All posts by Naomi Smith

Naomi is a UK-based Journalist, writer and online content creator with around six years experience. She has a master's degree in investigative journalism and experience working as a beat reporter, primarily covering aviation law, regulation and politics. She has written for online publications on a variety of topics, including politics, gaming and film.
Tech

Ex-Google CEO to create new home for computer science at Princeton University

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Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, have given Princeton a gift large enough for the university to rebuild and expand Guyot Hall into a new place for its Department of Computer Science, the New Jersey-based Ivy League university said on 29 May.

When completed in 2026, the renovated building will be called the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Hall, and will consolidate the computer science department — which is currently spread out over nine different buildings — into one purpose-built space.

Earlier this year, the University announced the gift establishing the Schmidt DataX Fund, which will advance the breadth and depth of data science impact on campus, accelerate discovery in three large, interdisciplinary research efforts, and create opportunities to educate, train, convene and support a broad data science community at the University.

Guyot Hall was built in 1909, and was named for Princeton’s first professor of geology and geography, Arnold Guyot, a member of the faculty from 1854 to 1884. The building’s construction was supported with proceeds from gifts made to Princeton by Cleveland H. Dodge 1879 and his mother to benefit the University’s programs in geology and biology.

According to the university, renovations will preserve the original collegiate Gothic architectural details of the building’s exterior, and the Guyot name will be recognized in a new built space located elsewhere on campus which will be associated with Princeton’s environmental science programs.

The university expects the renovation of Guyot Hall to increase the square feet assigned to the computer science department and will also build in capacity for future growth of the department’s faculty and student body.

During renovation of Guyot, the University said it will provide additional interim space in the Friend Center for the department. Construction is planned to begin in early 2024, with the computer science department projected to move into the renovated building in mid-2026.

The Schmidts also established the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund in 2009, an endowment which supports “the invention, development and utilization of cutting-edge technology that has the capacity to transform research in the natural sciences and engineering at Princeton”.

Eric Schmidt was formerly chief executive officer of Google from 2001 to 2011 and then served as executive chairman of Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent company. He is a member of Alphabet’s board of directors through June and has also previously served as a Trustee of Princeton.

Wendy Schmidt is a businesswoman and philanthropist, and the president of The Schmidt Family Foundation and co-founder of Schmidt Ocean Institute.

Schmidt’s “career as a computer scientist makes the . . . name especially fitting for the new home of Princeton’s world-class Department of Computer Science,” President Christopher L. Eisgruber said in a statement. “We are deeply grateful to Eric Schmidt, his wife, Wendy Schmidt, and Schmidt Futures for their spectacular vision and generosity.

“Their extraordinary commitments to this new facility, to the Schmidt DataX Fund, and to the Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund have powerfully enhanced Princeton’s capacity for teaching, innovation and collaboration that open new frontiers of learning and improve the world,” he added.

“Princeton recognizes that computational thinking as a mode of scholarship, inquiry and critical thinking is essential across campus,” Jennifer Rexford, Professor of Engineering and chair of Princeton’s computer science department, said.

“We are deeply grateful for [the] gift, which makes it possible to have a central location for computer science in which we can create intellectual collisions and serendipitous encounters between faculty and among students, creating human connections that spark new ideas across campus and beyond,” she concluded.

Schmidt noted that when he earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1976 he “majored in electrical engineering, because computer science was barely an option. Now it’s the largest department at Princeton and data science has the potential to transform every discipline, and find solutions to profound societal problems”.

“Wendy and I are excited to think about what will be possible when Princeton is able to gather students and faculty in one place, right at the centre of campus, to discover now-unimaginable solutions for the future century,” he added.

Tech

Study: Smart speakers are increasingly common in American households

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An annual study conducted by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) recently found that smart speaker ownership in the US rose by almost 100% for a second consecutive year, the Virginia-based consumer technology trade association said on 9 May.

The CTA’s 21st Annual Consumer Technology Ownership and Market Potential Study – which examines household ownership and the intent to purchase across almost 60 consumer tech products – showed that 31 percent of US homes now own a smart speaker, despite security concerns surrounding these products.

It also found that smart appliances are now owned by 17% of households, with smart light bulbs, thermostats, home security cameras and robotic vacuums rounding out the most-owned smart home devices in 2019.

Also read: Best Affordable True Wireless Earbuds

The CTA predicted that smart home devices will see the biggest gains in household adoption in the next year as first-time purchasers make up the largest proportion of prospective buyers, led by households planning to buy smart door locks, smart door bells and smart home hubs for the first time.

Among wearables, smartwatch adoption grew by five percentage points to reach 23 percent household ownership in 2019, narrowing the gap with fitness trackers, which grew four percentage points and are now owned by 29 percent of US households.

Televisions, smartphones and laptops remain the most commonly owned tech devices in American homes. Televisions were the most owned device at 95 percent household ownership, while smartphones were now owned in 91 percent of American homes – and, for a third consecutive year, had the highest combined intent to purchase among repeat and first-time purchases for the next year.

American households adopted wireless earbuds and headphones in greater numbers over the last year, the survey found, with growth outpacing their wired counterparts – and can be found in almost half of all US homes. They are expected to outplace wired products “very soon”.

“Americans are embracing AI tech in the home at unprecedented levels,” Steve Koenig, vice president of research at CTA, said in a statement. “The dramatic rise in household ownership of intelligent devices like smart speakers shows American consumers endorse the benefits and convenience of artificial intelligence and voice recognition to help them with everyday tasks.”

“Innovation is spurring demand for emerging technologies and driving consumers to upgrade existing devices,” he added. “The paradigm in consumer technology is rapidly evolving to a new IoT – The Intelligence of Things. AI, voice recognition, sensors, wireless connectivity and more are bringing greater capabilities and convenience to consumers.”

CTA’s 21st Annual Consumer Technology Ownership and Market Potential Study was administered as an online survey among 2,608 American adults (18+) between 7-14 March 2019. It is designed and formulated by CTA Market Research. The complete study is available for free for CTA member companies or purchase here.

