org Published On :: Wed, 06 Nov 2024 17:00:04 +0000 In 6G telecom research today, a crucial portion of wireless spectrum has been neglected: the Frequency Range 3, or FR3, band. The shortcoming is partly due to a lack of viable software and hardware platforms for studying this region of spectrum, ranging from approximately 6 to 24 gigahertz. But a new, open-source wireless research kit is changing that equation. And research conducted using that kit, presented last week at a leading industry conference, offers proof of viability of this spectrum band for future 6G networks.In fact, it’s also arguably signaling a moment of telecom industry re-evaluation. The high-bandwidth 6G future, according to these folks, may not be entirely centered around difficult millimeter wave-based technologies. Instead, 6G may leave plenty of room for higher-bandwidth microwave spectrum tech that is ultimately more familiar and accessible.The FR3 band is a region of microwave spectrum just shy of millimeter-wave frequencies (30 to 300 GHz). FR3 is also already very popular today for satellite Internet and military communications. For future 5G and 6G networks to share the FR3 band with incumbent players would require telecom networks nimble enough to perform regular, rapid-response spectrum-hopping.Yet spectrum-hopping might still be an easier problem to solve than those posed by the inherent physical shortcomings of some portions of millimeter-wave spectrum—shortcomings that include limited range, poor penetration, line-of-sight operations, higher power requirements, and susceptibility to weather. Pi-Radio’s New FaceEarlier this year, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based startup Pi-Radio—a spinoff from New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering—released a wireless spectrum hardware and software kit for telecom research and development. Pi-Radio’s FR-3 is a software-defined radio system developed for the FR3 band specifically, says company co-founder Sundeep Rangan.“Software-defined radio is basically a programmable platform to experiment and build any type of wireless technology,” says Rangan, who is also the associate director of NYU Wireless. “In the early stages when developing systems, all researchers need these.”For instance, the Pi-Radio team presented one new research finding that infers direction to an FR3 antenna from measurements taken by a mobile Pi-Radio receiver—presented at the IEEE Signal Processing Society‘s Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers in Pacific Grove, Calif. on 30 October. According to Pi-Radio co-founder Marco Mezzavilla, who’s also an associate professor at the Polytechnic University of Milan, the early-stage FR3 research that the team presented at Asilomar will enable researchers “to capture [signal] propagation in these frequencies and will allow us to characterize it, understand it, and model it... And this is the first stepping stone towards designing future wireless systems at these frequencies.”There’s a good reason researchers have recently rediscovered FR3, says Paolo Testolina, postdoctoral research fellow at Northeastern University’s Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things unaffiliated with the current research effort. “The current scarcity of spectrum for communications is driving operators and researchers to look in this band, where they believe it is possible to coexist with the current incumbents,” he says. “Spectrum sharing will be key in this band.”Rangan notes that the work on which Pi-Radio was built has been published earlier this year both on the more foundational aspects of building networks in the FR3 band as well as the specific implementation of Pi-Radio’s unique, frequency-hopping research platform for future wireless networks. (Both papers were published in IEEE journals.)“If you have frequency hopping, that means you can get systems that are resilient to blockage,” Rangan says. “But even, potentially, if it was attacked or compromised in any other way, this could actually open up a new type of dimension that we typically haven’t had in the cellular infrastructure.” The frequency-hopping that FR3 requires for wireless communications, in other words, could introduce a layer of hack-proofing that might potentially strengthen the overall network.Complement, Not ReplacementThe Pi-Radio team stresses, however, that FR3 would not supplant or supersede other new segments of wireless spectrum. There are, for instance, millimeter wave 5G deployments already underway today that will no doubt expand in scope and performance into the 6G future. That said, the ways that FR3 expand future 5G and 6G spectrum usage is an entirely unwritten chapter: Whether FR3 as a wireless spectrum band fizzles, or takes off, or finds a comfortable place somewhere in between depends in part on how it’s researched and developed now, the Pi-Radio team says. “We’re at this tipping point where researchers and academics actually are empowered by the combination of this cutting-edge hardware with open-source