Lifeboat Foundation

About a year ago, Apple made the bold proclamation that it was zeroing in on a future where iPhones and MacBooks were created wholly of recycled materials. It was, and still is, an ambitious thought. In a technologically-charged world, many forget that nearly 100 percent of e-waste is recyclable. Apple didn’t.

Named “Daisy,” Apple’s new robot builds on its previous iteration, Liam, which Apple used to disassemble unneeded iPhones in an attempt to scrap or reuse the materials. Like her predecessor, Daisy can successfully salvage a bulk of the material needed to create brand new iPhones. All told, the robot is capable of extracting parts from nine types of iPhone, and for every 100,000 devices it manages to recover 1,900 kg (4,188 pounds) of aluminum, 770 kg of cobalt, 710 kg of copper, and 11 kg of rare earth elements — which also happen to be some of the hardest and environmentally un-friendly materials required to build the devices.

In its latest environmental progress report, Apple noted:

Continue reading “Apple’s recycling robot disassembles 200 iPhones an hour” »

You might only know JPEG as the default image compression standard, but the group behind it has now branched out into something new: JPEG XS. JPEG XS is described as a new low-energy format designed to stream live video and VR, even over WiFi and 5G networks. It’s not a replacement for JPEG and the file sizes themselves won’t be smaller; it’s just that this new format is optimized specifically for lower latency and energy efficiency. In other words, JPEG is for downloading, but JPEG XS is more for streaming.

The new standard was introduced this week by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which says that the aim of JPEG XS is to “stream the files instead of storing them in smartphones or other devices with limited memory.” So in addition to getting faster HD content on your large displays, the group also sees JPEG XS as a valuable format for faster stereoscopic VR streaming plus videos streamed by drones and self-driving cars.

“We are compressing less in order to better preserve quality, and we are making the process faster while using less energy,” says JPEG leader Touradj Ebrahimi in a statement. According to Ebrahimi, the JPEG XS video compression will be less severe than with JPEG photos — while JPEG photos are compressed by a factor of 10, JPEG XS is compressed by a factor of 6. The group promises a “visual lossless” quality to the images of JPEG XS.

A KAIST research team recently developed sodium ion batteries using copper sulfide anode. This finding will contribute to advancing the commercialization of sodium ion batteries (SIBs) and reducing the production cost of any electronic products with batteries.

Professor Jong Min Yuk and Emeritus Professor Jeong Yong Lee from Department of Materials Science and Engineering developed a new anode material suitable for use in an SIB. Compared to the existing anode materials, the copper sulfide anode was measured to exhibit 1.5 times better cyclability with projected 40 percent reduction in cost.

Lithium-ion batteries (Li-ion batteries or LIBs) are widely used in mobile phones and other personal electronics. However, large-scale energy storage systems require less expensive, more abundant materials. Hence, a SIBs have attracted enormous attention for their advantage over lithium-based batteries.

Processors with artificial intelligence will spread from today’s top-end phones to cars, PCs, security cameras, smart speakers and mainstream phones.

Artificial intelligence is permeating everybody’s lives through the face recognition, voice recognition, image analysis and natural language processing capabilities built into their smartphones and consumer appliances. Over the next several years, most new consumer devices will run AI natively, locally and, to an increasing extent, autonomously.

But there’s a problem: Traditional processors in most mobile devices aren’t optimized for AI, which tends to consume a lot of processing, memory, data and battery on these resource-constrained devices. As a result, AI has tended to execute slowly on mobile and “internet of things” endpoints, while draining their batteries rapidly, consuming inordinate wireless bandwidth and exposing sensitive local information as data makes roundtrips in the cloud.

That’s why mass-market mobile and IoT edge devices are increasingly coming equipped with systems-on-a-chip that are optimized for local AI processing. What distinguishes AI systems on a chip from traditional mobile processors is that they come with specialized neural-network processors, such as graphics processing units or GPUs, tensor processing units or TPUs, and field programming gate arrays or FPGAs. These AI-optimized chips offload neural-network processing from the device’s central processing unit chip, enabling more local autonomous AI processing and reducing the need to communicate with the cloud for AI processing.

Continue reading “New AI systems on a chip will spark an explosion of even smarter devices” »

Artificial intelligence is being used for a dizzying array of tasks, but one of the most successful is also one of the scariest: automated surveillance. Case in point is Chinese startup SenseTime, which makes AI-powered surveillance software for the country’s police, and which this week received a new round of funding worth $600 million. This funding, led by retailing giant Alibaba, reportedly gives SenseTime a total valuation of more than $4.5 billion, making it the most valuable AI startup in the world, according to analyst firm CB Insights.

This news is significant for a number of reasons. First, it shows how China continues to pour money into artificial intelligence, both through government funding and private investment. Many are watching the competition between China and America to develop cutting-edge AI with great interest, and see investment as an important measure of progress. China has overtaken the US in this regard, although experts are quick to caution that it’s only one metric of success.

Secondly, the investment shows that image analysis is one of the most lucrative commercial applications for AI. SenseTime became profitable in 2017 and claims it has more than 400 clients and partners. It sells its AI-powered services to improve the camera apps of smartphone-makers like OPPO and Vivo; to offer “beautification” effects and AR filters on Chinese social media platforms like Weibo; and to provide identity verification for domestic finance and retail apps like Huanbei and Rong360.

Continue reading “The world’s most valuable AI startup is a Chinese company specializing in real-time surveillance” »

New computing architectures aim to extend artificial intelligence from the cloud to smartphones.

“Although smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous, many of the companies that make our everyday consumer products still rely on paper trails and manually updated spreadsheets to keep track of their production processes and delivery schedules,” says Leyuan Shi, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

That’s what she hopes to change with a research idea she first published almost two decades ago.

During the past 16 years, Shi has visited more than 400 manufacturing companies in the United States, China, Europe, and Japan to personally observe their production processes. “And I have used that insight to develop tools that can make these processes run much more smoothly,” she says.

We are now a connected global community where many digital natives cannot remember a time before the iPhone. The rise of smart homes means that we are increasingly attaching our lighting, door locks, cameras, thermostats, and even toasters to our home networks. Managing our home automation through mobile apps or our voice illustrates how far we have evolved over the last few years.

However, in our quest for the cool and convenient, many have not stopped to consider their cybersecurity responsibilities. The device with the weakest security could allow hackers to exploit vulnerabilities on our network and access our home. But this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Businesses and even governments are starting to face up to the vulnerabilities of everything being online. Sophisticated and disruptive cyberattacks are continuing to increase in complexity and scale across multiple industries. Areas of our critical infrastructure such as energy, nuclear, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing have vulnerabilities that make them a target for cybercriminals and even a state-sponsored attack.