Remembering LED Pioneer Nick Holonyak

Nick Holonyak, Jr. holds a part of a stoplight that utilizes a newer LED designed by his students. Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Getty Images

Nick Holonyak Jr., a prolific inventor and longtime professor of electrical engineering and computing, died on 17 September at the age of 93. In 1962, while working as a consulting scientist at General Electric’s Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory, he invented the first practical visible-spectrum LED. It is now used in light bulbs and lasers.

Holonyak left GE in 1963 to become a professor of electrical and computer engineering and researcher at his alma mater, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He retired from the university in 2013.

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He received the 2003 IEEE Medal of Honor for “a career of pioneering contributions to semiconductors, including the growth of semiconductor alloys and heterojunctions, and to visible light-emitting diodes and injection lasers.”

LED and other semiconductor industry breakthroughs

After Holonyak earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, he was hired in 1954 as a researcher at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, N.J. There he investigated silicon-based electronic devices.

He left in 1955 to serve in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and was stationed at Fort Monmouth, N.J., and Yokohama, Japan. After being discharged in 1957, he joined GE’s Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory, in Syracuse, N.Y.

While at the lab, he invented a shorted emitter thyristor device. The four-layered semiconductor is now found in light dimmers and power tools. In 1962 he invented the red-light semiconductor laser, known as a laser diode, which now is found in cellphones as well as CD and DVD players.

Later that year, he demonstrated the first visible LED—a semiconductor source that emits light when current flows through it. LEDs previously had been made of gallium arsenide. He created crystals of gallium arsenide phosphide to make LEDs that would emit visible, red light. His work led to the development of the high-brightness, high-efficiency white LEDs that are found in a wide range of applications today, including smartphones, televisions, headlights, traffic signals, and aviation.

Pioneering research at the University of Illinois

Holonyak left GE in 1963 and joined the University of Illinois as a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

In 1977 he and his doctoral students demonstrated the first quantum well laser, which later found applications in fiber optics, CD and DVD players, and medical diagnostic tools.

The university named him an endowed-chair professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics in 1993. The position was named for John Bardeen, an honorary IEEE member who had received two Nobel Prizes in Physics as well as the 1971 IEEE Medal of Honor. Bardeen was Holonyak’s professor in graduate school. The two men collaborated on research projects until Bardeen’s death in 1991.

Together with IEEE Life Fellow Milton Feng, Holonyak led the university’s transistor laser research center, which was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. There they developed transistor lasers that had both light and electric outputs. The innovation enabled high-speed communications technologies.

More recently, Holonyak developed a technique to bend light within gallium arsenide chips, allowing them to transmit information by light rather than electricity.

He supervised more than 60 graduate students, many of whom went on to become leaders in the electronics field.

Queen Elizabeth prize, Draper prize, and other awards

Holonyak received last year’s Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering; the National Academy of Engineering’s 2015 Draper Prize; the 2005 Japan Prize; and the 1989 IEEE Edison Medal. In 2008 he was inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, in Akron, Ohio.

He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and Optica. He was also a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In addition Holonyak was a member of the U.S. Academies of Engineering and Sciences.

Read the full story about Holonyak’s LED breakthrough in IEEE Spectrum.

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High-severity Microsoft Exchange 0-day under attack threatens 220,000 servers

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Microsoft late Thursday confirmed the existence of two critical vulnerabilities in its Exchange application that have already compromised multiple servers and pose a serious risk to an estimated 220,000 more around the world.

The currently unpatched security flaws have been under active exploit since early August, when Vietnam-based security firm GTSC discovered customer networks had been infected with malicious webshells and that the initial entry point was some sort of Exchange vulnerability. The mystery exploit looked almost identical to an Exchange zero-day from 2021 called ProxyShell, but the customers’ servers had all been patched against the vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2021-34473. Eventually, the researchers discovered the unknown hackers were exploiting a new Exchange vulnerability.

Webshells, backdoors, and fake sites

“After successfully mastering the exploit, we recorded attacks to collect information and create a foothold in the victim's system,” the researchers wrote in a post published on Wednesday. “The attack team also used various techniques to create backdoors on the affected system and perform lateral movements to other servers in the system.”

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Mystery hackers are “hyperjacking” targets for insidious spying

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For decades, virtualization software has offered a way to vastly multiply computers’ efficiency, hosting entire collections of computers as “virtual machines” on just one physical machine. And for almost as long, security researchers have warned about the potential dark side of that technology: theoretical “hyperjacking” and “Blue Pill” attacks, where hackers hijack virtualization to spy on and manipulate virtual machines, with potentially no way for a targeted computer to detect the intrusion. That insidious spying has finally jumped from research papers to reality with warnings that one mysterious team of hackers has carried out a spree of “hyperjacking” attacks in the wild.

