April’19 Startup Funding: Corporate Gushers


It was another rich month for startups, large and small. In April’s top 11 funding rounds, five were investments by big corporations or corporate venture capital funds—an investor consortium led by the SoftBank Vision Fund, PayPal, Ford Motor, NTT DoCoMo, and HAPSMobile, a joint venture of SoftBank Group and AeroVironment. Those 11 investments totaled $3.74 billion. Intel Capital was als... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things A dairy barn without any people working in it. An automated greenhouse for produce. Coming soon, little robots that will weed crop fields and look for diseased plants. This is Rivendale Farms, in the countryside west of Pittsburgh, which is 175 acres serving as a beta site for agricultural Internet of Things technology. The small farm has about 150 Jersey cows, each of which... » read more

Machine Learning’s Limits (Part 1)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Rob Aitken, an Arm fellow; Raik Brinkmann, CEO of OneSpin Solutions; Patrick Soheili, vice president of business and corporate development at eSilicon; and Chris Rowen, CEO of Babblelabs. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are we with machine learning? What problems still have to be resolved? Aitken: We're in a state where thi... » read more

Toward Autonomous Farming


While the automotive industry works diligently towards self-driving vehicles, it's possible the carrots you've eaten recently were semi-autonomously planted and harvested with Case IH equipment by Bolthouse Farms, one of the largest carrot growers in the United States. And the U.S. is hardly alone. Autonomous agriculture is coming everywhere, and it's happening much faster than autonomous ca... » read more

Robots Get Social


From Star Trek’s Data to Star Wars’ C-3PO, the idea of humanoid robots has fascinated people for years. Back in the real world, robots build automobiles in factories, mow lawns, and even assist in complex heart surgery. Meanwhile, the use of androids like Data is approaching reality, as semiconductor and semiconductor-related devices like low-power microprocessors, 3D sensors, accelerometer... » read more

Turning Down The Power


Chip and system designers are giving greater weight to power issues these days. But will they inevitably hit a wall in accounting for ultra-low-power considerations? Performance, power, and area are the traditional attributes in chip design. Area was originally the main priority, with feature sizes constantly shrinking according to Moore's Law. Performance was in the saddle for many years. M... » read more

Deep Learning Robust Grasps with Synthetic Point Clouds & Analytic Grasp Metrics (UC Berkeley)


Source: The research was the work of Jeffrey Mahler, Jacky Liang, Sherdil Niyaz, Michael Laskey, Richard Doan, Xinyu Liu, Juan Aparicio Ojea, and Ken Goldberg with support from the AUTOLAB team at UC Berkeley. Nimble-fingered robots enabled by deep learning Grabbing awkwardly shaped items that humans regularly pick up daily is not so easy for robots, as they don’t know where to apply grip... » read more

Even good bots fight: The case of Wikipedia (Oxford & Alan Turing Institute)


Source: University Of Oxford published via PLOS ONE, Milena Tsvetkova, Ruth García-Gavilanes, Luciano Floridi, Taha Yasseri "The research paper, published in PLOS ONE, concludes that bots are more like humans than you might expect as they appear to behave differently in culturally distinct online environments. The paper says the findings are a warning to those using artificial intelligence ... » read more

We’re All Beta Testers Now


There are two distinct camps forming around autonomous vehicles. One group wants to see self-driving cars on the road as quickly as possible because it will save more lives than if people are behind the wheel. Others are wary, insisting there is no way will this can or should happen in the next 10 to 15 years. Time will tell who's right. But what is clear is that the technology has far outst... » read more

System Bits: May 10


Topological insulators In a finding that could open up a new pathway to advanced electronic devices and even robust quantum computer architecture, researchers from MIT; Oak Ridge, and Argonne National Laboratories; the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Bochum, Germany; the Institute for Theoretical Solid State Physics in Dresden; the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris; and the Institute of N... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →