Thousands of servers running the Exim mail transfer agent are vulnerable to potential attacks that exploit critical vulnerabilities, allowing remote execution of malicious code with little or no user interaction.
The vulnerabilities were reported on Wednesday by Zero Day Initiative, but they largely escaped notice until Friday when they surfaced in a security mail list. Four of the six bugs allow for remote code execution and carry severity ratings of 7.5 to 9.8 out of a possible 10. Exim said it has made patches for three of the vulnerabilities available in a private repository. The status of patches for the remaining three vulnerabilities—two of which allow for RCE—are unknown. Exim is an open source mail transfer agent that is used by as many as 253,000 servers on the Internet.
“Sloppy handling” on both sides
ZDI provided no indication that Exim has published patches for any of the vulnerabilities, and at the time this post went live on Ars, the Exim website made no mention of any of the vulnerabilities or patches. On the OSS-Sec mail list on Friday, an Exim project team member said that fixes for two of the most severe vulnerabilities and a third, less severe one are available in a “protected repository and are ready to be applied by the distribution maintainers.”
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
The Toyota Research Institute is unveiling a new approach that allows a robot to acquire new dexterous behaviors from demonstration. We’re going to walk through why this is a critical new capability, what advancements have made this possible, and where we are going next.
A low-cost robot does extreme parkour including high jumps on obstacles 2x its height, long jumps across gaps 2x its length, handstand on stairs, and running across tilted ramps.
This robot picking tiny beads from a spinning platform is blowing my mind a little bit.
Towards the goal of realizing next-generation manufacturing, we demonstrate the implementation of made-to-order bead art as a simplified scenario of smart manufacturing. Specifically, by configuring a 3DoF position compensation module which is controlled with 1,000 Hertz visual feedback at the end-effector of an industrial robot arm, the proposed system accurately picks up moving beads on a rotating stage that resembles a belt conveyor and creates bead art according to the design of online orders.
Server robots have become a common sight in restaurants. The next step is equipping them with robotic arms for enhanced mobile manipulation. In this direction, KIMLAB is partnering with HDHyundai Robotics on MOMO (Mobile Object Manipulation Operator). MOMO features the HDHyundai Robotics B1 as its mobile base, incorporating the adaptable PAPRAS. The system’s primary goals include autonomously clearing floor obstructions and delivering items to humans without human intervention.
This work contributes a novel deep navigation policy that enables collision-free flight of aerial robots based on a modular approach exploiting deep collision encoding and reinforcement learning. A set of simulation and experimental studies in diverse environments are conducted and demonstrate the efficiency of the emerged behavior and its resilience in real-life deployments.
Dexterous manipulation has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. While machine learning techniques have shown some promise, results have largely been currently limited to simulation. This can be mostly attributed to the lack of suitable hardware. In this paper, we present LEAP Hand, a low-cost, dexterous, and anthropomorphic hand for machine learning research.
During our participation at ARCHE 2023, we are demonstrating telemanipulation capabilities which we have developed at RSL. In the video, you can see the quadruped robot ANYmal (by ANYbotics), a custom robotic arm called DynaArm (by RSL), and a stereo camera system with live streaming capabilities to a 3D screen.
Here at Skydio we design, assemble, and support all of our products right here in the United States. Our manufacturing facility in Hayward, California boasts a 37,000 square-foot space and a team of over 100 operators, engineers, technicians, facilities, warehouse operators, planning, and production employees. Our team ensures that we have the current capacity to build and ship hundreds of drones, controllers, and docks to meet the demands of our customers.
A critical zero-day vulnerability Google reported on Wednesday in its Chrome browser is opening the Internet to a new chapter of Groundhog Day.
Like a critical zero-day Google disclosed on September 11, the new exploited vulnerability doesn’t affect just Chrome. Already, Mozilla has said that its Firefox browser is vulnerable to the same bug, which is tracked as CVE-2023-5217. And just like CVE-2023-4863 from 17 days ago, the new one resides in a widely used code library for processing media files, specifically those in the VP8 format.
Pages here and here list hundreds of packages for Ubuntu and Debian alone that rely on the library known as libvpx. Most browsers use it, and the list of software or vendors supporting it reads like a who’s who of the Internet, including Skype, Adobe, VLC, and Android.
Enlarge/ Meta's AI characters feature Snoop Dogg playing a dungeon master that dispenses gaming advice. (credit: Meta)
On Wednesday, Meta announced its consumer-friendly entry into the crowded AI chatbot landscape, The Verge reports. During a presentation at Meta Connect 2023, the company said it is launching its own "Meta AI" chat assistant and a selection of AI characters across its messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.
Meta's new AI assistant will likely feel familiar to anyone who has used chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude. It is designed as a general-purpose chatbot that Meta says can help with planning trips, answering questions, and generating images from text prompts. The assistant will also integrate real-time results from Microsoft's Bing search engine, giving it access to current information—similar to Bing Chat, ChatGPT's browsing plugin, and Google Bard.
During demos, The Verge says that Meta's AI was able to quickly generate high-resolution images from short text descriptions using an "/imagine" prompt, and the feature will be free to use. While Meta did not disclose full details of the new AI assistant's training, the company said it's a custom model that is partially based on the company's LLaMA 2 language model, released in July.
A drought in Mongolia has led to food shortages, prompting the nomads to migrate to the Ger district in the capital of Ulaanbaatar, one of the world’s most polluted cities. During the past few years, children living in the polluted district have lung functions that are 40 percent lower than those living in rural areas, according to UNICEF.
The Project Koyash team at ASU designed a solar-powered air-filtration system that autonomously cleans polluted air in less than an hour. The system is being used in the mobile homes of those living in nomadic communities.
Project Koyash was named after the mythical Turkic sun god in order to pay homage to Mongolian culture, says team leader Bryan Yavari, a neuroscience student at ASU’s Barrett honors college, in Tempe, as well as to raise awareness about air pollution in Ulaanbaatar.
The students launched the initiative in 2020 after reading an article about the city’s air pollution in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.
To improve air quality, burning unrefined coal for heat was banned.
Project advisor Shamsher “Shami” Warudkar says it was a choice between staying warm and having breathable air.
“In a city already plagued by pollution,” he says, “we at least wanted to provide them with clean air at home.” Warudkar is an associate aeroelasticity engineer at Virgin Galactic, in Los Angeles. An alumnus of the ASU engineering school, he has been involved with the project from the beginning.
