Category Archives: Technology

Forbes

Why Trump's Infrastructure Plan Needs Regulatory Technology Reform First Forbes Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska, frustrated by the red tape of regulatory bottlenecks, has made federal permitting reform a focus of both his legislative agenda and a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. The senator wants to limit new regulations, put a ...

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Why Trump's Infrastructure Plan Needs Regulatory Technology Reform First - Forbes

Urban sprawl is the reality for two out of three people living in Europe. This edition of Real Economy comes from the Spanish city of Valencia.

As we move to urban economic powerhouses for jobs and opportunities we also have to deal with critical issues like economic hardships, such as housing, transport and pollution. And that is really forcing cities to start thinking of how to become smart cities.

Around 80 percent of Europes energy is used by us as city dwellers, but we contribute around 85 percent of the continents GDP. Now as the worlds urban population is set to double by 2050, it might be a good idea for us to understand what a smart city is.

Crash course: smart city

Everyday we connect lifes dots, to wake up, go to work, socialise and sleep.

Smart cities connect the dots as well. Between humans, society, information and communication technology.

Connections that know when your next bus to work will arrive, and is capable of controlling the traffic to decrease congestion. Finding you a parking space.

Sensors that light street lamps, call emergency services or warn about pollution levels in real time.

Smart cities take all the elements of urban life, creating a technological platform that allows citizens, businesses and governments to communicate and work together.

Smart cities have until recently been large ones like Barcelona or Amsterdam, but smaller cities are catching up, piloting or planning to implement smart city strategies.

Leading the way in Europe with the largest number of these smart cities are the UK, Spain and Italy.

Europe has put urban development at the heart of its plan for 2020. With a significant chunk of its European regional development fund earmarked to help smart cities, along with other funds that can be mixed and matched by cities and national governments.

The logic? Well it is quite simple: that smaller cities after the crisis are going to have a tough time raising the cheap funding they need to do the infrastructure transformation a smart city requires - municipal budgets have been cut and debt levels tend to be quite high.

Fanny Gauret set out to see how Valencia is starting ITS Smart transformation.

Inspired by Europes large smart cities, Valencia began its transformation in 2012. Im heading to the centre of urban innovation to find out how far theyve come.

Tools like AppValencia allow locals get real time information on buses and bikes, alerts about the city, and even pay bills online. This is integrated into the smart city management platform a first in Spain.

It is a horizontal platform, in the way that it integrates the information collated from all services and also the external information generated by companies, explained Rafael Monterde-Diaz, CEO, Las Naves Urban Innovation Centre, Valencia City Council. The citizens are able to use the data. The private sector in general can develop apps, solutions that the city can benefit from, because it gives us a solution for a service, but also it is a viable business model that allow them to generate profitability.

Valencia has budgeted over one billion euros for its transformation. More than half of that amount will be contributed by the European structural and investment funds.

An example of how the change will help Valencias residents is the traffic management control centre.

Basically we have real time control of what is happening in the principal avenues of the city, added Monterde-Diaz. The control of traffic lights, we can change the frequency to facilitate emergencies, for example, or avoid traffic jam.

The system reduces pollution and can lower costs for utilities so its getting another six million euros from the Spanish government and the EU. Companies such as Telefonica are helping it happen.

In the business world we have dedicated to themes around the Internet of Things, and amongst them, smart cities, Kim Faura, General Manager Catalonia, Valencian Community, Balearic Islands and Murcia Region, Telefonica Spain, told Euronews. We have in our pocket a sensor that gives a lot of information. It is said that by 2020, millions of things will be connected.

Our smart city strategy has allowed us to learn a lot about the resources we have in the city, said Monterde-Diaz.

Parking spots, street lamps, rubbish skips, they are in place, but now we need that these objects speak to us, and theyll communicate over the internet allowing us to manage more efficiently.

It is now up to Valencia to communicate and interact with the citizens, universities and companies to fully develop its strategy.

Because that smart digitalization is critical to our booming urban population growth.

Conversation with Xiao Puig, President of the Valencian government.

A coherent strategy and building trust among citizens is imperative for a successful smart city. In a region like Valencia, that job falls on Xiao Puig. He is the president of the Valencian government.

Maithreyi Seetharaman, Euronews: How are you building trust for a smart vision for Valencia and what is that vision?

