Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Nvidia Is Piloting a Generative AI for its Engineers




In a keynote address at IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design Monday, Nvidia chief technology officer Bill Dally revealed that the company has been testing a large-language model AI to boost the productivity of its chip designers.

“Even if we made them five percent more productive, that’s a huge win,” Dally said in an interview ahead of the conference. Nvidia can’t claim it’s reached that goal yet. The system, called ChipNeMo, isn’t ready for the kind of large—and lengthy—trial that would really prove its worth. But a cadre of volunteers at Nvidia is using it, and there are some positive indications, Dally said.

ChipNeMo is a specially tuned spin on a large language model. It starts as an LLM made up of 43 billion parameters that acquires its skills from one trillion tokens—fundamental language units—of data. “That’s like giving it a liberal arts education,” said Dally. “But if you want to send it to graduate school and have it become specialized, you fine tune it on a particular corpus of data… in this case, chip design.”

That took two more steps. First, that already-trained model was trained again on 24 billion tokens of specialized data. Twelve billion of those tokens came from design documents, bug reports, and other English-language internal data accumulated over Nvidia’s 30 years work designing chips. The other 12 billion tokens came from code, such as the hardware description language Verilog and scripts for carrying things out with industrial electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Finally, the resulting model was submitted to “supervised fine-tuning”, training on 130,000 sample conversations and designs.

The result, ChipNeMo, was set three different tasks: as a chatbot, as an EDA-tool script writer, and as a summarizer of bug reports.

Acting as a chatbot for engineers could save designers time, said Dally. “Senior designers spend a lot of time answering questions for junior designers,” he said. As a chatbot, the AI can save senior designer’s time by answering questions that require experience, like what a strange signal might mean or how a specific test should be run.

Chatbots, however, are notorious for their willingness to lie when they don’t know the answer and their tendency to hallucinate. So Nvidia developers integrated a function called retrieval-augmented generation into ChipNeMo to keep it on the level. That function forces the AI to retrieve documents from Nvidia’s internal data to back up its suggestions.

The addition of retrieval-augmented generation “improves the accuracy quite a bit,” said Dally. “More importantly, it reduces hallucination.”

In its second application, ChipNeMo helped engineers run tests on designs and parts of them. “We use many design tools,” said Dally. “These tools are pretty complicated and typically involves many lines of scripting.” ChipNeMo simplifies the designer’s job by providing a “very natural human interface to what otherwise would be some very arcane commands.”

ChipNeMo’s final use case, analyzing and summarizing bug reports, “is probably the one where we see the prospects for the most productivity gain earliest,” said Dally. When a test fails, he explained, it gets logged into Nvidia’s internal bug report system, and each report can include pages and pages of detailed data. Then an “ARB” (short for “action required by”) is sent to a designer for a fix, and the clock starts ticking.

ChipNeMo summarizes the bug report’s many pages into as little as a single paragraph, speeding decisions. It even can write that summary in two modes: one for the engineer and one for the manager.

Makers of chip design tools, such as Synopsys and Cadence, have been diving into integration of AI into their systems. But according to Dally, they won’t be able to achieve the same thing Nvidia is after.

“The thing that enables us to do this is 30 years of design documents and code in a database,” he said. ChipNeMo is learning “from the entire experience of Nvidia.” EDA companies just don’t have that kind of data.

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Monday, October 30, 2023

“This vulnerability is now under mass exploitation.” Citrix Bleed bug bites hard


“This vulnerability is now under mass exploitation.” Citrix Bleed bug bites hard

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A vulnerability that allows attackers to bypass multifactor authentication and access enterprise networks using hardware sold by Citrix is under mass exploitation by ransomware hackers despite a patch being available for three weeks.

Citrix Bleed, the common name for the vulnerability, carries a severity rating of 9.4 out of a possible 10, a relatively high designation for a mere information-disclosure bug. The reason: the information disclosed can include session tokens, which the hardware assigns to devices that have already successfully provided credentials, including those providing MFA. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-4966 and residing in Citrix’s NetScaler Application Delivery Controller and NetScaler Gateway, has been under active exploitation since August. Citrix issued a patch on October 10.

Repeat: This is not a drill

Attacks have only ramped up recently, prompting security researcher Kevin Beaumont on Saturday to declare: “This vulnerability is now under mass exploitation.” He went on to say, “From talking to multiple organizations, they are seeing widespread exploitation.”

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What You Need to Know About Biden's Sweeping AI Order




The world has been waiting for the United States to get its act together on regulating artificial intelligence—particularly since it’s home to many of the powerful companies that are pushing at the boundaries of what’s acceptable. Today, U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order on AI that many experts say is a significant step forward.

“I think the White House has done a really good, really comprehensive job,” says Lee Tiedrich, who studies AI policy as a distinguished faculty fellow at Duke University’s Initiative for Science & Society. She says it’s a “creative” package of initiatives that works within the reach of the government’s executive branch, acknowledging that it can neither enact legislation (that’s Congress’s job) nor directly set rules (that’s what the federal agencies do). Says Tiedrich: “They used an interesting combination of techniques to put something together that I’m personally optimistic will move the dial in the right direction.”

This U.S. action builds on earlier moves by the White House: a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights“ that laid out non-binding principles for AI regulation in October 2022, and voluntary commitments on managing AI risks from 15 leading AI companies in July and September.

And it comes in the context of major regulatory efforts around the world. The European Union is currently finalizing its AI Act, and is expected to adopt the legislation this year or early next; that act bans certain AI applications that are deemed to have unacceptable risks and establishes oversight for high-risk applications. Meanwhile, China has rapidly drafted and adopted several laws on AI recommender systems and generative AI. Other efforts are underway in countries such as Canada, Brazil, and Japan.

What’s in the executive order on AI?

The executive order tackles a lot. The White House has so far released only a fact sheet about the order, with the final text to come soon. That fact sheet starts with initiatives related to safety and security, such as a provision that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will come up with “rigorous standards for extensive red-team testing to ensure safety before public release.” Another states that companies must notify the government if they’re training a foundation model that could pose serious risks and share results of red-team testing.

