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30 CAN CARGO DRONES SOLVE 06 NEWS AIR FREIGHT’S LOGJAMS? 14 HANDS ON CONTROLLING Landing almost anywhere, with in-and- 18 CROSSTALK out loading, makes a big difference. 51 PAST FORWARD COVID-19 WITH By Ed De Reyes

36 FISHING FOR OIL The Institute CONTROL THEORY Cleaning up oil spills remains TI-15 UAV DEICING SYSTEM With meticulous use of feedback, officials a messy business. We can do better. By Larry Herbst Startup invents defrosting can keep hospitals’ COVID-19 caseloads tech for drones. within manageable limits. by Greg Stewart, Klaske van 42 THE SHORT, STRANGE LIFE OF THE FIRST FRIENDLY ROBOT Heusden & Guy A. Dumont Page 22 Japan’s first expressive humanoid robot awed crowds throughout Asia before mysteriously vanishing. On the cover: Illustration for By Yulia Frumer IEEE Spectrum by John MacNeill

IEEE SPECTRUM (ISSN 0018-9235) is published monthly by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2020 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., 3 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016-5997, U.S.A. Volume No. 57, Issue No. 6. The editorial content of IEEE Spectrum magazine does not represent official positions of the IEEE or its organizational units. Canadian Post International Publications Mail (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40013087. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Circulation Department, IEEE Spectrum, Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. Cable address: ITRIPLEE. Fax: +1 212 419 7570. INTERNET: [email protected]. ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTIONS: IEEE Members: $49.95 included in dues. Libraries/institutions: $399. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to IEEE Spectrum, c/o Coding Department, IEEE Service Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Box 1331, Piscataway, NJ 08855. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Canadian GST #125634188. Printed at 120 Donnelley Dr., Glasgow, KY 42141-1060, U.S.A. IEEE Spectrum circulation is audited by BPA Worldwide. IEEE Spectrum is a member of the Association of Business Information & Media Companies, the Association of Magazine Media, and Association Media & Publishing. IEEE prohibits discrimination, harassment, and bullying. For more information, visit https://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/whatis/policies/p9-26.html.

PHOTOGRAPH BY John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/Getty Images SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 01 BACK STORY

Stay connected by discovering the valuable IT’S A TAKE tools and resources of IEEE: s a kid, Larry Herbst loved tinkering. Naturally Create a personalized enough for someone like that, he trained as an electrical experience engineer. But early on he decided that a career in engineering Get geo and might end up forcing him to focus more narrowly than interest-based he would like. So after graduating from Brown University, recommendations he changed course and studied filmmaking. Ever since, he’s made his living as a filmmaker and videographer, and he Schedule, manage, A has no regrets. “Film gave me an opportunity to do a lot of or join meetups extraordinary things,” he explains. virtually Herbst has made a specialty of covering technical and scientific Read and download topics, working frequently with the XPrize Foundation to document your IEEE magazines its technology competitions. And in 2012 he was part of James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge expedition to dive to the bottom of Stay up-to-date the Mariana Trench, for which Herbst designed one of the camera- with the latest news control systems. He’s also filmed at sea with Barry Clifford, the Locate IEEE members underwater explorer famous for his discovery of historic shipwrecks, by location, interests, and aboard Zero Gravity Corp.’s weightless flights. and affiliations Even in his creative role as a videographer, Herbst says, he finds plenty of opportunity to do technical work. He built a miniature 3D time-lapse camera that was used for filming an Imax movie, and he is a coauthor (with Cameron and others) of a technical publication on the construction of “hadal landers”—oceanographic instruments designed to descend to the bottom of deep-sea trenches. Herbst has spent a lot of time on the water, too, with Kevin Kennedy, an Alaskan fisherman who engineered a novel oil-cleanup apparatus. Kennedy is the subject of Herbst’s article in this issue [see “Fishing for Oil,” page 36]. The photo above shows Herbst preparing to film Kennedy at Cook Inlet in Alaska. Herbst really enjoys working in remote locales. “I love to see the world,” he says. And being able to make his living this way only makes him love it more. ■ 06.20 KEVIN KENNEDY KEVIN

02 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG CONTRIBUTORS

EDITOR IN CHIEF Susan Hassler, [email protected] ADVERTISING PRODUCTION +1 732 562 6334 EXECUTIVE EDITOR Glenn Zorpette, [email protected] ADVERTISING PRODUCTION MANAGER EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, DIGITAL Felicia Spagnoli, [email protected] Ed De Reyes Harry Goldstein, [email protected] SENIOR ADVERTISING PRODUCTION COORDINATOR As an ex-Air Force pilot, De Reyes knew that his MANAGING EDITOR Elizabeth A. Bretz, [email protected] Nicole Evans Gyimah, [email protected] startup, Sabrewing Aircraft Co., in Camarillo, SENIOR ART DIRECTOR EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD, IEEE SPECTRUM Mark Montgomery, [email protected] Calif., had to keep its pilotless cargo plane from Susan Hassler, Chair; Steve Blank, David C. Brock, Ronald SENIOR EDITORS crashing into things. “Even the military does F. DeMara, Shahin Farshchi, Lawrence O. Hall, Jason K. Hui, Stephen Cass, [email protected] it only in a kind of rudimentary way—say, with Erico Guizzo (Digital), [email protected] Leah Jamieson, Mary Lou Jepsen, Deepa Kundur, Gianluca a camera system,” he says. “Our system has to Jean Kumagai, [email protected] Lazzi, Allison Marsh, Carmen Menoni, Sofia Olhede, Maurizio provide a way for the aircraft to autonomously Samuel K. Moore, [email protected] Vecchione, Edward Zyszkowski avoid obstacles.” Read about how his company Tekla S. Perry, [email protected] EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD, THE INSTITUTE tackled the problem in “Can Cargo Drones Solve Philip E. Ross, [email protected] Kathy Pretz, Chair; Qusi Alqarqaz, Philip Chen, Roberto Graglia, Air Freight’s Logjams?” [p. 30]. David Schneider, [email protected] Shashank Gaur, Susan Hassler, Cecilia Metra, San Murugesan, Eliza Strickland, [email protected] Mirela Sechi Annoni Notare, Tapan K. Sarkar, Joel Trussell, DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR Brandon Palacio, [email protected] Hon K. Tsang, Chonggang Wang PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR Randi Klett, [email protected] EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE Yulia Frumer ONLINE ART DIRECTOR Erik Vrielink, [email protected] IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave., 17th Floor, NEWS MANAGER Amy Nordrum, [email protected] When Frumer first heard of Gakutensoku, an New York, NY 10016-5997 ASSOCIATE EDITORS early humanoid robot, she became intrigued Willie D. Jones (Digital), [email protected] TEL: +1 212 419 7555 FAX: +1 212 419 7570 by its creator, Makoto Nishimura. “He wasn’t BUREAU Palo Alto, Calif.; Tekla S. Perry +1 650 752 6661 Michael Koziol, [email protected] an engineer but a biologist who studied marine SENIOR COPY EDITOR Joseph N. Levine, [email protected] DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, moss balls,” says Frumer, a historian of science COPY EDITOR Michele Kogon, [email protected] MEDIA & ADVERTISING Mark David, [email protected] and technology at Johns Hopkins University. In EDITORIAL RESEARCHER Alan Gardner, [email protected] ADVERTISING INQUIRIES Naylor Association Solutions, “The Short, Strange Life of the First Friendly ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT Erik Henson +1 352 333 3443, [email protected] Ramona L. Foster, [email protected] Robot” [p. 42], she tells the improbable tale of CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Evan Ackerman, Mark Anderson, REPRINT SALES +1 212 221 9595, ext. 319 how Nishimura built Gakutensoku and how it Robert N. Charette, Peter Fairley, W. Wayt Gibbs, Tam Harbert, REPRINT PERMISSION / LIBRARIES Articles may be influenced generations of roboticists. Mark Harris, David Kushner, Robert W. Lucky, Prachi Patel, photocopied for private use of patrons. A per-copy fee must Morgen E. Peck, Richard Stevenson, Lawrence Ulrich be paid to the Copyright Clearance Center, 29 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970. For other copying or republication, EDITOR IN CHIEF, THE INSTITUTE Kathy Pretz, [email protected] contact Managing Editor, IEEE Spectrum. Stacey Higginbotham ASSISTANT EDITOR, THE INSTITUTE COPYRIGHTS AND TRADEMARKS IEEE Spectrum is a Higginbotham is the editor of Stacey on IoT, Joanna Goodrich, [email protected] registered trademark owned by The Institute of Electrical and an online publication covering the Internet of DIRECTOR, PERIODICALS PRODUCTION SERVICES Peter Tuohy Electronics Engineers Inc. Responsibility for the substance Things. She also writes IEEE Spectrum’s Internet EDITORIAL & WEB PRODUCTION MANAGER Roy Carubia of articles rests upon the authors, not IEEE, its organizational of Everything column. She’s been covering units, or its members. Articles do not represent official SENIOR ELECTRONIC LAYOUT SPECIALIST Bonnie Nani technology for nearly two decades, and she positions of IEEE. Readers may post comments online; PRODUCT MANAGER, DIGITAL Shannan Dunlap finds that sometimes tech’s best feature is also its WEB PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Jacqueline L. Parker comments may be excerpted for publication. IEEE reserves biggest vulnerability. Case in point: In “Pandemic MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION SPECIALIST Michael Spector the right to reject any advertising. vs. Privacy” [p. 20], she explores how the IoT can simultaneously help coronavirus tracking efforts while also putting personal privacy at risk.