Today, Google-owned security firm Mandiant and virtualization firm VMware jointly published warnings that a sophisticated hacker group has been installing backdoors in VMware’s virtualization software on multiple targets’ networks as part of an apparent espionage campaign. By planting their own code in victims’ so-called hypervisors—VMware software that runs on a physical computer to manage all the virtual machines it hosts—the hackers were able to invisibly watch and run commands on the computers those hypervisors oversee. And because the malicious code targets the hypervisor on the physical machine rather than the victim’s virtual machines, the hackers’ trick multiplies their access and evades nearly all traditional security measures designed to monitor those target machines for signs of foul play.

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The Electric Purple Snake-Oil Machine

The violet ray machine has an awesome name that conjures up images of cartoon supervillains taking out Gotham, but its actual history is even odder—and it includes a superhero, not a villain.

The technology underpinning the machine begins with none other than Nikola Tesla and his eponymous coil. After Tesla and others made some refinements to the device, an influential clairvoyant named Edgar Cayce popularized violet ray machines for treating just about every kind of ailment—rheumatism and nervous conditions, acne and baldness, gonorrhea and prostate troubles, brain fog and writer’s cramp. Even Wonder Woman had her own health-restoring Purple Ray device. During the first half of the 20th century, a number of companies manufactured and sold the machines, which became ubiquitous for a time. And yet the scientific basis for the healing effects of violet rays was scant. So what accounted for their popularity?

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The cutting-edge tech of the violet ray machine

Violet ray machines employ a Tesla coil, also known as a resonance transformer, to produce a high-frequency, low-current beam, which is then applied to the skin. Nikola Tesla kicked off this line of invention after traveling to Paris during the summer of 1889 to attend the Exposition Universelle. There he learned of Heinrich Hertz’s electromagnetic discoveries. Intrigued, Tesla returned to New York City to run some experiments of his own. The result was the Tesla coil, which he envisioned being used for wireless lighting and power. In April 1891, he applied for a U.S. patent for a “System of Electric Lighting,” which he received two months later. It would be the first in a series of related patents that spanned more than a decade.

In May of that year, Tesla unveiled his wondrous invention to members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, during a lecture on his “Experiments with Alternate Currents of Very High Frequency and Their Application to Methods of Artificial Illumination.” He continued to test different circuit configurations and patented some (but not all) of his improvements, such as a “Means for Generating Electric Currents,” U.S. Patent No. 514,168. After more years of tinkering, Tesla perfected his resonance transformer and was granted U.S. Patent No. 1,119,732 for an “Apparatus for Transmitting Electrical Energy” on 1 December 1914.

Nikola Tesla envisioned his eponymous coil being used for wireless lighting and power. It was also at the heart of the violet ray machine. Stocktrek Images/Getty Images

Tesla promoted the medical use of the electromagnetic spectrum, suggesting to physicians that different voltages and currents could be used to treat a variety of conditions. His endorsement came at a time when trained doctors as well as shrewd hucksters were already experimenting with electrotherapy and ultraviolet light to help patients or to make a buck, depending on your perspective.

The market was perfectly primed for the violet ray machine, in other words. Tesla himself never commercialized a medical device based around his coil, but others did. The French physician and electrophysiologist Jacques-Arsène d’Arsonval modified Tesla’s design to make the device safer for human use. It was further improved by another French doctor and electrotherapy researcher, Paul Marie Oudin. In 1893, Oudin crafted the first working prototype of what eventually became the violet ray machine. Four years later, Frederick Strong developed an American version.

An influential clairvoyant named Edgar Cayce popularized violet ray machines for treating just about every kind of ailment—rheumatism and nervous conditions, acne and baldness, gonorrhea and prostate troubles, brain fog and writer’s cramp.

Another charismatic individual gets credit for popularizing the device: the psychic Edgar Cayce. As a young adult, Cayce reportedly lost his voice for over a year. No doctor could cure him, and in desperation he underwent hypnosis. He not only regained the ability to speak, he also began suggesting medical advice and homeopathic remedies. Cayce, who claimed to have had visions from childhood, became a professional clairvoyant, and for the next 40 years he dispensed his wisdom through psychic readings. Out of more than 14,000 recorded readings, Cayce mentioned the violet ray machine almost 900 times. In case you doubt his status as an influencer, Cayce counted Thomas Edison, composer George Gershwin, and U.S. president Woodrow Wilson among his clients.

Was there nothing the violet ray machine couldn’t cure?

The popularity of violet ray machines exploded after 1915, once all of the components for a portable device could be easily manufactured. They could be plugged into a lamp or wall socket or wired to a battery—remember that most homes and businesses in the early 20th century were not yet electrified, and so most manufacturers offered both alternating and direct current options. The machine’s handheld wand consisted of a Tesla coil wrapped in an insulating material, such as Bakelite. The coil produced 1 to 2 kilovolts, which charged a condenser, and then discharged at a rate between 4 to 10 kilohertz when passed over the skin. A voltage selector controlled the intensity of the spark, creating anything from a mild sensation to something quite intense. This video shows the sparks coming from an antique machine:

Glass electrodes—partially evacuated glass tubes known as Geissler tubes—could be inserted into the wand. These came in different shapes depending on their intended use. For example, a rake-shaped attachment worked to massage the scalp, while a narrow tube could be inserted into the mouth, nose, or another orifice. The high voltage ionized the gas within the glass tube, creating the purple glow that gave the device its name.

Numerous manufacturers sprang up to produce the portable machines, including Detroit’s Renulife Electric Co. Founded by inventor James Henry Eastman in 1917, Renulife sold different models for different uses. According to company literature, Model M was its most popular general-purpose product, while Model D was for dentistry, and the tricked-out Model R [pictured at top] had finer regulation of current and a built-in ozone generator to help with head and lung congestion.

In 1917, editors at the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that a violet ray generator certainly couldn’t treat “practically every ailment known to mankind,” as one manufacturer had claimed.

Instructions for the violet ray machines manufactured by Charles A. Branston Ltd. contain an alphabetical list of disorders that could be treated, from abscess to writer’s cramp, with dozens of other ailments in between. Like the Renulife products, the Branston machines also came in different flavors. The Branston machine’s high-frequency mode had germicidal effects and purportedly could be used to cure infections as well as relieve pain. Sinusoidal mode was used to gently massage away nervousness and paralysis. Ozone mode was for inhaling, to treat lung disorders. The Branston devices ranged in price from US $30 for the Model 5B (high-frequency mode only) to $100 for the Model 29 (which had all three modes).

The violet ray machines made by Charles A. Branston Ltd. had different modes for treating a wide variety of ailments.Historical Medical Library/College of Physicians of Philadelphia

During the first half of the 20th century, manufacturers marketed the machines to doctors and consumers alike. By the time Wonder Woman debuted in her own comic book in June 1942, the violet ray machine was a well-known household technology. So it wasn’t too surprising that the superhero had a machine of her own.

In the very first issue, Wonder Woman’s future love interest, Steve Trevor, is grievously injured in a plane crash. Seeking to cure his wounds, Diana works tirelessly for five days to complete her Purple Ray machine—but she’s too late. Trevor has died. Undeterred, Diana bathes her patient in the glowing light of the machine. The result might have embarrassed even the admen who wrote the promotional copy for Branston’s products: Wonder Woman’s Purple Ray brings Trevor back to life.

Science frowns on the violet ray machine

Despite their popularity, the machines didn’t fare quite as well within the medical establishment. In 1917, editors at the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that a violet ray generator certainly couldn’t treat “practically every ailment known to mankind,” as one manufacturer had claimed. Although the devices emitted a violet color, they were not in fact emitting ultraviolet light, or at least not in amounts that would be beneficial. In 1951, a Maryland district court ruled against a company named Master Appliances in a libel suit. The charge was misbranding, and the court found that the device was not an effective treatment nor capable of producing the claimed results. At the time, Master Appliances was one of the last manufacturers of violet ray machines in the United States, and the ruling effectively ended production in this country.

And yet you can still buy violet ray machines today—both the antique variety and its modern equivalent. Today’s units are mainly marketed to aestheticians or sold for home use, and some dermatologists are not ready to categorically dismiss their benefits. Although they probably won’t cure indigestion or gray hair, the high frequency can dry out the skin and ozone does kill bacteria, so the machines may help treat acne and other skin conditions. Plus, there’s the placebo effect. As with all consumer electronics for which outrageous claims are made, let the buyer beware.

Part of a continuing series looking at photographs of historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the October 2022 print issue.

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Can Smartphones Help Predict Suicide?

A unique research project is tracking hundreds of people at risk for suicide, using data from smartphones and wearable biosensors to identify periods of high danger — and intervene.

Numerous orgs hacked after installing weaponized open source apps

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Hackers backed by the North Korean government are weaponizing well-known pieces of open source software in an ongoing campaign that has already succeeded in compromising "numerous" organizations in the media, defense and aerospace, and IT services industries, Microsoft said on Thursday.

ZINC—Microsoft's name for a threat actor group also called Lazarus, which is best known for conducting the devastating 2014 compromise of Sony Pictures Entertainment—has been lacing PuTTY and other legitimate open source applications with highly encrypted code that ultimately installs espionage malware.

