The Sneaky Standard

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail.

Personal computing has changed a lot in the past four decades, and one of the biggest changes, perhaps the most unheralded, comes down to compatibility. These days, you generally can’t fry a computer by plugging in a joystick that the computer doesn’t support. Simply put, standardization slowly fixed this. One of the best examples of a bedrock standard is the peripheral component interconnect, or PCI, which came about in the early 1990s and appeared in some of the decade’s earliest consumer machines three decades ago this year. To this day, PCI slots are used to connect network cards, sound cards, disc controllers, and other peripherals to computer motherboards via a bus that carries data and control signals. PCI’s lessons gradually shaped other standards, like USB, and ultimately made computers less frustrating. So how did we get it? Through a moment of canny deception.

Commercial - Intel Inside Pentium Processor (1994) www.youtube.com

Embracing standards: the computing industry’s gift to itself

In the 1980s, when you used the likes of an Apple II or a Commodore 64 or an MS-DOS machine, you were essentially locked into an ecosystem. Floppy disks often weren’t compatible. The peripherals didn’t work across platforms. If you wanted to sell hardware in the 1980s, you were stuck building multiple versions of the same device.

For example, the KoalaPad was a common drawing tool sold in the early 1980s for numerous platforms, including the Atari 800, the Apple II, the TRS-80, the Commodore 64, and the IBM PC. It was essentially the same device on every platform, and yet, KoalaPad’s manufacturer, Koala Technologies, had to make five different versions of this device, with five different manufacturing processes, five different connectors, five different software packages, and a lot of overhead. It was wasteful, made being a hardware manufacturer more costly, and added to consumer confusion.

Drawing on a 1983 KoalaPad (Apple IIe) www.youtube.com

This slowly began to change in around 1982, when the market of IBM PC clones started taking off. It was a happy accident—IBM’s decision to use a bunch of off-the-shelf components for its PC accidentally turned them into a de facto standard. Gradually, it became harder for computing platforms to become islands unto themselves. Even when IBM itself tried and failed to sell the computing world on a bunch of proprietary standards in its PS/2 line, it didn’t work. The cat was already out of the bag. It was too late.

So how did we end up with the standards that we have today, and the PCI expansion card standard specifically? PCI wasn’t the only game in town—you could argue, for example, that if things played out differently, we’d all be using NuBus or Micro Channel architecture. But it was a standard seemingly for the long haul, far beyond other competing standards of its era.

Who’s responsible for spearheading this standard? Intel. While PCI was a cross-platform technology, it proved to be an important strategy for the chipmaker to consolidate its power over the PC market at a time when IBM had taken its foot off the gas, choosing to focus on its own PowerPC architecture and narrower plays like the ThinkPad instead, and was no longer shaping the architecture of the PC.

The vision of PCI was simple: an interconnect standard that was not intended to be limited to one line of processors or one bus. But don’t mistake standardization for cooperation. PCI was a chess piece—a part of a different game than the one PC manufacturers were playing.

The PCI standard and its derivatives have endured for over three decades. Modern computers with a GPU often use a PCIe interconnect. Alamy

In the early 1990s, Intel needed a win

In the years before Intel’s Pentium chipset came out in 1993, there seemed to be some skepticism about whether Intel could maintain its status at the forefront of the desktop-computing field.

In lower-end consumer machines, players like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Cyrix were starting to shake their weight around. At the high end of the professional market, workstation-level computing from the likes of Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and Digital Equipment Corporation suggested there wasn’t room for Intel in the long run. And laterally, the company suddenly found itself competing with a triple threat of IBM, Motorola, and Apple, whose PowerPC chip was about to hit the market.

A Bloomberg piece from the period painted Intel as being boxed in between these various extremes:

If its rivals keep gaining, Intel could eventually lose ground all around.

This is no idle threat. Cyrix Corp. and Chips & Technologies Inc. have re-created—and improved—Intel’s 386 without, they say, violating copyrights or patents. AMD has at least temporarily won the right in court to make 386 clones under a licensing deal that Intel canceled in 1985. In the past 12 months, AMD has won 40% of a market that since 1985 has given Intel $2 billion in profits and a $2.3 billion cash hoard. The 486 may suffer next. Intel has been cutting its prices faster than for any new chip in its history. And in mid-May, it chopped 50% more from one model after Cyrix announced a chip with some similar features. Although the average price of a 486 is still four times that of a 386, analysts say Intel’s profits may grow less than 5% this year, to about $850 million.

Intel’s chips face another challenge, too. Ebbing demand for personal computers has slowed innovation in advanced PCs. This has left a gap at the top—and most profitable—end of the desktop market that Sun, Hewlett-Packard Co., and other makers of powerful workstations are working to fill. Thanks to microprocessors based on a technology known as RISC, or reduced instruction-set computing, workstations have dazzling graphics and more oomph—handy for doing complex tasks and moving data faster over networks. And some are as cheap as high-end PCs. So the workstation makers are now making inroads among such PC buyers as stock traders, banks, and airlines.

This was a deep underestimation of Intel’s market position, it turned out. The company was actually well-positioned to shape the direction of the industry through standardization. They had a direct say on what appeared on the motherboards of millions of computers, and that gave them impressive power to wield. If Intel didn’t want to support a given standard, that standard would likely be dead in the water.

How Intel crushed a standards body on the way to giving us an essential technology

The Video Electronics Standards Association, or VESA, is perhaps best known today for its mounting system for computer monitors and its DisplayPort technology. But in the early 1990s, it was working on a video-focused successor to the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) internal bus, widely used in IBM PC clones.

A bus, the physical wiring that lets a CPU talk to internal and external peripheral devices, is something of a bedrock of computing—and in the wrong setting, a bottleneck. The ISA expansion card slot, which had become a de facto standard in the 1980s, had given the IBM PC clone market something to build against during its first decade. But by the early 1990s, for high-bandwidth applications, particularly video, it was holding back innovation. It just wasn’t fast enough to keep up, even after it had been upgraded from being able to handle 8 bits of data at once to 16.

That’s where the VESA Local Bus (VL-Bus) came into play. Built to work only with video cards, the standard offered a faster connection, and could handle 32 bits of data. It was targeted at the Super VGA standard, which offered higher resolution (up to 1280 x 1024 pixels) and richer colors at a time when Windows was finally starting to take hold in the market. To overcome the limitations of the ISA bus, graphics card and motherboard manufacturers started collaborating on proprietary interfaces, creating an array of incompatible graphics buses. The lack of a consistent experience around Super VGA led to VESA’s formation. The new VESA slot, which extended the existing 16-bit ISA bus with an additional 32-bit video-specific connector, was an attempt to fix that.

It wasn’t a massive leap—more like a stopgap improvement on the way to better graphics.

And it looked like Intel was going to go for the VL-BUS. But there was one problem—Intel actually wasn’t feeling it, and Intel didn’t exactly make that point clear to the companies supporting the VESA standards body until it was too late for them to react.