Ximo Puig: We came from a situation of mistrust in the public sector fundamentally because of problems from the past. It is still difficult but progressively results support the process and gradually there are more citizens, more companies that trust in this system of innovation that affects all of us and that most certainly is lead by the public sector together with the private sector.

Maithreyi Seetharaman, Euronews: What is the state of Valencias economy and how are you going to use technology to build on the strengths and curtail the weaknesses?

Ximo Puig: The Valencian economy has grown 3.9 percent in the past year. Valencian companies and workers are overcoming great challenges We have a problem in adapting education to new companies and this is a fundamental element. We also have an issue with language skills. We have a problem with everything related to the incorporation of education into an innovative society. For example, The Valencian community will be the first community in Spain to be connected on line. This is a fundamental element to finally bringing all citizens, all families, all companies together into a real information society.

Maithreyi Seetharaman, Euronews: How hard has it been for you to raise the money that you need from the capital markets or have you had to turn to grants and funding.. and in some ways do you think it sets some kind of precedent or example for other cities who are trying this strategy around Europe?

Ximo Puig: We have to combine funds. Private funds like banks, companies and there is also the non-profit sector. There are diverse possibilities of capital contribution from the private sector but of course we need European funds, we also need our own funds. It is a process.

We have the same problems as other different European regions. It is evident that there are more advanced regions and less advanced ones. In the end, this is about Europe having a project in favour of all of European regions facing this fundamental challenge which is an information society, a communication society.

Maithreyi Seetharaman, Euronews: Mr. Puig, on that note thank you for your time.

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How 'smart city' technology is connecting Europeans - euronews

Forbes

Entrepreneurs To Launch Technology Globally That May Revolutionize How We Care For Aging Parents Forbes In the heart of every caregiver is a knowing that we are all connected. As I do for you, I do for me. Tia Walker, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love. Two entrepreneurs in Middle America are about to launch a system ...

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Entrepreneurs To Launch Technology Globally That May Revolutionize How We Care For Aging Parents - Forbes

Knoxville Chamber(Photo: NEWS SENTINEL FILE)Buy Photo

Before long, companies might be able to use a drone to fly around inside a factory or warehouse and use radio frequency technology to checkinventory or equipment, Dale Conerly told a group at the Knoxville Chamber on Tuesday.

His company is still developing this, but for now, there are lots of more down-to-earth uses forradio frequency identification equipment, Conerly, sales engineer for Chattanooga-based Barcom Inc., told about 50 people gathered for a meeting of the Chamber's Manufacturer's Roundtable on Tuesday.

The group meets monthly to share ideas about problems and issues faced by all the companies involved. They host guest presenters and sometimes arrangetours of each other's facilities. Scott Snyder, materials manager with Morgan Olson, invitedConerly to tell the group about what Barcom offers.

The equipment is a more sophisticatedversion ofbar code systems used in stores. Barcom makes different kinds of electromagneticribbons that can be attached to equipment and materials to contain information that can be retrieved by a RFID reader. For manufacturers, the equipment could be used for tracking the location of equipment in a factory, keeping tabs on its maintenance schedule, or other uses. Conerly said one use of the technology in manufacturing is ina "closed-loop"system.

"A closed-loop system would be if I am manufacturing an automobile seat and it's going through a process from cell to cell to cell, and I have it on a skid or carrier, and I want to know the work in process," he said. "I can put an RFID tag on that skid and I can process and track that skid through the system usingRFID. No one has to scan it; no one has to put a bar code on it."

Jennifer Moore, in charge of business development for Mesa Technologies Inc., said she could see potential uses for the technology.

"We are a custom manufacturer," she said. "We build equipment for other manufacturers."

Mesa puts together systems that manufacturers can use to automate parts of their operations. RFID might be something that could be incorporated in some processes, she said. Moore said the roundtable meetings have been helpful.

"It's nice to have a forum where we can discuss issues together and get expert people to help," she said. "We are all collectively solving issues in common that we all have."

For more information on the Manufacturer's Roundtable, visit http://www.knoxvillechamber.com/manufacturer%E2%80%99s-roundtableor contact Sam Hart at 865-637-4550.

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Sky's the limit for RFID technology, Chamber told - Knoxville News Sentinel

Politicians who talk about the future of clean coal as part of the U.S. energy mix need look no farther than the Kemper County Energy Facility in Mississippi to see both the promise and the peril that the technology has to offer.