Tech

Scientists launch new tornado research mission using drones

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Image by Jonny Lindner from Pixabay

Researchers from multiple universities across the United States on 13 May launched the Targeted Observation by Radars and UAS of Supercells (TORUS) project, an effort to fly drones into supercell thunderstorms in the hope of improving storm forecasts.

The project’s goal is to better understand supercells – thunderstorms that spin – and the powerful tornados that they produce. Covering 365,000 square miles of the US Great Plains, TORUS has been described as “the most ambitious drone-based investigation of severe storms and tornadoes ever conducted”, involving three universities, more than fifty researchers and students, and a storm laboratory.

Led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the project will use a “broad suite of cutting-edge instrumentation” deployed across the Great Plains during the 2019 and 2020 storm seasons to provide a data-driven, multi-dimensional view of each storm system included in the study.

The equipment used in the study will reportedly include four unmanned aircraft systems or drones, a NOAA P3 manned aircraft, eight mesonet trucks equipped with meteorological instruments, three mobile radar systems, a mobile LIDAR system, and three balloon-borne sensor launchers.

The University of Colorado Boulder, Texas Tech University and the University of Oklahoma, along with the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), also are participating in the project.

According to the NSSL, multiple research teams will “follow severe thunderstorms to study how factors like wind speed, temperature, humidity and pressure may reveal the small-scale structures in a supercell storm and how it contributes to tornado formation”. The data collected will be used to improve current conceptual models of supercell thunderstorms.

Aims of the project include measuring and observing the frequency of changes in the atmosphere and relationships between the different atmospheric boundary layers. Among the tools used in the project will be swarms of radiosondes that take measurements of the atmosphere. They are attached to balloons that are much smaller than traditional weather balloons and as many as 100 can be tracked within the storm at once.

“We are flying more aircraft at the same time,” Adam Houston, associate professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and one of seven principal investigators, said in a statement. “We’ve only flown one drone in the past, now we’re going to fly four. We can fly in more parts of the storm at the same time, get more data and answer a more extensive set of questions.”

“There are fundamental problems with tornado warnings,” Houston added. “The false alarm rate is high — 75 percent of the time we don’t get a tornado. Yet if you reduce the false alarm rate, you also reduce the rate of detection. We need to improve that gap to save lives.”

“We can do that if we can improve our understanding of small-scale structures and small-scale processes that lead up to storms. We want to know how the storm influences the environment, and vice versa, in the seconds, minutes and hours leading up to the storm and afterwards,” he said.

The study will cover almost the entirety of the Central Plains – aka “Tornado Alley – including parts of North and South Dakota, Texas, Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. Houston described this area as a great laboratory to better understand severe storms.

“Every place in the United States is vulnerable to super cell thunderstorms,” he said. “What we learn in this laboratory called the Central Plains is applicable to everywhere — it’s geographically agnostic.”

Fieldwork on the project will continue until June 16, with a goal of staying out as long as possible. Houston noted that it is dangerous work, adding: “There’s no getting around it. We’re putting ourselves in the path of these serious storms.”

Startups

Virgin Galactic announces summer move to Spaceport America

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At a press conference on 10 May, Virgin Galactic CEO Sir Richard Branson announced that the company’s development and testing program had “advanced sufficiently to move its spaceline staff and space vehicles” from Mojave, California, to its commercial operations headquarters at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Speaking at the New Mexico State Capitol Building in Santa Fe, at an event hosted by New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, Branson said that the move, which involves over 100 staff would begin immediately and continue through summer to minimize schooling disruption for families.

According to Virgin Galactic, this move signals “the final countdown to a regular commercial spaceflight service for paying passengers and science research” at Spaceport America, and follows recent development of the site, including “the completion of the hanger, offices, fuel farm, warehouse and antenna for telemetry and communications, as well as interior fit-out”.

Over the next few months, the company said it plans to “reposition its space system consisting of carrier aircraft VMS Eve and spaceship VSS Unity” from Mojave to Spaceport America “once cabin interior and other work has been completed by Virgin Galactic’s sister manufacturing organization, The Spaceship Company (TSC)”.

TSC will remain based in Mojave to continue building Virgin Galactic’s planned fleet of SpaceShipTwo and carrier aircraft WhiteKnightTwo vehicles. Virgin Galactic said it plans to complete final test flights from New Mexico in anticipation of commencing a full commercial service for transporting passengers and research payloads into space.

Virgin Galactic partnered with the state of New Mexico in an agreement that saw the construction of Spaceport America, the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport, and the company committing to base its commercial spaceflight activities there once it was ready to commence service.

 “Our Virgin Galactic adventure has been intertwined with New Mexico and Spaceport America right from the start and our stories have unfolded together,” Branson said in a statement. “New Mexico delivered on its promise to build a world-first and world-class spaceport.”

“Today, I could not be more excited to announce, that in return, we are now ready to bring New Mexico a . . . spaceline,” he added. “Virgin Galactic is coming home to New Mexico where together we will open space to change the world for good.”

George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic and TSC, noted that the first photograph of Earth from space was taken over New Mexico in October 1946.

 “How inspiring and appropriate that the state will soon host the first regular commercial spaceflight service, which will enable thousands of people to see Earth from space with their own eyes, “ he said. “We are deeply grateful to the citizens and leadership of New Mexico for having the vision to create a better future for their children and all of humanity.”

 “Going to space and exploring the universe is a team effort,” Dan Hicks, CEO of Spaceport America, added. “It takes strong partnerships that are courageous and also vulnerable. Sir Richard’s visionary leadership to take meaningful risks along with New Mexico leadership’s far-sighted commitment – epitomizes the successful partnerships that are truly needed for the space industry.”

Gadgets

NASA awards US$106 million to US small businesses

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Image courtesy of Billy Brown on Flickr, under a Creative Commons 2.0 license

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has awarded US$106 million in funding to 142 proposals from 129 US small businesses across 28 states and the District of Columbia as part of the second phase of its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, the agency said on 14 May.