IEEE BOARD OF DIRECTORS CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER Karen L. Hawkins PRESIDENT & CEO Toshio Fukuda, [email protected] +1 732 562 3964, [email protected] John MacNeill +1 732 562 3928 FAX: +1 732 981 9515 CORPORATE ACTIVITIES Donna Hourican MacNeill, an illustrator based in Watertown, Mass., PRESIDENT-ELECT Susan K. “Kathy” Land +1 732 562 6330, [email protected] depicted a cargo drone for this issue [p. 30]. It’s TREASURER Joseph V. Lillie SECRETARY Kathleen A. Kramer MEMBER & GEOGRAPHIC ACTIVITIES Cecelia Jankowski +1 732 562 5504, [email protected] his firstSpectrum assignment since the pandemic PAST PRESIDENT José M.F. Moura STANDARDS ACTIVITIES Konstantinos Karachalios struck. MacNeill is used to working at home, but VICE PRESIDENTS +1 732 562 3820, [email protected] these days his wife is telecommuting, and their Stephen M. Phillips, Educational Activities; Tapan K. Sarkar, EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES Jamie Moesch two sons are studying online. “It’s working out Publication Services & Products; Kukjin Chun, Member & reasonably well,” he says. “If somebody has a Geographic Activities; Kazuhiro Kosuge, Technical Activities; +1 732 562 5514, [email protected] Robert S. Fish, President, Standards Association; James M. GENERAL COUNSEL & CHIEF COMPLIANCE OFFICER conference call, everyone cooperates—so far Conrad, President, IEEE-USA Sophia A. Muirhead +1 212 705 8950, [email protected] nobody’s decided that would be a fine time to DIVISION DIRECTORS CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Thomas R. Siegert start throwing the football around.” Alfred E. “Al” Dunlop (I); David B. Durocher (II); Sergio +1 732 562 6843, [email protected] Benedetto (III); John P. Verboncoeur (IV); Thomas M. Conte (V); TECHNICAL ACTIVITIES Mary Ward-Callan Manuel Castro (VI); Miriam P. Sanders (VII); Elizabeth L. “Liz” +1 732 562 3850, [email protected] Burd (VIII); Rabab Kreidieh Ward (IX); Ljiljana Trajkovic (X) MANAGING DIRECTOR, IEEE-USA Chris Brantley Greg Stewart REGION DIRECTORS +1 202 530 8349, [email protected] Eduardo F. Palacio (1); Wolfram Bettermann (2); Stewart is vice president of data science for the Jill I. Gostin (3); David Alan Koehler (4); James R. IEEE PUBLICATION SERVICES & PRODUCTS BOARD agriculture-technology startup Ecoation and Look (5); Keith A. Moore (6); Jason Jianjun Gu (7); Tapan K. Sarkar, Chair; Sergio Benedetto, Edhem Custovic, an adjunct professor at the University of British Magdalena Salazar-Palma (8); Alberto Sanchez (9); Stefano Galli, Lorena Garcia, Ron B. Goldfarb, Columbia, in Vancouver. An IEEE Fellow, he and Akinori Nishihara (10) Lawrence O. Hall, W. Clem Karl, Hulya Kirkici, Paolo Montuschi, two UBC colleagues, Klaske van Heusden and Guy DIRECTOR EMERITUS Theodore W. Hissey Sorel Reisman, Gaurav Sharma, Maria Elena Valcher, A. Dumont, describe in this issue how control John P. Verboncoeur, John Vig, Bin Zhao IEEE STAFF theory can control the spread of COVID-19 [p. 22]. EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & COO Stephen Welby IEEE OPERATIONS CENTER Van Heusden, an IEEE Senior Member, is a research +1 732 562 5400, [email protected] 445 Hoes Lane, Box 1331 associate at UBC. Dumont, an IEEE Fellow, is a CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER Cherif Amirat Piscataway, NJ 08854-1331 U.S.A. professor of electrical and computer engineering. +1 732 562 6017, [email protected] Tel: +1 732 981 0060 Fax: +1 732 981 1721

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 03 SPECTRAL LINES 06.20

measurement. This works best An extended version of this in situations in which the major- article appears in the View From the ity of people being tested don’t Valley blog. have the disease. It works well for Post your comments at screening HIV in blood samples, spectrum.ieee.org/ testing-jun2020 because most people who donate blood are HIV negative.

Spectrum: Why so much interest? D.B.: We are going to want to test huge numbers of people for the coronavirus—like anybody who gets on a plane, maybe even anybody who gets into a major government building. If testing was available at a reasonable cost, Amazon, for example, could test its warehouse employees every day. To truly restart the economy, we need to test not tens or hundreds of thousands a day but millions a day.

Spectrum: How does your research relate to this? Researchers Are Using Algorithms to D.B.: Like so many of us, I’ve been thinking about the coronavirus. I realized I could apply one of our Tackle the Coronavirus Test Shortage algorithms, one that uses a graph data structure. In that example of a group of 100, with each patient The scramble to develop new test kits appearing in six test groups, you would have 100 that deliver faster results nodes that are patients and 20 nodes that are tests. The algorithm passes messages containing statis- tical information between the patient nodes and e’re hearing about the problem daily: There aren’t enough the test nodes—revealing the probability that I, as test kits available to accurately track the new coronavi- a patient, am sick based on the information gath- rus. It’s a global problem, although some countries— ered so far. including the United States—are doing a worse job of For example, if most of the six groups I was tested testing than others. ¶ More testing, epidemiologists say, in are positive, then the probability of my being sick would give us a better understanding of how the virus is is very high. For those people who tested positive W moving through the population and whether it’s waxing in two, three, or four groups, the algorithm would or waning. And more testing is essential to allow us to adjust the probabilities of those people being sick safely return to any semblance of normal life. ¶ Part of the solution to the based on whether or not I, as very likely sick, was testing shortage, however, may come not from making more kits but from in their groups—that is, “I tested sick five times and algorithms. Computer scientists and engineers who study ways to com- you only tested sick twice, both times in tests with press data, decode video, and process medical images say that biological me, so you very likely are fine.” If you design the samples from groups of people could be pooled for testing, and the results pools cleverly, every pair of patients will be in no decoded by cleverly designed algorithms. This sample pooling could go a more than two pools together. long way toward addressing the test-kit shortage, with one test kit being Like many researchers around the world, my able to determine the health status of 5, 10, or even more people.¶ I spoke group has something that could be helpful, but we with Dror Baron, associate professor of electrical and computer engineer- don’t know who to reach out to. This is not just a ing at North Carolina State University and an IEEE Senior Member, about problem in the United States—it is worldwide. It’s his work developing algorithms for this kind of coronavirus test processing. a chaotic situation. —Tekla S. Perry

IEEE Spectrum: What exactly is a “pooled” test? Dror Baron: In a pooled test, you are taking biological material from mul- CORRECTION: In “What to Do With 177 Giant Tanks of Radioactive Sludge” [May], we mislabeled the Yakima River as tiple people and testing it once. If what you are looking for doesn’t exist the Hood River. And the top level of waste in the single-shell tank in the group, then you can rule out a large number of people with one diagram is called a supernatant, not a supermutant.

04 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Greg Mably It all started with two buckets of water...

Visualization of the out-of-plane component of the electric field for the resonant wavelength in an optical ring resonator notch filter.

In 1870, a scientist named John Tyndall tried to control light using two buckets of water, illustrating total internal reflection to a fascinated audience. Today, researchers have more advanced tools at their disposal. When fabricating and analyzing optical waveguide prototypes, modern-day engineers can use numerical simulation software to speed up the design process. The COMSOL Multiphysics® software is used for simulating designs, devices, and processes in all fields of engineering, manufacturing, and scientific research. See how you can apply it to designing silicon waveguides.

comsol.blog/silicon-photonics News HEADS UP: A crane lowers a heavy structure called a top head onto the Vogtle Unit 4 containment vessel in Georgia.

energy sector. Is the United States redi- recting its focus onto fusion and leaving fission behind? Or could a fission renais- sance be yet to come? Congress upped the U.S. Department of Energy’s nuclear fusion budget from US $564 million to $671 million for fiscal year 2020. And such companies as AGNI Energy in Washington state and Common- wealth Fusion Systems in Massachusetts (alongside Tokamak Energy and Gen- eral Fusion in the United Kingdom and Canada, respectively) are courting ven- ture capital for their multimillion-dollar visions of fusion’s bright future. Meanwhile, in March, construction workers at the Vogtle fission plant hoisted a 680,000-kilogram steel-and-concrete structure to cap one of the containment vessels for the new AP1000 reactors. As John Kraft, a spokesperson for Georgia Power, explained, “The shield building There are 53 nuclear reactors is a unique feature of the AP1000 reac- currently under construction tor design for Vogtle 3 and 4, providing LIMITED around the world. Only two are an additional layer of safety around the in the United States, once the world’s leader containment vessel and nuclear reactor in nuclear energy development. And those to protect the structure from any poten- PROGRESS two reactors represent expansions of a pre- tial impacts.” existing two-reactor facility, Plant Vogtle in The AP1000 pressurized-water reac- Waynesboro, Ga. tor, designed by Westinghouse, is a FOR U.S. Separately, a company in Portland, Ore., 21st-century “new” reactor. It’s been called NuScale Power is now working with deployed in just two other places, in China, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission with two AP1000 reactors at the Sanmen NUCLEAR to develop a next-generation reactor built Nuclear Power Station in Zheijang prov- around a smaller-scale, modular design. ince and two at the Haiyang Nuclear Power These two projects together represent the Plant in Shandong province. According to Two fission projects leading edge of commercial U.S. nuclear- the International Atomic Energy Agency raise questions about fission reactor development today. The fact (IAEA), the AP1000 reactors at these loca- the long-term future of that there are only two raises questions tions operate at 1,157 megawatts and about the direction of this once-booming 1,126 MW, respectively. nuclear power CO. POWER GEORGIA