Kemper is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over the $2.2-billion cost estimate given in 2010 when construction began. And a recent financial analysis paints a dim picture of the plants potential for profit.

A decade ago, integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC)was heralded as the enabler ofa continued and even expanded use of coal for electric power generation. The process starts byturning coal into synthesis gas, a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The syn gas can then be cleaned of impurities, and burned to drive a turbine. Excess heat goes to power steam turbine. Dozens of U.S. projects were proposed. Equipment manufacturers and engineering firms alike focused resources to developing the technology.

Southern Company, whose utility business units operate 44,000 megawatts of installed capacity and generate electricity for 9 million customers across the southern United States, saw an opportunity for IGCC at a location in Kemper County, Miss.

In many ways, a better site for IGCC could scarcely be found. Kemper is close to an estimated 4 billion metric tons of mineable Mississippi lignite, a low-rank coal with high moisture and ash content. Southern owns the lignite fields and saw a way via IGCC to use that coal for power generation. Whats more, Kemper is close to mature oil fields, which became candidates for enhanced oil recovery (EOR)the use of carbon dioxide captured from the power plants coal gasification process to push out the oil.

The clean coal opportunity extended beyond Kemper County and Southern Co. Low-rank coals make up roughly half of the proven coal reserves in the United States and worldwide. Southern, along with KBR and in conjunction with the U.S. Energy Department, developed its own version of IGCC calledTransport Integrated Gasification (TRIG). That technology was developed to work with lower-rank coals and presented an opportunity to market domesticallyand evenexport the technology.

The Kemper County IGCC Project is a scale-up of a test plant that was already in operation in Alabama. The combined cycle portion of Kemper Countyhas worked well and has been generating electricity since August 2014 with conventional natural gas.

Its the gasification part of the plant that is proving problematic.

For one thing, the company found that many of the original design specs needed changes, delaying the project and boosting its cost. One design flaw miscalculated pipe thickness, length, quantity, and metallurgy. After these changes were made, additional changes needed to be done to support structures.

For another thing, integrated gasification is something akin to a chemistry set that has been bolted onto a conventional power plants front end.IGCC technology is intended not only to produce syngasbut also to create marketable byproducts from the gasification process, such as carbon dioxide. Thecaptured carbon dioxide from Kemper was earmarked to help stimulate production at nearby oil fields through EOR.

On paper, at least, IGCC offers an elegant approach to use coal for electric power generation, create cleaner burning synthetic gas, capture and reuse carbon dioxide, and manufacture chemical byproducts for sale. In practice, however, Kemper Countys technology is proving to be troublesome, expensive, and potentially uneconomic to run.

In mid-February, Mississippi Powerthe Southern Co. utility that is hosting the projectextended the expected in-service date of Kemper County until mid-March, the latest in a series of rescheduled dates.

The utility said in a statement that while integrated operation of the facilitys gasifiers and combustion turbines has continued for periods since late January, the schedule adjustment is needed because of issues experienced with the ash removal system in one of the gasifiers.

In particular, the plant has had a reoccurring issue in operating both of its gasifiers reliably over an extended period without forming clinkers ash fused to the gasifier walls. Neither gasifier has operated for longer than about six weeks without clinkers occurring. These chunks of ash are enough to impact the plants operating efficiency and bring the facilitydown for maintenance.

The issues dont end there. Aconfidential report[PDF]by URS, made public by in early Februarythe Mississippi Public Service Commission, outlined seven key technical milestones in addition to the clinkers that it said had yet to be achieved.

Most of the milestones focused on the gasification technology and the plants ability to deliver byproducts (including carbon dioxide for oil recovery) that met environmental specs.

Engineering challenges aside, a separate report called into question the plants overall economic viability. In particular, long-term natural gas price forecasts now suggest that the Kemper IGCC may not be competitive when compared to natural gas combined cycle units at the nearby Plant Sweatt site.

In a 19 February earnings conference call, Thomas Fanning, chairman, president and CEO of Southern, said:When we had this plant certificated(in 2010), we all thought that gas prices were going to be double digits. By 2016, however, that assessment had changed, resulting in a reduction of gas price forecasts of 25to 30 percent.

Hydraulic fracturing largely can be thanked for the change in fortune. Indeed, as far back as 2011 natural gas prices nationally were low enough to economically displace coal-fired generating units across multiple states.