The order also discusses civil rights, stating that the federal government must establish guidelines and training to prevent algorithmic bias—the phenomenon in which the use of AI tools in decision-making systems exacerbates discrimination. Brown University computer science professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian, who coauthored the 2022 Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, calls the executive order “a strong effort” and says it builds on the Blueprint, which framed AI governance as a civil rights issue. However, he’s eager to see the final text of the order. “While there are good steps forward in getting info on law enforcement use of AI, I’m hoping there will be stronger regulation of its use in the details of the [executive order],” he tells IEEE Spectrum. “This seems like a potential gap.”

Another expert waiting for details is Cynthia Rudin, a Duke University professor of computer science who works on interpretable and transparent AI systems. She’s concerned about AI technology that makes use of biometric data, such as facial recognition systems. While she calls the order “big and bold,” she says it’s not clear whether the provisions that mention privacy apply to biometrics. “I wish they had mentioned biometric technologies explicitly so I knew where they fit or whether they were included,” Rudin says.

While the privacy provisions do include some directives for federal agencies to strengthen their privacy requirements and support privacy-preserving AI training techniques, they also include a call for action from Congress. President Biden “calls on Congress to pass bipartisan data privacy legislation to protect all Americans, especially kids,” the order states. Whether such legislation would be part of the AI-related legislation that Senator Chuck Schumer is working on remains to be seen.

Coming soon: watermarks for synthetic media?

Another hot-button topic in these days of generative AI that can produce realistic text, images, and audio on demand is how to help people understand what’s real and what’s synthetic media. The order instructs the U.S. Department of Commerce to “develop guidance for content authentication and watermarking to clearly label AI-generated content.” Which sounds great. But Rudin notes that while there’s been considerable research on how to watermark deepfake images and videos, it’s not clear “how one could do watermarking on deepfakes that involve text.” She’s skeptical that watermarking will have much effect, but says that if other provisions of the order force social media companies to reveal the effects of their recommender algorithms and the extent of disinformation circulating on their platforms, that could cause enough outrage to force a change.

Susan Ariel Aaronson, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University who works on data and AI governance, calls the order “a great start.” However, she worries that the order doesn’t go far enough in setting governance rules for the data sets that AI companies use to train their systems. She’s also looking for a more defined approach to governing AI, saying that the current situation is “a patchwork of principles, rules, and standards that are not well understood or sourced.” She hopes that the government will “continue its efforts to find common ground on these many initiatives as we await congressional action.”

While some congressional hearings on AI have focused on the possibility of creating a new federal AI regulatory agency, today’s executive order suggests a different tack. Duke’s Tiedrich says she likes this approach of spreading out responsibility for AI governance among many federal agencies, tasking each with overseeing AI in their areas of expertise. The definitions of safe and responsible AI will be different from application to application, she says. “For example, when you define safety for an autonomous vehicle, you’re going to come up with different set of parameters than you would when you’re talking about letting an AI-enabled medical device into a clinical setting, or using an AI tool in the judicial system where it could deny people’s rights.”

The order comes just a few days before the United Kingdom’s AI Safety Summit, a major international gathering of government officials and AI executives to discuss AI risks relating to misuse and loss of control. U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will represent the United States at the summit, and she’ll be making one point loud and clear: After a bit of a wait, the United States is showing up.

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A Dual-CPU Computer You Can Rewire With Software




When the home computer revolution arrived, it filled my childhood with fascination and inspired me to study computer engineering. I wanted to design a microcomputer to my own specifications. But at school I was never taught how a complete computer system was put together. Instead we studied various subsystems and the theory of things like digital signal processing and so on. Somebody, somewhere else, would always be responsible for assembling the whole system and making everything work together.

This was unfortunate and unjustified: Putting a complete working computer together isn’t difficult, and it can give students critical early confidence in their ability to live up to the label “computer engineer.” So, having recently retired from the high-tech industry, I decided to design a didactical but fully functional computer that could serve as a platform for learning and experimenting with system-level design issues—the Cerberus 2100.

I didn’t want to commit Cerberus to a particular CPU, as doing so would conflate system-level architecture concepts with the specific timings and control signals of that CPU. Much as a software-engineering course focuses on the structure of an algorithm rather than the syntax of its implementation in a particular language, I wanted Cerberus to focus on the system-level structure. Cerberus is thus a multi-CPU system, featuring both a Z80 and a W65C02S (6502), two well-known workhorse 8-bit processors that featured prominently in the home-microcomputer era. There is a wealth of resources available for learning how to program these processors, which are powerful enough to be useful and entertaining, yet simple enough to master.

The problem, of course, is that these two CPUs operate with very different interfaces to other parts of the computer, such as memory or input/output devices. For instance, the 6502 uses a single control line to indicate whether it is reading or writing to the data bus, while the Z80 uses two lines. This means the 6502’s signal needs to be combined with the signal from the system clock, via an AND gate, to prevent memory miswrites, while the Z80 has no such issue. Also, the Z80 has an output line to signal that the value on the address bus is stable, a function absent in the 6502. And so on.

These differences mean that I couldn’t use a standard control bus in the Cerberus. Instead, I used a large complex programmable logic device (CPLD) chip I dubbed “Fat-Spacer” to translate the control signals of each CPU into an abstraction layer. This layer defines the system architecture. Fat-Spacer then translates the output of the abstraction layer into the appropriate input signals for each component in the system. These two steps of translation entail both Boolean logic and timing control through flip-flops. I used a CPLD instead of an FPGA (field-programmable gate array) because, unlike FPGAs, CPLDs have a fixed propagation delay regardless of the Boolean logic implemented in them. This is critical because it allows users to make changes to the system architecture—by reprogramming the CPLD—without having to worry that the complexity of their changes will take too long to pass through a chain of logic gates, and so miss the timing windows imposed by the system clock.

Because of its internal abstraction layer, Cerberus is uniquely suitable for expansion: A direct memory access (DMA) expansion port is also connected to Fat-Spacer. By directly allowing access to system memory, I let the user add even more CPUs and microcontrollers to the system via the expansion port.

Another critical design challenge was to decouple the logic of the computer from the timings of the video circuitry

Another critical design challenge I faced was to decouple the system-level logic of the computer from the timings of the video circuitry. Traditionally, these two are tightly tied together so as to coordinate access to video and character memories by the CPU and display circuitry without causing conflicts or artifacts. But with two CPUs and the DMA expansion port, this wasn’t an option.