Intel revealed its hand in an interesting way, according to The San Francisco Examiner tech reporter Gina Smith:

Until now, virtually everyone expected VESA’s so-called VL-Bus technology to be the standard for building local bus products. But just two weeks before VESA was planning to announce what it came up with, Intel floored the VESA local bus committee by saying it won’t support the technology after all. In a letter sent to VESA local bus committee officials, Intel stated that supporting VESA’s local bus technology “was no longer in Intel’s best interest.” And sources say it went on to suggest that VESA and Intel should work together to minimize the negative press impact that might arise from the decision.

Good luck, Intel. Because now that Intel plans to announce a competing group that includes hardware heavyweights like IBM, Compaq, NCR and DEC, customers and investors (and yes, the press) are going to wonder what in the world is going on.

Not surprisingly, the people who work for VESA are hurt, confused and angry. “It’s a political nightmare. We’re extremely surprised they’re doing this,” said Ron McCabe, chairman for the committee and a product manager at VESA member Tseng Labs. “We’ll still make money and Intel will still make money, but instead of one standard, there will now be two. And it’s the customer who’s going to get hurt in the end.”

But Intel had seen an opportunity to put its imprint on the computing industry. That opportunity came in the form of PCI, a technology that the firm’s Intel Architecture Labs started developing around 1990, two years before the fateful rejection of VESA. Essentially, Intel had been playing both sides on the standards front.

Why PCI

Why make such a hard shift, screwing over a trusted industry standards body out of nowhere? Beyond wanting to put its mark on the standard, Intel also saw an opportunity to build something more future-proof; something that could benefit not just graphic cards but every expansion card in the machine.

As John R. Quinn wrote in PC Magazine in 1992:

Intel’s PCI bus specification requires more work on the part of peripheral chip-makers, but offers several theoretical advantages over the VL-Bus. In the first place, the specification allows up to ten peripherals to work on the PCI bus (including the PCI controller and an optional expansion-bus controller for ISA, EISA, or MCA). It, too, is limited to 33 MHz, but it allows the PCI controller to use a 32-bit or a 64-bit data connection to the CPU.

In addition, the PCI specification allows the CPU to run concurrently with bus-mastering peripherals—a necessary capability for future multimedia tasks. And the Intel approach allows a full burst mode for reads and writes (Intel’s 486 only allows bursts on reads).

Essentially, the PCI architecture is a CPU-to-local bus bridge with FIFO (first in, first out) buffers. Intel calls it an “intermediate” bus because it is designed to uncouple the CPU from the expansion bus while maintaining a 33-MHz 32-bit path to peripheral devices. By taking this approach, the PCI controller makes it possible to queue writes and reads between the CPU and PCI peripherals. In theory, this would enable manufacturers to use a single motherboard design for several generations of CPUs. It also means more sophisticated controller logic is necessary for the PCI interface and peripheral chips.

To put that all another way, VESA came up with a slightly faster bus standard for the next generation of graphics cards, one just fast enough to meet the needs of Intel’s recent i486 microprocessor users. Intel came up with an interface designed to reshape the next decade of computing, one that it would let its competitors use. This bus would allow people to upgrade their processor across generations without needing to upgrade their motherboard. Intel brought a gun to a knife fight, and it made the whole debate about VL-Bus seem insignificant in short order.

The result was that, no matter how miffed the VESA folks were, Intel had consolidated power for itself by creating an open standard that would eventually win the next generation of computers. Sure, Intel let other companies use the PCI standard, even companies like Apple that weren’t directly doing business with Intel on the CPU side. But Intel, by pushing forth PCI, suddenly made itself relevant to the entire next generation of the computing industry in a way that ensured it would have a second foothold in hardware. The “Intel Inside” marketing label was not limited to the processors, as it turned out.

The influence of Intel’s introduction of PCI is still felt: Thirty-two years later, and three decades after PCI became a major consumer standard, we’re still using PCI derivatives in modern computing devices.

PCI and other standards

Looking at PCI, and its successor PCI express, less as ways that we connect the peripherals we use with our computers, and more as a way for Intel to maintain its dominance over the PC industry, highlights something fascinating about standardization.

It turns out that perhaps Intel’s greatest investment in computing in the 1990s was not the Pentium chipset, but its investment in Intel Architecture Labs, which quietly made the entire computing industry better by working on the things that frustrated consumers and manufacturers alike.

Essentially, as IBM had begun to take its eye off the massive clone market it unwittingly built during this period, Intel used standardization to fill the power void. It worked pretty well, and made the company integral to computer hardware beyond the CPU. In fact, devices you use daily—that Intel played zero part in creating—have benefited greatly from the company’s standards work. If you’ve ever used a device with a USB or Bluetooth connection, you can thank Intel for that.

Five offshoots of the original PCI standard that you may be familiar with

Accelerated Graphics Port. Effectively a PCI-first approach to the VL-Bus standard, a slot dedicated especially to graphics, this port was a way to offer access to faster graphics cards at a time when 3D graphics were starting to hit the market in a big way. Its first appearance came not long after the original PCI standard.

PCI-X. Despite the name, Intel was less involved in this standard, which was intended for high-end workstations and server environments. Instead, the standard was developed by IBM, Compaq, and Hewlett-Packard, doubling the bandwidth of the existing PCI standard—and released in the wild not long before HP and Compaq merged in 2002. But the slot standard was effectively a dead end: It did not see wide use with PCs, likely because Intel chose not to give the technology its blessing, but was briefly utilized by the Power Macintosh G5 line of computers.

PCIe. This is the upgrade to PCI that Intel did choose to bless, and it’s the one used by desktop computers today, in part because it was developed to allow for a huge increase in flexibility compared to PCI, in exchange for somewhat more complexity. Key to PCIe’s approach is the use of “lanes” of data transfer speed, allowing high-speed cards like graphics adapters more bandwidth (up to 16 lanes) and slower technologies like network adapters or audio adapters less. This has given PCIe unparalleled backwards compatibility—it’s technically possible to run a modern card on a first-gen PCIe port in exchange for lower speed—while allowing the standard to continue improving. To give you an idea of how far it’s come: A one-lane fifth-generation PCIe slot is roughly as fast as a 16-lane first-generation slot.

Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt can best be thought of as a way to access PCIe lanes through a cable. First used by Apple in 2011, it has become common on laptops of all stripes in recent years. Unlike PCI and PCIe, which are open to all manufacturers, Thunderbolt is closely associated with Intel. This has meant its competitor AMD had traditionally not offered Thunderbolt ports until USB4—a reworked form of the Thunderbolt 3 standard—emerged.

Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). This popular Intel-backed standard, dating to 2011, has completely rewritten the way we think about storage in computers. Once a technology built around mechanical parts, NVMe has allowed for ever-faster solid-state storage communication speeds that take advantage of innovations in the PCIe spec. Modern NVMe drives, which can reach speeds above 6,000 megabytes per second, are roughly 10 times the speed of comparable SATA solid state drives, which top out at 600 MB/s. And, thanks to the corresponding M.2 expansion card standard, they’re far smaller and significantly easier to install.

Craig Kinnie, the director of Intel Architecture Labs in the 1990s, said it best in 1995, upon coming to an agreement with Microsoft on a 3D graphics architecture for the PC platform. “What’s important to us is we move in the same direction,” he said. “We are working on convergent paths now.”

