The future of carbon-free energy smells like teriyaki and sounds like a low-flying 737. A sleepy strip mall beside Boeing’s sprawling campus in Everett, WA isn’t necessarily where you’d expect to find technology promising to harness the power of the sun, release humanity from the grip of fossil fuels, and unlock an estimated US $40 […]
From 2019 to 2022, I had the privilege of serving as president of the RoboCup Federation. RoboCup is an annual international competitive event that merges visionary thinking about how AI and robotics will change the world with practical robot design. Participants spend months solving diverse technical problems to enable their robots to autonomously play soccer, […]
The Mechanical Turk was a fraud. The chess-playing automaton, dressed in a turban and elaborate Ottoman robes, toured Europe in the closing decades of the 18th century accompanied by its inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen. The Turk wowed Austrian empress Maria Theresa, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and Prussian king Frederick the Great as it defeated some […]
In 2019, Elon Musk stood up at a Tesla day devoted to automated driving and said, “Essentially everyone’s training the network all the time, is what it amounts to. Whether Autopilot’s on or off, the network is being trained.” Tesla’s suite of assistive and semi-autonomous technologies, collectively known as Autopilot, is among the most widely […]
Early in July, Rhode Island’s governor signed legislation mandating that the state acquire 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2033. Among the state’s American peers, there’s no deadline more ambitious. “Anything more ambitious, and I would start being a little skeptical that it would be attainable,” says Seaver Wang, a climate and […]
Alexander “Sandy” Fraser Developer of the first virtual circuit network switch Fellow, 85; died 13 June Fraser developed the Datakit, the first virtual circuit network switch, while working at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J. The telecommunications technology is used by all major U.S. telephone companies. He invented other pioneering technologies as well, including the […]
TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Keras: Those three deep-learning frameworks have dominated AI for years even as newer entrants gain steam. But one framework you don’t hear much about in the West is China’s PaddlePaddle, the most popular Chinese framework in the world’s most populous country. It is an easy-to-use, efficient, flexible, and scalable deep-learning platform, originally […]
You won’t see a single Tesla cruising the glamorous beachfront in Beidaihe, China, this summer. Officials banned Elon Musk’s popular electric cars from the resort for two months while it hosts the Communist Party’s annual retreat, presumably fearing what their built-in cameras might capture and feed back to the United States. Back in Florida, Tesla […]
As climate change edges from crisis to emergency, the aviation sector looks set to miss its 2050 goal of net-zero emissions. In the five years preceding the pandemic, the top four U.S. airlines—American, Delta, Southwest, and United—saw a 15 percent increase in the use of jet fuel. Despite continual improvements in engine efficiencies, that number […]
Few fields of endeavor have advanced as swiftly as bioinformatics over the past couple of decades. Just 25 years ago, the human genome was still largely a mystery. Then, in 2003, the first sequence was announced, of about 92 percent of a human genome. That sequence cost some US $300 million dollars. Over the years, […]