Coal from parts of the Appalachian and Illinois basins were displaced first as natural gas prices fell and the fuels nagging price volatility eased. Among the last to be impacted would be inexpensive, low-rank coals that required little handling to move from the mine mouth to the power plant. Just such a scenario began to hit the Kemper IGCC in late 2016.

We know that gas forecasts have changed a lot over time, Fanning said on the analyst call. And with respect to whether we should recover it or not, I don't thinkI mean as a matter of fairness, I cannot imagine that the company is going to be held accountable for changing gas price forecasts.

What Fanning was alluding to was the fact that state officials who oversee Mississippi Power ultimately will decide whether or not the Kemper IGCC plant is used and useful and how the company can account for and recover the expenses related to its construction.

Regulators already have capped the amount that Mississippi Power customers must pay at just under $3 billion. But another $4 billion need to be accounted for and allocated through regulatory hearings that are expected to start once Kemper County enters service.

As for the upcoming regulatory process, Fanning said:We certainly have taken our lumps, but we have delivered what was certificated back in 2010. He expressed confidence that the Kemper IGCC would deliver what was required when IGCC technology was seen as offering an opportunity to develop clean coal for electric power generation.

Certainly there's a lot of different ways the regulatory process could unfold from there, Fanning said. That's our starting point.

IEEE Spectrums energy, power, and green tech blog, featuring news and analysis about the future of energy, climate, and the smart grid.

Sign up for the EnergyWise newsletter and get biweekly news on the power & energy industry, green technology, and conservation delivered directly to your inbox.

As coal industry jobs are lost, likely not to return, some in coal country have turned to coding 15Feb

Deregulation actions by congressional Republicans may undercut innovative sensor technology by quashing methane detection at oil and gas sites 13Feb

DOE report says renewable power generation jobs surpassed those in fossil fuels, and are growing faster 26Jan

Petra Nova, the world's biggest CCS project, started up last week, and other sites show that it's not just for coal anymore 16Jan

Analytics from Berkeley-based WattTime precisely match new loads on a grid to the power plant that will serve them, providing estimates of carbon intensity that are up to 45 percent more accurate than regional averages. Such tools can guide cleaner charging by electric vehicles, and yield a bigger carbon reduction bang from energy efficiency measures and renewable power projects. 26Dec2016

Some of the work of the U.S. Department of Energy's advanced research wing fits fine with Trump's priorities, but analysts worry the next generation of solar tech could suffer 5Dec2016

Aluminum-based device produces industrially useful compounds 20Jul2016

Claire, a Canadian microsatellite launched in June, is gearing up to take high-resolution snapshots of greenhouse gas plumes 5Jul2016

Simulations show the potential for wider problems, because of natural gas dependence and poor understanding of feedback effects between the two systems 24May2016

A silicon MEMS device that accurately measures gravity could make geophysical surveys easier, cheaper, and safer 30Mar2016

With carbon markets and subsidies in doubt, nuclear is no longer affordable 25Mar2016

World leaders set a high bar for climate action, striking a deal in Paris that well exceeds their action plans. But transparency, verification and peer pressure could close the gap 16Dec2015

Pledged carbon emissions fall well short of what's needed to hold global warming to 2 degrees Celsius this century. Emissions denial could ultimately turn up the heat even more 10Nov2015

Researchers calculate the maximum efficiency for using sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into fuel, and it's pretty good 26Oct2015

A $20 million Carbon XPrize funded by big fossil fuel producers and users sets a 4-1/2 year challenge to turn carbon dioxide into value-added products. Could there be more value in reducing emissions at the source? 29Sep2015

An attempt to understand VW's clean diesel tech instead uncovered one of history's greatest corporate cybercrimes 22Sep2015

You have to account not just for inflation but for what economists call oil intensity 21Sep2015

Regions could save $5.7 million-$210 million per year by replacing coal-fired power with renewable energy or energy efficiency measures 31Aug2015

But will all this data have any impact on policy? 20Aug2015

Superfast simulation would allow regions to trade higher electricity costs for reduced healthcare costs 17Aug2015

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Kemper County and the Perils of Clean Coal Technology - IEEE Spectrum

On the surface,a Google subsidiarys blistering accusation last week that Uber has stolen its driverless car technology looks like any of the thousands of patent lawsuits piling up in Silicon Valley court dockets.

This one is different, however. And its different in ways that could spell bad news for Uber.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in San Francisco federal court by Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. devoted to developing self-driving technology. (Alphabet is the new name for Google.) Waymo is responsible for those bug-shaped cars and other vehicles testing the technology around Northern California. Theyre equipped with sophisticated laser systems that create a 3-D picture of the landscape, allowing the vehicles to navigate around obstacles.

Waymo says that Anthony Levandowski, who was once Googles driverless-car guru, downloaded 14,000 proprietary company files onto his own computer and absconded with them when he left Google to found his own company in 2016. That company, Otto, was soon acquired by Uber for $680 million. Not long after that, Google says, it discovered that Ottos technology was largely identical to its own. The lawsuit seeks damages for alleged infringement of three Google patents and an injunction barring Uber from using any of the technology.

One aspect of the lawsuit that struck some Silicon Valley observers from the first was the extensive detail in the accusations.

Normally in a case like this, theres a lot of innuendo in the early stages, says Eric Goldman, a patent law expert at Santa Clara University law school. But Waymo specified how and when it alleges Levandowski downloaded the files, the breadth of his alleged theft and efforts to conceal his actions, and how it discovered them from an email a supplier sent to members of Levandowskis team and mistakenly copied to a Waymo employee.

Google spent a lot of time and money investigating before it filed the lawsuit, Goldman told me.

Of course, the lawsuit represents just one side of the story. Uber hasnt yet responded in court. In a statement, the company said it had reviewedWaymo's claims anddetermined them to be a baseless attempt to slow down a competitor. Uber added, We look forward to vigorously defending against them in court.

Another unusual aspect of the case, Goldman says, is that Google is bringing it at all. Intellectual property lawsuits are out of character for Google, he says, even though it has so many former employees that a large amount of its IP must be at large in the technology community. They just dont show up as a plaintiff, he says. Moreover, Google is an investor in Uber with a stake of at least $250 million; a Google executive sat on Ubers board until just after Uber acquired Otto.

Google hasnt said much about why this episode should be different from any others, beyond a Waymo blog post that implies it was just too gross an offense to ignore.

These actions were part of a concerted plan to steal Waymos trade secrets and intellectual property, the post reads. Given the overwhelming facts...we have no choice but to defend our investment and development of this unique technology.

I asked Google to elaborate, but havent heard back.

Goldman conjectures further that this might be an asset especially valuable to the Google family, something extra important.If thats so, it underscores the grand expectations for driverless technology, despite indications that it may be oversold. Google has been among the most enthusiastic developers in the field; just last year, Eric Schmidt, its executive chairman, crowed that "the technology worksbecause, frankly, the computer can see better than you can, even if you're not drunk in a car.

The lawsuit says the markets for self-driving cars are nascent and on the cusp of rapid development. It asserts that the companys fleet of self-driving cars has logged 2.5 million miles on public roads, which it says equates to over 300 years of human driving experience. Its arithmetic is murky, however, since Americans alone log more than 3 trillion miles everyyear. In any event, some experts believe that a transition to fully autonomous cars the ones you nap in, rather than paying at least some attention to the road could be decades away.

Obviously, theres a lot at stake in the case for big, brash Uber. The company has built its reputation as a juggernaut by flouting local car-hire regulations and bullying municipal officials who dare to stand in its way. Google may not be as inclined to back off as your city alderman.

As my colleague Tracey Lien observed Friday, the lawsuit capped a bad stretch for Uber. That started with a boycott of the firm after it was perceived to have taken advantage of a taxi drivers strike at New Yorks JFK airport to protest President Trumps immigrant ban. It was followed by a devastating picture of a sexual harassment culture at Uber headquarters posted online by a former engineer, Susan Fowler Rigetti. Now comes Waymos unusually detailed accusation of intellectual property thievery.

The case may also underscore the weakness of Ubers claim to a $70-billion valuation in the private venture market. That valuation had been based on the expectation that Uber was poised to radically reform the transportation-for-hire economy by shouldering vehicle-owning taxi companies and individuals out of the way, replacing them with independent drivers using their own cars. If Google is to be believed, Uber now puts such stake in owning its own capital assets that it waswilling to pay $680 million for the necessary (allegedly stolen)technology.

Moving from a business model in which the company essentially owns nothing but skims a vigorish of 25% or more off the fares paid to its independent contractors, to one in which it owns and must continue to develop a fleet of its own vehicles represents a major change of direction. As transportation expert Hubert Horan observed in a detailed critique of Uber last December, it is unclear why investors would wager billions on the prospect that it will eventually be able to design and build highly sophisticated vehicles more efficiently than competitors such as Google, Tesla, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Ford and General Motors.