software,” Mezzavilla says. “And that will enable the testing of new features for communications in these new frequency bands.” (Mezzavilla credits the National Telecommunications and Information Administration for recognizing the potential of FR3, and for funding the group’s research.)By contrast, millimeter-wave 5G and 6G research has to date been bolstered, the team says, by the presence of a wide range of millimeter-wave software-defined radio (SDR) systems and other research platforms. “Companies like Qualcomm, Samsung, Nokia, they actually had excellent millimeter wave development platforms,” Rangan says. “But they were in-house. And the effort it took to build one—an SDR at a university lab—was sort of insurmountable.”So releasing an inexpensive open-source SDR in the FR3 band, Mezzavilla says, could jump start a whole new wave of 6G research. “This is just the starting point,” Mezzavilla says. “From now on we’re going to build new features—new reference signals, new radio resource control signals, near-field operations... We’re ready to ship these yellow boxes to other academics around the world to test new features and test them quickly, before 6G is even remotely near us.”This story was updated on 7 November 2024 to include detail about funding from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Full Article 5g 6g Wireless networks Frequency regulation Communications
ng Machine Learning Might Save Time on Chip Testing By spectrum.ieee.org Published On :: Sun, 10 Nov 2024 14:00:02 +0000 Finished chips coming in from the foundry are subject to a battery of tests. For those destined for critical systems in cars, those tests are particularly extensive and can add 5 to 10 percent to the cost of a chip. But do you really need to do every single test?Engineers at NXP have developed a machine-learning algorithm that learns the patterns of test results and figures out the subset of tests that are really needed and those that they could safely do without. The NXP engineers described the process at the IEEE International Test Conference in San Diego last week.NXP makes a wide variety of chips with complex circuitry and advanced chip-making technology, including inverters for EV motors, audio chips for consumer electronics, and key-fob transponders to secure your car. These chips are tested with different signals at different voltages and at different temperatures in a test process called continue-on-fail. In that process, chips are tested in groups and are all subjected to the complete battery, even if some parts fail some of the tests along the way.Chips were subject to between 41 and 164 tests, and the algorithm was able to recommend removing 42 to 74 percent of those tests.“We have to ensure stringent quality requirements in the field, so we have to do a lot of testing,” says Mehul Shroff, an NXP Fellow who led the research. But with much of the actual production and packaging of chips outsourced to other companies, testing is one of the few knobs most chip companies can turn to control costs. “What we were trying to do here is come up with a way to reduce test cost in a way that was statistically rigorous and gave us good results without compromising field quality.”A Test Recommender SystemShroff says the problem has certain similarities to the machine learning-based recommender systems used in e-commerce. “We took the concept from the retail world, where a data analyst can look at receipts and see what items people are buying together,” he says. “Instead of a transaction receipt, we have a unique part identifier and instead of the items that a consumer would purchase, we have a list of failing tests.”The NXP algorithm then discovered which tests fail together. Of course, what’s at stake for whether a purchaser of bread will want to buy butter is quite different from whether a test of an automotive part at a particular temperature means other tests don’t need to be done. “We need to have 100 percent or near 100 percent certainty,” Shroff says. “We operate in a different space with respect to statistical rigor compared to the retail world, but it’s borrowing the same concept.”As rigorous as the results are, Shroff says that they shouldn’t be relied upon on their own. You have to “make sure it makes sense from engineering perspective and that you can understand it in technical terms,” he says. “Only then, remove the test.”Shroff and his colleagues analyzed data obtained from testing seven microcontrollers and applications processors built using advanced chipmaking processes. Depending on which chip was involved, they were subject to between 41 and 164 tests, and the algorithm was able to recommend removing 42 to 74 percent of those tests. Extending the analysis to data from other types of chips led to an even wider range of opportunities to trim testing.The algorithm is a pilot project for now, and the NXP team is looking to expand it to a broader set of parts, reduce the computational overhead, and make it easier to use. Full Article Testing Test and measurement Machine learning Recommender systems Semiconductors