That was about collaborating with Microsoft. But really, it has been Intel’s modus operandi for decades—what’s good for the technology field is good for Intel. Innovations developed or invented by Intel—like Thunderbolt, Ultrabooks, and Next Unit Computers (NUCs)—have done much to shape the way we buy and use computers.

For all the talk of Moore’s Law as a driving factor behind Intel’s success, the true story might be its sheer cat-herding capabilities. The company that builds the standards builds the industry. Even as Intel faces increasing competition from alliterative processing players like ARM, Apple, and AMD, as long as it doesn’t lose sight of the roles standards played in its success, it might just hold on a few years longer.

Ironically, Intel’s standards-driving winning streak, now more than three decades old, might have all started the day it decided to walk out on a standards body.

Reference: https://ift.tt/KBi6czl

Financial institutions have 30 days to disclose breaches under new rules

Enlarge (credit: Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images)

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will require some financial institutions to disclose security breaches within 30 days of learning about them.

On Wednesday, the SEC adopted changes to Regulation S-P, which governs the treatment of the personal information of consumers. Under the amendments, institutions must notify individuals whose personal information was compromised “as soon as practicable, but not later than 30 days” after learning of unauthorized network access or use of customer data. The new requirements will be binding on broker-dealers (including funding portals), investment companies, registered investment advisers, and transfer agents.

"Over the last 24 years, the nature, scale, and impact of data breaches has transformed substantially," SEC Chair Gary Gensler said. "These amendments to Regulation S-P will make critical updates to a rule first adopted in 2000 and help protect the privacy of customers’ financial data. The basic idea for covered firms is if you’ve got a breach, then you’ve got to notify. That’s good for investors."

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Reference : https://ift.tt/bcQ1Nsi

Credentialing Adds Value to Training Programs

With careers in engineering and technology evolving so rapidly, a company’s commitment to upskilling its employees is imperative to their career growth. Maintaining the appropriate credentials—such as a certificate or digital badge that attests to successful completion of a specific set of learning objectives—can lead to increased job satisfaction, employee engagement, and higher salaries.

For many engineers, mostly in North America, completing a certain number of professional development hours and continuing-education units each year is required to maintain a professional engineering license.

Many companies have found that offering training and credentialing opportunities helps them stay competitive in today’s job marketplace. The programs encourage promotion from within—which helps reduce turnover and costly recruiting expenses for organizations. Employees with a variety of credentials are more engaged in industry-related initiatives and are more likely to take on leadership roles than their noncredentialed counterparts. Technical training programs also give employees the opportunity to enhance their technical skills and demonstrate their willingness to learn new ones.

One way to strengthen and elevate in-house technical training is through the IEEE Credentialing Program. An IEEE credential is an assurance of quality education obtained for employers and a source of pride for learners because they can share that their credentials have been verified by the world’s largest technical professional organization.

In addition to supporting engineering professionals in achieving their career goals, the certificates and digital badges available through the program help companies enhance the credibility of their training events, conferences, and courses. Also, most countries accept IEEE certificates towards their domestic continuing-education requirements for engineers.

Start earning your certificates and digital badges with these IEEE courses. Learn how your organization can offer credentials for your courses here.

Reference: https://ift.tt/vkQF3Ju

Video Friday: Robots With Knives

Greetings from the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Yokohama, Japan! We hope you’ve been enjoying our short videos on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. They are just a preview of our in-depth ICRA coverage, and over the next several weeks we’ll have lots of articles and videos for you. In today’s edition of Video Friday, we bring you a dozen of the most interesting projects presented at the conference.

Enjoy today’s videos, and stay tuned for more ICRA posts!

---

Upcoming robotics events for the next few months:

RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS

ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK

Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

Please send us your events for inclusion.

The following two videos are part of the “Cooking Robotics: Perception and Motion Planning” workshop, which explored “the new frontiers of ‘robots in cooking,’ addressing various scientific research questions, including hardware considerations, key challenges in multimodal perception, motion planning and control, experimental methodologies, and benchmarking approaches.” The workshop featured robots handling food items like cookies, burgers, and cereal, and the two robots seen in the videos below used knives to slice cucumbers and cakes. You can watch all workshop videos here.

“SliceIt!: Simulation-Based Reinforcement Learning for Compliant Robotic Food Slicing,” by Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Nicolas Erbetti, and Masashi Hamaya from OMRON SINIC X Corporation, Tokyo, Japan.

Cooking robots can enhance the home experience by reducing the burden of daily chores. However, these robots must perform their tasks dexterously and safely in shared human environments, especially when handling dangerous tools such as kitchen knives. This study focuses on enabling a robot to autonomously and safely learn food-cutting tasks. More specifically, our goal is to enable a collaborative robot or industrial robot arm to perform food-slicing tasks by adapting to varying material properties using compliance control. Our approach involves using Reinforcement Learning (RL) to train a robot to compliantly manipulate a knife, by reducing the contact forces exerted by the food items and by the cutting board. However, training the robot in the real world can be inefficient, and dangerous, and result in a lot of food waste. Therefore, we proposed SliceIt!, a framework for safely and efficiently learning robot food-slicing tasks in simulation. Following a real2sim2real approach, our framework consists of collecting a few real food slicing data, calibrating our dual simulation environment (a high-fidelity cutting simulator and a robotic simulator), learning compliant control policies on the calibrated simulation environment, and finally, deploying the policies on the real robot.

“Cafe Robot: Integrated AI Skillset Based on Large Language Models,” by Jad Tarifi, Nima Asgharbeygi, Shuhei Takamatsu, and Masataka Goto from Integral AI in Tokyo, Japan, and Mountain View, Calif., USA.

The cafe robot engages in natural language inter-action to receive orders and subsequently prepares coffee and cakes. Each action involved in making these items is executed using AI skills developed by Integral, including Integral Liquid Pouring, Integral Powder Scooping, and Integral Cutting. The dialogue for making coffee, as well as the coordination of each action based on the dialogue, is facilitated by the Integral Task Planner.

“Autonomous Overhead Powerline Recharging for Uninterrupted Drone Operations,” by Viet Duong Hoang, Frederik Falk Nyboe, Nicolaj Haarhøj Malle, and Emad Ebeid from University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.

We present a fully autonomous self-recharging drone system capable of long-duration sustained operations near powerlines. The drone is equipped with a robust onboard perception and navigation system that enables it to locate powerlines and approach them for landing. A passively actuated gripping mechanism grasps the powerline cable during landing after which a control circuit regulates the magnetic field inside a split-core current transformer to provide sufficient holding force as well as battery recharging. The system is evaluated in an active outdoor three-phase powerline environment. We demonstrate multiple contiguous hours of fully autonomous uninterrupted drone operations composed of several cycles of flying, landing, recharging, and takeoff, validating the capability of extended, essentially unlimited, operational endurance.

“Learning Quadrupedal Locomotion With Impaired Joints Using Random Joint Masking,” by Mincheol Kim, Ukcheol Shin, and Jung-Yup Kim from Seoul National University of Science and Technology, Seoul, South Korea, and Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa., USA.