Selected projects include solar panels that deploy like venetian blinds that can be used as a surface power source for crewed missions to the moon and Mars; sensor technology for autonomous entry, descent and precision landing on planetary surfaces; and a type of permanent magnet that creates a bonding force between two halves with no moving parts, enabling in-space assembly of large platforms.

NASA said it selected the successful proposals “based on a range of criteria, including technical merit and feasibility, as well as the organizations’ experience, qualifications, and facilities” as well as “effectiveness of proposed work plans and the commercial potential of the technologies”.

“Small businesses play an important role in our science and exploration endeavors,” Jim Reuter, acting associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a statement. “NASA’s diverse community of partners, including small businesses across the country, helps us achieve our mission and cultivate the U.S. economy.

“Their innovations will help America land the first woman and the next man on the Moon in 2024, establish a sustainable presence on the lunar surface a few years later, and pursue exciting opportunities for going to Mars and beyond,” he added.

The SBIR is a three phase program with phase one work and results providing a “sound basis for the continued development, demonstration and delivery” of the “proposed innovation” in phase two and follow-up efforts. Only small businesses awarded phase one contracts are eligible to apply for phase two.

Phase two is focused on the actual “development, demonstration and delivery” of the products selected in phase one, and the contracts awarded in this phase last for 24 months with maximum funding of US$750,000 available. NASA said that the contracts are “chosen as a result of competitive evaluations and based on selection criteria”. Phase three is the “commercialization of innovative technologies, products and services” resulting from phase one or two contract.

The SBIR and its sister program, the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR), are intended to “encourage small businesses and research institutions to develop innovative ideas that meet the specific research and development needs of the federal government”.

The two programs aim to “stimulate technological innovation in the private sector, increase the commercial application of research results, and encourage participation of socially and economically disadvantaged companies and women-owned small businesses”.

NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley manages the SBIR and STTR programs for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). The STMD is responsible for developing the “cross-cutting, pioneering new technologies and capabilities” needed by the agency to achieve its current and future missions.

Tech

MIT and US Air Force sign agreement to launch AI Accelerator

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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the United States Air Force said on 20 May that they had teamed up to launch a new program designed to “make fundamental advances in artificial intelligence that could improve Air Force operations while also addressing broader societal needs”.

The project – known as the MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator – aims to “leverage the expertise and resources” of both institutions to conduct research directed at “enabling rapid prototyping, scaling, and application of AI algorithms and systems”.

The Air Force said it plans to invest approximately US$15 million per year in the project as it builds upon a five-decade relationship with MIT. The collaboration is expected to support a minimum of ten projects addressing concerns that are important to the Air Force and society more broadly, including disaster response and medical readiness.

MIT said that – under the agreement – it would form interdisciplinary teams of researchers, faculty, and students whose work focuses on topics in artificial intelligence, control theory, formal methods, machine learning, robotics, and perception, among other fields.

The teams will also include leaders in technology policy, history, and ethics from a range of departments, labs, and centers across the Institute, and members of the Air Force will join and lend expertise to each team.

“This collaboration is very much in line with MIT’s core value of service to the nation,” Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and Professor of Geophysics, said in a statement. “MIT researchers who choose to participate will bring state-of-the-art expertise in AI to advance Air Force mission areas and help train Air Force personnel in applications of AI.”

“MIT is the leading institution for AI research, education, and application, making this a huge opportunity for the Air Force as we deepen and expand our scientific and technical enterprise,” Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson added. “Drawing from one of the best of American research universities is vital.”

According to Daniela Rus – director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science – the project will attempt to “advance the underlying science behind AI and facilitate societal applications, including helping create solutions in fields like disaster relief and medical preparedness that are of interest to the Air Force”.

“We plan to assemble interdisciplinary teams that will collaborate across disparate fields of AI to create new algorithms and solutions,” she added, to assist complex decision-making that might help the Air Force, for example, better focus its maintenance efforts — an expensive and critical part of its aircraft operations.

This research also intends to develop AI to assist humans in aspects of planning, control, and other complex tasks. Finally, the work aims to enable rapid deployment of advanced algorithms and capabilities developed at MIT to foster AI innovation across the country, MIT said. In addition to disaster relief and medical readiness, other possible research areas may include data management, maintenance and logistics, vehicle safety and cyber resiliency.

“The AI Accelerator provides us with an opportunity to develop technologies that will be vectors for positive change in the world,” Rus said. “This new project will integrate societal implications into research from the outset.”

“MIT continues to pursue research that addresses current problems, while training researchers to think through the implications for tomorrow as research is translated to new technologies and new problems,” concluded Krystyn Van Vliet, associate provost and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and of Biological Engineering. “The MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator allows MIT to demonstrate that concept when AI provides one of the tools for human decisions.”

Tech

YouTube uses machine learning tool to cut down long ads

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YouTube uses machine learning tool to cut down long ads
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Popular US-based video-sharing website YouTube has launched a new tool that uses machine learning to automatically cut down longer advertisements on videos uploaded to the website into smaller versions that only last for six seconds.

The “bumper” advertisement format was first introduced on YouTube back in early 2016 as part of the website’s drive to optimize the site for mobile viewing and are un-skippable. In a blog post, product manager Zach Lupei said the new format would be “ideal for driving incremental reach and frequency” particularly on mobile where so-called “snackable videos” perform well.

YouTube’s new tool – dubbed the Bumper Machine – is currently in alpha testing (which will lead to beta testing and eventually general availability) and relies on machine learning models that are trained to “identify interesting, well-structured moments in a longer video”.

These elements include aspects such as product or brand information, human faces, motion or contrast. The Bumper Machine “organizes these moments and brings them together to generate several different six-second ad variations for you to pick from, all in a matter of minutes”. The result can be adjusted with “simple edits” before users save them.

YouTube announced the new tool at parent company Google’s Marketing Live conference for advertisers on 14 May, alongside new “Discovery ads” that allegedly combine “rich audience targeting features and visually engaging, native formats to help you better personalize your ads to inspire customer action at scale”.

They don’t require advertisers to provide a video, instead requesting that they simply provide the “best images” from existing social media campaigns – including logos and other promotional images – as well as a headline, description, business name, URL and call-to action text. They will then place ads with a gallery of up to eight images in search results.

YouTube claims it will then “optimize your media mix or maximum performance across Gmail, Discover and the YouTube Home feed”. This includes placing the new ads on the Google homepage via its Discover feature, a Facebook-style news feed that users can swipe through to view an algorithmically personalized set of articles, videos and other digital content.

Google executives reportedly told journalists that the new features were “a response to how users behave, not competition”. However, they come as “choppy revenue growth [prompted] questions from some Alphabet investors about whether services such as [Amazon] and [Facebook’s] Instagram are drawing online shoppers and in turn, advertisers away from Google”.

The ads on the Google homepage appear on what the company calls its Discover feature, a Facebook-style news feed that users swipe through to view an algorithmically personalized set of links to articles, videos and other online content.

Google has been testing ads on Discover since last Autumn, when it said more than 800 million people were using the feature monthly. The gallery ads are part of an effort to make search results more visual, the company reportedly said, and they are expected to garner more clicks, which could lead them being shown in more results.

Tech

San Francisco bars law enforcement from using facial recognition

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Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

The American city of San Francisco approved ordinance on 14 May that barred the police department and other city agencies from using facial recognition technology on residents in a groundbreaking move that privacy advocates support but critics think goes too far.

The legislation, which was written by city Supervisor Aaron Peskin and passed by a vote of eight to one by the city’s Board of Supervisors, will also compel city departments to disclose the surveillance technology that they are currently using and to seek approval from the board for any new technology that collects or stores data on individuals.

As they are federally regulated, the city’s airport and port will be exempt from the ban. According to local newspaper San Francisco Chronicle, the city’s police department estimated that it would take between two and four full-time employees to fully comply with the new ordinance. The department said that it does not currently employ any facial recognition technology in its work.

Supervisor Catherine Stefani cast the dissenting vote, reportedly saying that she was “was concerned about how a complete ban on facial recognition could prevent the city’s law enforcement from having access to a potentially useful crime-solving tool”.

Stefani was also worried that forcing departments to disclose surveillance technology and seek board approval for anything new could “bog them down” with extra work. While this “does not undermine” what she deemed a “very well-intentioned piece of legislation”, Stefani added, she is “not yet convinced” and still has “many outstanding questions”.

In a statement published the same day, local advocacy group Stop Crime SF said it believed a moratorium (i.e. suspension or freeze) on facial recognition technology would have been more appropriate than an outright ban.

It said that it agreed that there are “problems” with the technology and that it “should not be used today” but noted that it “will improve and it could be a useful tool for public safety when used responsibly and with greater accuracy”.

The door should be kept open for that possibility, the group’s vice president, Joel Engardio, said, especially when facial recognition can be used to “help locate missing children, people with dementia and fight sex trafficking”.

Although the ban is the first-of-its-kind, San Francisco isn’t alone in considering this type of legislation as several other cities are considering barring the use of facial recognition, including Oakland and Berkeley in California, and Somerville in Massachusetts.

Tech

AI SpaceFactory Wins First Place in NASA 3D-Printing Habitat Challenge

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New York-based “multi-planetary architectural and technology design agency” AI SpaceFactory said on 6 May it had won the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge with a proposal to build a tall, slim Mars habitat called “Marsha”.

During the final of challenge, participants had thirty hours to build a one-third scale version of their design using a 3D printer. AI SpaceFactory were lauded by NASA for the automation of their print – completed with nearly no human assistance in 30 hours – and the innovative materials used in its creation.

The company created Marsha using a “biopolymer basalt composite” that is biodegradable and derived from recyclable material naturally found on Mars. According to AI SpaceFactory, the material was “found to be stronger and more durable than its concrete competitors” after “withstanding NASA’s pressure, smoke and impact testing”.

MARSHA uses a “dual-shell system to isolate the habitable spaces from the natural expansion and contraction caused by extreme temperature swings on Mars”, which the company said results in an interior that is “free to be light, airy, highly mass-optimized and human”.

AI SpaceFactory was awarded US$500,000 in prize money and now plans to launch an IndieGoGo campaign to develop a similar eco-friendly habitat for Earth that will be based on the Marsha concept but named “Tera”.

The company believes it will be the first of its kind and plans to make it “available to anyone wanting to experience what sustainable life might be like on Mars”. Tera will “emphasize the need for new, renewable construction technologies on this planet, while researching what’s needed to enable life on a new one”, it said.

“We developed these technologies for Space, but they have the potential to transform the way we build on Earth,” David Malott, CEO and Founder of AI SpaceFactory, said in a statement. “By using natural, biodegradable materials grown from crops, we could eliminate the building industry’s massive waste of unrecyclable concrete and restore our planet.”

The 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge is one of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program competitions and challenges participants to build a 3D-printed habitat for deep space exploration, including the agency’s missions to the Moon, Mars or beyond.

The multi-phase challenge – of which the On-Site Habitat Competition was the final stage – is intended to “advance the construction technology needed to create sustainable housing solutions” for Earth and beyond, and offers a total of US$3.15 million in prize money.

The previous two phases consisted of the Design Competition – in which teams were required to submit architectural renderings – and the Structural Member Competition – which focused on material technologies and required teams to create structural components for habitats. They were completed in 2015 and 2017 respectively.

The 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge is managed through a partnership with NASA’s Centennial Challenges program and Bradley University. The Centennial Challenges program is part of the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, and is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Gadgets

Netflix inks first-look deal with Dark Horse Entertainment and partners with OnePlus

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Image by Jade87 from Pixabay

Ubiquitous global streaming platform Netflix announced on 9 May that it had closed a “first-look” deal with Dark Horse Entertainment, the motion picture and television production arm of American comic book publishing company Dark Horse Comics.