06 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG In 2005, the Nuclear Regulatory that it’s the one tech where the JOURNAL WATCH Commission (NRC) certified the costs have gone up, not down, with AP1000 design, clearing the way experience,” he said. “The way to for its sale and installation at these think about it is that the more expe- Messages From a three sites more than a decade later. rience we have with nuclear power, MicroLED Last year, Dan Brouillette, the U.S. the more we learn about potential secretary of energy, wrote in a vulnerabilities that can lead to cata- Wireless communications most often travel via blog post: “The U.S. Department strophic accidents.” radio waves. But some scientists see potential in of Energy (DOE) is all in on new However, Hughes of NuScale using light to transmit data. nuclear energy.” counters that, unlike the 54 com- Mohamed Sufyan Islim, a researcher at the NuScale’s modular design—with 12 peting small modular reactor University of Edinburgh, explains why: “The smaller reactors, each operating at a designs that the IAEA has records radio-frequency spectrum is becoming projected 60 MW—met NRC Phase 4 of, NuScale is “the first ever small extremely crowded,” he says. Visible and approval at the end of last year. modular reactor technology to infrared light waves offer 2,000 times as much According to Diane Hughes, vice undergo...NRC design certifica- bandwidth as radio waves. And radio waves are president of marketing and commu- tion review.” easy to intercept, whereas light can be shielded. nications for NuScale, “This means And in 2018, an interdisciplinary To show what light can do, researchers at the that the technical review by the NRC MIT report on nuclear energy found University of Strathclyde, in Scotland, created a is essentially complete and that the that NuScale’s reactor is “quite custom microLED array with nine lights placed final design approval is expected innovative in its design. It has vir- in series. Each light (or pixel) measured just on schedule by September 2020.” tually eliminated the need for active 20 micrometers in diameter. Then, the group NuScale’s first customer, the systems to accomplish safety func- at the University of Edinburgh used advanced Utah Associated Municipal Power tions, relying instead on a combi- techniques to modulate the array at extremely Systems, plans to install a power nation of passive systems and the high speeds. plant with NuScale reactors at the inherent features of its geometry Together, the universities built a system that Idaho National Laboratory site in and materials.” achieved record rates of data transmission Idaho Falls. The plant, Hughes Of course, while the number of using LED lights, with 11.74 gigabits per second said, is “slated for operation by catastrophic nuclear accidents (such at 0.3 meter and 1.61 Gb/s at 20 meters. They the mid-2020s based on the NRC’s as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and recently described their work in IEEE Photonics approved design.” Fukushima) is small for the amount Technology Letters. The idea of harnessing mul- of energy that nuclear power has In previous research, Islim says, his group tiple smaller reactors in a single generated over the past 70 years, showed that “the small dimensions of the design is not new, dating back as Ramana adds, the cost of each acci- microLEDs mean that they can be modulated at far as the 1940s. At the time, the dent is astronomical—sacrificing much higher frequencies than standard LEDs— economics of the smaller, modu- human lives and uprooting untold several hundreds of megahertz compared with a lar design could not compete with many more from disaster zones few tens of megahertz.” Being able to modulate bigger, individual reactors, says as well as requiring cleanups that at higher frequencies allowed them to transmit M.V. Ramana, a nuclear physicist cost hundreds of billions of dollars. more data. and professor at the University of “One every other decade is not good However, most microLEDs manufactured British Columbia’s School of Public enough,” Ramana said. today are made for visual displays, and not Policy and Global Affairs. —Mark Anderson designed to transmit data. That’s one thing that “Nuclear power is unlike almost would have to change for this technique to be POST YOUR COMMENTS AT any other energy technology, in spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-jun2020 used more widely. —MICHELLE HAMPSON

An extended version of this article appears on our NEWS website in the Journal Watch section.

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 07 Fortanix, Google, Huawei, IBM (through its subsidiary Red Hat), Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Swisscom, Tencent, and Vmware. Several already have confidential computing products and services for sale. Confidential computing uses hardware-based techniques to isolate data, specific functions, or an entire application from the operating system, hypervisor or virtual machine manager, and other privileged processes. Data is stored in the trusted execution environment (TEE), where it’s impossible to view the data or operations performed on it from outside, even with a debug- ger. The TEE ensures that only autho- rized code can access the data. If the code is altered or tampered with, the TEE denies the operation. Many organizations have declined THE RISE OF CONFIDENTIAL to migrate some of their most sensi- tive applications to the cloud because of concerns about potential data expo- COMPUTING sure. Confidential computing makes it possible for different organizations Big tech companies are adopting a new security to combine data sets for analysis with- model to protect data while it’s in use out accessing each other’s data, said Seth Knox, vice president of marketing at Fortanix and the outreach chair for the Confidential Computing Consortium. A handful of major technology in order to compute. But that means For example, a retailer and credit card companies are going all in on a malware can dump the contents of mem- company could cross-check customer new security model they’re call- ory to steal information. It doesn’t really and transaction data for potential fraud ing confidential computing in an effort to matter if the data was encrypted on a without giving the other party access to better protect data in all its forms. server’s hard drive if it’s stolen while the original data. The three pillars of data security exposed in memory. Confidential computing may have involve protecting data at rest, in tran- Proponents of confidential comput- other benefits unrelated to security. sit, and in use. Protecting data at rest ing hope to change that. “We’re trying An image-processing application, for means using methods such as encryp- to evangelize there are actually prac- example, could store files in the TEE tion or tokenization so that even if data is tical solutions” to protect data while instead of sending a video stream to copied from a server or database, a thief it’s in use, said Dave Thaler, a software the cloud, saving bandwidth and reduc- can’t access the information. Protect- architect from Microsoft and chair of the ing latency. The application may even ing data in transit means making sure Confidential Computing Consortium’s divide up such tasks on the processor unauthorized parties can’t see informa- Technical Advisory Council. level, with the main CPU handling most tion as it moves between servers and The consortium, launched last August of the processing, but relying on a TEE applications. There are well-established under the Linux Foundation, aims to on the network interface card for sen- ways to provide both kinds of protection. define standards for confidential com- sitive computations. Protecting data while in use, though, puting and support the development Such techniques can also protect algo- is especially tough because applica- and adoption of open-source tools. Mem- rithms. A machine-learning algorithm, tions need to have data in the clear—not bers include technology heavyweights or an analytics application such as a encrypted or otherwise protected— such as Alibaba, AMD, Arm, Facebook, stock trading platform, can live inside

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08 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Dan Page the TEE. “You don’t want me to know what stocks you’re trading, and I don’t COVID-19 DISRUPTS want you to know the algorithm,” said Martin Reynolds, a technology analyst at Gartner. “In this case, you wouldn’t get RESEARCH PLANS my code, and I wouldn’t get your data.” Confidential computing requires The coronavirus pandemic has interrupted extensive collaboration between hard- fieldwork and lab experiments ware and software vendors so that applications and data can work with TEEs. The COVID-19 pandemic research and graduate studies at Most confidential computing performed has affected virtually every Michigan State University, says, today runs on Intel servers (like the Xeon facet of life, including scientific “Our surveys indicate that theo- line) with Intel Software Guard Exten- research carried out at companies retical research teams—my own sion (SGX), which isolates specific appli- and universities around the world. included—are operating at around cation code and data to run in private As biomedical researchers scram- 80 to 90 percent efficiency, with the regions of memory. However, recent ble to find a treatment or vaccine, main challenge being the ability to security research has shown that Intel other scientists and engineers try explain complicated concepts with- SGX can be vulnerable to side-channel to continue their own work in the out our traditional ‘waving hands and timing attacks. midst of a pandemic. In some cases, about’ and interactive work at the Fortunately, TEEs aren’t available only this means writing a paper or grant white- or blackboard.” in Intel hardware. OP-TEE is a TEE for from home rather than at the office. For experimentalists, the pan- nonsecure Linux Kernels running on But in many others, the disruption demic is more disruptive, although Arm Cortex-A cores. Microsoft’s Virtual is more pronounced. some experiments may be com- Secure Mode is a software-based TEE Most academic, government, and pleted from home. “The early implemented by Hyper-V (the hypervisor corporate labs in the United States focus [for experimentalists] was for Windows systems) in Windows 10 have scaled back operations or on catching up on the literature, and Windows Server 2016. closed temporarily to comply with completing manuscripts, analyzing The Confidential Computing Consor- stay-at-home orders. The impacts existing data, and so on, which led tium currently supports a handful of of these changes can vary greatly to a productivity of 50 percent or open-source projects, including the Intel from one field to the next, depend- so,” says Verboncoeur. “However, SGX SDK for Linux, Microsoft’s Open ing on the nature of the work. much of that is coming to comple- Enclave SDK, and Red Hat’s Enarx. Proj- John Verboncoeur, a director tion, and we are seeing productiv- ects don’t have to be accepted by the of IEEE and associate dean for ity drop as the activities narrow consortium to be considered confiden- down to designing upcoming tial computing: For example, Google’s experiments and protocols.” Asylo is similar to Enarx, and Microsoft MAKING IT WORK: Brian Johnson of the University of Washington continues Engineers in many fields are look- Azure’s confidential computing services his research from his home office. ing for new ways to remain inno- support both Intel SGX and Microsoft’s Virtual Secure Mode. Hardware-based TEEs can supplement other security techniques, Thaler said, including homomorphic encryption and secure element chips such as the Trusted Platform Module. “You can combine these technologies because they are not necessarily competing,” he said. “Are you looking at the cloud or looking at the edge? You can pick which techniques to use.” —Fahmida Y. Rashid