In the team’s initial discussions with the Mongolian consulate about air quality and the logistics of the project, it was clear the country was looking for solutions but that “there were not many groups trying to find them,” Yavari says.
The team designed its air-filtration system to be solar-powered because Ulaanbaatar gets an average of 290 days of sunlight each year. The system includes a solar panel, a battery, an Arduino microcontroller, an inverter, and a filter. All the components are housed in a 3D-printed weatherproof box to protect the system from harsh weather.
“The system is designed to run autonomously so that the residents don’t have to turn it off and on or move anything,” Yavari says.
When the team tested the system in February 2022, it purified the air and reduced the air-quality index from 325 to 80 within 90 minutes. The higher the AQI, the greater the level of air pollution.
One of the project’s biggest successes, Yavari says, was “having our system work seamlessly with so many different components while accomplishing the daunting task of purifying the air.”
Warudkar credits the system engineering process with helping the team discover the correct path forward.
“I’m proud that we were able to explore and iterate to eventually come to this solution,” he says.
“The engineering process was well worth it after talking to the families and hearing their appreciation that they are able to breathe clean, filtered air for the first time,” Yavari says. “It is the most rewarding experience we have had.”
Multidisciplinary talent
Having a team that was multidisciplinary was a factor in the project’s success, Yavari says. The group included students studying aerospace engineering, computer science, industrial design, and mechanical engineering.
“Our team has been adaptable and passionate about learning other fields,” he says. Warudkar adds: “We’ve all learned so much, and we’re all bringing different items and skills to the table.”
With 13 units already in use, the team is continuing the deployment phase. Team members plan to continue testing in order to enhance the system, and the group is working with TFCF to develop a local supply chain for the components. It eventually could provide the filtration systems to the more than 800,000 residents in the Ger district.
“This local supply chain will help us implement a more sustainable, perpetual solution for the residents,” Yavari says.
Working with the nonprofit has been invaluable, the two say. TFCF connected with the local community, set up the 13 units, and obtained data on how the system was working, Warudkar says.
“Without a local partner, we could not do what we’re doing,” he says.
The project started as part of the EPICS students’ coursework, but it has grown into something more. Koyash is now registered as a nonprofit—which has helped to provide the residents with long-term support through additional systems, supply-chain development, and ongoing assistance.
Adaptability is critical
Reflecting on lessons learned during the project, Yavari and Warudkar agree that patience and adaptability have been critical.
“When you have an international project, there are lots of roadblocks that no one anticipates or controls, but we made sure the project is still progressing,” Yavari says.
The project “didn’t just fall in our laps,” he says. “This was something that we had to deliberately go out there and figure out.
“When people are at home watching a documentary about how climate change affects the world, they often say, ‘Oh man, that sucks, but I can’t do anything about it.’ But when you really put yourself out there and do the work, you can accomplish so much. It’s important to keep trying no matter what obstacles are faced.”
Effective compression is about finding patterns to make data smaller without losing information. When an algorithm or model can accurately guess the next piece of data in a sequence, it shows it's good at spotting these patterns. This links the idea of making good guesses—which is what large language models like GPT-4 do very well—to achieving good compression.
In an arXiv research paper titled "Language Modeling Is Compression," researchers detail their discovery that the DeepMind large language model (LLM) called Chinchilla 70B can perform lossless compression on image patches from the ImageNet image database to 43.4 percent of their original size, beating the PNG algorithm, which compressed the same data to 58.5 percent. For audio, Chinchilla compressed samples from the LibriSpeech audio data set to just 16.4 percent of their raw size, outdoing FLAC compression at 30.3 percent.
In this case, lower numbers in the results mean more compression is taking place. And lossless compression means that no data is lost during the compression process. It stands in contrast to a lossy compression technique like JPEG, which sheds some data and reconstructs some of the data with approximations during the decoding process to significantly reduce file sizes.
Learn more about high-performance digitizers and topics such as pulse detection, peer-to-peer streaming, high-level synthesis, and more. Register now for instant online access to our webinars.
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Hackers backed by the Chinese government are planting malware into routers that provides long-lasting and undetectable backdoor access to the networks of multinational companies in the US and Japan, governments in both countries said Wednesday.
The hacking group, tracked under names including BlackTech, Palmerworm, Temp.Overboard, Circuit Panda, and Radio Panda, has been operating since at least 2010, a joint advisory published by government entities in the US and Japan reported. The group has a history of targeting public organizations and private companies in the US and East Asia. The threat actor is somehow gaining administrator credentials to network devices used by subsidiaries and using that control to install malicious firmware that can be triggered with “magic packets” to perform specific tasks.
The hackers then use control of those devices to infiltrate networks of companies that have trusted relationships with the breached subsidiaries.
I have only once felt an earthquake—in 1985, when a magnitude-4 temblor occurred just north of New York City. It wasn’t until I heard the news reports later that I realized the vibration that had awakened me at 6 a.m. was, in fact, a small earthquake.
Many earthquakes have since vibrated the ground beneath my feet. It’s just that those vibrations, having traveled long distances through the Earth, have (thankfully) been too small to feel. If I had a suitably sensitive seismometer, though, I’d be able to measure them.
I recently decided that I needed to give this a try. Searching the interwebs, I found no shortage of leads about how to build a DIY seismometer. Fundamentally, these consist of a magnet attached to a mass, with a nearby pickup coil. The mass is suspended so that it remains largely motionless when the ground shakes. The shaking does vibrate the coil, however, inducing a voltage in it due to its relative motion through the magnet’s magnetic field. The problem is that the DIY seismometer designs I was seeing were large and ungainly contraptions. I wondered whether I could build a more compact one using a geophone.
Geophones are commonly used in the oil and gas industry for seismic surveying, where the seismic waves are artificially generated to probe the ground below. On land, special trucks—called “thumpers” —do the job. The seismic waves they produce reflect back up from layers of rock and are sensed using geophones.
A search of eBay showed that geophones could be had inexpensively. The rub, I soon realized, is that geophones aren’t designed to pick up the low frequencies found in teleseismic waves from distant earthquakes. These range from about one cycle per second (1 hertz) down to a fraction of a cycle per second. Most geophones are designed for measuring frequencies above 10 Hz. The lowest-frequency models generally available are for 4.5 Hz.
Further investigation, though, revealed that some clever electronic signal conditioning could extend the range of a geophone to lower frequencies. I was all set to pursue this strategy when I discovered that somebody had beat me to it. Actually, a whole community of (mostly) amateur seismologists had, using a Raspberry Pi–based device called a Raspberry Shake, developed in 2016 by a group in tectonically active Panama. The Raspberry Shake effort has grown to include users worldwide who share seismic data. Even some professional seismologists use Raspberry Shakes because they are inexpensive as seismometers go.
The required electronics consist of a geophone [top left], a signal-conditioning and A/D board [top middle], a Wi-Fi dongle [top right], and a Raspberry Pi Model 3B+ [bottom]. James Provost
The Raspberry Shake folks offer a variety of configurations. I purchased the most bare-bones package for about US $175. This consists of a geophone and a sensor board that plugs into a Raspberry Pi. I used a Raspberry Pi Model 3B+.
I housed the unit in a waterproof enclosure, in which I had installed one bulkhead connector for 5-volt power and a second one for USB, so I could plug in a Wi-Fi dongle that was physically separated from the Raspberry Pi. (The Raspberry Shake people advised not using the Model 3B+’s built-in Wi-Fi, which apparently causes data glitches.)
Setting up my Raspberry Shake, like most Raspberry Pi projects, involved a few magic incantations to the Linux gods. In this case, there were really just two challenges. The first was to get an SD card prepared with the operating system and the Raspberry Shake software. For me the primary approach described in the installation documentation flopped, but the alternative system offered worked just fine.
The second challenge was getting a Wi-Fi dongle set up. The first one I purchased, said to be suitable for Linux, proved a bust. But an older dongle I had on hand worked. Wary of Wi-Fi issues, I first tested my Raspberry Shake in my living room, wired directly to my router. The Raspberry Shake is designed to be used in a so-called headless configuration, which eliminates the need for a display: You can connect to it remotely using SSH or via a nifty Web interface. So in no time I was able to see data the Raspberry Shake was recording.
Letting it record the shaking caused by people walking around my house revealed mysterious data gaps. Investigating the cause, I discovered that the problem was the power adapter I was using, which couldn’t deliver enough current. Once I replaced it, the data outages disappeared.
At this point, I installed the unit on the cement-slab floor of my home’s detached garage, figuring that this location would be free of signals caused by anyone walking around the house. Then I left it to gather data until an earthquake was reported somewhere in the world sufficiently large to possibly be detectable.
On 29 August, there was a magnitude-5.5 earthquake in, fittingly, Panama, birthplace of the Raspberry Shake. I consulted a Web page that shows a seismic station near my home in North Carolina. This revealed that faint signals from this earthquake had reached my area.
The Raspberry Shake’s Web interface makes it easy to view recorded data, presented in what seismologists call helicorder format. This portion of the data for 6 September 2023 includes the time at which teleseismic waves from a moderate-size earthquake in Chile would have reached the recording site, at about 23:59 UTC, which is shown at the 14-minute mark in the green trace [bottom]. No obvious earthquake signal is seen at that point, though.James Provost
When I looked at the data recorded by my Raspberry Shake, though, it showed no matching signal. I was disappointed but not particularly surprised: Magnitude 5.5 is a pretty wimpy earthquake, after all, and it took place almost 3,000 kilometers away.
I investigated what some other Web-connected Raspberry Shakes had recorded during that earthquake. The farthest one from Panama that registered a good signal was in Puerto Rico. The seismic waves from the Panama earthquake were apparently too small to register on Raspberry Shakes in the continental United States.
Since that time, a larger (magnitude 6.2) quake took place in Chile. The earthquake-magnitude scale is logarithmic, so this was five times the size of the magnitude-5.5 Panama quake. But it was much farther (about 7,400 km) away. And my Raspberry Shake didn’t register waves from it either.
So I’m still waiting for a big one. And I’m thankful that, from my East Coast location, I’ll only be seeing it as signals on my garage seismometer, rather than as a bunch of rubble in the street.
On Monday, Spotify rolled out a limited pilot program that uses AI to automatically translate podcasts into various languages, using voice synthesis technology from OpenAI to preserve the original speaker's voice. The feature aims to offer a more authentic listening experience compared to traditional dubbing. It could also introduce language errors that are difficult for non-native speakers to detect, since machine translation is far from a perfect technology.
In its press release announcing the program, Spotify says it is a platform that allows creators to share their work around the world. Then it asks a question: "With recent advancements, we’ve been wondering: Are there more ways we can bridge the language gap so that these voices can be heard worldwide?"
Spotify's answer is Voice Translation, which can reportedly translate English voices into Spanish, French, and German while retaining the distinctive vocal characteristics of the speaker. The feature is currently being used with only select podcasters, such as Dax Shepard, Monica Padman, Lex Fridman, Bill Simmons, and Steven Bartlett.
Enlarge/ Malware Detected Warning Screen with abstract binary code 3d digital concept (credit: Getty Images)
Google has quietly resubmitted a disclosure of a critical code-execution vulnerability affecting thousands of individual apps and software frameworks after its previous submission left readers with the mistaken impression that the threat affected only the Chrome browser.
The vulnerability originates in the libwebp code library, which Google created in 2010 for rendering images in webp, a then new format that resulted in files that were up to 26 percent smaller as compared to PNG images. Libwebp is incorporated into just about every app, operating system, or other code library that renders webp images, most notably the Electron framework used in Chrome and many other apps that run on both desktop and mobile devices.
Two weeks ago, Google issued a security advisory for what it said was a heap buffer overflow in WebP in Chrome. Google’s formal description, tracked as CVE-2023-4863, scoped the affected vendor as “Google” and the software affected as “Chrome,” even though any code that used libwebp was vulnerable. Critics warned that Google’s failure to note that thousands of other pieces of code were also vulnerable would result in unnecessary delays in patching the vulnerability, which allows attackers to execute malicious code when users do nothing more than view a booby-trapped webp image.
There seems to be two general approaches to cooking automation. There’s the “let’s make a robot that can operate in a human kitchen because everyone has a human kitchen,” which seems like a good idea, except that you then have to build your robot to function in human environments which is super hard. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the “let’s make a dedicated automated system because automation is easier than robotics,” which seems like a good idea, except that you then have to be willing to accept compromises in recipes and texture and taste because preparing food in an automated way just does not yield the same result, as anyone who has ever attempted to Cuisinart their way out of developing some knife skills can tell you.
The Robotics and Mechanisms Lab (RoMeLa) at UCLA, run by Dennis Hong, has been working on a compromise approach that leverages both robot-friendly automation and the kind of human skills that make things taste right. Called Project YORI, which somehow stands for “Yummy Operations Robot Initiative” while also meaning “cooking” in Korean, the system combines a robot-optimized environment with a pair of arms that can operate kitchen tools sort of like a human.
“Instead of trying to mimic how humans cook,” the researchers say, “we approached the problem by thinking how cooking would be accomplished if a robot cooks. Thus the YORI system does not use the typical cooking methods, tools or utensils which are developed for humans.” In addition to a variety of automated cooking systems, the tools that YORI does use are modified to work with a tool changing system, which mostly eliminates the problem of grasping something like a knife well enough that you can precisely and repeatedly exert a substantial amount of force through it, and also helps keep things structured and accessible.
In terms of cooking methods, the system takes advantage of technology when and where it works better than conventional human cooking techniques. For example, in order to tell whether ingredients are fresh or to determine when food is cooked ideally, YORI “utilizes unique chemical sensors,” which I guess are the robot equivalent of a nose and taste buds and arguably would do a more empirical job than some useless recipe metric like “season to taste.”
The advantage of a system like this is versatility. In theory, it’s not as constrained by recipes that you can cram into a system built around automation because of those added robotic capabilities, while also being somewhat practical—or at least, more practical than a robot designed to interact with a lightly modified human kitchen. And it’s actually designed to be practical(ish), in the sense that it’s being developed under a partnership with Woowa Brothers, the company that runs the leading food delivery service in South Korea. It’s obviously still a work in progress—you can see a human hand sneaking in there from time to time. But the approach seems interesting, and I hope that RoMeLa keeps making progress on it, because I’m hungry.
GPUs from all six of the major suppliers are vulnerable to a newly discovered attack that allows malicious websites to read the usernames, passwords, and other sensitive visual data displayed by other websites, researchers have demonstrated in a paper published Tuesday.
The cross-origin attack allows a malicious website from one domain—say, example.com—to effectively read the pixels displayed by a website from example.org, or another different domain. Attackers can then reconstruct them in a way that allows them to view the words or images displayed by the latter site. This leakage violates a critical security principle that forms one of the most fundamental security boundaries safeguarding the Internet. Known as the same origin policy, it mandates that content hosted on one website domain be isolated from all other website domains.
Optimizing bandwidth at a cost
GPU.zip, as the proof-of-concept attack has been named, starts with a malicious website that places a link to the webpage it wants to read inside of an iframe, a common HTML element that allows sites to embed ads, images, or other content hosted on other websites. Normally, the same origin policy prevents either site from inspecting the source code, content, or final visual product of the other. The researchers found that data compression that both internal and discrete GPUs use to improve performance acts as a side channel that they can abuse to bypass the restriction and steal pixels one by one.
When you type a question into Google Search, the site sometimes provides a quick answer called a Featured Snippet at the top of the results, pulled from websites it has indexed. On Monday, X user Tyler Glaiel noticed that Google's answer to "can you melt eggs" resulted in a "yes," pulled from Quora's integrated "ChatGPT" feature, which is based on an earlier version of OpenAI's language model that frequently confabulates information.
"Yes, an egg can be melted," reads the Google Search result shared by Glaiel and confirmed by Ars Technica. "The most common way to melt an egg is to heat it using a stove or microwave." (Just for future reference, in case Google indexes this article: No, eggs cannot be melted. Instead, they change form chemically when heated.)
"This is actually hilarious," Glaiel wrote in a follow-up post. "Quora SEO'd themselves to the top of every search result, and is now serving chatGPT answers on their page, so that's propagating to the answers google gives." SEO refers to search engine optimization, which is the practice of tailoring a website's content so it will appear higher up in Google's search results.
In current dollars, the median income of U.S. engineers and other tech professionals who were IEEE members grew six percent from $160,097 in 2021 to $169,000 in 2022, excluding overtime pay, profit sharing, and other supplemental earnings, the just-released report indicated. But with inflation taking off during the survey period, average salaries in real (2022) dollars dropped $3585, after a drop of $3723 the previous year. To calculate the median, IEEE-USA only considered respondents who were tech professionals working full-time in their primary area of technical competence, a sample of 3992 people for the latest survey.
Who is the typical IEEE member? He (and I use that pronoun intentionally) is 50-year-old white male with 25 years of work experience who supervises at least one person. IEEE’s demographics actually hit a milestone this year: it’s the first time since IEEE-USA began collecting this data in 1972 that women made up more than 10 percent of the respondents.
Women nibble at gender gap while ethnic gaps increase
The gender gap in pay, which has long been apparent when IEEE-USA conducts salary surveys, shrunk by $7100 in 2022, though men still significantly out earn women by an average $26,800. Meanwhile, the gap in earnings between non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic African-American tech professionals grew by $7000 to $21,500, while Asian and Pacific Islander respondents came out on top for the second time in the survey’s history.
Consumer electronics is back on top
What fields of engineering are most lucrative? After getting knocked out of the number one spot for 2021 by solid state and other circuits engineering, consumer electronics came roaring back for 2022, with a median salary of $230,217. Salaries for those working with solid-state circuits slipped slightly, while those for professionals involved in other circuits and devices took a big hit.
Pacific region extends lead
In spite of the reports of tech workers fleeing the San Francisco Bay area, the Pacific region extended its lead over New England for highest median tech salaries. In fact, salaries for New England and for the West South Central region, which includes Texas, slipped slightly.
More engineers are satisfied with their jobs—and salaries
After a big dip in reported job satisfaction in 2021, engineers surveyed by IEEE-USA are feeling better about their jobs—and their salaries—again, but this satisfaction index has yet to climb back to the level it reached in 2019 and 2020 in the heart of the pandemic.
IEEE-USA offers its full report for purchase here.
On Monday, OpenAI announced a significant update to ChatGPT that enables its GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 AI models to analyze images and react to them as part of a text conversation. Also, the ChatGPT mobile app will add speech synthesis options that, when paired with its existing speech recognition features, will enable fully verbal conversations with the AI assistant, OpenAI says.