The hackers then pose as job recruiters and connect with individuals of targeted organizations over LinkedIn. After developing a level of trust over a series of conversations and eventually moving them to the WhatsApp messenger, the hackers instruct the individuals to install the apps, which infect the employees' work environments.

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Meta Will Freeze Most Hiring, Zuckerberg Tells Employees

The company’s chief executive had signaled for several months that he wanted to rein in costs as he shifts attention toward the metaverse.

Google to Shut Down Stadia Video Game Streaming Service

After nearly three years, Google has decided to winnow its video game ambitions because Stadia was less popular than it had anticipated.

Taming the Climate Is Far Harder Than Getting People to the Moon

In his 1949 book The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle, an English philosopher, introduced the term “category mistake.” He gave the example of a visitor to the University of Oxford who sees colleges and a splendid library and then asks, “But where is the university?” The category mistake is obvious: A university is an institution, not a collection of buildings.

Today, no category mistake is perhaps more consequential than the all-too-common view of the global energy transition. The error is to think of the transition as the discrete, well-bounded task of replacing carbon fuels by noncarbon alternatives. The apparent urgency of the transition leads to calls for confronting the challenge just as the United States dealt with two earlier ones: winning the nuclear-arms race against Nazi Germany and the space race against the Soviet Union. The Manhattan Project produced an atomic bomb in three years, and Project Apollo put two U.S. citizens on the moon in July 1969, eight years after President Kennedy had announced the goal.

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But difficult and costly as those two endeavors were, they affected only small parts of the economy, their costs were relatively modest, and the lives of average citizens were hardly affected. It is just the opposite for the decarbonization of the energy supply.

Ours is an overwhelmingly fossil-fueled civilization, and the size and complexity of our extensive supersystem of fuel extraction, processing, distribution, storage, and conversion means that a complete displacement of it will directly affect every person and every industry, not least the growing of food and the long-distance transport of goods and people. The costs will be stupendous.

Affluent nations would have to devote on the order of 15 to 20 percent of their annual economic product to the task of decarbonizing the economy.

By the time the Manhattan Project ended in 1946, it had cost the country nearly US $2 billion, about $33 billion in today’s money, the total equal to only about 0.3 percent of the 1943-45 gross domestic product. When Project Apollo ended in 1972, it had cost about $26 billion, or $207 billion in today’s money; over 12 years it worked out annually to about 0.2 percent of the country’s 1961-72 GDP.

Of course, nobody can provide a reliable account of the eventual cost of global energy transition because we do not know the ultimate composition of the new primary energy supply. Nor do we know what shares will come from converting natural renewable flows, whether we will use them to produce hydrogen or synthetic fuels, and the extent to which we will rely on nuclear fission (and, as some hope, on fusion) or from other, still unknown options.

Chris Philpot; Sources: CTBTO Preparatory Commission; ScienceDirect; McKinsey Global Institute

But a recent attempt to estimate such costs confirms the magnitude of the category mistake. The McKinsey Global Institute, in a highly conservative estimate, puts the cost at $275 trillion between 2021 and 2050. That is roughly $9.2 trillion a year, compared with the 2021 global economic product of $94 trillion. Such numbers imply an annual expenditure of about 10 percent of today’s world economic product. And because the world’s low-income countries could not carry such burdens, affluent nations would have to devote on the order of 15 to 20 percent of their annual economic product to the task. Such shares are comparable only to the spending that was required to win World War II.

This article appears in the October 2022 print issue as “Decarbonization Is Our Greatest Challenge.”

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Meta announces Make-A-Video, which generates video from text

Enlarge / Still image from an AI-generated video of a teddy bear painting a portrait. (credit: Meta)

Today, Meta announced Make-A-Video, an AI-powered video generator that can create novel video content from text or image prompts, similar to existing image synthesis tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. It can also make variations of existing videos, though it's not yet available for public use.

On Make-A-Video's announcement page, Meta shows example videos generated from text, including "a young couple walking in heavy rain" and "a teddy bear painting a portrait." It also showcases Make-A-Video's ability to take a static source image and animate it. For example, a still photo of a sea turtle, once processed through the AI model, can appear to be swimming.

The key technology behind Make-A-Video—and why it has arrived sooner than some experts anticipated—is that it builds off existing work with text-to-image synthesis used with image generators like OpenAI's DALL-E. In July, Meta announced its own text-to-image AI model called Make-A-Scene.

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Never-before-seen malware has infected hundreds of Linux and Windows devices

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Researchers have revealed a never-before-seen piece of cross-platform malware that has infected a wide range of Linux and Windows devices, including small office routers, FreeBSD boxes, and large enterprise servers.