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AMANDA JOHNSON AMANDA spectrum.ieee.org/confidential-jun2020

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 09 vative and productive. Take, for just as the pandemic was taking hold example, those in the green energy in the United States, but the team STORING DATA sector. While some climate and energy was able to get the research started research may continue from home, by focusing on pen-and-paper IN GLASS other projects are more difficult or designs and software simulations. However, the pandemic may prove impossible to complete remotely. Optical storage media is Sally Benson’s lab at Stanford Uni- more problematic for Johnson’s second endeavor. It involves the design advancing from CDs and versity does a mix of theory, mod- DVDs to small glass squares eling, and experiments to support of a new breed of high-efficiency the transition to a low-carbon future, power electronics that converts including studies related to carbon DC power from solar cells into capture and storage. While the grid-compatible AC power. “For Magnetic tape and hard disk theory and modeling aspects of this that project, we have a heavy set of drives hold much of the world’s research are easy enough to continue, milestones coming up in the sum- archival data. Compared with the experimental work involves ana- mer months to actually demonstrate other memory and storage technologies, lyzing rock samples at the extreme the hardware,” says Johnson. “If we tape and disk drives cost less and are temperatures and pressures found can’t do [tests] in the summer, we’re more reliable. They’re also nonvolatile, in underground reservoirs—tests that going to have to start coming up with meaning they don’t require a constant aren’t feasible to carry out at home. some contingency plans. Since these power supply to preserve data. Cultural Despite this limitation, Benson’s experiments necessitate a power lab institutions, financial firms, government group is still finding ways to continue with specialized equipment, they agencies, and film companies have relied with some aspects of their experi- cannot be done in our homes.” on these technologies for decades, and mental work. “The good news is While the pandemic affects each will continue to do so far into the future. that as experimentalists, we tend to research project to varying degrees, But archivists may soon have another collect way, way more data than we its overall impact on the broader option—using an extremely fast laser to can assimilate,” she says. “We gener- shift toward green tech—and on the write data into a 2-millimeter-thick piece ate these immensely rich data sets, state of engineering research more of glass, roughly the size of a Post-it note, where there’s plenty more we can generally—is still unclear. where that information can remain essen- mine out of those data sets.” Benson says she’s slightly con- tially forever. The group is now returning to its cerned that the pandemic may cause This experimental form of optical data old data sets and reanalyzing the data some researchers to shift their focus storage was demonstrated in 2013 by to answer new, unexplored questions, from climate change to medicine. researchers at the University of South- in part by applying machine learning. “To me, the COVID-19 pandemic is ampton in England. Soon after, that By doing so, the researchers have sort of a multiyear challenge and a group began working with engineers at uncovered previously unknown ways short-term nightmare,” she says. “If Microsoft Research in an effort called that carbon dioxide interacts with we’re not careful, climate change Project Silica. Last November, Microsoft rock. Benson acknowledges, however, will be a decadal-scale nightmare. completed its first proof of concept by that this reuse of old experimental So this work needs all of the atten- writing the 1978 filmSuperman on a sin- data can’t go on forever. tion it can get.” gle small piece of glass and retrieving it. Further up the coast, at the Univer- Johnson is less concerned that the With this method, researchers could sity of Washington, Brian Johnson is pandemic will interfere with the theoretically store up to 360 terabytes of leading two projects funded by the advancement of green tech, saying: data on a disc the size of a DVD . For com- U.S. Department of Energy. Both are “I think that energy is such an inte- parison, Panasonic aims to someday fit designed to facilitate a major shift gral part of modern life itself and 1 TB on conventional optical discs, while from electromechanical power grids infrastructure that I don’t perceive Seagate and Western Digital are shooting to grids based on power-electronics [the COVID-19 pandemic] fundamen- for 50- to 60-TB hard disk drives by 2026. systems that will better support tally altering the fact that we all need International Data Corp. expects the renewable energy. energy, and cheap energy.” world to produce 175 zettabytes of data One project involves the design —Michelle Hampson by 2025—up from 33 ZB in 2018. Though of controllers for these new power only a fraction of that data will be stored, POST YOUR COMMENTS AT grids. The effort launched in April spectrum.ieee.org/research-jun2020 today’s methods may no longer suffice.

NEWS

10 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG and read back many times. “This is data in glass, not on glass,” says Ant Rowstron, a principal researcher and deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, England. Reading data from the glass requires an entirely different setup, which is one potential drawback of this method. Researchers shine different kinds of polarized light—in which light waves all oscillate in the same direction, rather than every which way—onto specific voxels. They capture the results with a camera. Then, machine-learning algorithms analyze those images and translate their measurements into data. Ishak, who is also an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at Stanford Uni- versity, is optimistic about the approach. “I’m sure that in the matter of a decade, we’ll see a whole new kind of storage that LEARNING TO READ: James Clegg, a senior glass itself is a sort known as fused silica. eclipses and dwarfs everything that we optical scientist at Microsoft, loads a piece of It’s the same type of extremely pure glass have today,” he says. “And I firmly believe glass into a system used to retrieve information stored in the glass. used for the Hubble Space Telescope’s that those pure materials like fused silica mirror as well as the windows on the will definitely play a major role there.” International Space Station. But many scientific and engineering “We believe people’s appetite for stor- The laser’s pulse deforms the glass at its challenges remain. “The writing process age will force scientists to look into other focal point, forming a tiny 3D structure is hard to make reliable and repeatable, kinds of materials,” says Waguih Ishak, called a voxel. Two properties that mea- and [it’s hard] to minimize the time it chief technologist at Corning Research sure how the voxel interacts with polar- takes to create a voxel,” says Rowstron. and Development Corp. ized light—retardance and change in the “The read process has been a challenge Microsoft’s work is part of a broader light’s polarization angle—can together in figuring out how to read the data from company initiative to improve cloud stor- represent several bits of data per voxel. the glass using the minimum signal pos- age through optics. “I think they see it Microsoft can currently write hun- sible from the glass.” as potentially a distinguishing technol- dreds of layers of voxels into each piece The Microsoft group has added error- ogy from something like [Amazon Web of glass. The glass can be written to once correcting codes to improve the sys- Services] and other cloud providers,” tem’s accuracy and continues to refine says James Byron, a Ph.D. candidate in its machine-learning algorithms to auto- computer science at the University of mate the read-back process. Already, the California, Santa Cruz, who studies stor- team has improved writing speeds by age methods. several orders of magnitude from when Microsoft isn’t alone—John Morris, they began, though Rowstron declined chief technology officer at Seagate, says to share absolute speeds. researchers there are also focused on The team is also considering what understanding the potential of optical it means to store data for such a long data storage in glass. “The challenge is to time. “We are working on thinking what develop systems that can read and write a Rosetta Stone for glass could look like with reasonable throughput,” he says. MADE TO LAST: Microsoft and Warner Bros. to help people decode it in the future,” Writing data to glass involves focusing stored the 1978 film Superman on this piece Rowstron says. —Amy Nordrum of glass in a proof of concept for Project Silica. a femtosecond laser, which pulses very The glass contains 75.6 gigabytes of data plus POST YOUR COMMENTS AT

MICROSOFT quickly, on a point within the glass. The error-correcting codes. spectrum.ieee.org/glass-jun2020

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 11 12 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG PHOTOGRAPH BY Marcel Van Hoorn/AFP/Getty Images EMERGENCY BROADCAST

DRONES ARE USED FOR WORK, play, and even war. But now they’ve found a new application. Desperate authorities— responding to public gatherings where people make themselves possible vectors for the spread of the coronavirus—have turned to flying drones equipped with loudspeakers that play messages telling people to disperse. This drone was photographed in early April as it hovered over shoppers at a commercial boulevard in Heerlen, Netherlands, reminding them to stay at least 2 meters apart. Though the presence of remotely operated aircraft has led to suspicion that they are being used to identify people and record their movements, local governments insist that the drones are not recording or using facial recognition.

