Lifeboat Foundation

An ambitious smart-city project spearheaded by Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs has run into local resistance, causing delays.

The backstory: Waterfront Toronto, a development agency founded by the Canadian government, partnered with the Google sister company in October 2017 to create a futuristic neighborhood on the Toronto waterfront. Sidewalk Labs plans to fill the 12-acre plot with driverless shuttle buses, garbage-toting robots, and other gadgets to show how emerging technologies can improve city life.

The problem: Sidewalk Labs’ connection to Google and vague descriptions of its business model alarmed privacy advocates and urban planners from the start. Local pushback has increased since, causing a key supporter to resign from the project and delaying the release of its final development plan to spring 2019.

Continue reading “Even Alphabet is having trouble reinventing smart cities” »

LG will build its next artificial intelligence (AI) research lab in Toronto, it announced Wednesday.

The South Korean electronics company said the Canadian lab is an extension of its newly expanded Silicon Valley AI Lab in Santa Clara, California. It also has AI labs in South Korea, India and Russia.

“Early implementations of AI in connected devices today are setting the stage for tomorrow’s smart cities, smart homes, smart businesses and smart devices, all with capabilities that no one has even dreamed of yet.” said LG President and Chief Technology Officer Il-pyung Park.

The energy-generating potential of solar panels – and a key limitation on their use – is a result of what they’re made of. Panels made of silicon are declining in price such that in some locations they can provide electricity that costs about the same as power from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. But silicon solar panels are also bulky, rigid and brittle, so they can’t be used just anywhere.

In many parts of the world that don’t have regular electricity, solar panels could provide reading light after dark and energy to pump drinking water, help power small household or village-based businesses or even serve emergency shelters and refugee encampments. But the mechanical fragility, heaviness and transportation difficulties of silicon solar panels suggest that silicon may not be ideal.

Building on others’ work, my research group is working to develop flexible solar panels, which would be as efficient as a silicon panel, but would be thin, lightweight and bendable. This sort of device, which we call a “solar tarp,” could be spread out to the size of a room and generate electricity from the sun, and it could be balled up to be the size of a grapefruit and stuffed in a backpack as many as 1,000 times without breaking. While there has been some effort to make organic solar cells more flexible simply by making them ultra-thin, real durability requires a molecular structure that makes the solar panels stretchable and tough.

New solar energy research from Arizona State University demonstrates that silicon-based, tandem photovoltaic modules, which convert sunlight to electricity with higher efficiency than present modules, will become increasingly attractive in the U.S.

A paper that explores the costs vs. enhanced efficiency of a new solar technology, titled “Techno-economic viability of silicon-based, tandem photovoltaic modules in the United States,” appears in Nature Energy this week. The paper is authored by ASU Fulton Schools of Engineering, Assistant Research Professor Zhengshan J. Yu, Graduate Student Joe V. Carpenter and Assistant Professor Zachary Holman.

The Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative was launched in 2011 with a goal of making solar cost-competitive with conventional energy sources by 2020. The program attained its goal of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour three years early and a new target of $0.03 per kilowatt-hour by 2030 has been set. Increasing the efficiency of photovoltaic modules is one route to reducing the cost of the solar electricity to this new target. If reached, the goal is expected to triple the amount of solar installed in the U.S. in 2030 compared to the business-as-usual scenario.

Continue reading “Research finds silicon-based, tandem photovoltaic modules can compete in solar market” »

https://www.futuretechpodcast.com/podcasts/disease-time-mach…eneration/

Ten months after Hurricane Maria, Adjuntas still loses power any time a heavy rain or wind pounds the rickety power lines feeding this town high in the central mountains of Puerto Rico.

That leaves its 20,000 people once again in the dark, without light, fresh water or air conditioning—except for a handful of homes and businesses glowing in the night thanks to solar energy.

The people of Adjuntas call those places “cucubanos,” an indigenous Puerto Rican firefly. They’re part of a small but growing movement to provide the U.S. territory with sustainable, renewable energy independent of the decrepit power grid.

Interesting article on the limited future of human paid employment for AI, some thoughts.

By Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson

Superman versus Batman. Captain America versus Iron Man. Zuckerberg versus Musk?

Continue reading “What Are The New Jobs In A Human + Machine World?” »

Supply chain and sales and marketing are the first big opportunities.

We brought the leading experts in aging research and biotech investment together for an action-packed day of science. See what happened at this exciting event and check out our first event video now.

On July 12th, we hosted our first conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases: Investment Prospects & Advances in Research, at the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, which is part of the Cooper Union campus in New York City. We are delighted to announce that the conference was a huge success with 160 attendees, a wide variety of speakers from both research and business, and some great discussion panels.

Continue reading “Celebrating Success at Our First Conference” »