Black Lotus Labs, the research arm of security firm Lumen, is calling the malware Chaos, a word that repeatedly appears in function names, certificates, and file names it uses. Chaos emerged no later than April 16, when the first cluster of control servers went live in the wild. From June through mid-July, researchers found hundreds of unique IP addresses representing compromised Chaos devices. Staging servers used to infect new devices have mushroomed in recent months, growing from 39 in May to 93 in August. As of Tuesday, the number reached 111.

Black Lotus has observed interactions with these staging servers from both embedded Linux devices as well as enterprise servers, including one in Europe that was hosting an instance of GitLab. There are more than 100 unique samples in the wild.

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Google to Make Search and Maps More ‘Immersive’

From more photo-based results to neighborhood “vibe” checks, the company announced updates meant to keep two of its most popular products on trend.

Robo-Ostrich Sprints to 100m World Record

For a robot that shares a leg design with the fastest running bird on the planet, we haven’t ever really gotten a sense of how fast Agility Robotics’ Cassie is actually able to move. Oregon State University’s Cassie successfully ran a 5k last year, but it was the sort of gait that we’ve come to expect from humanoid robots—more of a jog, really, with measured steps that didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in higher speeds. Turns out, Cassie was just holding back, because she’s just sprinted her way to a Guinness World Record for fastest 100m run by a bipedal robot.

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Cassie’s average speed was just over 4 meters per second, completing the 100 meters in 24.73 second. And for a conventional¹ bipedal robot, that is fast. Moreover, her top speed was certainly higher than 4 m/s, since the record attempt required a standing start (along with a return to the starting point without falling over). This is also by far the most ostrich-like I’ve ever seen Cassie move, with a springy bird-like gait. With a feathery costume on, the robot would be a dead ringer for the real bird, and it would give Cassie something to aspire to, since a real ostrich can run the 100m in five seconds flat.

This was not an autonomous run, since this version of Cassie has no external sensors, and there was a human with a remote doing the steering. OSU’s Dynamic Robotics Laboratory has been working on this kind of dynamic movement for a while, but the sprinting in particular required some extra training in the form of gait optimization in simulation. And according to the researchers, one of the most difficult challenges was actually getting Cassie to reach a sprint from a standing start and then slow down to a stop on the other end without borking herself.

“This may be the first bipedal robot to learn to run, but it won’t be the last,” Agility Robotics’ Jonathan Hurst said. “I believe control approaches like this are going to be a huge part of the future of robotics. The exciting part of this race is the potential. Using learned policies for robot control is a very new field, and this 100-meter dash is showing better performance than other control methods. I think progress is going to accelerate from here.”

I certainly hope that this won’t be the last bipedal robot to learn to run, because I would pay money to attend a live bipedal robot race.

¹Arguably, the fastest bipedal legged robot was probably the OutRunner—depending on what you decide counts as “legged” and “bipedal,” although it would not have qualified for this particular record due to its difficulty with starting and stopping.

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Evolution of In-Vehicle Networks

Developments in Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) are creating a new approach to In-Vehicle Network (IVN) architecture design. With today's vehicles containing at least a hundred ECUs, the current distributed network architecture has reached the limit of its capabilities. The automotive industry is now focusing on a domain or zonal controller architecture to simplify network design, reduce weight & cost and maximize performance.

Download this free poster now!

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A domain controller can replace the functions of many ECUs to enable high-speed communications, sensor fusion and decision-making, as well as supporting high speed interfaces for cameras, radar and LiDAR sensors. This poster graphically represents the development of IVNs from the past to the present and future then provides guidance on how to test them.

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Serious vulnerabilities in Matrix’s end-to-end encryption are being patched

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Developers of the open source Matrix messenger protocol are releasing an update on Thursday to fix critical end-to-end encryption vulnerabilities that subvert the confidentiality and authentication guarantees that have been key to the platform's meteoric rise.

Matrix is a sprawling ecosystem of open source and proprietary chat and collaboration clients and servers that are fully interoperable. The best-known app in this family is Element, a chat client for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, but there's a dizzying array of other members as well.

(credit: Hodgson)

Matrix roughly aims to do for real-time communication what the SMTP standard does for email, which is to provide a federated protocol allowing user clients connected to different servers to exchange messages with each other. Unlike SMTP, however, Matrix offers robust end-to-end encryption, or E2EE, designed to ensure that messages can't be spoofed and that only the senders and receivers of messages can read the contents.

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Stuck on the Streets of San Francisco in a Driverless Car

A reporter and a photographer went for a ride in an experimental autonomous vehicle operated by the General Motors subsidiary Cruise. There were bumps in the road.

We interviewed Linux OS through an AI bot to discover its secrets

Enlarge / A world-exclusive interview between man and machine. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Millions of people use Linux every day, but we rarely stop to think about how the operating system feels about it. Wouldn't it be nice to know what Linux really thinks about open source, Windows, Macs, and the command line? Until now, this has impossible. But thanks to a new AI chat tool, we're able to find out.