Quadrupedal robots have played a crucial role in various environments, from structured environments to complex harsh terrains, thanks to their agile locomotion ability. However, these robots can easily lose their locomotion functionality if damaged by external accidents or internal malfunctions. In this paper, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning framework to enable a quadrupedal robot to walk with impaired joints. The proposed framework consists of three components: 1) a random joint masking strategy for simulating impaired joint scenarios, 2) a joint state estimator to predict an implicit status of current joint condition based on past observation history, and 3) progressive curriculum learning to allow a single network to conduct both normal gait and various joint-impaired gaits. We verify that our framework enables the Unitree’s Go1 robot to walk under various impaired joint conditions in real world indoor and outdoor environments.

“Synthesizing Robust Walking Gaits via Discrete-Time Barrier Functions With Application to Multi-Contact Exoskeleton Locomotion,” by Maegan Tucker, Kejun Li, and Aaron D. Ames from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Ga., and California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., USA.

Successfully achieving bipedal locomotion remains challenging due to real-world factors such as model uncertainty, random disturbances, and imperfect state estimation. In this work, we propose a novel metric for locomotive robustness – the estimated size of the hybrid forward invariant set associated with the step-to-step dynamics. Here, the forward invariant set can be loosely interpreted as the region of attraction for the discrete-time dynamics. We illustrate the use of this metric towards synthesizing nominal walking gaits using a simulation in-the-loop learning approach. Further, we leverage discrete time barrier functions and a sampling-based approach to approximate sets that are maximally forward invariant. Lastly, we experimentally demonstrate that this approach results in successful locomotion for both flat-foot walking and multicontact walking on the Atalante lower-body exoskeleton.

“Supernumerary Robotic Limbs to Support Post-Fall Recoveries for Astronauts,” by Erik Ballesteros, Sang-Yoep Lee, Kalind C. Carpenter, and H. Harry Asada from MIT, Cambridge, Mass., USA, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., USA.

This paper proposes the utilization of Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SuperLimbs) for augmenting astronauts during an Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) in a partial-gravity environment. We investigate the effectiveness of SuperLimbs in assisting astronauts to their feet following a fall. Based on preliminary observations from a pilot human study, we categorized post-fall recoveries into a sequence of statically stable poses called “waypoints”. The paths between the waypoints can be modeled with a simplified kinetic motion applied about a specific point on the body. Following the characterization of post-fall recoveries, we designed a task-space impedance control with high damping and low stiffness, where the SuperLimbs provide an astronaut with assistance in post-fall recovery while keeping the human in-the-loop scheme. In order to validate this control scheme, a full-scale wearable analog space suit was constructed and tested with a SuperLimbs prototype. Results from the experimentation found that without assistance, astronauts would impulsively exert themselves to perform a post-fall recovery, which resulted in high energy consumption and instabilities maintaining an upright posture, concurring with prior NASA studies. When the SuperLimbs provided assistance, the astronaut’s energy consumption and deviation in their tracking as they performed a post-fall recovery was reduced considerably.

“ArrayBot: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Distributed Manipulation through Touch,” by Zhengrong Xue, Han Zhang, Jingwen Cheng, Zhengmao He, Yuanchen Ju, Changyi Lin, Gu Zhang, and Huazhe Xu from Tsinghua Embodied AI Lab, IIIS, Tsinghua University; Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute; Shanghai AI Lab; and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.

We present ArrayBot, a distributed manipulation system consisting of a 16 × 16 array of vertically sliding pillars integrated with tactile sensors. Functionally, ArrayBot is designed to simultaneously support, perceive, and manipulate the tabletop objects. Towards generalizable distributed manipulation, we leverage reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for the automatic discovery of control policies. In the face of the massively redundant actions, we propose to reshape the action space by considering the spatially local action patch and the low-frequency actions in the frequency domain. With this reshaped action space, we train RL agents that can relocate diverse objects through tactile observations only. Intriguingly, we find that the discovered policy can not only generalize to unseen object shapes in the simulator but also have the ability to transfer to the physical robot without any sim-to-real fine tuning. Leveraging the deployed policy, we derive more real world manipulation skills on ArrayBot to further illustrate the distinctive merits of our proposed system.

“SKT-Hang: Hanging Everyday Objects via Object-Agnostic Semantic Keypoint Trajectory Generation,” by Chia-Liang Kuo, Yu-Wei Chao, and Yi-Ting Chen from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, in Taipei and Hsinchu, Taiwan, and NVIDIA.

We study the problem of hanging a wide range of grasped objects on diverse supporting items. Hanging objects is a ubiquitous task that is encountered in numerous aspects of our everyday lives. However, both the objects and supporting items can exhibit substantial variations in their shapes and structures, bringing two challenging issues: (1) determining the task-relevant geometric structures across different objects and supporting items, and (2) identifying a robust action sequence to accommodate the shape variations of supporting items. To this end, we propose Semantic Keypoint Trajectory (SKT), an object agnostic representation that is highly versatile and applicable to various everyday objects. We also propose Shape-conditioned Trajectory Deformation Network (SCTDN), a model that learns to generate SKT by deforming a template trajectory based on the task-relevant geometric structure features of the supporting items. We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate substantial improvements in our framework over existing robot hanging methods in the success rate and inference time. Finally, our simulation-trained framework shows promising hanging results in the real world.

“TEXterity: Tactile Extrinsic deXterity,” by Antonia Bronars, Sangwoon Kim, Parag Patre, and Alberto Rodriguez from MIT and Magna International Inc.

We introduce a novel approach that combines tactile estimation and control for in-hand object manipulation. By integrating measurements from robot kinematics and an image based tactile sensor, our framework estimates and tracks object pose while simultaneously generating motion plans in a receding horizon fashion to control the pose of a grasped object. This approach consists of a discrete pose estimator that tracks the most likely sequence of object poses in a coarsely discretized grid, and a continuous pose estimator-controller to refine the pose estimate and accurately manipulate the pose of the grasped object. Our method is tested on diverse objects and configurations, achieving desired manipulation objectives and outperforming single-shot methods in estimation accuracy. The proposed approach holds potential for tasks requiring precise manipulation and limited intrinsic in-hand dexterity under visual occlusion, laying the foundation for closed loop behavior in applications such as regrasping, insertion, and tool use.

“Out of Sight, Still in Mind: Reasoning and Planning about Unobserved Objects With Video Tracking Enabled Memory Models,” by Yixuan Huang, Jialin Yuan, Chanho Kim, Pupul Pradhan, Bryan Chen, Li Fuxin, and Tucker Hermans from University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Ore., and NVIDIA, Seattle, Wash., USA.

Robots need to have a memory of previously observed, but currently occluded objects to work reliably in realistic environments. We investigate the problem of encoding object-oriented memory into a multi-object manipulation reasoning and planning framework. We propose DOOM and LOOM, which leverage transformer relational dynamics to encode the history of trajectories given partial-view point clouds and an object discovery and tracking engine. Our approaches can perform multiple challenging tasks including reasoning with occluded objects, novel objects appearance, and object reappearance. Throughout our extensive simulation and real world experiments, we find that our approaches perform well in terms of different numbers of objects and different numbers

“Open Sourse Underwater Robot: Easys,” by Michikuni Eguchi, Koki Kato, Tatsuya Oshima, and Shunya Hara from University of Tsukuba and Osaka University, Japan.

“Sensorized Soft Skin for Dexterous Robotic Hands,” by Jana Egli, Benedek Forrai, Thomas Buchner, Jiangtao Su, Xiaodong Chen, and Robert K. Katzschmann from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Conventional industrial robots often use two fingered grippers or suction cups to manipulate objects or interact with the world. Because of their simplified design, they are unable to reproduce the dexterity of human hands when manipulating a wide range of objects. While the control of humanoid hands evolved greatly, hardware platforms still lack capabilities, particularly in tactile sensing and providing soft contact surfaces. In this work, we present a method that equips the skeleton of a tendon-driven humanoid hand with a soft and sensorized tactile skin. Multi-material 3D printing allows us to iteratively approach a cast skin design which preserves the robot’s dexterity in terms of range of motion and speed. We demonstrate that a soft skin enables frmer grasps and piezoresistive sensor integration enhances the hand’s tactile sensing capabilities.

Reference: https://ift.tt/2yGltKU

Arizona woman accused of helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at 300 companies

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | the-lightwriter)

An Arizona woman has been accused of helping generate millions of dollars for North Korea’s ballistic missile program by helping citizens of that country land IT jobs at US-based Fortune 500 companies.

Christina Marie Chapman, 49, of Litchfield Park, Arizona, raised $6.8 million in the scheme, federal prosecutors said in an indictment unsealed Thursday. Chapman allegedly funneled the money to North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department, which is involved in key aspects of North Korea’s weapons program, including its development of ballistic missiles.

Part of the alleged scheme involved Chapman and co-conspirators compromising the identities of more than 60 people living in the US and using their personal information to get North Koreans IT jobs across more than 300 US companies.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Reference : https://ift.tt/Sm1u6t4

Archie, the Internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running

Enlarge (credit: The Serial Code/YouTube)

It's amazing, and a little sad, to think that something created in 1989 that changed how people used and viewed the then-nascent Internet had nearly vanished by 2024.

Nearly, that is, because the dogged researchers and enthusiasts at The Serial Port channel on YouTube have found what is likely the last existing copy of Archie. Archie, first crafted by Alan Emtage while a student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, allowed for the searching of various "anonymous" FTP servers around what was then a very small web of universities, researchers, and government and military nodes. It was groundbreaking; it was the first echo of the "anything, anywhere" Internet to come. And when The Serial Port went looking, it very much did not exist.

The Serial Port's journey from wondering where the last Archie server was to hosting its own.

While Archie would eventually be supplanted by Gopher, web portals, and search engines, it remains a useful way to index FTP sites and certainly should be preserved. The Serial Port did this, and the road to get there is remarkable and intriguing. You are best off watching the video of their rescue, along with its explanatory preamble. But I present here some notable bits of the tale, perhaps to tempt you into digging further.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Reference : https://ift.tt/eE3MYum

High-Speed Rail Finally Coming to the U.S.

In late April, the Miami-based rail company Brightline Trains broke ground on a project that the company promises will give the United States its first dedicated, high-speed passenger rail service. The 350 kilometer (218 mile) corridor, which the company calls Brightline West, will connect Las Vegas to the the suburbs of Los Angeles. Brightline says it hopes to complete the project in time for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games that will take place in Los Angeles.

Brightline has chosen Siemens American Pioneer 220 engines that will run at speeds averaging 165 kilometers per hour, with an advertised top speed of 320 km/h. That average speed still falls short of the Eurostar network connecting London, Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam (300 km/h), Germany’s Intercity-Express 3 service (330 km/h), and the world’s fastest train service, China’s Beijing-to-Shanghai regional G trains (350 km/h).

There are currently only two rail lines in the U.S. that ever reach the 200 km/h mark, which is the unofficial minimum speed at which a train can be considered to be high-speed rail. Brightline, the company that is about to construct the L.A.-to-Las-Vegas Brightline West line, also operates a Miami-Orlando rail line that averages 111 km/h. The other is Amtrak’s Acela line between Boston and Washington, D.C.—and that line only qualifies as high-speed rail for just 80 km of its 735-km route. That’s a consequence of the rail status quo in the U.S., in which slower freight trains typically have right of way on shared rail infrastructure.

As Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, noted in IEEE Spectrum in 2018, there has long been hope that the U.S. would catch up with Europe, China, and Japan, where high-speed regional rail travel has long been a regular fixture. “In a rational world, one that valued convenience, time, low energy intensity and low carbon conversions, the high-speed electric train would always be the first choice for [intercity travel],” Smil wrote at the time. And yet, in the U.S., funding and regulatory approval for such projects have been in short supply.

Now, Brightline West, as well as a few preexisting rail projects that are at some stage of development, such as the California High-Speed Rail Network and the Texas Central Line, could be a bellwether for an attitude shift that could—belatedly—put trains closer to equal footing with cars and planes for travelers in the continental U.S.

The U.S. government, like many national governments, has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Because that generally requires decarbonizing transportation and improving energy efficiency, trains, which can run on electricity generated from fossil-fuel as well as non-fossil-fuel sources, are getting a big push. As Smil noted in 2018, trains use a fraction of a megajoule of energy per passenger-kilometer, while a lone driver in even one of the most efficient gasoline-powered cars will use orders of magnitude more energy per passenger-kilometer.

Brightline and Siemens did not respond to inquiries by IEEE Spectrum seeking to find out what innovations they plan to introduce that would make the L.A.-to-Las Vegas passenger line run faster or perhaps use less energy than its Asian and European counterparts. But Karen E. Philbrick, executive director of the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University in California says that’s beside the point. She notes that the U.S., having focused on cars for the better part of the past century, already missed the period when major innovations were being made in high-speed rail. “What’s important about Brightline West and, say, the California High-speed Rail project, is not how innovative they are, but the fact that they’re happening at all. I am thrilled to see the U.S. catching up.”

Maybe Brightline or other groups seeking to get Americans off the roadways and onto railways will be able to seize the moment and create high-speed rail lines connecting other intraregional population centers in the United States. With enough of those pieces in place, it might someday be possible to ride the rails from California to New York in a single day, in the same way train passengers in China can get from Beijing to Shanghai between breakfast and lunch.

Reference: https://ift.tt/juNl6rd

BreachForums, an online bazaar for stolen data, seized by FBI

Enlarge / The front page of BreachForums.

The FBI and law enforcement partners worldwide have seized BreachForums, a website that openly trafficked malware and data stolen in hacks.

The site has operated for years as an online trading post where criminals could buy and sell all kinds of compromised data, including passwords, customer records, and other often-times sensitive data. Last week, a site user advertised the sale of Dell customer data that was obtained from a support portal, forcing the computer maker to issue a vague warning to those affected. Also last week, Europol confirmed to Bleeping Computer that some of its data had been exposed in a breach of one of its portals. The data was put up for sale on BreachForums, Bleeping Computer reported.