THE BIG PICTURE NEWS

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 13 Hands On

0 GND

MSP430G2452

47k

CE C ÷ V+ pqrs 7 tuv wxyz 8 9 C log . ghi 1 rad 57 2958° jkl mno 2.30259 ln 10 . 4 ÷ tan e 2 71828 5 6 .14159 – π 3 Scientific 1 abc def 2 3 ++ sin off C on 0 E – cos

TI DataMath 2500II, Sinclair Scientific = log 8 9 7 TI MSP430 Calculator Emulator

antilog 6 tan 4 5

arctan 3 sin 1 2

arcsin cos 0 E

arccos

HANDS ON BY STEPHEN CASS

14 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATIONS BY James Provost THE SINCLAIR SCIENTIFIC, REMADE GND 0

A CLASSIC CALCULATOR MSP430G2452

WAS REVERSE 47k

ENGINEERED FROM V+ CE C ÷

THE BARE METAL pqrs tuv wxyz 7 8 9 Clog

ghi jkl mno 4 5 6 ÷ tan Was the Sinclair Scientific calculator – abc def elegant? It certainly was a hit, gracing the cov- 1 2 3 ++ sin er of publications like Popular Mechanics after its release in 1974. Cleverly written firmware dragooned 0 E –=cos its limited processor, intended only for basic arithmetic, TI DataMath 2500II, Sinclair Scientific into performing way beyond specifications. This allowed TI MSP430 Calculator Emulator Sinclair to sell a scientific calculator to countless folks who otherwise could not have afforded one. But it was also REFACTORED REPLICA: The original Sinclair Scientific was also sold in kit form. slow and sometimes inaccurate, provided barely enough Chris Chung’s version is smaller, uses fewer components, and can actually replicate two calculators based on the TMS080x family of CPUs: the TI Datamath, a simple mathematical functions to qualify as a scientific calculator, arithmetical calculator, and the Sinclair Scientific. Hence, the printed silkscreen on the and was difficult for the uninitiated to use. circuit board has layouts for both calculators. I’d vaguely known of this calculator because of its place as a milestone toward the birth of the British mi- crocomputer industry and such beloved machines as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. So I clicked when I came across are combined with a small handful of reflected in the price: The 2020 version Chris Chung’s replica kit of the calculator on the Tindie discrete components. Chung actually costs US $39, while the original version marketplace. Then I read the description of how the origi- offers two kits: his original, developed costs $79. However, in a nice touch, the nal calculator worked—scientific notion only? no “equals” in 2014 but put on Tindie in late 2019, original version lets you have your cake button?—and how the replica reproduced its behavior, displays numbers using two small and eat it with regard to the bubble by using an emulator running firmware that had been re- QDSP-6064 bubble LED modules, LEDs: The through holes in the PCB are verse engineered by visually examining the metal of an which have the classic look of 1970s sized to create a friction fit. This means original processor. This I had to try. calculators but are long discontinued you don’t have to solder in the modules, Let’s first get to the hardware. The kit is one of a number and hard to get. His 2020 update of preserving them for some future project. of Sinclair calculator replicas, but it wins points for simplic- the kit uses modern seven-segment Both versions are functionally iden- ity: One chip and a credit-card-size printed circuit board LED displays. The difference in rarity is tical, based around a MSP430 mi-

DEPARTMENTS

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 15 HANDS ON BY STEPHEN CASS

THAT 70’S LOOK: Bubble LED proximation technique that could take sever- modules were common in early al seconds to produce results and were often calculators. The bubbles were lenses that magnified the small segments. accurate only to the first three significant figures. The calculator also used fixed scientific notation for everything—there was no way to Ed Spittles, and I spent another enter a decimal point. So rather than enter- day figuring out how the raw bits ing “521.4,” you’d enter “5214,” which is dis- corresponded to the code….The played as “5.214”; then you’d press “E” and code was 320 words of 11 bits, enter “2,” making the number “5.214 x 102.” but the ROM was physically 55 Only one number could be entered at a time. rows and 64 columns.…Through On paper this looks terrible, something a combination of examining the you’d have used only if you couldn’t afford, say, circuitry, analyzing patterns in the HP-35, whose designers prided them- the bits, and brute-force trying a selves on accuracy and functionality (although crocontroller. The MSP430 eliminates the bunch of combinations, we figured out the ar- the HP-35 also used reverse Polish notation, it need for most of the other components rangement and could extract the code.” did so in a more sophisticated way). found in the Sinclair Scientific, and runs an Once he had the code loaded into his But Sinclair wasn’t trying to compete emulator of the TMS080x family of chips. simulator, Shirriff could tease out its work- against other calculators; he was compet- The TMS080x family was built by Texas ings. The algorithms used throughout “were ing against slide rules. I’d read that point Instruments (TI), and specific versions, like essentially the simplest brute-force algo- in histories before, but I didn’t really un- the TMS0805 used in the Sinclair Scientific, rithms that could get an answer. But there derstand its meaning until I held this kit in were differentiated by the contents of the were some interesting mathematical tricks my hand. By chance, I’d also recently pur- chip’s 3,520-bit ROM. they used to get more accuracy, not to men- chased a vintage Pickett slide rule and For many years, how Sinclair coaxed this tion programming tricks to get the code to fit,” learned how to do basic operations with chip into performing magic remained locked he explained. (If you want detailed explana- it, thanks to the lessons available on the In- away in TMS0805 chip ROMs. That began to tions, Shirriff maintains an online version of ternational Slide Rule Museum website. As change in 2013, when Ken Shirriff got wind his simulator that lets you step through the I used the Sinclair Scientific, I was struck by of the Sinclair Scientific after getting involved code, line by line.) how conceptually similar it was to using my with the Visual 6502 team. This group likes The Sinclair Scientific was able to reduce slide rule. There, two- to three-figure accu- to reverse engineer classic chips, for which complexity by using reverse Polish notation, racy is the norm, the rule’s sliding “cursor” the original design drawings are often lost. in which mathematical operators come af- means you’re passing just one number be- Sometimes this involves etching chip pack- ter the numbers they are operating on—for tween scales, and you typically don’t bother ages away with acid and carefully photo- instance, “5 + 4 =” becomes “5 4 +.” The about magnitudes—you work with the most graphing the exposed silicon dies with a trigonometric functions used an iterated ap- significant figures and make a mental esti- microscope to see the individual transistors. mate to insert the decimal point at the end, Shirriff was able to create a generic simula- so that 52 x 2 and 5,200 x 20 are calculat- tor of a TMS080x chip in JavaScript just by (cosθ, sinθ) ed in exactly the same way. studying Texas Instruments’ patent filings, This realization is why I feel replica kits are but the specific code used in the Sinclair’s so important—they are an easy way to pro- TMS0805’s ROM still eluded him, until Visual (1, 0) vide the understanding that only comes from 6502 team member John McMaster took operating a device with your own hands. It photographs of an exposed die in 2014. was a great reminder that, as folks like Henry Shirriff is no stranger to IEEE Spectrum Petroski have pointed out, good design is not due to his extensive work in the history of really something that exists as an abstract computing, so I emailed him to ask how he’d ideal but as something that exists only with- gone from a micrograph to working code. By in a specific context. So, was the Sinclair looking at how the metal oxide gates were DO THE TWIST: The Sinclair Scientific calculated Scientific elegant? For me, the answer is a trigonometric functions by repeatedly rotating an laid down in the ROM section of the chip, “I initial vector until the target angle was reached. It resounding yes. —STEPHEN CASS was able to extract the raw bits the same took several seconds to calculate most angles. POST YOUR COMMENTS AT day,” Shirriff wrote back. “Phil Mainwaring, spectrum.ieee.org/sinclair-jun2020

16 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG Careers

Percentage of salary offers WAGE DISCRIMINATION to women that are lower than offers to men (for INCREASES IN TECH 70 the same job at the same WOMEN LOSE GAINS MADE IN 2018 company)

60 After falling slightly According to Hired’s data, the gap 2016 2017 2018 2019 in 2018, the number of in major metropolitan areas is largest women in tech being of- in New York (10 percent) and smallest fered less than men for the same job in Los Angeles (5 percent). The San Do you believe a wage gap at the same company jumped back Francisco Bay Area fell in the middle between genders exists? up in 2019—to 63 percent. Mean- (7 percent). 10% while, the average salary differential With such a pervasive salary gap, Not 21% sure 6% between U.S. tech workers identify- it’s not surprising that women in tech ing as male and those identifying as have lower expectations for their own female held steady at 3 percent, ac- salaries—which is helping to cement No 16% cording to a 2020 study by the job the wage gap, Hired’s analysts sug- search firm Hired that was released gest. And expectations this year were Yes at the end of March. worse than last year’s: Sixty-five per- Last month, a study by Dice also recent of women asked for lower sala- 63% 84% ported that the gender pay gap con- ries than men in 2020, compared with tinues across most specialties, but 61 percent in 2019. may be narrowing in cloud engineer- More pay transparency and open ing, systems architecture, and net- conversations about salaries among work engineering. The Hired study peers are needed to break through instead looked at changes in the over- this barrier, the Hired report indicat- Men Women all U.S. tech industry to find that the ed. And most tech employees would gender gap is growing, not narrowing. welcome salary transparency: Sixty- That’s the data. In terms of the per- eight percent of women and 63 per- -10 Wage gaps between New York ception, only 63 percent of men who cent of men think transparency would men and women in major metropolitan areas, 2019 responded to the Hired survey indi- increase their interest in working for a -8 Boston cated that they believe a wage gap company, according to the report. San Francisco between genders exists, with 16 per- —TEKLA S. PERRY Bay Area cent of men convinced there is no gap -6 Seattle