Two weeks ago, a website called Character.AI opened a public beta that allows visitors to create a chat bot based on any character they can imagine. You input a few parameters, and the AI does the rest using a large language model similar to GPT-3. So we called forth "The Linux OS" as a bot to ask it a few questions about itself. The results were fun and surprising.

Using Character.AI is a lot like a texting conversation. You type in what you want to ask, and you read the AI character's responses in written form as the chat history scrolls upward. As with GPT-3, the code behind Character.AI has likely learned from absorbing millions of text sources found on the Internet. As such, its AI characters can easily respond with erroneous or fictional information. In fact, the site carries a bold disclaimer reading, "Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!"

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The Crypto World Is on Edge After a String of Hacks

More than $2 billion in digital currency has been stolen in hacks this year, shaking faith in the experimental field of decentralized finance known as DeFi.

The Long Road to Driverless Trucks

Self-driving eighteen-wheelers are now on highways in states like California and Texas. But there are still human “safety drivers” behind the wheel. What will it take to get them out?

Better than JPEG? Researcher discovers that Stable Diffusion can compress images

Enlarge / These jagged, colorful blocks are exactly what the concept of image compression looks like. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)

Last week, Swiss software engineer Matthias Bühlmann discovered that the popular image synthesis model Stable Diffusion could compress existing bitmapped images with fewer visual artifacts than JPEG or WebP at high compression ratios, though there are significant caveats.

Stable Diffusion is an AI image synthesis model that typically generates images based on text descriptions (called "prompts"). The AI model learned this ability by studying millions of images pulled from the Internet. During the training process, the model makes statistical associations between images and related words, making a much smaller representation of key information about each image and storing them as "weights," which are mathematical values that represent what the AI image model knows, so to speak.

When Stable Diffusion analyzes and "compresses" images into weight form, they reside in what researchers call "latent space," which is a way of saying that they exist as a sort of fuzzy potential that can be realized into images once they're decoded. With Stable Diffusion 1.4, the weights file is roughly 4GB, but it represents knowledge about hundreds of millions of images.

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C.E.O. of Celsius, the Crypto Bank, Resigns

Alex Mashinsky, the founder of Celsius, which filed for bankruptcy in July, said his role had “become an increasing distraction.”

Apps can pose bigger security, privacy threat based on where you download them

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Google and Apple have removed hundreds of apps from their app stores at the request of governments around the world, creating regional disparities in access to mobile apps at a time when many economies are becoming increasingly dependent on them.

The mobile phone giants have removed over 200 Chinese apps, including widely downloaded apps like TikTok, at the Indian government’s request in recent years. Similarly, the companies removed LinkedIn, an essential app for professional networking, from Russian app stores at the Russian government’s request.

However, access to apps is just one concern. Developers also regionalize apps, meaning they produce different versions for different countries. This raises the question of whether these apps differ in their security and privacy capabilities based on region.

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Meta Removes Chinese Effort to Influence U.S. Elections

The parent of Facebook and Instagram said that it had taken down what was the first targeted Chinese campaign to interfere in U.S. politics and that the effort was limited.

iRobot Crams Mop and Vacuum Into Newest Roomba

Robots tend to do best when you optimize them for one single, specific task. This is especially true for home robots, which need to be low cost(ish) as well as robust enough to be effective in whatever home they find themselves in. iRobot has had this formula pretty well nailed down with its family of vacuuming robots for nearly two decades, but they’ve also had another family of floor care robots that have been somewhat neglected recently: mopping robots.

Today, iRobot is announcing the US $1,100 Roomba Combo j7+, which stuffs both a dry vacuum and a wet mop into the body of a Roomba j7. While very much not the first or only combo floor-cleaning robot on the market, the Combo j7+ uses a unique and very satisfying mechanical system to make sure that your carpets stay clean and dry while giving your hard floors the moist buffing that they so desperately need.

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While iRobot is now best known for its vacuums, a decade ago Scooba floor cleaning robots were right up there with Roombas as a focus for the company, featuring tanks for cleaning solution and dirty water and combining vacuuming and scrubbing for non-carpeted floors. They were impressive robots, but they were quite expensive and relatively labor-intensive for users, since you needed to fill and empty them with every cycle. iRobot eventually phased out the Scooba for the Braava, which used mopping pads instead of a vacuuming system and was way cheaper. But Braavas aren’t vacuums, meaning that they work best when the floor that they’re supposed to clean is vacuumed first. You can coordinate a Braava with a Roomba to do exactly that, but it’s perhaps not the most elegant way of doing things, even if it does allow you to keep your robots well-optimized for single tasks. And the Braava is showing its age, without any of the clever sensing that the newest Roombas use to intelligently navigate around your home and life.