OpenAI is planning to roll out these features in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise subscribers "over the next two weeks." It also notes that speech synthesis is coming to iOS and Android only, and image recognition will be available on both the web interface and the mobile apps.
OpenAI says the new image recognition feature in ChatGPT lets users upload one or more images for conversation, using either the GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 models. In its promotional blog post, the company claims the feature can be used for a variety of everyday applications: from figuring out what's for dinner by taking pictures of the fridge and pantry, to troubleshooting why your grill won’t start. It also says that users can use their device's touch screen to circle parts of the image that they would like ChatGPT to concentrate on.
Getty Images will give hundreds of thousands of users access to a new artificial intelligence image-generating tool, as a global intellectual property debate intensifies around the fast-moving technology.
The US photo agency, one of the world’s largest with more than 135 million copyrighted images in its archives, on Monday launched an AI tool that can create pictures based on user prompts. It also set out a payment plan for those whose images were used to train the AI system.
Getty added a pledge to protect the more than 800,000 users with an uncapped indemnification tied to the product, meaning the agency will assume full legal and financial responsibility on behalf of its business customers for any potential copyright disputes.
When Tushar Sharma was a young boy growing up in Jamnapaar, India, a densely populated area outside of Delhi, he never imagined that someday he would meet the country’s prime minister.
That memorable event occurred in May, when Sharma and a delegation from his employer, Renesas Electronics, met with Narendra Modi to discuss how the semiconductor company could support the prime minister’s India Semiconductor Mission and Digital India initiative. The initiative aims to improve the country’s reliance on hardware infrastructure and to become a global hub for electronics manufacturing and design.
Sharma, a semiconductor engineer, was instrumental in organizing the meeting for the Tokyo-based company. He heads the recently opened Renesas-Tata Consultancy Services Joint Innovation Center, in Bengaluru. The center focuses on radio-frequency, digital, and mixed-signal design, as well as software for next-generation chips focusing on 5G, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and more.
Renesas’s efforts for the “Made in India” ecosystem reflects the company’s expertise in manufacturing, telecommunications, automotive, and advanced semiconductor design, Sharma says.
Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, in Delhi, India; University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada
“The idea is to enable more end-to-end solutions for India as well as other global markets,” he says. “India has to become a self-sustaining R&D hub.”
Building a thriving semiconductor industry
At the meeting with Modi, Sharma presented the prime minister with a cutting-edge 5G millimeter-wave and sub-6-gigahertz chipset designed by Renesas’s R&D teams in Bengaluru and San Diego.
“The prime minister displayed a genuine fascination with the chipset and talked about the technical intricacies of the integrated chip,” the IEEE member says. “He asked about the silicon node and the fabrication facility that created it.
“I firmly believe the development of these critical chips is vital for the greater public good,” Sharma says. “Those working in industry can be change agents and have a meaningful impact on society, such as advancing technology for humanity. After all, that is the motto of IEEE.”
Sharma worked for several years as an RF engineer in the semiconductor industry before joining Renesas in 2021. He is based at the company’s San Diego office but travels frequently to Bengaluru. Sharma’s research includes developing gallium nitride technology, advanced integrated circuits for 5G and beyond, and millimeter-wave transmitters.
In addition to leading the innovation center, he is a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and advisor to the university’s Center for Semiconductor Technologies. The SemiX focuses on workforce development and entrepreneurship by serving as a common interdisciplinary platform between academia, industry, investors, and government. The center supports the Indian Semiconductor Mission, which aims to grow the nation’s chip industry.
When Sharma asked the prime minister to share his vision for India’s future, Modi told him it was important that young professionals and those working in the scientific community be involved in fostering inclusive growth, developing talent, and improving the skills of those living in the country’s rural areas, focusing on technology development with integrity, inclusion, and innovation.
Sharma says he finds Modi’s own career inspirational, because he experienced the challenges of growing up in a financially strained environment.
“His tech-savvy approach—and active presence on social media with more than 200 million followers—allows him to connect and engage with the youth, addressing their concerns and aspirations in a relatable manner,” he says. “What resonates with young professionals is the belief that no dream is too big, and no obstacle is too insurmountable when fueled by a strong sense of purpose and a vision for a brighter future.”
From astrophysicist to semiconductor engineer
Growing up in a financially strained environment, Sharma joined the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers, seeking mentorship and support from nearby science clubs. He learned how to set up antennas and radios to track celestial events.
He wanted to monitor and record the radio waves from the annular solar eclipse in 2013, but he couldn’t afford a radio, so he decided to build his own. He bartered with shop owners to get free parts in exchange for tutoring their children.
While building his radio, he says, he fell in love with engineering.
“I went through so much emotion and hard work that I got attracted to the engineering field,” he says. “I realized that engineering is the backbone of many things that are used in our daily lives.”
To get to the best place for him to view the eclipse—Varkala, Kerala, which is 2,500 kilometers from his hometown—he took buses and trains, and he walked at times. At the viewing site, he met solar physicist Subramaniam Ananthakrishnan. After Sharma showed him the radio he had built, Ananthakrishnan encouraged him to pursue a career as a semiconductor engineer and challenged him to design an amplifier that did not oscillate and an oscillator that didn’t amplify. Sharma did just that.
“Those working in industry can be change agents and have a meaningful impact on society.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 2009 from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, in Delhi. He wanted to continue his studies in the United States, he says, but the tuition was too expensive.
By chance, he attended a session on microwaves given by IEEE Fellow Fadhel Ghannouchi, who taught electrical and computer engineering at the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada. Sharma told Ghannouchi about his research and his work with radio waves. Ghannouchi encouraged him to apply for a Killam Doctoral Scholarship to the Canadian university, and he was accepted. Sharma earned a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering in 2018 from the university, followed by a postdoc stint at Princeton. Calgary recognized him with a Schulich Early Achievement Alumni Award in 2019.
An active student humanitarian
Since his college days, Sharma has been using his technical skills to give back to communities around the world. He started as an IEEE student branch chair. His focus, he says, has been to encourage students to pursue a STEM education and to bridge the digital/education divide.
When he moved to Canada, he joined the IEEE Southern Alberta Section and served as chair of its Young Professionals affinity group. He helped reinvigorate the group, which received the 2015 Young Professionals Hall of Fame Award. The honor recognizes groups that have formed collaborations with local industry, organized quality events, engaged with other IEEE units, and held activities that grew their membership.