The allegations in the lawsuit imply that Uber went to great lengths to obtain its driverless technology. The core allegation concerns its light detection and ranging system, orLiDAR, which coordinates and interprets in real timethe signals returned from laser beams bouncing off objects in the real world. Waymo says its LiDAR is the most advanced in the fieldanda trade secret.

According to the lawsuit, while Levandowski was managing Waymo, he was plotting to start his own competing company. Starting in December 2015, he downloaded 14,000 Waymo files, including specifications for its LiDAR system, from a company laptop, the lawsuit alleges,then he erased and reformatted the laptop to eliminate evidence of what he had done. Within weeks he resigned from Waymo and launched Otto. Other Waymo employees soon followed him out the door, taking other trade secrets, the lawsuit says.

Then, last December, a Waymo employee was sent a copy of an email destined for the Otto team. It happened, the lawsuit said,to include a rendering of an Otto circuit board that bore a striking resemblance to a circuit board design that Levandowski had downloaded.

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow@hiltzikmon Twitter, see hisFacebook page, or emailmichael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

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Facing a lawsuit from Google over driverless car technology, Uber may finally have met its match - Los Angeles Times

Forbes

Technology Hits The Fields Forbes During a recent blizzard in Massachusetts, Sonia Lo, CEO of FreshBox Farms, was in a grocery store suggesting to skeptical patrons that they sample her leafy greens. They were picked yesterday, is what she told tasters. She also told them no, they ...

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Technology Hits The Fields - Forbes

The United States shares 5,525 miles of land border with Canada and 1,989 miles with Mexico. Monitoring these borders, which is the responsibility of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), is an enormous task. Detecting, and responding to, illegal activity while facilitating lawful commerce and travel is made more difficult by the expansive, rugged, diverse, and thickly vegetated geography that spans both often-crossed borders. To help mitigate the challenges to border surveillance, a group of researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory is investigating whether an airborne ladar system capable of imaging objects under a canopy of foliage could aid in the maintenance of border security by remotely detecting illegal activities. Their work will be presented at the 16th Annual IEEE Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security to be held April 25-26 in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Requisite for effective border protection is timely, actionable information on areas of interest. Leveraging the laboratorys long experience in building imaging systems that exploit microchip lasers and Geiger-mode avalanche photodiodes, the research team developed and tested two concepts of operations (CONOPS) for using airborne ladar systems to detect human activity in wooded regions.

"For any new technology to be effectively used by CBP, an emerging sensor must bring with it a sensible deployment architecture and concept of operation," said John Aldridge, a technical staff member from the Laboratory's Homeland Protection Systems Group, who has been working with a multidisciplinary, cross-divisional team that includes Marius Albota, Brittany Baker, Daniel Dumanis, Rajan Gurjar, and Lily Lee. The CONOPS that the engineering team focused on were cued examination of a localized area and uncued surveillance of a large area. To demonstrate the approach, the engineering team conducted proof-of-concept experiments with the laboratory's Airborne Optical Systems Testbed (AOSTB), a Twin Otter aircraft outfitted with an onboard ladar sensor.

For cued surveillance, the use of an airborne ladar sensor platform (whether a piloted or unpiloted aircraft system) might be prompted by another persistent sensor that indicates the presence of activity in a localized area at or near the border. "The area of coverage for cued surveillance may be in the 1 km2 to 10km2 range, and the laboratory has already developed and demonstrated sensor technology that can achieve this coverage in minutes," Albota said.

Uncued wide-area surveillance sorties might be flown long distances and over timelines of days or weeks to establish typical activity patterns and to discover emerging paths and structures in high-interest regions. "The area coverage required under such a CONOPS may reach as high as 300 to 800 km of border, depending on the Border Patrol Sector and vegetation density," Aldridge explained, adding, "Although the current AOSTB's area coverage rate is limited by the aircraft's airspeed, the sensor can image such a region in a matter of hours in a single sortie."

As a start to their field tests to assess their CONOPS, the team flew data collection runs over several local sites identified as representative of the northern U.S. border environment. The sites contained a variety of low-growing brush, thin ground vegetation, very tall coniferous-trees, and leafy deciduous trees. For the tests, the team positioned vehicles, tents, and other camp equipment in the woods to serve as the targets of interest. "We made 40 passes at an altitude of 7,500 feet to allow for a spatial resolution of about 25 centimeters," Dumanis said. "In between each pass, we moved the concealed items so that we could perform post-process analysis for change and motion detection," Baker added.

