Artificial intelligence, or AI, requires a huge amount of computing power and versatile hardware to support that power. But most AI-supportive hardware is built around the same decades-old technology, and still a long way from emulating the neural activity in the human brain.

In an effort to solve this problem, a group of scientists from around the country, led by Shriram Ramanathan of Purdue University, has discovered a way to make the hardware more efficient and sustainable.

“We’re creating hardware that is smart enough to keep up [with advancements in AI] and also doesn’t use too much energy. In fact, the energy demand will be cut significantly using this technology.”—Argonne physicist Hua Zhou

Ramanathan and his team used quantum materials—those whose properties operate outside the bounds of classical physics—to develop a device that can sort information quickly and efficiently. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, DOE’s Brookhaven Laboratory (BNL), and the University of California at San Diego helped him learn exactly how it works.

Ramanathan and his team began their experiment by introducing a proton into a quantum material called neodymium nickel oxide (NdNiO₃).

The RGM Watch Co. was founded by American watchmaker Roland G. Murphy. His career and interest in horology (the art or science of timekeeping devices) began as a teenager while working part-time for a clock company. Later, he enrolled in the Bowman Technical School of Watchmaking, and in 1986, Murphy was accepted into WOSTEP (Watchmakers of Switzerland Training and Educational Program).

After finishing WOSTEP, he worked in product development for the Hamilton Watch Co. until he founded the RGM Watch Co. in 1992.

RGM Watch sales are conducted on a personal, one-to-one basis. Customers who visit the company are often greeted by Murphy himself, who openly shares his passion for classic watch design, innovation, and craftsmanship as he discusses the custom design features that are often requested. RGM employs a team of 11 people and produces “a few hundred” watches a year, priced from $3,500 to $95,000, depending on design and material.

The future of work is hybrid. In the post-pandemic world, many companies will embrace the lessons learned from more than a year of telecommuting and not fully return to the office. Instead, Wharton management professor Martine Haas says, they will adopt a hybrid model with some combination of remote and in-person work.

“It’s going to be complicated to manage, but at the same time there are benefits that are probably pretty substantial,” she says. “Ideally, you’ll get some of the benefits of traditional co-located work, and you’ll also get some of the benefits, which we now know to be more substantial than we’d realized, of remote working.”

On conveyor systems in the food processing industry, some powdered and bulk solid materials such as grains, sugar, and creamer are ignition-sensitive in specific concentrations, particularly when exposed to static electricity discharge. Key concerns are conveyor-system connection points such as inlets, outlets, and storage bins. The concentration of dust can become sufficiently high for a deflagration to occur with accidental exposure to an ignition source, such as static electricity, a spark, flame, or even high heat or friction.

So, the characteristics of the material conveyed and the type of conveyor along with its associated component parts and connection points should be considered in the system’s design to avoid a serious risk of dust combustion and explosion. By carefully selecting and integrating the conveyor system and its components, food processors can minimize the risk of dust explosions while safely conveying materials in a hygienic and energy-efficient manner.

Quality professionals no longer focus solely on product or service quality. Today, the quality function is involved in almost every aspect of a company, from customer interactions and compliance management to environmental health and safety, supply chain management, risk management, and more.

A key reason for this broadened scope is the skills that already exist within the quality department. If you already have experience dealing with quality compliance, you already have many of the skills for environmental health and safety (EHS) compliance. If you’re already versed at risk management from a quality perspective, supply chain risk isn’t much of a reach.

Sophia Finn, director of strategy, QualityOne at Veeva Systems, agrees. “More is expected of the quality function, from managing risk to addressing sustainability and transparency across the supply chain,” says Finn, adding that the extended scope has also changed the focus. “As quality is elevated, the duties shift from tactical—like fighting fires—to more strategic—like determining how quality can help companies meet their objectives.”

It’s not so simple to deploy a practical system that satisfies differential privacy. Our example in the last post was a simple Python program that adds Laplace noise to a function computed over the sensitive data. For this to work in practice, we’d need to collect all the sensitive data on one server to run our program.

What if that server gets hacked? Differential privacy provides no protection in this case—it only protects the output of our program.

When deploying differentially private systems, it’s important to consider the threat model—that is, what kind of adversaries we want the system to protect against. If the threat model includes adversaries who might compromise the server holding the sensitive data, then we need to modify the system to protect against this kind of attack.

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.

Last spring, things looked grim for Dora Herrera. Revenues at her family’s 45-year-old restaurant business, Yuca’s, had plummeted within a few short weeks as Covid-19 kept customers away from its two popular taco shacks in Los Angeles and Pasadena, California.

The drop was precipitous. By late April things reached “a point where we were like, if we don’t get more customers or cash, we’re going to close on Monday,” she recalls.

A federal loan arrived in early May 2020, providing enough money for eight weeks of payroll, she says. During the months that followed, additional loans and grants—and Yuca’s ability to adapt to pandemic restrictions—kept the business alive, though the stress remained.

“We always said, we’ll figure out how to pay that loan back later,” Herrera says. “It was, just stay alive. Just stay alive.”

Using X-ray tomography, a research team has observed the internal evolution of the materials inside solid-state lithium batteries as they were charged and discharged. Detailed 3D information from the research could help improve the reliability and performance of the batteries, which use solid materials to replace the flammable liquid electrolytes in existing lithium-ion batteries.

The operando synchrotron X-ray computed microtomography imaging revealed how the dynamic changes of electrode materials at lithium/solid-electrolyte interfaces determine the behavior of solid-state batteries. The researchers found that battery operation caused voids to form at the interface, which created a loss of contact that was the primary cause of failure in the cells.

Artificial intelligence holds great promise for improving human health by helping doctors make accurate diagnoses and treatment decisions. It can also lead to discrimination that can harm minorities, women, and economically disadvantaged people.

The question is, when healthcare algorithms discriminate, what recourse do people have?

A prominent example of this kind of discrimination is an algorithm used to refer chronically ill patients to programs that care for high-risk patients. A study in 2019 found that the algorithm favored whites over sicker African Americans in selecting patients for these beneficial services. This is because it used past medical expenditures as a proxy for medical needs.

Poverty and difficulty accessing healthcare often prevent African Americans from spending as much money on healthcare as others. The algorithm misinterpreted their low spending as indicating they were healthy, and deprived them of critically needed support.

What is America Works, and why is it important to the future of American manufacturing?

The American manufacturing industry is at a crossroads, facing growing competition from foreign countries while struggling to develop a skilled, dedicated workforce here at home. American manufacturers are desperately searching for more employees in general, and more skilled workers specifically. Before the pandemic, it was widely reported that there were 600,000 manufacturing openings unfilled nationwide. Further, according to a November 2018 study in MIT Technology Review, during the next 10 years, 4.6 million manufacturing jobs will be created, with 2.4 million going unfilled due to a lack of skills and interest.