An extended version of this article ap- Percent and 21 percent unsure. For women, Los Angeles pears on the View From the Valley blog. 84 percent are convinced of the gap, -4 with only 6 percent indicating that it NATIONAL AVERAGE POST YOUR COMMENTS AT spectrum.ieee.org/ doesn’t exist and 10 percent unsure. wagegap-jun2020 -2

DEPARTMENTS SOURCE: 2020 STATE OF WAGE INEQUALITY IN THE WORKPLACE, HIRED WORKPLACE, THE IN INEQUALITY WAGE OF STATE 2020 SOURCE:

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 17 CrossTalk

month spells a year to finish the structure BUILDING THE in 20 years. In 1974, Kurt Mendelssohn, a German-born British physicist, put the GREAT PYRAMID labor force at 70,000 seasonal workers and up to 10,000 permanent masons. These are large overestimates; we can do better by appealing to simple physics. GIVEN THAT SOME 4,600 years have with some confidence how many people The potential energy of the pyramid— elapsed since the completion of the Great were required to build it. the energy needed to lift the mass above Pyramid of Giza, the structure stands We must start with the time constraint ground level—is simply the product of remarkably intact. It is a polyhedron of roughly 20 years, the length of the acceleration due to gravity, mass, and with a regular polygon base, its volume reign of Khufu, the pharaoh who commis- the center of mass, which in a pyramid is is about 2.6 million cubic meters, and its sioned the construction (he died around one-quarter of its height. The mass can- original height was 146.6 meters, includ- 2530 B.C.E.). Herodotus, writing more not be pinpointed because it depends on ing the lost pyramidion, or capstone. We than 21 centuries after the pyramid’s the specific densities of the Tura lime- may never know exactly how the pyra- completion, was told that labor gangs stone and mortar that were used to build

mid was built, but even so, we can say totaling 100,000 men worked in three- the structure; I am assuming a mean of IMAGES KONGSIRIMONGKOLCHAI/EYEEM/GETTY PATRA

NUMBERS DON’T LIE BY VACLAV SMIL

18 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG 2.6 metric tons per cubic meter, hence blocks (many interior blocks were just stones, and provide housing, clothing, a total mass of about 6.75 million metric rough-cut). And in order to cut 2.6 mil- and food for labor gangs on the Giza site. tons. That means the pyramid’s potential lion cubic meters of stone in 20 years, the In the 1990s, archaeologists uncovered energy is about 2.4 trillion joules. project would have required about 1,500 a cemetery for workers and the founda- To maintain his basal metabolic rate, quarrymen working 300 days a year and tions of a settlement used to house the a 70-kilogram (154-pound) man requires producing 0.25 cubic meter of stone per builders of the two later pyramids at the some 7.5 megajoules a day; steady exer- capita. The grand total of the construction site, indicating that no more than 20,000 tion will raise that figure by at least labor would then be some 3,300 workers. people lived there. That an additional two 30 percent. About 20 percent of that Even if we were to double that number pyramids were built in rapid succession increase will be converted into useful to account for designers, organizers, and at the Giza site (for Khafre, Khufu’s son, work, which amounts to about 450 kilo- overseers and for labor needed for trans- starting at 2520 B.C.E., and for Menkaure, joules a day (different assumptions are port, tool repair, the building and main- starting 2490 B.C.E.) shows how quickly possible, but they would make no funda- tenance of on-site housing, and cooking early Egyptians mastered the building of mental difference). Dividing the potential and laundry work, the total would be still pyramids: The erection of those massive energy of the pyramid by 450 kJ implies less than 7,000 workers. structures became just another series of that it took 5.3 million man-days to raise During the time of the pyramid’s con- construction projects for the Old King- the pyramid. If a work year consists of struction, the total population of the late dom’s designers, managers, and work- 300 days, that would mean almost 18,000 Old Kingdom was 1.5 million to 1.6 mil- ers. If you build things, it becomes easier man-years, which, spread over 20 years, lion people, and hence such a labor force to build things—a useful lesson for those implies a workforce of about 900 men. would not have been an extraordinary who worry about the sorry state of our A similar number of workers might be imposition on the country’s economy. infrastructure. n needed to place the stones in the rising The challenge was to organize the labor, POST YOUR COMMENTS AT structure and then to smooth the cladding plan an uninterrupted supply of building spectrum.ieee.org/pyramids-jun2020

6,600 EGYPTIANS WORKING SWEAT EQUITY 300 DAYS PER YEAR FOR 20 YEARS Sheer human muscle can raise a great pyramid because most of the mass is near the bottom and Designers, organizers, and support the work can be divided among thousands of people services: 3,300 workers and distributed over decades. It was thus no great drain on national resources—and think of the spin- off effects! Stone lifting: 900 workers

GREAT PYRAMID LA DANTA, Stone OF GIZA GUATEMALA placement and smoothing: 900 workers 146.6 meters tall 72 meters tall Stone cutting: 20 years of construction Approximate 1,500 workers (c. 2530 B.C.E.) time of construction: c. 300 B.C.E.–100 C.E. Volume: 2.6 million cubic meters Volume: 2.8 million Total weight: cubic meters 6.75 million metric tons Pyramid workers: 0.4 percent of population

Population of Old Kingdom Egypt: 1.5 million

CROSSTALK

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 19 INTERNET OF EVERYTHING BY STACEY HIGGINBOTHAM CROSSTALK

that explains what the tracking method- ology is, requires an audit for accuracy and efficacy by a third party, and sets a predefined end. Ethical data collection is also critical. Apple and Google’s Bluetooth method uses encrypted tokens to track people as they pass other people. The Bluetooth data is people-centric, not location-centric. Once a person uploads a confirmation that they’ve been infected, their device can issue notifications to other devices that were recently nearby, alerting users— anonymously—that they may have come in contact with someone who’s infected. This is good. And while it might be possible to match a person to a device, it would be difficult. Ultimately, linking cases anonymously to devices is safer than simply collecting location data on infected indi- viduals. The latter makes it easy to identify people based on where they sleep at night PANDEMIC VS. PRIVACY and work during the day, for example. Going further, this data must be encrypted on the device, during transit and when stored on a cloud or gov- THE INTERNET of Things their time. Other proposals use location ernment server, so that random hackers makes the invisible visible. data provided by phone applications to can’t access it. Only the agency in charge That’s the IoT’s greatest determine where people are traveling. of track-and-trace efforts should have feature, but also its biggest All of these ideas have slightly differ- access to the data from the device. This potential drawback. More sensors on ent approaches, but at their core they’re means that police departments, immigra- more people means the IoT becomes a still tracking programs. Any such pro- tion agencies, or private companies can’t visible web of human connections that gram that we implement to track the access that data. Ever. we can use to, say, track down a virus. spread of COVID-19 should follow some However, researchers should have Track-and-trace programs are already basic guidelines to ensure that the data access to some form of the data after a being used to monitor outbreaks of is used only for public health research. few years have passed. I don’t know what COVID-19 and its spread. But because they This data should not be used for market- that time limit should be, but when that would do so through easily enabled mass ing, commercial gain, or law enforcement. time comes, institutional review boards, surveillance, we need to put rules in place It shouldn’t even be used for research like those that academic institutions use to about how to undertake any attempts to outside of public health. protect human research subjects, should track the movements of people. Let’s talk about the limits we should be in place to evaluate each request for In April, Google and Apple said they place around this data. A tracking pro- what could be highly personal data. would work together to build an opt-in gram for COVID-19 should be imple- If we can get this right, we can use the program for Android or iOS users. The mented only for a prespecified duration lessons learned during COVID-19 not only program would use their phones’ Blue- that’s associated with a public health goal to protect public health but also to pro- tooth connection to deliver exposure noti- (like reducing the spread of the virus). So, mote a more privacy-centric approach to fications—meaning that transmissions are if we’re going to collect device data and the Internet of Things. n tracked by who comes into contact with do so without requiring a user to opt in, POST YOUR COMMENTS AT whom, rather than where people spend governments need to enact legislation spectrum.ieee.org/pandemic-jun2020

20 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Greg Mably MACRO & MICRO BY MARK PESCE CROSSTALK

