All Features
Oliver Laasch
It’s been a tough few years for people who own or manage a business. Lockdowns shut down whole industrial sectors worldwide, turning profitable businesses into loss-making ones, while a lot of smaller businesses went under.
Many companies will now be hoping for a return to some type of normality…
Mike Kotzian
The pandemic both reduced the available workforce and accelerated online sales. Warehouse operations grew and had to handle increased volume with fewer employees. Prior to Covid-19, the answer to this problem was to hire more fork truck drivers. Now, companies have difficulty finding trained fork…
Quality Digest
This year’s World Conference on Quality and Improvement (WCQI) will be a hybrid event—online and in person—scheduled for May 15–18, 2022, in Anaheim, California. Themed as “The art and science of quality,” the conference will explore the symbiotic relationship between human and scientific aspects…
Sowmya Juttukonda
By 2035, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to increase business productivity by up to 40 percent. It’s already a part of people’s daily lives and its use is only expected to increase to solve more critical problems that assail our world.
Businesses are looking at AI to achieve cost-…
Andrew Myers
Standard image sensors, like the billion or so already installed in practically every smartphone in use today, capture light intensity and color. Relying on common, off-the-shelf sensor technology—known as CMOS—these cameras have grown smaller and more powerful by the year and now offer tens-of-…
MIT News
The Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program (GEL Program) recently revamped and relaunched Engineering Design and Rapid Prototyping (D-PRO), a Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics course last taught in 2012. It was updated to center on a new multidisciplinary project focused on…
David Chandler
Industrial processes for chemical separations, including natural gas purification and the production of oxygen and nitrogen for medical or industrial uses, are collectively responsible for about 15 percent of the world’s energy use. They also contribute a corresponding amount to the world’s…
Knowledge at Wharton
Negotiating a salary increase or a job promotion ranks high on the list of hard conversations to have at work, and it doesn’t get any easier without a plan.
“People think, ‘I’m just going to knock on their door, sit down with them, and noodle around and see where this goes.’ That’s not a plan,”…
Anthony Tarantino
In 2007, Nassim Taleb described black swans as highly improbable events that had dramatic or even catastrophic effects on markets and economies. Until recently, it seemed that such events were indeed rare.1 There’s now a major rethinking with the world entering the third year of the Covid-19…
NIST
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have discovered a potential source of error when using acoustic waves to measure the properties of fluids such as blood. Their discovery raises the possibility of more accurate diagnostic tests for certain types of blood…
Susan Robertson
Every year in the spring, Amy B., a buyer for a large retail chain store, hosts an Easter egg-decorating, team-building party, where she and a bunch of her suppliers spend an entire afternoon coloring and bedazzling hard-boiled eggs. None of them bring their kids.
They do this for the sheer…
Ben Bensaou
Not every CEO can be the next Steve Jobs, constantly conjuring up game-changing new ideas and revolutionary products. But what all CEOs and senior leaders can be are champions for innovation within their own organizations. They are the ones who can help give their employees the freedom and space to…
Kara Baskin
Which companies deploy machine intelligence (MI) and data analytics successfully for manufacturing and operations? Why are those leading adopters so far ahead—and what can others learn from them?
MIT Machine Intelligence for Manufacturing and Operations (MIMO) and McKinsey & Company have the…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Recently I was interviewed by Rocky Buckley, a strategic business coach and creator of the Power Persona Project. We discussed an aspect of success that I wish I could give to everyone: the concept of a positive temperament or mental state. So I decided to share the conversation.
Rocky: Is success…
Theodoros Evgeniou, Ludo Van der Heyden
Technology has always been a double-edged sword. While it’s been a major force for progress, it has also been abused and caused harm. From water power to Fordism, history shows that technology is neither good nor bad by itself. It can, of course, be both, depending on how it’s used.…
Wade Schroeder
On May 12, 2021, President Biden signed the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. Among other items in the order was a requirement that every vendor that supplies the federal government with software must provide a software bill of materials (SBOM) with their product.
Given that…
NIST
As a step toward improving our ability to identify and manage the harmful effects of bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommend widening the scope of where we look for the source of these biases—beyond the machine…
Danielle Underferth
As municipalities clamor for a slice of President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill, one Johns Hopkins scientist is re-examining one of the basic elements of road-building: Determining the width of road lanes. But determining the width that provides the highest level of safety,…
Nanoscribe
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), antibiotic resistance is now one of the greatest threats to global health, food safety, and development. This immunity of bacteria is a natural evolutionary process, and that is further accelerated by the misuse of antibiotic treatments. For more…
Aliyah Kovner
To combat a pandemic, science needs to move quickly. With safe and effective vaccines now widely available, and a handful of promising Covid-19 treatments coming soon, there’s no doubt that many aspects of biological research have been successfully accelerated during the past two years.
Now,…
Kenny Tsang
The e-commerce industry is forecast to see substantial growth in 2022. Retail e-commerce sales in 2021 totaled $4.9 trillion, and may reach $5.42 trillion this year. Exponential growth in the sector has given rise to an ecosystem of millions of third-party sellers on sites such as Amazon that make…
Adam Zewe
Multiple programs running on the same computer may not be able to directly access each other’s hidden information. But because they share the same memory hardware, their secrets could be stolen by a malicious program through a “memory timing side-channel attack.”
This malicious program notices…
Duxin Sun
It takes 10 to 15 years and around $1 billion to develop one successful drug. Despite these significant investments in time and money, 90 percent of drug candidates in clinical trials fail. Whether because they don’t adequately treat the condition they’re meant to target or the side effects are too…
David Chandler
Scintillators are materials that emit light when bombarded with high-energy particles or X-rays. In medical or dental X-ray systems, they convert incoming X-ray radiation into visible light that can then be captured using film or photosensors. They’re also used for night-vision systems and for…
V R Vijay Anand
As the world moves toward a new, post-pandemic normal, industries must leverage digital transformation at an accelerated pace. This is already happening. According to IBM, 67 percent of manufacturers have accelerated digital projects since Covid-19.
Although improved operational efficiency is…