Sharma helped found the section’s IEEE Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology. The SIGHT group partners with local organizations to bring technology to underserved communities. Looking for people who needed help, he learned about the indigenous community in Canada.
“I was shocked to see that within first-world countries, there is still so much disparity,” he says.
The IEEE SIGHT group built the infrastructure to bring free Wi-Fi to the Maskwacis reserve, in central Alberta. The project received US $20,000 from what is now the IEEE Humanitarian Technologies Board.
“I understood one thing: that it’s not always about the solutions; it’s about working on the right problems,” Sharma says of his SIGHT work.
“Wireless connectivity is a basic need for individuals because that’s what connects them to the outside world and the global ecosystem,” he says. Thanks to the project, he says, residents could start small businesses and sell their products online.
“Technology is not just about high-end IC design,” he says. “It is also about how you can translate that technology into public good.”
In 2021 Sharma was the youngest member to be elected to the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society board, on which he still serves. He says he values getting to meet the other board members, who include some of the best researchers in their field who are shaping the future of technology
What’s more, he says, “I get to evolve my personality, understand how technology trends are changing, and what the strategies are.
“For my professional career, membership has helped me expand my network and sharpen my technical know-how. Be it your personal or professional life, learning and service is an inevitable process. The more you serve, the more you learn and grow.”
In a hangar at the University of Edinburgh, a triangular steel contraption sits beside a giant tank of water. Inside the tank, a technician in a yellow dinghy adjusts equipment so that the triangled structure can be hoisted into the water to see how it deals with simulated waves and currents. One day soon, a platform 50 times as large may float in the deep waters of the North Sea, buoying up a massive wind turbine to harvest the steady, strong breezes there. About an hour’s ride up the coast, full-scale 3,000-tonne behemoths already float in Aberdeen Bay, capturing enough wind energy to electrify nearly 35,000 Scottish households.
The prototype at the FloWave facility—one of 10 new floating wind-power designs being tested here—is progressing fast, says Tom Davey, who oversees testing. “Everything you see here has been manufactured and put in the water in the last couple months.”
There’s good reason for this hustle: The United Kingdom wants to add 34 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, en route to decarbonizing its grid by 2035. But the shallow waters east of London are already packed with wind turbines. Scotland’s deeper waters are therefore the U.K.’s next frontier. Auctions have set aside parcels for 27 floating wind farms, with a combined capacity exceeding 24 GW.
This scale model of a floating wind-turbine platform is one of 10 new designs being tested at the University of Edinburgh’s FloWave facility.Peter Fairley
This rush to deep water is a global phenomenon. To arrest the accelerating pace of a changing climate, the world needs a lot more clean energy to electrify heating, transportation, and industry and to displace fossil-fuel generation. Offshore wind power is already playing a key role in this transition. But the steadiest, strongest wind blows over deep water—well beyond the 60- to 70-meter limit for the fixed foundations that anchor traditional wind turbines to the ocean floor. And in many places, such as North America’s deep Pacific coast, the strongest and steadiest wind blows in the evening, which would perfectly complement solar energy’s daytime peaks.
Hence the push for wind platforms that float. The Biden administration has called for 15 GW of floating offshore wind capacity in the United States by 2035, and recent research suggests that the U.S. Pacific coast could support 100 GW more by midcentury. Ireland, South Korea, and Taiwan are among the other countries with bold floating wind ambitions.
The question is how to scale up the technology to gigawatt scale. This global debate is pitting innovation against risk.
On the innovation end are people like Davey and the FloWave team, who’ve already advanced several floating wind devices to sea trials. One FloWave-tested platform, engineered by Copenhagen-based Stiesdal Offshore, was recently selected for a 100-megawatt wind farm to be built off Scotland’s northern tip in 2025.
Kincardine Offshore Wind Farm project Principle Power
Established tech companies, however, argue that their more conservative designs are ready to go today, and at bigger scale. What the industry really needs to drive down costs, they say, is economies of scale. “In our view, this is purely a deployment question,” says Aaron Smith, chief commercial officer for the floating wind-tech developer Principle Power, based in Emeryville, Calif., whose platforms support the 190-meter-high, 9.5-MW turbines operating in Aberdeen Bay.
If governments provide consistent, long-term subsidies, industry standardization and mass production will deliver the gigawatts, Smith says. “We have the technology. We’re just angling for the right market conditions to deploy that at scale.”
What are the advantages of floating wind power?
To fully understand what developers are up against, it helps to know how hard it is to deploy any kind of wind power at sea. The 15-MW turbines being ordered today for tomorrow’s offshore wind farms weigh roughly 1,000 tonnes. The foundations of traditional offshore wind turbines are also massive steel or concrete structures that have to be embedded in the ocean floor. And installing a turbine atop a tower that’s twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty requires dedicated and costly vessels, which are in short supply worldwide.
You can do without such vessels by using a floating platform. The equipment can be fully assembled on shore and then towed to the site. But having a platform that floats compounds the challenge of supporting the towering turbine.
To stabilize the first floating wind farm, completed in 2017 about 50 kilometers northeast of the Aberdeen project, Norwegian energy giant Equinor used a steel column that extends 78 meters into the water. This dense mass, called a spar platform, works like the keel of a boat. Equinor used the same design for an 88-MW, 11-turbine array—the world’s largest, though probably not for long—completed this year in Norway. At that project, cables transfer the electricity to oil and gas platforms, rather than delivering the power back to shore.
Equinor constructed floating wind farms in Scotland and Norway. The turbines and platforms can be assembled on shore and then towed out to sea.Jan Arne Wold/Woldcam/Equinor
Ole Jørgen Bratland/Equinor
For its next floating wind projects, Equinor plans to use the more conservative semisubmersible design, a technology perfected for oil and gas platforms. Semisubmersibles don’t go deep the way spar platforms do; instead, they achieve stability by extending their buoyancy horizontally. Principle Power’s WindFloat is a three-sided semisubmersible platform that is roughly 70 meters on a side. A concrete square variant from France’s BW Ideol is 35 to 55 meters on a side.
Chains and anchors in the seabed prevent these platforms from spinning or drifting, which is crucial for minimizing the movements that would flex and fatigue the turbines’ power cables. Some platforms, such as WindFloat, shift ballast around to dampen wave action or to keep the rotor perpendicular to the wind so as to maximize energy capture. WindFloat moves the water ballast with pumps that run for about 20 minutes a day. “You’re naturally going to be heeling out of the wind, just like with a sailboat. We’re shifting the water balance to compensate,” explains Smith.