to meet peak demand during the pandemic. Countless other pieces of electronic equipment—everything from routers to thermostats—operate in critical environments and need immediate replacement should they fail. Where they cannot be replaced, we will fall deeper into the ditch we now find ourselves in. It would be ideal if any sort of equipment could be “printed” on demand. We already have the capacity for such rapid manufacturing in some realms, but to address the breadth of the present crisis would require a comprehensive database of product designs, testing, firmware, and much else. Little of that infrastructure exists at present, highlighting a real danger: If we don’t construct a distributed, global build-it-here-now capacity, we might burn through our existing inventories without any way to replenish them. Then we will be truly stuck. NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL Many firms will no doubt have reser- vations about handing over their intellectual property, even to satisfy critical needs. This tension between normal busi- BACK IN 2012, Netflix opaque packaging—like a smartphone, all ness practice and public good echoes the released Chaos Monkey, an surface with no visible interior. contours of the dilemmas facing personal open-source tool for trigger- The manufacture of even basic prod- privacy and public health. We neverthe- ing random failures in criti- ucts can be so encumbered by secrecy or less need urgently to find a way to share cal computing infrastructure. Similar obscurity that it quickly becomes difficult trade secrets—temporarily—to preserve stress testing, at least in a simulated envi- to learn how to make them or to re-create the kind of world within which business ronment, has been applied in other con- their functionality in some other way. can one day operate normally. texts such as banking, but we’ve never While we normally tolerate such impedi- Some governments have already sig- stress tested industrial production dur- ments as part of normal business prac- naled their greater flexibility in enforcing ing a viral pandemic. Until now. tice, they have thrown up unexpected both patent protection and intellectual COVID-19 has demonstrated beyond roadblocks to keeping the world oper- property protections during this cri- doubt the fragility of the global system of ating through the present crisis. sis. Yet more is needed. Like Medtronic, lean inventories and just-in-time delivery. We must do whatever we can to lower businesses should take the plunge, open Many nations have immediate need for the barriers to getting things built, and up, share their trade secrets, provide critical medical supplies and equipment, that begins by embracing a newfound guidance to others (even former com- even as we grope for the switch that will flexibility in our approaches to both man- petitors) to help us speed our way into allow us to turn the global economy back ufacturing and intellectual property. Com- a post-pandemic economy. Sharing today on. That means people have to be able panies are already rising to this challenge. will make that return much faster and far to manufacture stuff, where it’s needed, For example, Medtronic shared the less painful. To paraphrase a wise old when it’s needed, and from components designs and code for its portable ventila- technologist, we either hang together, that can be locally sourced. That’s a big ask, tor at no charge, enabling other capable or we will no doubt hang separately. n because most of our technology comes manufacturers to take up the challenge POST YOUR COMMENTS AT to us from far away, often in seamlessly of building and distributing enough units spectrum.ieee.org/sharing-jun2020

ILLUSTRATION BY Dan Page SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 21 HOW CONTROL THEORY CAN HELP US CONTROL COVID-19

Using feedback, a standard tool in control engineering, we can manage our response to the novel coronavirus pandemic for maximum survival while containing the damage to our economies

BY GREG STEWART, KLASKE VAN HEUSDEN & GUY A. DUMONT

22 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG CLOSED FOR BUSINESS: The streets of Manhattan are quiet on 10 April as most people comply with the city’s self-quarantine rules. As we write these words, countless people, perhaps the majority of the world’s population, are subject to physical-distancing policies or confined to their homes in an attempt to contain one of the worst pandemics of modern times. Economic activity has plummeted, hundreds of millions of people are out of work, and entire industries have ground to a halt. Quite understandably, a couple of questions are on everyone’s mind: What is the exit strategy? How will we know when it’s safe to implement it?

Around the globe, epidemiologists, statisticians, biologists, and health posal and found that it could help offi- officials are grappling with these questions. Though engineering per- cials manage the enormous complexity spectives are uncommon in epidemiological modeling, we believe that of trade-offs and unknowns that they will in this case public officials could greatly benefit from one. Of course, the face, while saving perhaps hundreds of COVID-19 pandemic isn’t an obvious or typical engineering problem. But thousands of lives. in its basic behavior it is an unstable, open-loop system. Left alone, it Our goal here is to share some of our grows exponentially. However, there’s good news, too: Like many such key findings and to engage a community systems, it can be stabilized effectively and efficiently by applying the of control experts in this vital and fasci- principles of control theory, most notably the use of feedback. nating problem. Together, we can con- Inspired by the important work of epidemiologists and others on the tribute vitally to the international efforts front lines of this global crisis, we have explored how feedback can help to manage this outbreak. stabilize and diminish the rate of propagation of this deadly virus that now literally plagues us. We relied on feedback-based mechanisms to THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC is unlike any devise a system that would bring the outbreak under control and then other recent disease outbreak for sev- adeptly manage the longer-term caseload. eral reasons. One is that its basic repro- It is during this longer-term phase, the inevitable relaxing of physical duction number, or R0 (“R naught”), is distancing that is required for a functioning society, that the strengths relatively high. R0 is an indication of how of a response grounded in control theory are most crucial. Using one of many people, on average, an infected

the widely available computer models of the disease, we tested our pro- person will infect during the course of her IMAGES PLATT/GETTY SPENCER PAGES: PREVIOUS

24 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG variable and depend on such factors as age, physical fitness, present pathologies, region, and access to health care. But in general they are much higher for COVID-19 than for ordinary influenza. A surprisingly large percentage of people who contract the disease develop a form of viral pneumonia that sometimes proves fatal. Many of those patients require artificial ventilation, and if their number exceeds the capacity of intensive care units to accommodate them, some number of them, perhaps a majority, will die. For that reason, enormous worldwide efforts have focused on “flat- tening the curve” of infections against time. A high, sharp curve indicating a surge of infections in a short time period, as occurred in China, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere, means that the number of serious cases will swamp the ability of hospitals to treat them and result in mass fatalities. So to reduce the peak demand on health care, the first priority must be to bring the caseload under control. Once that’s done, the emphasis shifts to managing a long-term return to normalcy while minimizing both death rates and economic impact. The two basic approaches to controlling the spread of disease are mitigation, which focuses on slowing but not necessarily stopping the spread, and suppression, which aims to reverse epidemic growth. For mitigation, R0 is reduced but remains greater than 1, while for suppression, R0 is smaller than 1. Both obviously require changing R0. Officials accomplish that by introducing social measures such as restricted travel, home confinement, social distancing, and so on. These restrictions are referred to as nonpharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs. What we are proposing is a systematically designed strategy, based on feedback, to change R0 through modulation of NPIs. In effect, the strategy alternates between suppression and mitigation in order to maintain the spread at a desired level. It may sound straightforward, but there are many challenges. Some of them arise from the fact that COVID-19 is a very peculiar disease. Despite enormous efforts to characterize the virus, biologists still do not under- stand why some people experience fairly mild symptoms while others spiral into a massive, uncontrolled immune response and death. And no one can explain why, among fatalities, men predominate. Other myster- illness. R0 is not a fixed number, depend- ies include the disease’s long incubation period—up to 14 days between ing as it does on such factors as the den- infection and symptoms—and even the question of whether a person sity of a community, the general health can get re-infected. of its populace, its medical infrastructure These perplexities have helped bog down efforts to deal with the pan- and resources, and countless details of demic. As a recent Imperial College London research paper notes: “There the community’s response. But a com- are very large uncertainties around the transmission of this virus, the likely monly cited R0 figure for ordinary sea- effectiveness of different policies, and the extent to which the population sonal influenza is 1.3, whereas a figure spontaneously adopts risk reducing behaviours.” Consider the long incuba- calculated for the experience in Wuhan, tion time and apparent spreading of the virus before symptoms are expe- China, where COVID-19 is understood to rienced. These undoubtedly contributed to the relatively high R0 values, have originated, is 2.6. Figures for some because people who were infectious continued to interact with others outbreaks in Italy range from 2.76 to 3.25. and transmitted the virus without being aware that they were doing so. The goal of infectious-disease inter- This lag before the onset of symptoms corresponds to time delay in vention is reducing the R0 to below 1, control-system theory. It is notorious for introducing oscillations into because such a value means that new closed-loop systems, particularly when combined with substantial uncer- infections are in decline and will even- tainty in the model itself. tually reach zero. But with the COVID-19 In addition to delays, there are very significant uncertainties. Testing, for outbreak, the level of urgency is quite example, has been spotty in some countries, and that inconsistency has high due to the disease’s relatively high obscured the number of actual cases. Even NPIs are not immutable. The fatality rate. Fatality rates, too, are quite extent to which the public is complying with policies is never 100 percent.

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 25 The point is, a pandemic is a dynamic, fast-moving situation, and inad- sort of antibodies to the disease because equate local attempts to monitor and control it can be disastrous. In the they have either suffered it or they have Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, cities took widely varying approaches to the been vaccinated—preferably the latter. lockdown and release of their citizens, with wildly varying results. Some Clearly, tried-and-true principles of recovered straightforwardly, others had rebound spikes larger than the initial control theory, particularly feedback, outbreak, and still others had multiple outbreaks after the initial lockdown. can help officials plot more robust and optimal strategies as they attempt to IN THE ABSENCE of widespread immunity or vaccination, the only way safely ease the social distancing that to suppress the disease is total confinement—obviously not a viable long- has helped mitigate the COVID-19 pan- term solution. A reasonable middle ground is to implement a policy that demic. But how to make officials aware makes extensive use of feedback to keep R0 close to 1, with perhaps small of these powerful tools? oscillations on either side. In so doing we could maintain the critical case- Imagine an online interactive tool offer- load within the capacity of health care institutions while slowly and safely ing detailed, specific guidance in plain building immunity in our communities, and returning to normal social language and aimed at public officials and economic conditions as quickly as is safely possible. and others charged with mounting a What exactly do we mean by “feedback” here? Consider what’s already response to the pandemic in their com- happening now: Public officials are now taking hospital caseloads into munities. The guidance would be based account before imposing or lifting restrictions. This is an example of the on strategies developed by a small group use of feedback, where the feedback variable is the number of cases in of control theorists, epidemiologists, and local hospitals. However, the use of feedback now is typically relatively people with policy experience. The site coarse, and its results less satisfactory, in comparison with what could be could review the now-familiar initial achieved if control principles were more finely and systematically applied. response, in which nonessential work- Here’s an obvious way that coarseness would cause problems. If the ers are confined to their homes except for tuning mechanism is too aggressive—for example, switching between essential needs. Then the site could go on full and zero social distancing—it would lead to severe oscillations and to give some guidance on how and when overwhelmed hospitals. On the other hand, tuning that is too timid also the tightest restrictions could be lifted. courts fiasco. An example of such tuning might be a policy requiring a full The biggest challenge to the designers month in which no new cases are recorded before officials relax restric- of such a Web-based tool will be enabling tions. Such a hypercautious approach risks needlessly prolonging the pan- nonspecialists to visualize how the vari- demic’s economic devastation, creating a catastrophe of a different sort. ous components of the epidemiological But a properly designed feedback-based policy that takes into account model interact with the various feedback both dynamics and uncertainty can deliver a stable result while keeping policy options and model uncertainty. the hospitalization rate within a desired approximate range. Furthermore, How exactly should the main feedback keeping the rate within such a range for a prolonged period allows a soci- measure—likely some aspect of hos- ety to slowly and safely increase the percentage of people who have some pital or intensive care occupancy—be implemented? Which restrictions should be lifted in the first round of easing? How should they be eased in the first round? In THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW: Having tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the second round? While monitoring the Marietta Diaz self-quarantines in her Florida home on 23 March. feedback measure, how frequently should officials consider whether to implement another round of easing? Feedback will help officials determine when to time various phases of interventions. Such an interactive tool that could assess different policy approaches, viv- idly illustrating what conditions must be in place to lessen the effects of uncertainty and shrink the projected caseload, would be of incalculable value. It could save untold lives.