Instead, Cerberus uses two dual-ported static RAMs (SRAMS) as video and character memories. Each port allows asynchronous access to the memory’s contents. One port of each SRAM is connected to the computer proper, while the other is exclusive to the video circuitry.

An illustration showing how central data and memory address buses interconnect the CPUs with other components, while control signals are routed through a chip marked Fat-Spacer. The Z80 and 6502 processors use different control signals to interface with memory and interface chips. A reprogrammable logic chip, dubbed Fat-Spacer translates these signals as required. Another reprogrammable logic chip handles storage and the keyboard interface, while a third generates video signals. James Provost

Despite the dual-ported memories, onscreen glitches could still happen if the video circuitry was to read from a given address as the computer wrote to that same address. Fortunately, dual-ported SRAMs provide a “BUSY” signal to indicate a conflict. This signal is used by Fat-Spacer to pause the CPUs for the duration of the conflict. The control abstraction layer comes very handy here too, as it already has the appropriate translation logic for pausing the CPUs.

Fat-Spacer isn’t the only CPLD in Cerberus: Three of them constitute the system’s core chipset. Fat-Cavia continuously scans the video and character memories, and sends bitmaps to Fat-Scunk, which then generates the appropriate RGB signals and synchs pulses to create a 320-by-240-pixel VGA output. Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, Fat-Spacer provides the glue logic. Finally, there’s an additional chip: Fat-Cat, which is actually an ATmega328PB microcontroller. This is used to handle I/O: The microcontroller manages a keyboard, buzzer, the expansion protocol, and a microSD card for storage. The I/O firmware is held in the ATmega’s memory, meaning it leaves no memory footprint in the 64 kilobytes of RAM accessible to the Z80 and 6502.

The Cerberus 2100 is an open hardware design available to all and complete details are available on my website. But for those who don’t want to build their own machine from scratch, I am working with European electronics company Olimex for the sale of a fully assembled version shortly. I hope it helps students and hobbyists to understand—and faculty to teach—how a complete, fully functional computer can be put together, regardless of the target CPU.

This article appears in the November 2023 print issue as “Software-Defined Architecture.”

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Biden issues sweeping executive order that touches AI risk, deepfakes, privacy


Biden issues sweeping executive order that touches AI risk, deepfakes, privacy

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

On Monday, President Joe Biden issued an executive order on AI that outlines the federal government's first comprehensive regulations on generative AI systems. The order includes testing mandates for advanced AI models to ensure they can't be used for creating weapons, suggestions for watermarking AI-generated media, and provisions addressing privacy and job displacement.

In the United States, an executive order allows the president to manage and operate the federal government. Using his authority to set terms for government contracts, Biden aims to influence AI standards by stipulating that federal agencies must only enter into contracts with companies that comply with the government's newly outlined AI regulations. This approach utilizes the federal government's purchasing power to drive compliance with the newly set standards.

As of press time Monday, the White House had not yet released the full text of the executive order, but from the Fact Sheet authored by the administration and through reporting on drafts of the order by Politico and The New York Times, we can relay a picture of its content. Some parts of the order reflect positions first specified in Biden's 2022 "AI Bill of Rights" guidelines, which we covered last October.

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Friday, October 27, 2023

Microsoft profiles new threat group with unusual but effective practices


This is not what a hacker looks like. Except on hacker cosplay night.

Enlarge / This is not what a hacker looks like. Except on hacker cosplay night. (credit: Getty Images | Bill Hinton)

Microsoft has been tracking a threat group that stands out for its ability to cash in from data theft hacks that use broad social engineering attacks, painstaking research, and occasional physical threats.

Unlike many ransomware attack groups, Octo Tempest, as Microsoft has named the group, doesn’t encrypt data after gaining illegal access to it. Instead, the threat actor threatens to share the data publicly unless the victim pays a hefty ransom. To defeat targets’ defenses, the group resorts to a host of techniques, which, besides social engineering, includes SIM swaps, SMS phishing, and live voice calls. Over time, the group has grown increasingly aggressive, at times resorting to threats of physical violence if a target doesn’t comply with instructions to turn over credentials.

“In rare instances, Octo Tempest resorts to fear-mongering tactics, targeting specific individuals through phone calls and texts,” Microsoft researchers wrote in a post on Wednesday. “These actors use personal information, such as home addresses and family names, along with physical threats to coerce victims into sharing credentials for corporate access.”

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Video Friday: ChatSpot




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.

IEEE SSRR 2023: 13–15 November 2023, FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN
Humanoids 2023: 12–14 December 2023, AUSTIN, TEX.
Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 2024, ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

Enjoy today’s videos!

The process of getting Spot to talk with a personality is very cool, but this is also something that should be done very carefully: Spot is a tool, and although it may sound like it thinks and feels, it absolutely doesn’t. Just something to keep in mind as more Spots (and other robots) make it out into the wild.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Shhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet.

[ Paper ]

This video presents the remarkable capabilities of the TALOS robot as it demonstrates agile and robust walking using Model Predictive Control (MPC) references sent to a Whole-Body Inverse Dynamics (WBID) controller developed in collaboration with Dynamograde.

[ PAL Robotics ]

Dr. Hooman Samani from the Creative Robotics Lab at the University of the Arts London writes, “the idea is to show how robots can be beyond traditional use and involve more people in robotics such as artists as we do at our university. So we made this video to show how a co-bot can be used as a DJ and people and robots dance together to the robot DJ in a robot dance party!”

[ London CCI ]

Future robots should perform multiple and various tasks, instead of simple pick-and-place operations. In this video, Dino Robotics demonstrates the functionalities in their software solution: it cooks a steak! Bon Appétit!

[ Dino Robotics ]

This video presents a novel perching and tilting aerial robot for precise and versatile power tool work on vertical walls. The system was developed as part of the AITHON ETH Zürich Bachelor student focus project and presented at IEEE IROS 2023. It combines a compact integrated perching drone design with a concrete drill’s heavy payload and reaction forces.

[ Paper ]

This is what very high precision, very useful robotics looks like.

[ Dusty ]

I never thought I’d write this sentence, but here is some video of a failing robotic mudskipper sex doll.

[ Nature ]

Good aim on this drone considering that its landing pad is speeding along at 20 knots.

[ AeroVironment ]

From the people responsible for the giant gundam in Japan comes this very big and very slow rideable quadruped thing.