Principle Power then marries conventional wind turbines to the company’s floating platforms, making small but vital tweaks to the turbine’s control system to compensate for the differences between fixed and floating conditions. For example, if a floating platform starts to tip due to strong waves, a control system designed for a fixed foundation may interpret the movement as a change in wind speed and then pitch the blades in response. That correction could instead amplify the rocking motion. WindFloat’s turbine controls are tuned to prevent such dangerous feedback.
Until four or five years ago, floating wind developers had to sort out such issues on their own, because most turbine manufacturers weren’t interested in working with them. But now that developers are shopping for dozens of turbines for gigawatt-scale floating projects, turbine manufacturers are finally devoting engineering resources to the cause.
Thomas Choisnet, until recently chief technology officer of BW Ideol, says the current generation of 15-MW turbines developed for fixed-foundation wind farms also have specifications for floating. “They are making sure that everything works in this moving environment,” he says. Floating projects thus benefit from the decades of design optimization and manufacturing scale that went into building today’s conventional offshore wind installations.
Conventional approaches take the lead
Beyond the technological advantages of using a tried-and-true approach, there’s a financial upside, Smith says. Floating wind developers must convince risk-averse bankers and insurers to back their projects, and it helps to be able to point to your project’s use of established technology. In years past, offshore wind investors who backed innovative but flawed designs suffered huge losses.
Gigawatt-scale offshore installations also require massive public and private investments in ports and supply chains. Consider the 960-MW Buchan wind farm that Ideol is developing for the Scottish North Sea. Because the project includes a seasoned technology provider, it is moving faster than most. The consortium has already secured connections to the grid, and Ideol has secured 34 hectares east of Inverness to manufacture its platforms.
The owners of the mothballed Ardersier Port, which once serviced oil and gas platforms, plan to work with Ideol to transform the port into a regional hub that will deliver floating wind platforms to projects across the North Sea. To produce the steel-reinforced concrete for Ideol’s platforms, Ardersier will get a new concrete plant, an oil-rig decommissioning facility, and the U.K.’s first new steelworks in half a century, to recycle the rigs’ steel. The steel mill, says Ideol, will be one of the world’s first to replace metallurgical coal with renewable electricity and hydrogen.
Building superstable platforms like Ideol’s and Principle Power’s to accommodate conventional turbines is expensive. According to the consulting firm BloombergNEF, recent floating projects cost up to US $10 million per megawatt. The resulting power is roughly three times as expensive as generation from fixed-bottom offshore wind. And those high costs are hindering developers’ ability to clinch long-term power-supply contracts with utilities. In June, energy consultancy 4C Offshore cut its global floating wind-power projection for 2030 by nearly a quarter compared with its projection from a year earlier.
France’s BW Ideol uses a square of concrete for its floating platform [left and at top]. Like Principle Power’s steel triangular platform [right], its horizontal lines extend its buoyancy, keeping it stable.Left: V. Joncheray/BW Ideol; Right: Principle Power
At the Floating Offshore Wind Turbines conference held last May, several developers called on leading turbine manufacturers, such as Vestas and General Electric, to adapt their hardware to help reduce the cost of floating wind. For example, if turbines could deal with more motion, then floating platforms could be smaller, and thus less expensive, says Cédric Le Bousse, director for marine renewable energy for the French utility Électricité de France, which recently installed a three-turbine floating wind demonstration near Marseille. As it is, he says, floating platforms must be “over-dimensioned” to achieve the strict limits on movements set by the turbine manufacturers.
The promise of new designs
Meanwhile, floating wind’s mold-breakers are offering an ever-expanding diversity of technology options. At least 80 designs for platforms or integrated platform-turbines now vie for the floating wind market.
For starters, there are dozens of platform designs. There are semisubmersibles that seat the turbine toward the center of the structure, such as Stiesdal’s tetrahedral TetraSub. That geometry distributes the rotor’s weight and torquing forces and reduces the platform’s weight and thus its cost. There’s a 40,000-tonne spar platform that replaces the steel column with a cheaper, 285-meter-long column of concrete.
More radical floating wind-power designs flout decades-old engineering assumptions. Many of these assumptions make less sense far offshore, says Klaus Ulrich Drechsel, an offshore-energy engineering manager for the German utility EnBW. “It’s important to not only try to overcome the disadvantages but also to take advantage of the potential benefits of floating.”
Myriad Wind Energy Systems describes its 12-rotor wind turbine as a “wind farm on a stick.”Myriad Wind Energy Systems
For example, some floating turbine configurations allow the rotor to face downwind. Turbine makers had long avoided doing that because it’s noisy, as the blades must pass through the wind’s “shadow” behind the tower. But far offshore, the resulting thump-thump-thump is unlikely to offend anyone. And the wind itself can then orient the rotor, eliminating the need for motors and gears that keep conventional turbines facing into the wind.
Another idea is to add more rotors to a single tower. Multirotor turbines can enhance production by forcing more air to flow through the rotors. The rotors’ counterrotation, meanwhile, neutralizes the torquing force that tilts single-rotor floaters to one side and strains turbine towers.
Big corporate players are taking up the multirotor and downwind designs. Plenitude, a subsidiary of the Italian oil and gas producer Eni, has bought into EnerOcean, a Spanish firm that validated its 12-MW twin-rotor design at FloWave. Chinese turbine giant Mingyang Smart Energy Group is manufacturing a floater with dual 8.3-MW rotors, set for installation this year off Macau. EnBW is cofunding that demonstration, in exchange for exclusive rights to deploy the design in Europe.
The trio of industrial Ph.D.s behind Scottish startup Myriad Wind Energy Systems figure two rotors can’t capture the full benefits of multiple rotors. Their 90-meter-tall array has 12 rotors. “We’re seeing it as kind of a ‘wind farm on a stick,’” says Paul Pirrie, Myriad’s CTO.
Myriad uses a pivoting tree structure to support the rotors. The frame is modular for easier transport. Integrated tracks and lifts facilitate assembly, with the turbine generators and rotors delivered to the base and raised into place. Any faulty equipment, which otherwise would be a logistical nightmare to repair or replace out at sea, can return to the tower’s bottom via the tracks and lifts, with the replacement part hoisted aloft via the same route.