In this post-processing stage, the team members enhanced the data captured during the flights so that human analysts could then inspect the ladar imagery. They digitally removed ground-height data to reveal the three-dimensional ladar point cloud above ground and then digitally thresholded the height (erased 3-D points above a certain height) to eliminate the foliage cover. The resulting images gave analysts Gurjar and Lee a starting point for approximating the locations of both the planted objects as well as objects that were already on scene.

Searching through vast quantities of ladar data to spot areas for careful inspection is a labor intensive task even for experienced analysts who can recognize subtle cues that direct them to the possible presence of objects in the imagery. For the ladar data to be efficiently mined, an automated method of identifying areas of interest is needed. "One of the ways to alert analysts to potential targets is to track changes in the 3-D temporal data," Lee explained. "Changes caused by vehicle movements or alterations in a customary scene can indicate uncharacteristic activity."

To begin a change detection approach to the discovery of potential targets of interest, the research team registered the before and after ladar data and then subtracted the before data from the after dataset. This process allowed some improvement in the visual identification of vehicles that appeared where there had been none before; however, even a skilled human analyst would find it difficult to spot the small changes that signaled the presence of a vehicle.

A change detection approach, therefore, must compensate for the challenge posed by clutter in the ladar data. This clutter comes from the nature of ladar collection in densely foliated environment. As light travels through gaps between foliage, it bounces off a surface of leaves, ground, or human-made objects. The returned light is collected by the ladar sensor to form the 3-D point cloud. Because the motion induced by a flying platform causes each ladar scan to travel through different configurations of gaps between leaves, different parts of the canopy and shrubbery are sensed by the ladar. "Much of the clutter in our change detection output is from the different levels of canopy detected from different ladar scans," explained Gurjar.

To make the ladar change detection data easier for analysts to search, the team looked to automated object detection, a well-established field in computer vision that has been applied to images and radar data. Since ladar data presents in three dimensions and has unique noise characteristics, the team had to enhance the established automated detection approach with a sum of absolute difference (SAD) technique that factors in the height differences used to construct 3-D ladar imagery. Trials of the SAD technique applied to simulated vehicles in a foliated environment demonstrated that the approach yielded high detection rates and has potential as an automated method for reducing the huge amount of ladar data analysts would have to scrutinize to discover objects of interest.

"Looking forward, we hope to improve the capabilities of automated 3-D change detection to be more robust to natural temporal changes in foliage, expand the number of automatically detected object classes, and extend automated detection capability to full 3-D point clouds," said Lee, with Aldridge adding that they are also interested in exploring alternative aircraft for hosting the ladar system.

In its strategic plan "Vision and Strategy 2020," the CBP has expressed the need to apply advanced technology solutions for border management. Continued development of Lincoln Laboratory's automated approach to using a low-cost ladar system for surveillance of foliated regions may in the future offer another tool that the Department of Homeland Security's CBP can deploy to monitor the growing volume of land border activity.

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Foliage-penetrating ladar technology may improve border surveillance - MIT News

Manufacturing small proteins known as peptides is usually very time-consuming, which has slowed development of new peptide drugs for diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and bacterial infections.

To help speed up the manufacturing process, MIT researchers have designed a machine that can rapidly produce large quantities of customized peptides. Their new tabletop machine can form links between amino acids, the buildings blocks of proteins, in about 37 seconds, and it takes less than an hour to generate complete peptide molecules containing up to 60 amino acids.

You can dial in whatever amino acids you want, and the machine starts printing off these peptides faster than any machine in the world, says Bradley Pentelute, the Pfizer-Laubach Career Development Associate Professor of Chemistry at MIT.

This technology could help researchers rapidly generate new peptide drugs to test on a variety of diseases, and it also raises the possibility of easily producing customized cancer vaccines for individual patients.

Pentelute is the senior author of a paper describing the new system in the Feb. 27 issue of Nature Chemical Biology. The papers lead authors are graduate students Alexander Mijalis and Dale Thomas; other authors are graduate student Mark Simon, research associate Andrea Adamo, Ryan Beaumont, and Warren K. Lewis Professor of Chemical Engineering Klavs Jensen.