On Wednesday, the normal BreachForums front page was replaced with one that proclaimed: “This website has been taken down by the FBI and DOJ with assistance from international partners.” It went on to say agents are analyzing the backend data and invited those with information about the site to contact them. A graphic shown prominently at the top showed the forum profile images of the site's two administrators, Baphomet and ShinyHunters, positioned behind prison bars.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Reference : https://ift.tt/D4wLKtY

Google unveils Veo, a high-definition AI video generator that may rival Sora

Enlarge / Still images taken from videos generated by Google Veo. (credit: Google / Benj Edwards)

On Tuesday at Google I/O 2024, Google announced Veo, a new AI video synthesis model that can create HD videos from text, image, or video prompts, similar to OpenAI's Sora. It can generate 1080p videos lasting over a minute and edit videos from written instructions, but it has not yet been released for broad use.

Veo reportedly includes the ability to edit existing videos using text commands, maintain visual consistency across frames, and generate video sequences lasting up to and beyond 60 seconds from a single prompt or a series of prompts that form a narrative. The company says it can generate detailed scenes and apply cinematic effects such as time-lapses, aerial shots, and various visual styles

Since the launch of DALL-E 2 in April 2022, we've seen a parade of new image synthesis and video synthesis models that aim to allow anyone who can type a written description to create a detailed image or video. While neither technology has been fully refined, both AI image and video generators have been steadily growing more capable.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Reference : https://ift.tt/GNIkrjF

Linux maintainers were infected for 2 years by SSH-dwelling backdoor with huge reach

Enlarge (credit: BeeBright / Getty Images / iStockphoto)

Infrastructure used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system kernel was infected for two years, starting in 2009, by sophisticated malware that managed to get a hold of one of the developers’ most closely guarded resources: the /etc/shadow files that stored encrypted password data for more than 550 system users, researchers said Tuesday.

The unknown attackers behind the compromise infected at least four servers inside kernel.org, the Internet domain underpinning the sprawling Linux development and distribution network, the researchers from security firm ESET said. After obtaining the cryptographic hashes for 551 user accounts on the network, the attackers were able to convert half into plaintext passwords, likely through password-cracking techniques and the use of an advanced credential-stealing feature built into the malware. From there, the attackers used the servers to send spam and carry out other nefarious activities. The four servers were likely infected and disinfected at different times, with the last two being remediated at some point in 2011.

Stealing kernel.org’s keys to the kingdom

An infection of kernel.org came to light in 2011, when kernel maintainers revealed that 448 accounts had been compromised after attackers had somehow managed to gain unfettered, or “root,” system access to servers connected to the domain. Maintainers reneged on a promise to provide an autopsy of the hack, a decision that has limited the public’s understanding of the incident.

Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Reference : https://ift.tt/lPDLvjO

Never Recharge Your Consumer Electronics Again?

Stephen Cass: Hello and welcome to Fixing the Future, an IEEE Spectrum podcast where we look at concrete solutions to tough problems. I’m your host Stephen Cass, a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. And before I start, I just wanted to tell you that you can get the latest coverage of Spectrum‘s most important beats, including AI, climate change, and robotics, by signing up for one of our free newsletters. Just go to spectrum.ieee.org/newsletters to subscribe.

We all love our mobile devices where the progress of Moore’s Law has meant we’re able to pack an enormous amount of computing power in something that’s small enough that we can wear it as jewelery. But their Achilles heel is power. They eat up battery life requiring frequent battery changes or charging. One company that’s hoping to reduce our battery anxiety is Exeger, which wants to enable self-charging devices that convert ambient light into energy on the go. Here to talk about its so-called Powerfoyle solar cell technology is Exeger’s founder and CEO, Giovanni Fili. Giovanni, welcome to the show.

Giovanni Fili: Thank you.

Cass: So before we get into the details of the Powerfoyle technology, was I right in saying that the Achilles heel of our mobile devices is battery life? And if we could reduce or eliminate that problem, how would that actually influence the development of mobile and wearable tech beyond just not having to recharge as often?

Fili: Yeah. I mean, for sure, I think the global common problem or pain point is for sure battery anxiety in different ways, ranging from your mobile phone to your other portable devices, and of course, even EV like cars and all that. So what we’re doing is we’re trying to eliminate this or reduce or eliminate this battery anxiety by integrating— seamlessly integrating, I should say, a solar cell. So our solar cell can convert any light energy to electrical energy. So indoor, outdoor from any angle. We’re not angle dependent. And the solar cell can take the shape. It can look like leather, textile, brushed steel, wood, carbon fiber, almost anything, and can take light from all angles as well, and can be in different colors. It’s also very durable. So our idea is to integrate this flexible, thin film into any device and allow it to be self-powered, allowing for increased functionality in the device. Just look at the smartwatches. I mean, the first one that came, you could wear them for a few hours, and you had to charge them. And they packed them with more functionality. You still have to charge them every day. And you still have to charge them every day, regardless. But now, they’re packed with even more stuff. So as soon as you get more energy efficiency, you pack them with more functionality. So we’re enabling this sort of jump in functionality without compromising design, battery, sustainability, all of that. So yeah, so it’s been a long journey since I started working with this 17 years ago.

Cass: I actually wanted to ask about that. So how is Exeger positioned to attack this problem? Because it’s not like you’re the first company to try and do nice mobile charging solutions for mobile devices.

Fili: I can mention there, I think that the main thing that differentiates us from all other previous solutions is that we have invented a new electrode material, the anode and the cathode with a similar almost like battery. So we have anode, cathode. We have electrolytes inside. So this is a—

Cass: So just for readers who might not be familiar, a battery is basically you have an anode, which is the positive terminal—I hope I didn’t forgot that—cathode, which is a negative terminal, and then you have an electrolyte between them in the battery, and then chemical reactions between these three components, and it can get kind of complicated, produce an electric potential between one side and the other. And in a solar cell, also there’s an anode and a cathode and so on. Have I got that right, my little, brief sketch?

Fili: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so what we add to that architecture is we add one layer of titanium dioxide nanoparticles. Titanium dioxide is the white in white wall paint, toothpaste, sunscreen, all that. And it’s a very safe and abundant material. And we use that porous layer of titanium nanoparticles. And then we deposit a dye, a color, a pigment on this layer. And this dye can be red, black, blue, green, any kind of color. And the dye will then absorb the photons, excite electrons that are injected into the titanium dioxide layer and then collected by the anode and then conducted out to the cable. And now, we use the electrons to light the lamp or a motor or whatever we do with it. And then they turn back to the cathode on the other side and inside the cell. So the electrons goes the other way and the inner way. So the plus, you can say, go inside ions in the electrolytes. So it’s a regenerative system.

So our innovation is a new— I mean, all solar cells, they have electrodes to collect the electrons. If you have silicon wafers or whatever you have, right? And you know that all these solar cells that you’ve seen, they have silver lines crossing the surface. The silver lines are there because the conductivity is quite poor, funny enough, in these materials. So high resistance. So then you need to deposit the silver lines there, and they’re called current collectors. So you need to collect the current. Our innovation is a new electrode material that has 1,000 times better conductivity than other flexible electrode materials. That allows us as the only company in the world to eliminate the silver lines. And we print all our layers as well. And as you print in your house, you can print a photo, an apple with a bite in it, you can print the name, you can print anything you want. We can print anything we want, and it will also be converting light energy to electric energy. So a solar cell.