The deal gives Netflix a first look at Dark Horse’s IP for both film and TV, and the companies said they had already started exploring future projects with Dark Horse Entertainment’s Mike Richardson, Keith Goldberg and Paul Schwake signed on to produce.

Netflix and Dark Horse have previously collaborated on hit action-comedy series The Umbrella Academy, which was recently renewed for a second season, as well as Jonas Åkerlund’s feature film Polar. Exact details of any projects currently on the slate for the two companies are still being kept strictly under wraps.

A first-deal is a contract between the two parties that gives Netflix first rights to consider a production by Dark Horse Entertainment for production and/or distribution by giving financial support to the project during the development period. So they essentially get first dibs on anything Dark Horse wants to produce but also reserve the right not to pick up anything they don’t fully support.

“We are very excited about this new arrangement with the talented people at Netflix,” Mike Richardson, Dark Horse Entertainment’s President and Founder, said in a statement. “We have strong creative relationships as well as a large content library to work with and, as we have seen with our recent projects, Netflix is the perfect partner to bring our stories to fans around the world.”

“With The Umbrella Academy and Polar, Netflix has pushed our content out into the world and allowed it to spread in a way that we’ve never experienced before, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring a whole new slate of movies and shows to their world-wide audience,” Keith Goldberg, Dark Horse Entertainment’s Senior Vice President, added.

“Following the success of The Umbrella Academy, we’re excited to extend our relationship with Dark Horse Comics,” Cindy Holland, Vice President, Original Content for Netflix, concluded. “The Netflix teams are already working in deep collaboration with Dark Horse to identify projects beyond the world of traditional superheroes — branching into horror, fantasy and family entertainment — that we think our members will love.”

Founded by Mike Richardson, Dark Horse Entertainment was spun off from Dark Horse Comics in 1992. The company’s first hits – The Mask and Timecop – were based on creations by Richardson himself, and the production house has since produced more than thirty films and series over the last few decades, including the Dark Matter series for the SyFy network and Resident Alien, another SyFy series starring Alan Tudyk of Firefly fame and based on the comic series by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse.

OnePlus partnership

On the following day, Netflix further announced that it had partnered with Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus to “deliver an incredible Netflix viewing experience on the much awaited OnePlus 7 Pro”, leveraging a “common philosophy of a community and member-first approach”.

Netflix released two new posters for their much-anticipated original series Sacred Games Season 2 to celebrate the partnership, noting that the imagery for the artwork was shot on OnePlus 7 Pro.

The posters capture two Sacred Games characters – Sartaj Singh (Saif Ali Khan) and Ganesh Gaitonde (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). The streaming service also gave fans a sneak peek into the series by releasing a behind-the-scenes video, also shot on the OnePlus 7 Pro.

The OnePlus 7 Pro will feature a three camera set-up and launches on 14 May at Bangalore International Exhibition Centre.

“Through . . . devices like the OnePlus 7 Pro, consumers increasingly are able to enjoy an amazing viewing experience on Netflix,” Jerome Bigio, Director-Partner Marketing, APAC, Netflix, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to celebrate the epic fandom of Sacred Games with posters and a behind-the-scenes video shot on the OnePlus 7 Pro.”

“OnePlus continues to look for innovative ways to engage and bring unique experiences to our community,” added Vikas Agarwal, General Manager, OnePlus India. “We are excited to partner with Netflix and Sacred Games Season 2 to creatively showcase the . . . capabilities of OnePlus 7 Pro. We can’t wait to unveil more about the product and the partnership at the launch event.”

Gadgets

Purdue researchers create AI-based “hummingbird” drone

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Image by Domenic Hoffmann from Pixabay

Indiana-based Purdue University said on 9 May that researchers had engineered drones that “behave like hummingbirds”, trained by machine learning algorithms based on various techniques the bird naturally uses every day.

This means that – after learning from a simulation – the robot “knows” how to fly and hover on its own like a hummingbird would, such as discerning when to perform an escape maneuver, allowing them to move “better through collapsed buildings and other cluttered spaces to find trapped victims”.

A combination of AI and flexible flapping wings allows the robot to “teach itself” new tricks. For example, it can’t yet “see” but senses by touching surfaces. Each touch alters an electrical current, which the researchers realized they could track.

“The robot can essentially create a map without seeing its surroundings,” Xinyan Deng, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue, said in a statement. “This could be helpful in a situation when the robot might be searching for victims in a dark place – and it means one less sensor to add when we do give the robot the ability to see.”

While drones cannot be made infinitely smaller as they would be unable to generate enough lift to support their weight, hummingbirds do not use conventional dynamics and have extremely resilient wings.

“The physics is simply different; the aerodynamics is inherently unsteady, with high angles of attack and high lift,” Deng said. “This makes it possible for smaller, flying animals to exist, and also possible for us to scale down flapping wing robots.”

According to Purdue, researchers have long tried to “decode” hummingbird flight to facilitate robots flying where larger aircraft cannot. For example, California-based drone developer and manufacturer AeroVironment was commissioned by DARPA – a US Department of Defence agency – in 2011 to build a robotic hummingbird that was heavier than a real one but not as fast. It had helicopter-like flight controls and limited manoeuvrability, and required a human to operate the remote control at all times.

Deng’s research group and fellow collaborators studied hummingbirds themselves over multiple summers in Montana, documenting key hummingbird manoeuvres, such as rapid 180-degree turns, and translated them into computer algorithms that a computer could learn from when hooked up to a simulation.

Further study of the physics of insects and hummingbirds allowed researchers at Purdue to create robots that are smaller than hummingbirds – and even as small as insects – without compromising the way they fly. According to Deng, a smaller drone with a greater wing flapping frequency will fly most efficiently.

The drones have 3D-printed bodies, wings made from carbon fibre and laser-cut membranes. One weighs as little as 12 grams – the weight of the average adult hummingbird – and another insect-sized drone weighing just one gram. The hummingbird-sized drone can lift up to 27 grams.

Drones with higher lift give researchers more room to eventually add a battery and sensing technology, such as a camera or GPS, and while the drone currently needs to be tethered to an energy source, the researchers reportedly say that this will not be the case for much longer. It only requires two motors to fly and can independently control each wing, which is how flying animals are capable of performing highly agile manoeuvres in nature.

The drones can fly as silently as a real hummingbird, making them ideal for covert operations, and can stay steady through turbulence, which researchers demonstrated by testing the dynamically scaled wings in an oil tank.

Robotic hummingbirds could both help with search-and-rescue missions and allow biologists to study hummingbirds more reliably in their natural environment through the senses of a realistic robot.

“An actual hummingbird has multiple groups of muscles to do power and steering strokes, but a robot should be as light as possible, so that you have maximum performance on minimal weight,” Deng said. “We learned from biology to build the robot, and now biological discoveries can happen with extra help from robots.”

Early stages of the work, including the Montana-based experiments in collaboration with researchers from the University of Montana, were financially supported by the National Science Foundation. The project is related to Purdue’s 150th anniversary Giant Leaps celebration, acknowledging the university’s global advancements in AI, algorithms and automation as part of Purdue’s 150th anniversary.

The researchers will present their work on 20 May at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Montreal with a YouTube video available here if you’re unable to attend. Simulations of the technology are available open-source on GitHub.

Tech

Five Star Trek Technologies That Actually Exist Now

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Image via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

When Star Trek: the Original Series first premiered on 8 September 1966, it was ahead of its time in many respects, optimistically forecasting a future with people of all races (eh, most races) cooperating towards a shared goal: to explore the vast wonders of the universe we inhabit together.

It posited that, following a third world war, humanity would come together to form a single world government, make huge advancements in human rights and develop technologies that would allow us to traverse the stars at lightspeed.

We haven’t quite got there yet (and hopefully we can do it without the war part, although it’s not looking too promising) but Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s most famous work has gone on to inspire the creation of some of the technologies that we take for granted today – and, in some cases, even rely on to function on an everyday basis.

Communicators

This is perhaps one of the most obvious examples of technology that seemed completely farfetched back in Rodenberry’s day but that many of us would struggle to survive without in the modern world. Star Trek’s communicators – not the badges of later series but the original flip phone style ones of the Kirk era – were clear precursors for the modern mobile phone.

Martin Cooper, the man often credited with the invention of the first viable mobile phone, has publicly stated that he was inspired by Star Trek’s communicators and phone developers went on to create flip phones that looked very much like those used by the crew of the Enterprise.

Hyposprays

This technology actually predates Star Trek. In the real world, we call hyposprays – a form of hypodermic injection of medication used to deliver inoculations and other medicines – jet injectors. Originally designed for mass vaccinations, jet injectors are safer and faster than standard needles in administering vaccines.

They work by subcutaneously injecting a liquid vaccine, using high air pressure to shoot it deep enough under the skin that no needle in required. They’re similar in appearance to the kind of paint guns we use on cars and use a larger container for the vaccine, allowing doctors and other medical personnel to quickly inoculate large numbers of people.

Transporters

Beam me up, Scotty! Kirk never actually said this famous line in the television show but the iconic transporter beams featured in just about every episode, reportedly because Roddenberry didn’t have a large enough budget to build a shuttlecraft set but needed a way to quicker transport characters from one place to another.

While it’s unlikely that we’ll ever be able to move a human being from one place to another in this way – essentially by disassembling a person on the atomic level at one end and reassembling them in the same order at the other – we have technically achieved teleportation of photons (light particles) and atoms. However, the particles don’t actually disappear and reappear – an exact copy appears at the destination, while the original is destroyed. Human beings consist of around 15 trillion cells so it’s unlikely that this method is going to work for human teleportation – and we’d still have to destroy the original, which seems impractical at best and unethical at worst.

Tractor Beams

The ability to tow an entire starship (if we ever manage to invent such a thing outside of science-fiction) using a tractor beam still sounds out-of-this-world impossible but two New York University professors are working on it nonetheless, using a light beam to control tiny microscopic particles. These are basically optical tweezers aka small lasers focused into beams capable of manipulating molecules and moving them with precision, suspending them in an optical trap.

And in 2015, a team of UK-based engineers announced to the world that they’d invented a way to use soundwaves to move tiny objects of up to 5mm in size without physically touching them. They believe such technology in its current form has a lot of potential for medical usage, and expect that further study will lead to the development of larger, more powerful tractor beams that can move heavier objects in the future.

Startups

How the British government could help your start-up get off the ground

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Image by Adam Derewecki from Pixabay

With Brexit (maybe, possibly – at the end of the day, who really knows?) looming on the horizon, this is a frustrating and scary time for UK-based entrepreneurs. No one knows what the future might hold for businesses, especially those just starting out, and economists aren’t much help when the future of the country is terribly unpredictable and stuck in limbo.

However, all is not entirely lost. An analysis of economic data by consumer research firm NimbleFin recently concluded that the United Kingdom is the second-best country in Europe for start-ups and the British government has made great strides in recent years in the support it provides to start-ups.

Funding

There are several government-backed funding routes for start-ups in the UK, such as a range of grants provided by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and the Start Up Loans scheme, which offers loans of up to £25,000 at a fixed interest rate of six percent per annum for new business ideas. A successful applicant will also receive guidance on writing a business plan and up to 12 months of free mentoring.

If you’re feeling lucky, there’s also a range of funding competitions offered by Innovate UK, a government agency that funds and connects UK businesses to develop new products, processes and services.

Setting up in the nation’s capital isn’t necessarily the most cost effective move but being in the thick of it all can provide motivation, access and – perhaps most importantly – better Wi-Fi than elsewhere in the country. London-based start-ups can apply for support from the London Co-Investment Fund.