[ Robotstart ]

RoboCup 2024 will be in Eindhoven in July!

[ RoboCup ]

A brief look into the 2023 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems, which took place in July 2023 in Prague, Czech Republic.

[ CTU ]

Lava caves on Mars and particularly on the moon are not only interesting for exo-geologists and other space scientists, but they also could be used as storage rooms or even habitats for future human settlements. The question is how to access and explore these huge cavities under the lunar surface without risking the lives of astronauts. This is where robots, or rather teams of robots, come into play.

[ DFKI ]

The rise of recent Foundation models (and applications e.g. ChatGPT) offer an exciting glimpse into the capabilities of large deep networks trained on Internet-scale data. In this talk, I will briefly discuss some of the lessons we’ve learned while scaling real robot data collection, how we’ve been thinking about Foundation models, and how we might bootstrap off of them (and modularity) to make our robots useful sooner.

[ UPenn ]

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People are speaking with ChatGPT for hours, bringing 2013’s Her closer to reality


Joaquin Phoenix in 'Her' (2013)

Enlarge / Joaquin Phoenix talking with AI in Her (2013). (credit: Warner Bros.)

In 2013, Spike Jonze's Her imagined a world where humans form deep emotional connections with AI, challenging perceptions of love and loneliness. Ten years later, thanks to ChatGPT's recently added voice features, people are playing out a small slice of Her in reality, having hours-long discussions with the AI assistant on the go.

In 2016, we put Her on our list of top sci-fi films of all time, and it also made our top films of the 2010s list. In the film, Joaquin Phoenix's character falls in love with an AI personality called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and he spends much of the film walking through life, talking to her through wireless earbuds reminiscent of Apple AirPods, which launched in 2016. In reality, ChatGPT isn't as situationally aware as Samantha was in the film, and OpenAI has done enough conditioning on ChatGPT to keep conversations from getting too intimate or personal. But that hasn't stopped people from having long talks with the AI assistant to pass the time.

Last week, we related a story in which AI researcher Simon Willison spent hours talking to ChatGPT. "I had an hourlong conversation while walking my dog the other day," he told Ars for that report. "At one point, I thought I'd turned it off, and I saw a pelican, and I said to my dog, 'Oh, wow, a pelican!' And my AirPod went, 'A pelican, huh? That's so exciting for you! What's it doing?' I've never felt so deeply like I'm living out the first ten minutes of some dystopian sci-fi movie."

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Thursday, October 26, 2023

iPhone privacy feature hiding Wi-Fi MACs has failed to work for 3 years


Private Wi-Fi address setting on an iPhone.

Enlarge / Private Wi-Fi address setting on an iPhone. (credit: Apple)

Three years ago, Apple introduced a privacy-enhancing feature that hid the Wi-Fi address of iPhones and iPads when they joined a network. On Wednesday, the world learned that the feature has never worked as advertised. Despite promises that this never-changing address would be hidden and replaced with a private one that was unique to each SSID, Apple devices have continued to display the real one, which in turn got broadcast to every other connected device on the network.

The problem is that a Wi-Fi media access control address—typically called a media access control address or simply a MAC—can be used to track individuals from network to network, in much the way a license plate number can be used to track a vehicle as it moves around a city. Case in point: In 2013, a researcher unveiled a proof-of-concept device that logged the MAC of all devices it came into contact with. The idea was to distribute lots of them throughout a neighborhood or city and build a profile of iPhone users, including the social media sites they visited and the many locations they visited each day.

As I wrote at the time:

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Roombas at the End of the World




Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station is a permanent scientific research base located at what is arguably the most isolated place on Earth. During the austral summer, the station is home to about 150 scientists and support staff, but during the austral winter, that number shrinks to just 40 or so, and those people are completely isolated from the rest of the world from mid-February until late October. For eight months, the station has to survive on its own, without deliveries of food, fuel, spare parts, or anything else. Only in the most serious of medical emergencies will a plane attempt to reach the station in the winter.

While the station’s humans rotate seasonally, there are in fact four full-time residents: the South Pole Roombas. First, there was Bert, a Roomba 652, who arrived at the station in 2018 and was for a time the loneliest robot in the world. Since the station has two floors, Bert was joined by Ernie, a Roomba 690, in 2019. A second pair of Roombas, Sam and Frodo, followed soon after.

These Roombas are at the South Pole to do what Roombas do: help keep the floors clean. But for the people who call the South Pole home for months on end, it turns out that these little robots have been able provide some much-needed distraction in a place where things stay more or less the same all of the time, and where pets, plants, and even dirt is explicitly outlawed by the Antarctic Treaty in the name of ecological preservation.


For the last year, an anonymous IT engineer has been blogging about his experiences working first at McMurdo Station (on the Antarctic coast south of New Zealand), and later at Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, where he’s currently spending the winter as part of the station’s support staff. His blog includes mundane yet fascinating accounts of what day-to-day life is like at the South Pole, including how showering works (four minutes per person per week), where the electricity comes from (a huge amount of aviation fuel hauled over land from the coast that will power generators), and the fate of the last egg for five months (over medium with salt and pepper).

The engineer also devoted an entire post to signage at the South Pole, at the very end of which was this picture, which raised some questions for me:

A close up picture of the top of a Roomba showing some small eye stickers, a sticker with the name "Ernie," and a sticker that says "it was so cold." Ernie, a Roomba living at the south pole.brr.fyi

Ernie, it turns out, has had a dramatic and occasionally harrowing life at the South Pole station. After Ernie arrived in 2019 to clean one floor of the station, lore began to develop that Ernie and its partner Bert (tasked with cleaning the floor above) were “star-crossed lovers, forever separated by the impenetrable barrier of the staircase.” That quote comes from Amy Lowitz, a member of the South Pole Telescope team, who overwintered at the pole in 2016 and has spent many summers there. “I think I made that joke every year when a new group of people comes to the pole for the summer,” Lowitz tells IEEE Spectrum. “There’s only so many things to talk about, so eventually the Roombas come up in conversation.” Happily for Ernie, Lowitz says that it’s now on the same floor as Bert, with the new Roombas Sam and Frodo teaming up on the floor below.