Cass: So the key part is that the color dye is doing that initial work of converting the light. Do different colors affect the efficiency? I did see on your site that it comes in all these kind of different colors, but. And I was thinking to myself, well, is the black one the best? Is the red one the best? Or is it relatively insensitive to the visible color that I see when I look at these dyes?

Fili: So you’re completely right there. So black would give you the most. And if you go to different colors, typically you lose like 20, 30 percent. But fortunately enough for us, over 50 percent of the consumer electronic market is black products. So that’s good. So I think that you asked me how we’re positioned. I mean, with our totally unique integration possibilities, imagine this super thin, flexible film that works all day, every day from morning to sunset, indoor, outdoor, can look like leather. So we’ve made like a leather bag, right? The leather bag is the solar cell. The entire bag is the solar cell. You wouldn’t see it. It just looks like a normal leather bag.

Cass: So when you talk about flexible, you actually mean this— so sometimes when people talk about flexible electronics, they mean it can be put into a shape, but then you’re not supposed to bend it afterwards. When you’re talking about flexible electronics, you’re talking about the entire thing remains flexible and you can use it flexibly instead of just you can conform it once to a shape and then you kind of leave it alone.

Fili: Correct. So we just recently released a hearing protector with 3M. This great American company with more than 60,000 products across the world. So we have a global exclusivity contract with them where they have integrated our bendable, flexible solar film in the headband. So the headband is the solar cell, right? And where you previously had to change disposable battery every second week, two batteries every second week, now you never need to change the battery again. We just recharge this small rechargeable battery indoor and outdoor, just continues to charge all the time. And they have added a lot of extra really cool new functionality as well. So we’re eliminating the need for disposable batteries. We’re saving millions and millions of batteries. We’re saving the end user, the contractor, the guy who uses them a lot of hassle to buy this battery, store them. And we increase reliability and functionality because they will always be charged. You can trust them that they always work. So that’s where we are totally unique. The solar cell is super durable. If we can be in a professional hearing protector to use on airports, construction sites, mines, whatever you use, factories, oil rig platforms, you can do almost anything. So I don’t think any other solar cell would be able to pass those durability tests that we did. It’s crazy.

Cass: So I have a question. It kind of it’s more appropriate from my experience with utility solar cells and things you put on roofs. But how many watts per square meter can you deliver, we’ll say, in direct sunlight?

Fili: So our focus is on indirect sunlight, like shade, suboptimal light conditions, because that’s where you would typically be with these products. But if you compare to more of a silicon, which is what you typically use for calculators and all that stuff. So we are probably around twice as what they deliver in this dark conditions, two to three times, depending. If you use glass, if you use flexible, we’re probably three times even more, but. So we don’t do full sunshine utility scale solar. But if you look at these products like the hearing protector, we have done a lot of headphones with Adidas and other huge brands, we typically recharge like four times what they use. So if you look at— if you go outside, not in full sunshine, but half sunshine, let’s say 50,000 lux, you’re probably talking at about 13, 14 minutes to charge one hour of listening. So yeah, so we have sold a few hundred thousand products over the last three years when we started selling commercially. And - I don’t know - I haven’t heard anyone who has charged since. I mean, surely someone has, but typically the user never need to charge them again, just charge themself.

Cass: Well, that’s right, because for many years, I went to CES, and I often would buy these, or acquire these, little solar cell chargers. And it was such a disappointing experience because they really would only work in direct sunlight. And even then, it would take a very long time. So I want to talk a little bit about, then, to get to that, what were some of the biggest challenges you had to overcome on the way to developing this tech?

Fili: I mean, this is the fourth commercial solar cell technology in the world after 110 or something years of research. I mean, the Americans, the Bell Laboratory sent the first silicon cell, I think it’s in like 1955 or something, to space. And then there’s been this constant development and trying to find, but to develop a new energy source is as close to impossible as you get, more or less. Everybody tried and everybody failed. We didn’t know that, luckily enough. So just the whole-- so when I try to explain this, I get this question quite a lot. Imagine you found out something really cool, but there’s no one to ask. There’s no book to read. You just realize, “Okay, I have to make like hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of experiments to learn. And all of them, except finally one, they will all fail. But that’s okay.” You will fail, fail, fail. And then, “Oh, here’s the solution. Something that works. Okay. Good.” So we had to build on just constant failing, but it’s okay because you’re in a research phase. So we had to. I mean, we started off with this new nanomaterials, and then we had to make components of these materials. And then we had to make solar cells of the components, but there were no machines either. We have had to invent all the machines from scratch as well to make these components and the solar cells and some of the non-materials. That was also tough. How do you design a machine for something that doesn’t exist? It’s pretty difficult specification to give to a machine builder. So in the end, we had to build our own machine building capacity here. We’re like 50 guys building machines, so.

But now, I mean, today we have over 300 granted patents, another 90 that will be approved soon. We have a complete machine park that’s proprietary. We are now building the largest solar cell factory— one of the largest solar cell factories in Europe. It’s already operational, phase one. Now we’re expanding into phase two. And we’re completely vertically integrated. We don’t source anything from Russia, China; never did. Only US, Japan, and Europe. We run the factories on 100 percent renewable energy. We have zero emissions to air and water. And we don’t have any rare earth metals, no strange stuff in it. It’s like it all worked out. And now we have signed, like I said, global exclusivity deal with 3M. We have a global exclusivity deal with the largest company in the world on computer peripherals, like mouse, keyboard, that stuff. They can only work with us for years. We have signed one of the large, the big fives, the Americans, the huge CE company. Can’t tell you yet the name. We have a globally exclusive deal for electronic shelf labels, the small price tags in the stores. So we have a global solution with Vision Group, that’s the largest. They have 50 percent of the world market as well. And they have Walmart, IKEA, Target, all these huge companies. So now it’s happening. So we’re rolling out, starting to deploy massive volumes later this year.

Cass:So I’ll talk a little bit about that commercial experience because you talked about you had to create verticals. I mean, in Spectrum, we do cover other startups which have had these— they’re kind of starting from scratch. And they develop a technology, and it’s a great demo technology. But then it comes that point where you’re trying to integrate in as a supplier or as a technology partner with a large commercial entity, which has very specific ideas and how things are to be manufactured and delivered and so on. So can you talk a little bit about what it was like adapting to these partners like 3M and what changes you had to make and what things you learned in that process where you go from, “Okay, we have a great product and we could make our own small products, but we want to now connect in as part of this larger supply chain.”

Fili: It’s a very good question and it’s extremely tough. It’s a tough journey, right? Like to your point, these are the largest companies in the world. They have their way. And one of the first really tough lessons that we learned was that one factory wasn’t enough. We had to build two factories to have redundancy in manufacturing. Because single source is bad. Single source, single factory, that’s really bad. So we had to build two factories and we had to show them we were ready, willing and able to be a supplier to them. Because one thing is the product, right? But the second thing is, are you worthy supplier? And that means how much money you have in the bank. Are you going to be here in two, three, four years? What’s your ISO certifications like? REACH, RoHS, Prop 65. What’s your LCA? What’s your view on this? Blah, blah, blah. Do you have professional supply chain? Did you do audits on your suppliers? But now, I mean, we’ve had audits here by five of the largest companies in the world. We’ve all passed them. And so then you qualify as a worthy supplier. Then comes your product integration work, like you mentioned. And I think it’s a lot about— I mean, that’s our main feature. The main unique selling point with Exeger is that we can integrate into other people’s products. Because when you develop this kind of crazy technology-- “Okay, so this is solar cell. Wow. Okay.” And it can look like anything. And it works all the time. And all the other stuff is sustainable and all that. Which product do you go for? So I asked myself—I’m an entrepreneur since the age of 15. I’ve started a number of companies. I lost so much money. I can’t believe it. And managed to earn a little bit more. But I realized, “Okay, how do you select? Where do you start? Which product?”