Fast flow

Using traditional peptide manufacturing techniques, which were developed more than 20 years ago, it takes about an hour to perform the chemical reactions needed to add each amino acid to a peptide chain.

Pentelute, Jensen, and their colleagues set out several years ago to devise a faster method based on a newer manufacturing approach known as flow chemistry. Under this strategy, chemicals flow through a series of modules that each perform one step of the overall synthesis.

The teams first version of a flow-based peptide synthesis machine, reported in 2014, sped up the process to about three minutes per peptide bond. In their latest effort, the researchers hoped to make the synthesis even faster by automating more of the process. In the earlier version, the person running the machine had to manually pump amino acids out of their storage bottles, but the new machine automates that step as well.

Our focus when we were setting out to design the automated machine was to have all the steps controlled by computer, and that would eliminate a lot of the human error and unreliability thats associated with someone doing this process by hand, Mijalis says.

Once a user enters the desired amino acid sequence, the amino acids are pumped, in the correct order, into a module where they are briefly heated to about 90 degrees Celsius to make them more chemically reactive. After being activated, the amino acids flow into a chamber where they are added to the growing peptide chains.

Its a very iterative process, where youre building up this molecular chain, one piece by one piece, Mijalis says.

As each amino acid is added to the chain, the researchers can measure how much was correctly incorporated by analyzing the waste products that flow into the final chamber of the device. The current machine attaches each amino acid to the chain with about 99 percent efficiency.

In my view, this approach opens up the field to the generation of peptide libraries that enable more complete structure-activity relationships of bioactive peptides in a matter of days, as well as extending this chemical approach to the synthesis of small proteins and protein domains, says Paul Alewood, a research group leader in chemistry and structural biology at the University of Queensland Institute for Molecular Bioscience.

It will be used in both academia and industry when commercially available instruments for this chemistry become widely available, says Alewood, who was not involved in the research.

Personalized chemistry

Once synthesized, small peptides can be joined together to form larger proteins. So far, the researchers have made proteins produced by HIV, a fragment of an antifreeze protein (which helps organisms survive extreme cold), and a toxin secreted by snails. They are also working on replicating toxins from other animals, which have potential uses as painkillers, blood thinners, or blood clotting agents. They have also made antimicrobial peptides, which scientists are exploring as a possible new class of antibiotic drugs.

Another possible application for the new machine is generating peptides that could be used as personalized cancer vaccines targeting unique proteins found in individual patients tumors. Thats exactly what our machine makes, and it makes them at scales that are all ready to meet this demand for personalized cancer vaccines, Pentelute says.

The MIT team is also interested in adapting this technology to make other molecules in which building blocks are strung together in long chains, such as polymers and oligonucleotides (strands of RNA or DNA).

We can start thinking about a personalized chemistry machine, Pentelute says. Its modular and its adaptable to all sorts of other chemistries.

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New technology offers fast peptide synthesis | MIT News - MIT News

7 hours ago Columns By Hebani Duggal | 7 hours ago

The worst news today is the news about how technology is killing us. The use of social media causes us to meet face-to-face with much less frequency resulting in a lack of social skills or technology creates the perfect recipe for depression with the lack of human contact, overeating, and lack of exercise or being constantly plugged in and connected causes an extra layer of stress that wasnt present before the overuse of technology I can keep going, but honestly Im sure you could type the words bad and technology, and Googles algorithm will be happy to oblige.

Its not so much that these news stories are fake as it is that technology seems to be pit against anything good that could occur in society. Fearing the inevitable shift towards technology accomplishes little else other than an unproductive discussion to which the only logical conclusion seems to be switching off all your devices and hiding in your house.

There seems to be a distinction people draw today of what is real and unreal. Real is what occurs in our everyday, face-to-face interactions while unreal is what apparently occurs online. There is, however, danger in drawing conclusions like this about the technology we engage with on an everyday basis. Technology tends to be a reflection of the kind of people we are and the interactions we engage in on an everyday basis. When we draw a line between technology and real life, however, we do ourselves a disservice in analyzing how technology impacts our everyday lives. Rather than looking at how we may turn away from the technology we employ in our lives, we must look to how we may better understand and benefit from the technologies we have and will continue to use in our lives. Painting the teenagers that spend time on their phones as being too obsessed with technology unfairly identifies technology as the problem, and fails to see the larger context at hand.

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