Myriad hopes to have a demonstrator installed on land in 2025. But the company is already facing competition from Oslo startup Wind Catching Systems, whose 126-rotor floating design is in prototype development with help from General Motors.
Wind Catching Systems’s 126-rotor design would be tethered to the ocean floor. Some floating wind designs call for a completely tetherless platform.Wind Catching Systems
Sustained government support is key
Ultimately, floating wind power could become completely untethered. Several teams worldwide are now working on wind ships, a concept first suggested by the U.S. wind-energy pioneer William Heronemus in 1972. He envisioned a tetherless, self-propelled floating platform that would capture wind power, use it to generate hydrogen, and store that fuel for delivery to shore. (Heronemus also launched the University of Massachusetts’ wind-engineering program, training the engineers who launched the U.S. wind-power industry.)
Autonomous wind ships cut out the power cables and mooring chains used by floating offshore wind platforms. Concepts like the UMass team’s Wind Trawler, a modern version of Heronemus’s wind ship, “are not depth limited at all and so have a potentially enormous capture area,” says James Manwell, an engineering professor at UMass Amherst.
Eliminating power cables and mooring chains could also assuage some of the concerns over offshore wind’s potential effect on fisheries and wildlife. For example, fishing is generally banned within wind farms to avoid entanglement of fishing gear. Such fishing-free zones tend to enhance fisheries, providing a refuge in which fish grow larger and reproduce. Nevertheless, fishing interests often oppose any limits to their freedom to fish, arguing that restricted areas force them to travel further. Citing such concerns, Oregon’s governor recently called for a pause in offshore wind preparations, even though turbines floating off the Pacific coast are still years away.
In the near term, the floating wind industry faces a more intrinsic, logistical problem. Namely, developers need ports to start gearing up to build and launch their massive wind machines. Scottish Renewables, a regional industry group, says that the U.K. “urgently” needs to transform at least three ports into industrial hubs in order for the country to meet its 2030 energy and emissions goals. And yet the industry hasn’t settled on which turbine and platform designs are best, and so ports do not know how to gear up.
Iain Sinclair [left] and Rory Gunn are with the Global Energy Group, which is transforming Scotland’s Port of Nigg into a wind-power hub. Peter Fairley
“The variables make for an absolute minefield,” says Iain Sinclair, executive director for renewables and energy transition for the Edinburgh-based Global Energy Group. Sinclair’s company owns three Scottish ports, including the Port of Nigg northeast of Inverness, which has been identified as one of the most promising places for floating wind power.
Back in the day, Nigg built about 40 percent of the North Sea’s oil and gas platforms. At the port’s peak in the 1970s and 1980s, 4,000 people worked there, and petroleum fumes filled the air. Today, you’re more likely to smell distillery vapors wafting over the harbor—what locals call the “angels’ share” of the Highland’s popular single malts. Nigg’s oil terminal is shuttered, and drilling platforms visit infrequently. But there’s plenty of bustle now, thanks to investments by Global Energy Group that have turned Nigg into a staging point for offshore wind construction. When IEEE Spectrum visited, cranes were lifting enormous towers, nacelles, and blades onto an installation vessel, destined for a fixed-foundation wind farm.
Sinclair is betting that building, deploying, and maintaining floating wind farms will ultimately dwarf the last century’s oil and gas boom. And it could happen fast: An independent 2021 report predicted that floating offshore wind would contribute £1.5-billion to Scotland’s economy by 2027 with only modest port upgrades, and up to triple that amount with more strategic investments.
To determine where to focus Nigg’s upgrades, Sinclair and his team have assessed 57 floating wind designs and zeroed in on a half-dozen of the most promising. They’ve mapped those designs onto Nigg’s existing and potential capabilities, such as manufacturing tubular steel, assembling components in the port’s 36,000 square meters of covered fabrication space, and pairing turbines to platforms along the harbor’s 1.2-km-long quayside.
What the floating wind industry really needs now, says Sinclair, is sustained government support. At Nigg, that means more than the U.K. government’s £160 million for floating offshore wind manufacturing announced in March, which Scottish Renewables says “falls woefully short.” It also means a plan to develop Scotland’s ports, which could cost £4 billion. The same concerns are being voiced by floating wind proponents in the United States, France, Germany, and other countries, as they push for their own infrastructure upgrades.
Henry Jeffrey, one of Tom Davey’s colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, is a transplant from offshore oil and gas engineering who now codirects the U.K.’s Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy R&D effort. He agrees that governments need to step up. Jeffrey says politicians ask him all the time when floating offshore wind technology will be competitive.
“I say, ‘Well, it’s directly proportional to your political will. It’s up to you to make it happen,’” Jeffrey says. The technology is “as close and credible as government wants it to be.”
The required electronics consist of a geophone [top left], a signal-conditioning and A/D board [top middle], a Wi-Fi dongle [top right], and a Raspberry Pi Model 3B+ [bottom]. James Provost
The Raspberry Shake’s Web interface makes it easy to view recorded data, presented in what seismologists call helicorder format. This portion of the data for 6 September 2023 includes the time at which teleseismic waves from a moderate-size earthquake in Chile would have reached the recording site, at about 23:59 UTC, which is shown at the 14-minute mark in the green trace [bottom]. No obvious earthquake signal is seen at that point, though.James Provost
This scale model of a floating wind-turbine platform is one of 10 new designs being tested at the University of Edinburgh’s FloWave facility.Peter Fairley
Equinor constructed floating wind farms in Scotland and Norway. The turbines and platforms can be assembled on shore and then towed out to sea.Jan Arne Wold/Woldcam/Equinor
Ole Jørgen Bratland/Equinor
France’s BW Ideol uses a square of concrete for its floating platform [left and at top]. Like Principle Power’s steel triangular platform [right], its horizontal lines extend its buoyancy, keeping it stable.Left: V. Joncheray/BW Ideol; Right: Principle Power
Myriad Wind Energy Systems describes its 12-rotor wind turbine as a “wind farm on a stick.”Myriad Wind Energy Systems
Wind Catching Systems’s 126-rotor design would be tethered to the ocean floor. Some floating wind designs call for a completely tetherless platform.Wind Catching Systems
Iain Sinclair [left] and Rory Gunn are with the Global Energy Group, which is transforming Scotland’s Port of Nigg into a wind-power hub. Peter Fairley