But Ernie’s presumed joy at finally being united with Bert was not to last—in January of 2020, Ernie went missing. The Twitter account of the South Pole Telescope posted photos pleading for Ernie’s return, and a small memorial appeared at Ernie’s docking station.

A Twitter post shows two pictures, including a lost poster for the Roomba Ernie, and flowers near a sign for Ernie. SPT

Soon, things took a more sinister (amusingly sinister) turn. Kyle Ferguson is a South Pole Telescope team member who was at the station in the summer of 2020 when Ernie went missing, and has vivid memories of the drama that ensued:

I believe it started with just one poster that went up outside of the galley, with a picture of two people calling themselves the Cookie Monsters posing in balaclavas and standing on a staircase holding Ernie. It said something like, ‘if you ever want to see Ernie alive again, leave a tray of chocolate chip cookies in such and such location and we will return him safely.’ So that was the initial ransom.

A twitter post showing two people with nerf guns and a roomba on ransom notes. SPT

As tends to happen in a community like this, things sort of took off from there—everybody ran with it in their own direction. So, on that wall outside of the galley, there evolved a narrative where people were trying to mount rescue missions, and there were sign up sheets for that. And there were people saying, ‘we won’t negotiate with you until you provide proof of life.’

Down the hallway, there was another narrative where people had assumed the worst: that the kidnappers had ended poor Ernie’s life prematurely. So the memorial that had sprung up for Ernie next to one of the water fountains grew. There were fake flowers and Tootsie rolls, and some people put some trash there, just in homage—trash that Ernie would never be able to sweep up. I even ended up writing a parody of the song ‘5,000 Candles in the Wind’ from Parks and Recreation for Ernie, and singing it at an open mic night.

A Twitter post shows two roombas, flowers, and signs. SPT

But Ernie did come back. Those of us who believed that he had perished (I was one of those) were in the wrong. Someone claimed that the cookies had been delivered, and that the kidnappers should give Ernie back, and then there was a poster that went up that said Ernie was found abandoned underneath one of the staircases. He was rescued and revived by the Cookie Monsters. So, the kidnappers sort of got credit for saving him in the end.

Ferguson suspects that Ernie’s “IT WAS SO COLD” sticker was acquired after the robot’s brief trip outside with the kidnappers. Summer temperatures at the south pole average around -28°C, substantially below the operating temperature of a Roomba, although when we spoke to Ferguson for this article during the South Pole winter, it was closer to -80°C outside the station, including wind chill.

The harsh weather and isolation may help explain why Ernie and his Roomba brethren get so much attention from the station residents. “There’s more to do at the South Pole than people think,” Amy Lowitz tells us, “but you’re still pretty much within a half mile radius of the main station, all of the time. So people get a little bored and a little stir crazy, and we look for new and strange ways to entertain ourselves. The ransom notes were just some goofy hijinks from some bored people at the South Pole.”

Lowitz also remembers a party where either Bert or Ernie was drafted as a DJ, with a Bluetooth speaker and some fancy lighting. “We had it running around up on a table so that people wouldn’t trip over it,” she recalls. And as recently as this winter, says Kyle Ferguson, a befurred Roomba could be seen on station: “Someone put up a silly ‘lost cat’ poster earlier in the winter, with a picture not even of a cat but of like a raccoon or something. And then someone else took that and decided to run with it, so they had this fake raccoon fur that they put to the top of one of the Roombas and sent it out to wander the hallways.”

A photo of a Roomba that is mostly covered by the skin of a raccoon. Sam, the “station cat.”Kyle Ferguson

Covering a Roomba with fur may be getting the robot a little closer to what people at the South Pole are actually missing, suggests Lowitz: “my guess is that at least some Polies [i.e. South Pole residents] are into the Roombas because we’re not allowed to have pets at the South Pole, and when there are these little Roombas running around, it’s sort of close. People do odd things at that altitude [the pressure altitude at the south pole is nearly 3500 meters], and when they miss home… a Roomba is just like a cute little thing to personify and pay attention to.”

Ferguson agrees. “We all miss our pets down here. Sometimes we joke about trying to smuggle down a puppy or a kitten even though it’s a huge violation of the Antarctic Treaty. One of the things that I think gives the Roombas some of their charm is how they keep running into walls. If I was to ascribe a personality to them, it would be kind of dumb and aloof, which evokes some of those pet memories—maybe like the time that your dog ate something it shouldn’t have.”

A close up photo of a Roomba on a floor sprinkled with popcorn pieces. A recent picture of Ernie, who is currently living underneath a popcorn machine.Kyle Ferguson

Sadly, we’ve heard that the South Pole Roombas are not at their Roomb-iest right now. They’re not as young as they used to be, and getting spare parts (like new batteries) is only possible during the austral summer and requires a lead time of six months. We’ll be checking in on Bert, Ernie, Sam, and Frodo towards the end of the year once the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station reopens for the austral summer. But for now, please enjoy the lyrics to Kyle Ferguson’s Ernie-themed “5000 Candles in the Wind” parody, adapted from ‘5,000 Candles in the Wind’ from Parks and Recreation.


Up in Roomba Heaven, here’s the thing;

You trade your wheels for angel’s wings,

And once we’ve all said goodbye,

You stop running into walls and you learn to fly.


Bye-bye, Roomba Ernie.

You were taken from us too early.

Bye-bye, Roomba Ernie.

You’re 5,000 candles in the wind.


Though we all miss you everyday,

We know you’re up there cleaning heaven’s waste.

Here’s the part that hurts the most:

Humans cannot recharge a ghost.


Bye-bye, Roomba Ernie.

You were taken from us too early.

Bye-bye, Roomba Ernie.

You’re 5,000 candles in the wind.


EVERYBODY NOW!

Bye-bye, Roomba Ernie.

You were taken from us too early.

Bye-bye, Roomba Ernie.

You’re 5,000 candles in the wind.

Maybe some day you’ll clean these halls again.

And I know I’ll always miss my Roomb-iest friend.


Spread your wings and fly.


Special thanks to the National Science Foundation, brr.fyi, and the Polies that we spoke to for this article. And if you’d like even more South Pole winter shenanigans, there’s an Antarctic Film Festival open to all of the research stations in Antarctica. Kyle Ferguson stars in John Wiff, an action movie that was written, filmed, and produced in just 48 hours, and you can watch it here (mildly NSFW for a truly astonishing amount of Nerf gun violence).

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Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Pro-Russia hackers target inboxes with 0-day in webmail app used by millions


Pro-Russia hackers target inboxes with 0-day in webmail app used by millions

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A relentless team of pro-Russia hackers has been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in widely used webmail software in attacks targeting governmental entities and a think tank, all in Europe, researchers from security firm ESET said on Wednesday.

The previously unknown vulnerability resulted from a critical cross-site scripting error in Roundcube, a server application used by more than 1,000 webmail services and millions of their end users. Members of a pro-Russia and Belarus hacking group tracked as Winter Vivern used the XSS bug to inject JavaScript into the Roundcube server application. The injection was triggered simply by viewing a malicious email, which caused the server to send emails from selected targets to a server controlled by the threat actor.

No manual interaction required

“In summary, by sending a specially crafted email message, attackers are able to load arbitrary JavaScript code in the context of the Roundcube user’s browser window,” ESET researcher Matthieu Faou wrote. “No manual interaction other than viewing the message in a web browser is required.”

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University of Chicago researchers seek to “poison” AI art generators with Nightshade


Robotic arm holding dangerous chemical.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago released a research paper outlining "Nightshade," a data poisoning technique aimed at disrupting the training process for AI models, reports MIT Technology Review and VentureBeat. The goal is to help visual artists and publishers protect their work from being used to train generative AI image synthesis models, such as Midjourney, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion.

The open source "poison pill" tool (as the University of Chicago's press department calls it) alters images in ways invisible to the human eye that can corrupt an AI model's training process. Many image synthesis models, with notable exceptions of those from Adobe and Getty Images, largely use data sets of images scraped from the web without artist permission, which includes copyrighted material. (OpenAI licenses some of its DALL-E training images from Shutterstock.)

AI researchers' reliance on commandeered data scraped from the web, which is seen as ethically fraught by many, has also been key to the recent explosion in generative AI capability. It took an entire Internet of images with annotations (through captions, alt text, and metadata) created by millions of people to create a data set with enough variety to create Stable Diffusion, for example. It would be impractical to hire people to annotate hundreds of millions of images from the standpoint of both cost and time. Those with access to existing large image databases (such as Getty and Shutterstock) are at an advantage when using licensed training data.

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IEEE Young Professionals Take On Climate Change




Developing technology to address the causes of climate change, mitigate its impact, and adapt to the crisis is one of IEEE’s top priorities. To assist with that effort, the IEEE Young Professionals group this year launched its Climate and Sustainability Task Force.

The YP group is a global network of IEEE members who graduated with their first professional degree within the past 15 years. It holds networking events, provides educational resources, and publishes career-related articles on its blog.

“The group’s goal is to engage as many young professionals as possible in the conversation about how to get involved in the climate and sustainability sectors,” says Sajith Wijesuriya, CSTF chair. The IEEE member is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.

The CSTF hosts panel sessions and webinars where experts discuss how technology can lessen the impact of climate change. The task force collaborates on organizing virtual and in-person events with IEEE groups including Women in Engineering and external organizations such as the International Renewable Energy Agency. IRENA, a global intergovernmental group, helps countries transition to renewable energy sources.

The task force also participates in policymaking efforts with the United Nations and other agencies.

“CSTF wants to support young engineers who are really passionate about developing climate and sustainability technology and being a part of the solution,” Wijesuriya says.

Partnering with IRENA, the U.N., and other agencies

Earlier this year, the task force collaborated with IRENA on several events. One webinar, for example, brought together representatives from the ETH Zurich university, the Clean Energy Ministerial forum, and Student Energy. The Clean Energy Ministerial is a partnership of 29 countries that are working together to accelerate the deployment of clean energy technologies. Student Energy empowers young people to participate in the transition to sustainable power sources through education and events.

The representatives presented technological solutions related to off-grid energy they are developing and discussed how government policies could impact the technologies’ implementation.

CSTF members in May presented their recommendations to a gathering of experts at the United Nations on how to meet the agency’s Sustainable Development Goal 7, which calls for affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all by 2030.

“Participating in this allowed the young professionals to have their voices heard by government representatives and gave CSTF members the opportunity to take part in policy design,” Wijesuriya says.

On 12 September, CSTF and IRENA presented a Youth Day event. It took place in Bonn, Germany, during IRENA’s Innovation Week, which brings together industry representatives, academics, and policymakers to discuss new ideas that could support and accelerate the global transition to renewables. During a YP panel session on Youth Day, young engineers highlighted technology they’ve developed.

“CSTF wants to support young engineers who are really passionate about developing climate and sustainability technology and being a part of the solution.”

The task force is also a member of the International Energy Agency’s Global Commission on People-Centered Clean Energy Transitions. Commission organizations help government officials create inclusive energy strategies that focus on equality, social and economic development, and worker protection.

CSTF held a webinar in April that focused on engaging young professionals in climate change and sustainability. At the event, IEA representatives explained how participating in the energy sector could benefit young engineers, and they talked about available opportunities.

CSTF is preparing for panel sessions next month at the IEEE Power Africa Conference, the International Vienne Energy and Climate Forum, and the Student Energy Summit.

The task force is scheduled to host a panel session at COP28 on 6 December in Dubai. Another panel is scheduled for April at the IRENA Assembly in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Government leaders, stakeholders, and policymakers are expected to gather at the April assembly.

Working with IEEE’s societies and groups

In addition to partnering with external organizations, CSTF works with IEEE Women in Engineering, the IEEE Power & Energy Society (IEEE PES), and the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society to inspire members to participate in climate efforts.

CSTF cohosts webinars with IEEE WIE that focus on promoting diversity and inclusion in the climate and sustainability sectors.

The task force is working with IEEE PES to help support Puerto Rico’s transition to renewable energy by 2050. The U.S. territory pledged in 2019 to complete the shift; Hurricane Maria had severely damaged its infrastructure in 2017.

IEEE PES is hosting its Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies, Latin America in San Juan from 6 to 9 November. The conference’s theme is Disaster Recovery and Network Transformation in Times of Climate Change. CSTF plans to hold a panel session there on energy transitioning and how to build green infrastructure.

The YP group and the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society held a webinar this year that discussed IEEE’s role in addressing the climate crisis. Participants learned how young engineers can get involved in programs including Planet Positive 2030 and the IEEE Climate Change Technical Community.

Join the Climate and Sustainability Taskforce

“Being a member of the task force allows young engineers to gain leadership skills,” Wijesuriya says. “They can also participate in developing technological solutions to address climate change and contribute to policymaking.”

To join the task force, become part of the Climate and Sustainability community on WhatsApp. To learn more about joining or collaborating with CSTF, contact Wijesuriya.

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“Do not open robots,” warns Oregon State amid college food delivery bomb prank


A 2020 file photo of a Starship Technologies food delivery robot.

Enlarge / A 2020 file photo of a Starship Technologies food delivery robot. Food is stored inside the robot's housing during transportation and opened upon delivery. (credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, officials at Oregon State University issued a warning on social media about a bomb threat concerning Starship Technologies food delivery robots, autonomous wheeled drones that deliver food orders stored within a built-in container. By 7 pm local time, a suspect had been arrested in the prank, and officials declared there had been no bombs hidden within the robots.

"Bomb Threat in Starship food delivery robots," reads the 12:20 pm initial X post from OSU. "Do not open robots. Avoid all robots until further notice." In follow-up posts, OSU officials said they were "remotely isolating robots in a safe location" for investigation by a technician. By 3:54 pm local time, experts had cleared the robots and promised they would be "back in service" by 4 pm.

In response, Starship Technologies provided this statement to the press: "A student at Oregon State University sent a bomb threat, via social media, that involved Starship’s robots on the campus. While the student has subsequently stated this is a joke and a prank, Starship suspended the service. Safety is of the utmost importance to Starship and we are cooperating with law enforcement and the university during this investigation."

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Lewis H. Latimer: A Life of Lightbulb Moments




James Weldon Johnson’s hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” adopted by African Americans as the unofficial “Negro National Anthem,” includes the line, “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,” which sums up how Black Americans have found ways to thrive under conditions they weren’t meant to survive. Emblematic of the hope, faith, perseverance, and drive to overcome systemic legal and social barriers the song encapsulates is the life of self-taught technical genius Lewis H. Latimer. By the time he died nearly 100 years ago, he had been awarded 10 U.S. patents, including ones for an improved lightbulb filament, an early version of what we would today call an air conditioner, and an improved restroom facility for trains. Along the way, he molded himself into a leader in industry and his community, and became a living, breathing rebuke to the assertion that Blacks were inherently inferior to Whites.

Before failing eyesight forced him into retirement in 1922 at age 74, he had proved himself the definition of a renaissance man. His career highlights include being instrumental in Alexander Graham Bell being awarded the patent for the telephone in 1876, being named a member of the inaugural group of technologists known as “Edison Pioneers,” and developing the filament that turned Edison’s electric lightbulb from an expensive novelty to a reliable, long-lasting commodity. His mechanical drawings were so exquisite that he raised drafting to the level of visual art. Meanwhile, he wrote poetry, played the flute, became a renowned public intellectual writing about the confluence of art and science, and even taught himself to speak French well enough to supervise an electrical lighting installation working with francophones in Montreal.

A historical image shows a group of men seated in rows around a stately table. A 70-year-old Latimer [in the foreground seated at the right side of the table] was photographed along with other Edison Pioneers in 1918.Lewis Latimer House/Alamy

Unlike his Black contemporary Granville T. Woods , whose fierce independence left him with few resources and helpful contacts, Latimer inserted himself into positions where he used his unrivaled experience and expertise to elevate others. He advanced himself by helping to preserve the legacies of other inventors, many of whom are regarded as the leading innovators of their time. What would the name Alexander Graham Bell mean to us today if Lewis Latimer wasn’t there providing the invaluable assistance that helped Bell win the race to patent the telephone? The same could be asked regarding Edison’s association with the incandescent lightbulb because Latimer performed the unsung tasks of solidifying the enforceability of Edison General Electric’s patent holdings and putting a league of upstart indoor lighting competitors out of business. Latimer literally wrote the book on electric lighting at Edison’s urging: Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System was published in 1890 by the Van Nostrand Company, a leading publisher of trade, technical, and scientific books in the 19th century.

There’s also the matter of Latimer’s own indispensable invention: a process for producing an improved carbon filament for bulbs that made them longer lasting, cheaper, and accessible by the masses just in time for the large-scale electrification efforts in the United States.

Latimer’s Troubled Beginnings

Latimer, the fourth of four children of George and Rebecca Latimer, was born in Chelsea, Mass., on 4 September 1848. Both parents were fugitives, having finally escaped enslavement in Virginia after several unsuccessful attempts. As fate would have it, George was spotted in Boston one day by an acquaintance of the human trafficker who had once held him in bondage. Before Latimer could be returned to Virginia to the control of his former enslaver, a league of abolitionists including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison rallied around him, making him a cause célèbre. A Black Boston minister paid to free him. But the existential dread associated with being a Black man without documents certifying that he was free became more pitched when the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, ruled that an enslaved person was not made free by entering a state whose laws forbid slavery. Understanding that Massachusetts, a “free” state, was not the safe haven he once imagined it to be, George Latimer chose to leave Rebecca and their four children rather than see his precarious legal status put them in the crosshairs of mercenary slave catchers.

Latimer molded himself into a leader in industry and his community, and became a living, breathing rebuke to the assertion that Blacks were inherently inferior to Whites.

At that point, his son Lewis was 10 years old. Despite the hole blasted in the family dynamic, young Lewis remained an excellent student until his academic career was cut short by the loss of George’s income. Out of sheer desperation, his mother split up the family, sending Lewis’ sister to live with relatives and the three Latimer boys to a state-run school where they were trained in farming.

It was, no doubt, lingering resentment over the difficult choices forced upon his parents that led a 16-year-old Lewis to forge identity papers so he could enlist in the U.S. Navy in 1864. He served as a landsman, the Navy’s lowest rank at the time, on the gunboat USS Massasoit during the height of the Civil War. When the war ended in 1865, he was honorably discharged. He returned to Boston, reunited with his mother, and got a job as an “office boy” at a patent law office with a salary of $3.00 a week.