Okay, so I sat down. I was like, “When does it sell well? When do you see market success?” When something is important. When something is important, it’s going to work. It’s not the best tech. It has to be important enough. And then, you need distribution and scale and all that. Okay, how do you know if something is important? You can’t. Okay. What if you take something that’s already is— I mean, something new, you can’t know if it’s going to work. But if we can integrate into something that’s already selling in the billions of units per year, like headphones— I think this year, one billion headphones are going to be sold or something. Okay, apparently, obviously that’s important for people. Okay, let’s develop technology that can be integrated into something that’s already important and allow it to stay, keep all the good stuff, the design, the weight, the thickness, all of that, even improve the LCA better for the environment. And it’s self-powered. And it will allow the user to participate and help a little bit to a better world, right? With no charge cable, no charging in the wall, less batteries and all that. So our strategy was to develop such a strong technology so that we could integrate into these companies/partners products.

Cass: So I guess the question there is— so you come to a company, the company has its own internal development engineers. It’s got its own people coming up with product ideas and so on. How do you evangelize within a company to say, “Look, you get in the door, you show your demo,” to say, product manager who’s thinking of new product lines, “You guys should think about making products with our technology.” How do you evangelize that they think, “Okay, yeah, I’m going to spend the next six months of my life betting on these headphones, on this technology that I didn’t invent that I’m kind of trusting.” How do you get that internal buy-in with the internal engineers and the internal product developers and product managers?

Fili: That’s the Holy Grail, right? It’s very, very, very difficult. Takes a lot of time. It’s very expensive. And the point, I think you’re touching a little bit when you’re asking me now, because they don’t have a guy waiting to buy or a division or department waiting to buy this flexible indoor solar cell that can look like leather. They don’t have anyone. Who’s going to buy? Who’s the decision maker? There is not one. There’s a bunch, right? Because this will affect the battery people. This will affect the antenna people. This will affect the branding people. It will affect the mechanic people, etc., etc., etc. So there’s so many people that can say no. No one can say yes alone. All of them can say no alone. Any one of them can block the project, but to proceed, all of them have to say yes. So it’s a very, very tough equation. So that’s why when we realized this— this was another big learning that we had that we couldn’t go with the sales guy. We couldn’t go with two sales guys. We had to go with an entire team. So we needed to bring our design guy, our branding person, our mechanics person, our software engineer. We had to go like huge teams to be able to answer all the questions and mitigate and explain.

So we had to go both top down and explain to the head of product or head of sustainability, “Okay, if you have 100 million products out in five years and they’re going to be using 50 batteries per year, that’s 5 billion batteries per year. That’s not good, right? What if we can eliminate all these batteries? That’s good for sustainability.” “Okay. Good.” “That’s also good for total cost. We can lower total cost of ownership.” “Okay, that’s also good.” “And you can sell this and this and this way. And by the way, here’s a narrative we offer you. We have also made some assets, movies, pictures, texts. This is how other people talk about this.” But it’s a very, very tough start. How do you get the first big name in? And big companies, they have a lot to risk, a lot to lose as well. So my advice would be to start smaller. I mean, we started mainly due to COVID, to be honest. Because Sweden stayed open during COVID, which was great. We lived our lives almost like normal. But we couldn’t work with any international companies because they were all closed or no one went to the office. So we had to turn to Swedish companies, and we developed a few products during COVID. We launched like four or five products on the market with smaller Swedish companies, and we launched so much. And then we could just send these headphones to the large companies and tell them, “You know what? Here’s a headphone. Use it for a few months. We’ll call you later.” And then they call us that, “You know what? We have used them for three months. No one has charged. This is sick. It actually works.” We’re like, “Yeah, we know.” And then that just made it so much easier. And now anyone who wants to make a deal with us, they can just buy these products anywhere online or in-store across the whole world and try them for themselves.

And we send them also samples. They can buy, they can order from our website, like development kits. We have software, we have partnered up with Qualcomm, early semiconductor. All the big electronics companies, we’re now qualified partners with them. So all the electronics is powerful already. So now it’s very easy now to build prototypes if you want to test something. We have offices across the world. So now it’s much easier. But my advice to anyone who would want to start with this is try and get a few customers in. The important thing is that they also care about the project. If we go to one of these large companies, 3M, they have 60,000 products. If they have 60,001, yeah. But for us, it’s like the project. And we have managed to land it in a way. So it’s also important for them now because it just touches so many of their important areas that they work with, so.

Cass: So in terms of future directions for the technology, do you have a development pathway? What kind of future milestones are you hoping to hit?

Fili: For sure. So at the moment, we’re focusing on consumer electronics market, IoT, smart home. So I think the next big thing will be the smart workplace where you see huge construction sites and other areas where we connect the workers, anything from the smart helmet. You get hit in your head, how hard was it? I mean, why can’t we tell you that? That’s just ridiculous. There’s all these sensors already available. Someone just needs to power the helmet. Location services. Is the right person in the right place with the proper training or not? On the construction side, do you have the training to work with dynamite, for example, or heavy lifts or different stuff? So you can add the geofencing in different sites. You can add health data, digital health tracking, pulse, breathing, temperature, different stuff. Compliance, of course. Are you following all the rules? Are you wearing your helmet? Is the helmet buttoned? Are you wearing the proper other gear, whatever it is? Otherwise, you can’t start your engine, or you can’t go into this site, or you can’t whatever. I think that’s going to greatly improve the proactive safety and health a lot and increase profits for employers a lot too at the same time. In a few years, I think we’re going to see the American unions are going to be our best sales force. Because when they see the greatness of this whole system, they’re going to demand it in all tenders, all biggest projects. They’re going to say, “Hey, we want to have the connected worker safety stuff here.” Because you can just stream-- if you’re working, you can stream music, talk to your colleagues, enjoy connected safety without invading the privacy, knowing that you’re good. If you fall over, if you faint, if you get a heart attack, whatever, in a few seconds, the right people will know and they will take their appropriate actions. It’s just really, really cool, this stuff.

Cass: Well, it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out. But I’m afraid that’s all we have time for today, although this is fascinating. But today, so Giovanni, I want to thank you very much for coming on the show.

Fili: Thank you so much for having me.

Cass: So today we were talking with Giovanni Fili, who is Exeger’s founder and CEO, about their new flexible powerfoyle solar cell technology. For IEEE Spectrum‘s Fixing the Future, I’m Stephen Cass, and I hope you’ll join me next time.

Reference: https://ift.tt/TZHE4Mm