This program was established by the London Economic Action Partnership (LEAP) – which contributed £25 million – supported by the Mayor of London, and delivered by Funding London and Capital Enterprise. The money is earmarked for investment in seed rounds of between £250,000 to £1 million.

Other possible options include the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), which offers tax relief to individual investors who buy new shares in a company; Research and Development tax credits, which allows companies to claim back some research and development costs; and the EU’s Horizon 2020 funding pot, which UK companies may still be allowed to access post-Brexit.

Connectivity

The UK government hasn’t always had the best reputation when it comes to digital connectivity. It notoriously failed to hit many of its targets for superfast fibre-optic broadband provision and consistently lags behind the internet access available in other European countries.

However, last year, the government unveiled plans to make the UK world leader in digital connectivity in its Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review. It aims to give the majority of the population access to 5G mobile internet, connect 15 million premises to full fibre-optic broadband by 2025 and across all of the UK by 2033.

The government claims that it was providing superfast broadband coverage to 95 percent of premises in the UK by December 2017 and is introducing a broadband Universal Service Obligation that aims to give everyone in the UK a clear, enforceable right to request high-speed broadband by 2020.

Visas

Like many industries, the technology sector has repeatedly warned that access to international workers that they need to bridge the digital skills gap is far too restricted by immigration regulations, an issue that is sure to be compounded by the effects of Brexit, whether or not the country actually leaves the European Union, due to the rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric and uncertainty about the future.

In the 2017, the government attempted to allay these concerns, doubling the number of visas available through the Tier 1 (Exceptional Talent) route from 1,000 to 2,000. In March, two further visa routes with no cap on the number of applicants came into effect as replacements for the Tier 1 (Graduate Entrepreneur) visa: these were the Start-up visa and the Innovator visa.

Foreign workers who want to run a business in the UK can apply for an Innovator visa if their idea is endorsed by an approved body, they come from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland and they meet the remaining eligibility requirements. They must also have at least £50,000 in investment funds for a new business, unless their business is already established and has been endorsed for an earlier visa.

Alternatively, they can apply for a Start-up visa if they come from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland, meet the remaining eligibility requirements and are endorsed by an authorised body that is either a UK-based higher education institution or a business organisation with a history of supporting UK-based entrepreneurs.

Other forms of support

The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy maintains a database of schemes offering expertise and advice and the Business is Great website provides information on subjects ranging from how to  intellectual property issues to tax.

Tech.London offers advice on setting up London, including local workspaces, events, mentorship programmes, job boards and funding tips, as part of a collaboration between the Mayor of London, investor portal Gust and lead sponsor IBM. London & Partners also offers support and advice for scale-up companies looking to set up shop in the capital.

Overseas start-ups can seek free guidance from the Department for International Trade’s (DIT) Global Entrepreneur Programme (GEP), while London-based businesses can apply for a place on Techstars London, an accelerator providing access to investment, mentorship and collaboration with top entrepreneurs.

Further guidance is available at Tech Nation, a government-funded body which provides a range of support for technology companies, include schemes like the Future Fifty, which has given successful start-ups access to expertise across both the public and private sectors, and the Digital Business Academy, a free online learning platform for budding tech entrepreneurs to learn digital skills.

Gadgets

Lockheed Martin Completes Heat Shield Testing for NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover Heat Shield

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Image by Aynur Zakirov from Pixabay

Global security and aerospace company Lockheed Martin said on 2 May it had “successfully completed” construction of the heat shield for the Mars 2020 rover – one half of the craft’s protective “aeroshell” – performing a final static test to confirm its structural integrity after “after exposing it to flight-like thermal conditions”.

The Mars 2020 Rover mission forms part of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the fourth planet in our solar system. The mission will explore the potential for life on Mars, seeking “signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the ancient past” as well as “signs of past microbial life itself”.

The rover’s finished aeroshell will – at least theoretically – “encapsulate [the] NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars 2020 rover from the punishing heat and friction of entry through the Martian atmosphere”. The heart shield aerodynamics are intended to serve as a “brake” to slow the spacecraft down from around 12,000 mph (19,300 kph) so the structure “needs to be flawless”.

It is the tenth aeroshell system that Lockheed Martin has designed for NASA and measures 15 feet (4.5 meters) in diameter. In a press release, the company described the mission as “one of the most challenging entry, descent and landings ever attempted”.

The static test was conducted on 25 April and was designed to mimic the load that the heat shield is expected to experience during the entry phase, the “most extreme” part of its journey. Lockheed Martin engineers used vacuum pumps to simulate the pressure of approximately 140,000 pounds on the structure, which was tested to 120 percent of the expected flight load to push it to the limit.

This particular test used a new form of instrumentation, augmenting conventional strain gauges and extensometers – that monitor structural response at distinct points during loading – with photogrammetry or “digital image correlation”. Lockheed Martin partnered with NASA’s Langley Research Center to integrate this new technology into the testing process.

It allowed the team working on the project to “monitor full-field strains and displacements over the entire visible area of the structure in real time”. A “vinyl wrap” with different visual cues (aka “dark random speckles over a white background) was applied to the heat shield. During the test, a set of digital cameras optically monitored changes in the pattern, generating a 3D image of the displacements and surface strains as the applied load increased.

“Our experience building aeroshells for NASA Mars missions does not mean that it is ‘easy’,” Neil Tice, Lockheed Martin Mars 2020 Aeroshell program manager, said in a statement. “Tests like this structural test are absolutely essential to ensuring mission success in the long-run.”

“While we have used [the] full-field photogrammetry technique . . . in the past, this is the first successful implementation on official flight hardware,” Dr. Sotiris Kellas, NASA Langley aerospace engineer and lead for the technical demonstration, added. “This technology will allow us to safeguard hardware during testing but more importantly provide data for test analysis correlation, and improvement of our design and analysis tools.”

The new rover includes a drill that can collect core samples of rocks and soils that are deemed “most promising”, and will set them aside in a “cache” on the planet to be potentially returned to Earth on a future mission. That would allow scientists to study the samples in laboratories will special room-sized equipment that would be too large to take to Mars.

NASA also plans to use the mission to “gather knowledge and demonstrate technologies that address the challenges of future human expeditions to Mars”. This includes testing a method to produce oxygen from the planet’s atmosphere, identifying other possible resources such as subsurface water, improving landing techniques, and looking at weather, dust, and other potential environmental conditions that could affect future astronauts living and working on Mars. The mission is expected to launch between 17 July and 5 August 2020 when Earth and Mars will be in good positions relative to each other for landing on the planet. Basically, it will take less power to travel to Mars during that window in time, compared to other times when Earth and Mars are in different positions in their orbits. The rover is expected to land on Mars on 18 February 2021 and the subsequent mission is timed to last for at least one Mars year, which is equivalent to around 687 days on Earth.

Tech

Best Gaming PC’s for 2019

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Courtesy of Falcon Northwest under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

Gaming PC’s are quite possibly one of the hardest pieces of tech to recommend. Every user is going to be looking for something a little different and every game is going to use system resources in different, horrifically inefficient ways. However, should you want to avoid building your own system that’s customized down to the very smallest details for your specific gaming needs, here are a few suggestions for the best gaming PCs you can buy in 2019.

HP Pavilion Gaming 790 Desktop

With the base model costing a meagre US$750, this is the best of the cheaper options. It’s compact and understated, targeting the casual gamers among us with the minimum you should need to play relatively undemanding games in 1080p with minimal frustration. It comes with i5-8400 with Optane to accelerate disk operations with the 1 terabyte hard drive, a GTX 1050 and 8GB of RAM – as well as a ton of connections at the front, including four USB-A ports, one USB-C port and an SD card slot.

Alienware Aurora R8

This midsize desktop clocks in at US$800 for the base configuration with an i5-9400, 8GB RAM, a Radeon RX 560X and a 1 terabyte hard drive. At under US$1000, you’re not going to get the best performance possible but you should be able to get more than 60fps in 1080p on the kind of action-oriented games with less detailed graphics that aren’t full of big-texture. It also boasts a bunch of connectors, including a USB-C and three USB-A ports at the front. For slightly better performance, try swapping out the hard drive for a solid state drive – it has less capacity but Windows really will run faster on it – and spend a little extra on the 2×2 Wi-Fi networking card.

Falcon Northwest Tiki and Talon

Falcon Northwest specializes in ultra-fast systems with effortlessly cool custom paint jobs. The Tiki is its most compact system with the capacity for a top-of-the-line i9-9900K and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti but nothing larger. The Talon, however, is designed pretty much like a standard midsize tower so you can pack in a lot of high-end components, including an 18-core i9-9980XE and dual RTX 2080 Ti cards (or dual Quadro P6000s). And with the brand’s signature customization added, it’s not so standard at the end of the day.

Also read: Best Budget Gaming PC Build for 60FPS Gaming

On the downside, you’re stuck with onboard audio and networking for most of the available configurations, and it’s terrifically expensive with a website noticeably devoid of any support information (get ready to spend time poring through the hardcopy documentation and media arranged in an old-fashioned binder of all things).

Origin PC

For maximum performance and/or configurability, go with a boutique builder like Origin. You can get similarly fast systems for insane prices from more mainstream companies like Alienware but they’re a little more on the cookie-cutter side and tend to be more conservatively tuned. Plus the customer service is never as useful or personalized. Boutique companies also tend to be more transparent about the components that you’re choosing – especially with the Origin PC, which lets you get right now to the nitty gritty of it all, allowing you to pick the brand and speed of memory and power supply as well as the motherboard and even the color of the cover for the power supply cables.

Unlike Falcon Northwest, they don’t come with particularly pretty outsides but you can get a custom paint job and laser etching to perk them up a little. Plus, the cases are well designed, easy to open up and work inside, and have transparent side panels which looks cool and allows you to see what’s going on without having to pull everything apart first.

Tech

BBC to bring VR to more than 40 local libraries across the UK

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Britain’s main public service broadcaster is taking its virtual reality (VR) experiences on tour this summer at over forty participating libraries around the country, in partnership with Libraries Connected and the Scottish Library and Information Council.

Members of the public will be able to try out a range of the BBC’s VR experiences, including Congo VR – a three-part news documentary that takes viewers into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of Africa’s most dangerous and beautiful countries – and 1943 Berlin Blitz, a film in which viewers join the Royal Air Force (RAF) on a bombing run during the Berlin Blitz.

Placed in the footsteps of BBC war reporter Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and sound recordist Reg Pidsley, who genuinely went on this mission in 1943, viewers will experience sitting in the belly of Lancaster bomber ‘F for Freddie’ as VR transports them high over Berlin in the midst of anti-aircraft fire. Wynford’s commentary was one of the most ambitious and dangerous reports to be made during World War Two, and viewers can step into his shoes to experience war reporting as never before.

Some libraries will also be showing the BBC’s People Just Do Nothing VR, a short 360° version of the hit sitcom. Viewers have been kidnapped by Chabuddy G and the Kurupt FM crew, and are sat on the sofa of Steves’ flat while MC Grindah and DJ Beats run through a hit to try and convince you to sign them to your record label.

“Virtual reality is an extraordinary way to experience a story, by immersing yourself in it completely you get a huge connection to it,” Zillah Watson, head of BBC VR Hub, said in a statement. “The trouble is that headsets are expensive, and only a very small number of people have them at home. That’s why we wanted to bring some of our favorite experiences out on the road, and by putting them into local libraries across the UK we’re hoping to give everyone the chance to try out virtual reality.”

Fans keen to try out virtual reality from the BBC can find out if their local library is showing on this online schedule, which will be updated each week with details of where the tour is heading next: https://canvas-story.bbcrewind.co.uk/sites/bbcvrtour/