ng Why Are Kindle Colorsofts Turning Yellow? By spectrum.ieee.org Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 12:00:02 +0000 In physical books, yellowing pages are usually a sign of age. But brand-new users of Amazon’s Kindle Colorsofts, the tech giant’s first color e-reader, are already noticing yellow hues appearing at the bottoms of their displays.Since the complaints began the trickle in, Amazon has reportedly suspended shipments and announced that it is working to fix the issue. (As of publication of this article, the US $280 Kindle had an average 2.6 star rating on Amazon.) It’s not yet clear what is causing the discoloration. But while the issue is new—and unexpected—the technology is not, says Jason Heikenfeld, an IEEE Fellow and engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati. The Kindle Colorsoft, which became available on 30 October, uses “a very old approach,” says Heikenfeld, who previously worked to develop the ultimate e-paper technology. “It was the first approach everybody tried.” Amazon’s e-reader uses reflective display technology developed by E Ink, a company that started in the 1990s as an MIT Media Lab spin off before developing its now-dominant electronic paper displays. E Ink is used in Kindles, as well as top e-readers from Kobo, reMarkable, Onyx, and more. E Ink first introduced Kaleido—the basis of the Colorsoft’s display—five years ago, though the road to full-color e-paper started well before. How E-Readers WorkMonochromatic Kindles work by applying voltages to electrodes in the screen that bring black or white pigment to the top of each pixel. Those pixels then reflect ambient light, creating a paper-like display. To create a full-color display, companies like E Ink added an array of filters just above the ink. This approach didn’t work well at first because the filters lost too much light, making the displays dark and low resolution. But with a few adjustments, Kaleido was ready for consumer products in 2019. (Other approaches—like adding colored pigments to the ink—have been developed, but these come with their own drawbacks, including a higher price tag.) Given this design, it initially seemed to Heikenfeld that the issue would have stemmed from the software, which determines the voltages applied to each electrode. This aligned with reports from some users that the issue appeared after a software update. But industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested in a post on X that the issue is due to the e-reader’s hardware. Amazon switched the optically clear adhesive (OCA) used in the Colorsoft to a material that may not be so optically clear. In its announcement of the Colorsoft, the company boasted “custom formulated coatings” that would enhance the color display as one of the new e-reader’s innovations. In terms of resolving the issue, Kuo’s post also stated that “While component suppliers have developed several hardware solutions, Amazon seems to be leaning toward a software-based fix.” Heikenfeld is not sure how a software fix would work, apart from blacking out the bottom of the screen. Amazon did not reply to IEEE Spectrum’s request for comment. In an email to IEEE Spectrum, E Ink stated, “While we cannot comment on any individual partner or product, we are committed to supporting our partners in understanding and addressing any issues that arise.”The Future of E-ReadersIt took a long time for color Kindles to arrive, and the future of reflective e-reader displays isn’t likely to improve much, according to Heikenfeld. “I used to work a lot in this field, and it just really slowed down at some point, because it’s a tough nut to crack,” Heikenfeld says. There are inherent limitations and inefficiencies to working with filter-based color displays that rely on ambient light, and there’s no Moore’s Law for these displays. Instead, their improvement is asymptotic—and we may already be close to the limit. Meanwhile, displays that emit light, like LCD and OLED, continue to improve. “An iPad does a pretty damn good job with battery life now,” says Heikenfeld. At the same time, he believes there will always be a place for reflective displays, which remain a more natural experience for our eyes. “We live in a world of reflective color,” Heikenfeld says.This is story was updated on 12 November 2024 to correct that Jason Heikenfeld is an IEEE Fellow. Full Article Amazon Kindle E-readers Color display
ng We Can Thank Deep-Space Asteroids for Helping Start Life on Earth By time.com Published On :: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 19:54:02 +0000 Samples from the asteroid Ryugu contain key ingredients in the biological cookbook. Full Article Uncategorized healthscienceclimate
ng You Won’t Want to Miss October’s Rare Comet Sighting. Here’s How and When You Can See It By time.com Published On :: Wed, 09 Oct 2024 16:41:48 +0000 A ”once in a lifetime” comet is expected to light up the night sky as it passes by Earth. Full Article Uncategorized News Desk