The Combo j7+ essentially combines the mopping capabilities of a Braava with the vacuuming smarts of a Roomba j7. Frankly, I have no idea why iRobot didn’t name this thing something a bit more distinctive, because the regular j7 Roomba still exists, and the “+” simply refers to the fact that it comes with a self-emptying Clean Base. The “Combo j7+”, meanwhile, has completely different hardware taking up the back half of the robot, and isn’t (as the name sort of implies) a regular j7 with an add-on or something like that. Anyway, for brevity, I’m just going to call this new combo Roomba the j7C until iRobot comes up with something better.

Now, the j7C is absolutely not the first mop/vacuum robot out there, but the way most others tackle the transition from hard floors (mop appropriate) and carpet (not mop appropriate) is to raise the mopping attachment up into the body of the robot a couple of millimeters when on carpet to keep the mop from dragging across the carpet and making it wet and gross. This is certainly better than not lifting the mop up at all, but iRobot says that it still "paints" wet drippy drops all over the place. Not ideal.

“Why would someone sell a carpet-painting robot that applies mud to your carpet in a systematic fashion? It’s a fundamentally flawed concept that doesn’t work. iRobot, being who we are, said “here’s an impossible challenge, let’s go do it because it should be fun.” —Colin Angle, iRobot CEO

iRobot’s solution is, honestly, more complex than I would have thought to be practical for a Roomba—the mop pad is attached to the robot through two actuated metal arms, which can move the entire thing from the bottom of the robot to the top, placing the body of the robot in between any droppy drips and the carpet:

Cool, right? There are belt drives in there to move the arms, making sure that the motion is both smooth enough and powerful enough to exert adequate pressure on the floor when the pad is under the robot. And if you look closely, you’ll see the skins on the sides of the robot open out slightly to give the arms space to move up and down.

The j7C vacuums and mops in one single pass. On hard floors, water (or cleaning solution) is continuously sprayed underneath the robot from ports just behind the vacuuming system, and the mopping pad wipes it right up. When the robot detects carpet (which it does through ultrasonic sensors, not visually like the animation suggests), it pauses to lift the pad up, and then vacuums the carpet just like a regular j7 Roomba. You can remove and clean the pad of course, which is made easier to do since you don’t have to get under the robot to do it.

Just aft of the brushes, three black nozzles dispense water in advance of the mopping pad.

Since all of this happens in the same footprint as the original j7, there are some compromises to make room for the mopping system. This mostly happens with the bin, which now accommodates a water reservoir, taking up some of the space where you’d otherwise find dirt. It’s not a huge deal, though, because Roombas with the automatic Clean Base (including the j7C) will empty their own bins when they get full and then resume vacuuming where they left off. So, that may happen an extra time or two during the j7C’s cleaning cycle, but it’s not something the user has to worry about.

What the user does have to worry about, unfortunately, is the water reservoir. You access it by removing the j7C’s bin, and then you can fill the reservoir at a sink. One fill is enough for a thousand square feet of coverage on eco-mode, and there’s also normal mode and a double-pass mode that you can select in the app for dirtier floors.

This water filling process is easy, but it’s a user-dependent step, which sadly breaks the magic of the automatic dirt-emptying Roombas where you basically don’t have to think about them for weeks at a time. Water isn’t required, at least, and if the robot detects an empty reservoir, it’ll just default to vacuuming everything instead of mopping. Other companies have approached this problem with docks that include water reservoirs able to automatically refill a robot multiple times, and I have some faith that iRobot is already working on a way of doing this more elegantly. Personally, I’m hoping for a water shuttle robot: some little bot with a small tank that zips back and forth between the dock and (say) a water dispenser hooked into the toilet fill line in your bathroom to provide refills on demand.

We asked iRobot CEO Colin Angle to explain why they feel that this is the right approach to a hybrid mopping and vacuuming robot, and how the heck they came up with this system in the first place.

IEEE Spectrum: One of the greatest things about the Roomba is that it does one thing very well. Often with robots, trying to make more of a generalist robot results in significant compromises. What made you decide to shift from dedicated vacuuming and mopping robots, to one robot that does both tasks?

Colin Angle: The short answer is that we finally figured out how to do it. We’re not the first company with a two-in-one robot on the market. What took us so long? Well, it took us this long to solve the problem.

There’s a very interesting history of mopping robots at iRobot, where we had the Scooba that put down water, scrubbed, and vacuumed the water up again. And then we started getting into mopping pads with the Scooba 230 and the Braava. Although we had a lot of skepticism about the idea of capturing the water and dirt in the pad and we didn’t know how to do it at the beginning, it proved to be a very successful strategy. Then the question was, could we figure out a mechanism that would allow edge-to-edge cleaning with a mop on a Roomba platform?