How Latimer Got His Start

Ever the autodidact, Latimer paid close attention to how the draftsmen at the office produced their drawings. Then, at night, he read books on technical drawing and reproduced sketches he had seen at the office. Before long, he had gained enough expertise to feel confident in approaching his employers about a new role at the firm. Right before their eyes, Latimer produced a set of patent sketches that were so impressive, he was soon promoted to draftsman, with a salary of $20.00 a week.

A detailed drawing of an electric lightbulb. This highly detailed mechanical drawing of an Edison lamp appeared in Latimer’s 1890 book “Incandescent Electric Lighting.”Lewis Latimer/Google

His exquisite patent drawings and keen understanding of how to translate technological ideas into schematics on the printed page were so highly regarded that when Alexander Graham Bell retained the firm to help him put together his patent application for the telephone, Latimer was assigned to do the work. According to historians at the Latimer House Museum in Queens, N.Y., “Latimer helped to develop a more efficient transmitter that improved the quality of the [device's] sound, and his drawings were crucial for securing the telephone patent.”

In 1879, a then-married Latimer moved with his wife Mary, his mother, and his brother William to Bridgeport, Connecticut, on the advice of his sister Margaret. She lived there, as did their brother George, in a section of town called “Little Liberia” that had been founded nearly a century earlier by free Blacks.

In what could only be described as a stroke of luck, Latimer was working as a draftsman at a machine shop in Bridgeport when Hiram Maxim, who would go on to invent the machine gun, came in one day. Maxim was shocked to see a Black man performing something other than menial duties. Upon further investigation, Maxim realized he had stumbled upon the person who could help him advance his own interests in the nascent field of electric lighting.

Maxim hired Latimer as assistant manager and draftsman at his United States Electric Lighting Company, an early rival of Edison General Electric. That was where Latimer developed the invention for which he is most noted—an improved process for producing carbon filaments for lightbulbs that rendered them much more resilient. He even mastered the glassblowing techniques then used to produce lightbulbs.

Stumbling blocks to Latimer revealed themselves to be stepping stones.

Latimer’s mastery of the entire electric lighting process was put on full display in 1881 when Maxim dispatched him to England to oversee the setup and operation of an electric lamp factory for the Maxim company’s partnership there. In only nine months—despite staunch resistance from the British workers to the idea of being trained and supervised by a Black man—Latimer succeeded in getting the electric lighting factory up and running.

At the end of that project, which also spelled the end of his contract with the Maxim Lighting Company, he returned to the United States looking for work. Despite the clear demonstration of his managerial prowess and unsurpassed technical know-how, his career hit rocky shoals. He bounced around, with short, inconsistent stints at fledgling electric lighting companies. He supplemented his much-reduced income by hanging wallpaper—the trade he’d learned from his father during his childhood.

Eventually, these stumbling blocks revealed themselves to be stepping stones. Over the course of Latimer’s many stops, he had come to know nearly all the early lighting companies and their principals. So, he was a natural choice when Edison General Electric’s legal department was looking for someone to speak for the company in a spate of patent interference cases. He was hired in 1888 and served as lead witness for Edison General Electric in court. This was remarkable, because in the 19th century, Black people were routinely said to have no standing in U.S. courts—whether as petitioners, witnesses, or members of juries.

A Man Apart

Latimer was such an exception to the web of unwritten and codified rules meant to assign Blacks to a permanent underclass, he often found it difficult to conceptualize just how far removed his experiences were from those of his Black contemporaries. By the time he began working for Edison, notes Rayon Fouché in his 2003 book Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation, Latimer had “...limited connection with the everyday existence of Black people in America.” He believed that with his achievements, says Fouché, he had purchased entry to “a raceless social, political, and cultural world.” What’s more, he was convinced, despite the Jim Crow laws that circumscribed the legal and civil rights of most Black people, that the route he had taken to personal success was navigable by anyone.

A lightbulb with a glowing filament. The Latimer House Museum’s collection includes a lightbulb featuring one of its namesake’s inventions—a filament that improved the performance and lifespan of incandescent bulbs.Alamy

In a piece of personal correspondence with Booker T. Washington in 1904, Latimer expressed his support for Washington’s view that Blacks could acquire full citizenship rights in the United States by essentially remaking themselves, to whatever extent possible, in the image of Whites. Referring to a letter Washington had written to the Montgomery Adviser in which the Tuskegee University founder said, “Every revised constitution throughout the Southern States has put a premium on intelligence, ownership of property, thrift, and character.” Latimer weighed in with a hearty endorsement of this viewpoint (which would today be called respectability politics) in no small part because he was a paragon of these virtues. “For Latimer,” Fouché wrote, “freedom was not a God-given right, but an earned privilege.” Latimer saw himself as an exemplar of what succeeding generations of African Americans could aspire to.

Of the four cardinal attributes he saw as the keys to respectability in “civilized” society, he is said to have had taken immense pride in the fact that he owned his own home at a time when the average person, White or Black, could not afford such a purchase.

As part of the effort to keep his memory and legacy alive, the house in Queens, New York, in which he resided for the final 10 years of his life has been restored and declared a historical landmark. It now serves as a museum dedicated to teaching about this person who Mary Ann Hellrigel , institutional historian and archivist at the IEEE History Center and advisory board member at the Latimer House Museum, describes as “the most prominent African American draftsman and inventor in early electric light, heat, and power technology.”

The fact that Edison, Tesla, and others of that ilk became so well known “is not [because they were] brighter than Latimer,” says Hellrigel. What they had over him was support and business infrastructure that eventually made them household names. Edison, in particular, “understood the invention business,” says Hellrigel. “He built up a team of reliable lab workers, office workers, and sales agents, and he knew that in order to support this infrastructure… he needed to keep marketing inventions to make money.”

Latimer viewed his career through a different lens than Edison did, says Hellrigel. “He knew that he needed to make money as the draftsman and patent expert in electric lighting,” she says. “Even when he went out on his own, he took on the role of patent consultant.” To the end, he was helping other inventors get their ideas out of their heads and into the world. In doing so, he was being careful to limit the risks that might plunge him once again into poverty. Finding his niche and establishing himself there is part of what Fouché means when he says the most interesting thing he discovered about Latimer and other Black inventors he’s researched was “how shrewd, and careful, and savvy these Black inventors were.”

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The Top 10 Climate Tech Stories of 2024

In 2024, technologies to combat climate change soared above the clouds in electricity-generating kites, traveled the oceans sequestering...