ng In Photos: Celebrating Hawaii’s Wonder a Year After the Maui Wildfires By time.com Published On :: Fri, 11 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000 In his latest book, The Blue on Fire: Hawaii, photographer Enzo Barracco hopes to inspire the world to protect the ocean. Full Article Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate
ng 4 Astronauts Return to Earth After Being Delayed by Boeing’s Capsule Trouble and Hurricane Milton By time.com Published On :: Fri, 25 Oct 2024 12:26:13 +0000 A SpaceX capsule carrying the crew parachuted before dawn into the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida coast. Full Article Uncategorized News Desk wire
ng It’s Time to Redefine What a Megafire Is in the Climate Change Era By time.com Published On :: Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:46:23 +0000 It's not the reach of a fire that matters most; it's the speed. Understanding this can help society better prepare. Full Article Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate
ng Why Risky Wildfire Zones Have Been Increasing Around the World By time.com Published On :: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 19:06:35 +0000 More blazes break out where wild land and urban areas overlap. Full Article Uncategorized climate change embargoed study healthscienceclimate
ng Comment on Preventing Hair Loss: How Diwali Commitments Disrupt Women’s Hair Care Routine by Emlakçılık Belgesi By www.thehealthsite.com Published On :: Fri, 01 Nov 2024 07:17:59 +0000 https://maps.google.co.in/url?q=https://yukselenakademi.com/kurs/detay/emlakcilik-belgesi-seviye-5 Full Article
ng Comment on Are You Breathing More Than Just Festive Cheer This Diwali? Beware Of The Air Pollution by Emlakçılık Belgesi By www.thehealthsite.com Published On :: Fri, 01 Nov 2024 07:24:16 +0000 https://maps.google.co.uk/url?q=https://yukselenakademi.com/kurs/detay/emlakcilik-belgesi-seviye-5 Full Article
ng Comment on Are You Breathing More Than Just Festive Cheer This Diwali? Beware Of The Air Pollution by Samsun Perdeci By www.thehealthsite.com Published On :: Fri, 01 Nov 2024 07:35:46 +0000 Bütün ihtiyaçlara en iyi şekilde karşılık veren Samsun perde modelleri bütçe dostu fiyatlarla sunulmaktadır. Fon perde, tül perde, stor perde, güneşlik ve plise SAMSUN Ucuz Perde Modelleri ve Fiyatları. Siz hemen şimdi maviperde.com'dan güvenle alışveriş yapın, biz SAMSUN'un her yerine ucuz perde modellerini imalattan Samsun Perde Mağazaları ve PERDES Brillant Şubeleri: İlkadım, Atakum, Bafra, Çarşamba, Canik, Vezirköprü, Terme, Tekkeköy, Havza, 19 Mayıs, Alaçam perdeci, Samsun bölgesi zebra perdeci, zebra perdeci, perdeciler Samsun, perdeci adres Samsun, perde servisi. Samsun zebra perde montajı montajcısı. https://asrtekstil.com/ Full Article
ng Comment on The Shocking Truth About SMA: Why Every Family Should Be Informed by 먹튀검증소 By www.thehealthsite.com Published On :: Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:48:32 +0000 <a href="https://mtverify.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">먹튀검증</a> 전문가들이 꼼꼼하게 검증한 사이트만을 소개합니다. 안심하고 베팅하세요. 먹튀검증소: https://mtverify.com/ Full Article
ng Comment on Case Study: Premature Baby Overcomes Life-Threatening Complications by Blue Techker By www.thehealthsite.com Published On :: Thu, 07 Nov 2024 14:49:56 +0000 <a href="https://bluetechker.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Blue Techker</a> Nice post. I learn something totally new and challenging on websites Full Article
ng Comment on Keep Your Heart Safe This Chhath Puja: Expert Fasting Tips For A Healthy Celebration by Blue Techker By www.thehealthsite.com Published On :: Thu, 07 Nov 2024 23:49:34 +0000 <a href="https://bluetechker.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Blue Techker</a> naturally like your web site however you need to take a look at the spelling on several of your posts. A number of them are rife with spelling problems and I find it very bothersome to tell the truth on the other hand I will surely come again again. Full Article
ng Comment on Unmasking Confidence: 5 Reasons Why Skin Health Can Impact Your Emotional And Mental Health by airhostess By www.thehealthsite.com Published On :: Sun, 10 Nov 2024 12:28:24 +0000 Thank you for the auspicious writeup It in fact was a amusement account it Look advanced to more added agreeable from you By the way how could we communicate Full Article
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ng Comment on Numbness In The Arm, Face, And Leg Could Indicate A Stroke: Warning Signs To Watch Out For by 먹튀검증사이트 By www.thehealthsite.com Published On :: Mon, 11 Nov 2024 01:11:08 +0000 <a href="https://offhd.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">먹튀검증커뮤니티</a> 전문가들이 꼼꼼하게 검증한 안전한 토토사이트를 소개합니다. 안심하고 베팅하세요. 먹튀오프: https://offhd.com/ Full Article
ng Pixel phones are getting an actual weather app in 2024, with a bit of AI By arstechnica.com Published On :: Thu, 31 Oct 2024 17:27:42 +0000 Pixel 6 and newer can try out an app that has AI summaries, but no frog. Full Article Google Tech android google pixel Weather weather app