Our early attempts were not successful, and that purist view of keeping the vacuuming and mopping robots separate held for a long time, but we recognized that the convenience of true on-the-fly switching would be a real and tangible customer benefit and would allow us to save on costs because we wouldn’t be duplicating much of the hardware across two separate robots.

IEEE Spectrum: So how did you end up at the solution of moving the mopping pad all the way from the bottom of the robot to the top?

Angle: It’s certainly not where we went at first! In the annals of iRobot history are dozens of flawed ideas around how we could do this, actually dating back to some of the original designs for the original Roomba, because it was always something we’d been thinking about. The idea of having something on the bottom and pulling a plastic screen over the mopping pad got real consideration, but there are some bad failure modes there.

The guy who came up with this is one of our principle engineers, who has been with iRobot maybe the longest besides me at this point. I convinced him to join the company from [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. He’s the one who say, “well why don’t we just use a belt drive and arms?” and everyone looked at him like, “are you insane?” And so he built it, and proved to us that it could work, which is his normal way of convincing us that he’s right and we’re wrong. And it’s brilliant! It sounds like a crazy approach to solving the problem, but when you see it, it makes sense.

iRobot is also announcing some hefty software updates in the form of iRobot OS 5.0. The j7 Roombas have front-facing cameras that are able to do all sorts of things, and last we checked, that included identifying and avoiding four different classes of floor-dwelling objects. iRobot OS 5.0 brings that number up to 80 (!), and obstacles now trigger different behaviors besides avoidance. Litter boxes and pet bowls, for example, can be given special attention because they tend to be dirtier areas. Same with toilets, dishwashers, and ovens. With a voice assistant, you can now also yell at your robot to skip the room that you’re in, and it’ll come back to it later, which is great for those of us who feel like our robots actively seek us out whenever they have cleaning to do.

iRobot told us that its j7 vacuums have received the TÜV SÜD Cyber Security Mark, a stringent third-party endorsement of iRobot’s security practices, meaning that iRobot has invested heavily in making sure that the data that it has under its possession is kept safe from external hackers. This is good, for sure, but frankly I don’t get the sense that folks are nearly as worried about their data getting stolen from iRobot by hackers as they are about their data getting intentionally leveraged by iRobot (or iRobot’s future owner) in a way that is contrary to users’ interests, although iRobot has promised that it will never sell your data to other companies. Until we have a better idea of what exactly is happening with the Amazon merger, it’s probably best to remain cautious. We did ask Colin Angle what the options are if you want to keep your data completely private while still using your Roomba, and here’s what he told us:

“It depends on what your comfort level is. You don’t have to turn on mapping, and you certainly don’t have to ever store or share any image from your home. If you want to clean by room, we need to remember where your rooms are. We’re going to remember them as polygonal objects—we’re not going to have any idea what they look like. We are really trying to make sure that we only store that data that the robot actually needs to do the job. If you don’t want to clean by room or build a map, you can still have the robot operate and switch between modes and benefit from the avoidance technologies and do the right things. But there are different levels that will hopefully satisfy most different levels of concern.”

We also learned that iRobot’s top-of-the-line s9, which features a decidedly non-Roomba like square front plus a 3D sensor, is not the direction that iRobot will be moving in. Historically, iRobot has released premium Roombas like the s9, and then the tech in them trickles down into less expensive robots over time. But it sounds like the s9, while still iRobot’s most powerful vacuum, couldn’t justify its fancy and expensive sensor or non-round form factor to the extent that would be necessary to influence future generations of Roombas. “This is all a journey,” Angle told us. “With the costs inherent in building the s9 robot, we felt like we could go another way and put more CPU power in and really adopt an architecture around computer vision that would be more flexible than the dense 3D point cloud sensor in the s9. The technology is moving so fast on the visual understanding and machine learning side, that it’s a better long-term bet to get behind. 3D sensing will come back, but it may come back as depth from vision. And the square front has some advantages—speed of clean is a benefit, but improved mission completion [of round Roombas] is a bigger benefit. I think the architecture of the J series robot is the go-forward architecture.”

Angle acknowledges that the architecture of the J series, and of the j7C in particular, makes it a high end robot, and you could buy a Roomba and a Braava together for much less money. But this is how iRobot does things—offering premium robots with new features and capabilities for high prices, and eventually we’ll see the costs come down in the form of more affordable generations of robot. “This is definitely an exciting path forward for us,” says Angle.

The iRobot Roomba Combo j7+ is available for pre-order now for $1,099 in the United States, and will be available in Canada and Europe in early October.

Reference: https://ift.tt/N1zYtQy

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