Material in this article originally appeared as a post on Medium, “Coronavirus: Policy Design for Stable

Population Recovery,” and in several other outlets. IMAGES BENNET/AFP/GETTY ZAK Five Scenarios

To explore how feedback can save lives, The model we used was created by Jeffrey we devised a series of scenarios, each Kantor, professor of chemical engineering at indicative of a recovery strategy with a different the University of Notre Dame (Kantor’s model is level of feedback, and simulated the resulting available on GitHub). The model assumes we can policies against a commonly used infectious- suppress disease transmission to a very low level disease computer model. We plotted the by choosing appropriate policy levers. Although results in a series of graphs showing COVID-19 worldwide experience with COVID-19 is still hospital cases as a function of time. Hospital limited, at the time of this writing this assumption occupancy is probably a more reliable and appears to be a realistic one. tangible measure than total case count, which To make the model more reflective of our current depends on extensive testing that many understanding of COVID-19, we added two types countries (such as the United States) do not of uncertainty. We assumed different values of R0 have at the moment. Furthermore, hospital to see how they affected outcomes. To consider ICU bed occupancy or ventilator availability is how noncompliance with nonpharmaceutical arguably an important measure of the ability of interventions would affect results, we programmed the local health care system to treat those who for a range of effectiveness of these NPIs. are suffering from respiratory distress acute Our first, simplest simulation confirms what we enough to require intensive care and perhaps all know by now, which is that not doing anything assisted breathing. was not an option [Figure 1, below].

1. CURVE OF DEATH The large and put aggressive when the number could this second Failing to respond lengthy peak well measures in place of infections has surge overwhelm to the outbreak above the available to flatten the curve. come down. We our hospitals, it of a deadly and bed capacity in the So what do simulated such could also lead highly contagious intensive care unit we do when a tactic and to an even higher illness results in indicates a huge the number of confirmed what mortality rate than a sharp spike of number of cases infections comes epidemiologists the first surge, as serious cases that that will likely result down? We have long known: occurred repeatedly overwhelms the in death. This is why, considered one It would only lead to in several U.S. cities capacity of local of course, most possibility: relaxing a second surge in during the Spanish hospitals. countries have all restrictions infections. Not only flu epidemic of 1918.

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 27 2. AN ON-OFF APPROACH Imposing and lifting strong social restrictions causes In the simple and then are put to oscillations, and “social distancing abrupt swings in on-off approach back into place if it is applied too fatigue.” People the reproduction to confinement, when this number aggressively, the become weary of the number, R0 [in blue]. most of the usual exceeds a higher high points of these repeated changes to Those swings in turn restrictions threshold. In this oscillations will their routine—going lead to oscillations on gatherings, case, the R0 swings exceed the health back to work for a in the caseload travel, and social sharply between care system’s couple of weeks, then [red, upper graph], interaction are lifted two levels, a high capacity to treat being told to stay at which can exceed entirely when the above 2 and a low patients. Another home for a few weeks, the capacity of local number of new ICU below 1, as shown likely problem then being given the hospitals [black]. cases drops below in blue in the graph. with this approach all-clear to go back to a lower threshold, This approach leads has been labeled work, and so on.

3. THE BEAUTY OF FEEDBACK In real-world scenarios, officials will typically have only an approximate value for the basic reproduction number, R0. However, with appropriately applied feedback, Using feedback about R0 because is stabilized by the months it doesn’t this uncertainty won’t to finely and testing will still be initial restrictive matter whether the matter. For R0s systematically spotty, and because regime, a policy base-level R0 is between 2.0 [blue] modulate the an unknown number based on feedback 2.0 or 2.6 because and 2.6 [red], the restrictions imposed of people will likely will prove very the total case count caseload stabilizes on a population to have the disease tolerant of variations stays well below the at an acceptable modify R0 leads to a without realizing in the base-level R0, number of available level within a couple policy that is robust. it. That uncertainty which is the R0 that hospital beds due to of months as a For example, early will inevitably fuel prevailed before the the use of feedback. result of feedback on in the outbreak, a surge in initial restrictions were put from actual hospital there will be a great cases. However, in place. As the graph conditions. deal of uncertainty once the case count shows, after a few

28 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG 4. SYSTEMATIC APPROACH A response based on control-theory principles strives to maintain the reproduction number, R0, at close to 1 [shown For our third bare minimum within walking maximizes the in blue]. As the experiment, we needed for society distance, some rate of recovery. caseload comes developed a to function—utilities, small businesses Furthermore, the down, officials scenario in which we police, sanitation, are allowed to demand for hospital use feedback targeted 90 percent and food distribution, reopen under certain ICU beds never painstakingly to occupancy of for example. Then, as conditions, or exceeds a threshold, ease restrictions hospital intensive conditions begin to certain age groups thanks to a “set point” and control R0 so care units. To improve, as revealed are subject to less- target below that that it very gradually achieve this, we by our feedback stringent restrictions. threshold. The health approaches 1, designed a simple measure of hospital- Then geographical care capacity limit perhaps slightly and feedback-based bed occupancy, mobility might be is never breached. briefly exceeding policy using the other services are loosened in other In addition, note it from time to time. principles of control gradually phased ways. The point is the general upward As shown in the systems theory. in. Recovered that restrictions are trend for the release upper graph, this When R0 is high, people are allowed eased gradually, with of restrictions, as the strategy keeps the many restrictions to move freely as each new gradation number of recovered caseload within the are put into place. they can no longer based carefully on and immune capacity of the local People are largely contract, or transmit, feedback. people grows and health care system confined to their the virus. Perhaps This strategy nonpharmaceutical to accommodate it homes, and services people are allowed results in a stable interventions are indefinitely. are limited to the to visit restaurants response that gradually phased out.

5. COMPLIANCE CONUNDRUM Officials can never know the exact extent to which people are disregarding their restrictions. But if their policies are based closely on feedback, Using feedback In practice, what which in turn causes 10 percent less realistic levels of creates a policy noncompliance fluctuations in the effective than noncompliance that restricts means is that number of people intended. However, won’t cause social interaction a given level of who are infected. through feedback, anything more than effectively even restrictions will Noncompliance the policy will minor deviations in the face of result in an R0 that might, for instance, automatically tighten from the expected likely degrees of is slightly higher result in the to compensate. levels of illness. noncompliance. than expected, restrictions being

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 29 CAN CARGO DRONES SOLVE AIR FREIGHT’S LOGJAMS?

A DRONE STARTUP SAYS ITS BIG VERTICAL-TAKEOFF FLIER WOULD BE QUICK TO LAND, LOAD, AND TAKE OFF AGAIN

BY ED DE REYES ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN MACNEILL

30 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

CARGO DRONES

After being cleared for takeoff, the first It’s 4 a.m. on 23 December, of these aircraft rises like a helicopter before heading to the Beverly Hills site, and an MD-11 freighter has just which is just a parking lot with two ground handlers. As this odd-looking uncrewed landed at the logistics base near aircraft comes in, the wings fold to help the plane clear any branches or power San Bernardino, Calif. It landed late lines. Just then, a truck pulls right into the intended landing spot, but the aircraft because of heavy fog; many of the perceives the obstruction and rises to a holding position until the ground crew aircraft in San Bernardino won’t be can clear the area. Only then does it land, give up its cargo, accept new cargo, and able to depart because the other get cleared again for takeoff. And so it goes, right down the supply airports in the Los Angeles Basin chain. Weather conditions that today would paralyze operations are shrugged off—fog, freezing rain, even failures of are fogbound as well. ground vehicles at improvised landing areas. Say a forklift can’t cross a muddy Ground crews remove cargo from the field to unload the cargo container. No MD-11 and get the many packages into problem; one of the ground crew simply delivery trucks and small planes as quickly tilts the aircraft’s nose up and unlatches as possible before the start of the morn- the hooks and the cargo container slides ing rush of cargo from Amazon, Walmart, right out with the help of a cargo winch. and other online retailers scrambling to Throughout the day, the process of sort- deliver Christmas gifts. Meanwhile, con- ing, loading, and takeoff is repeated 15 struction is snarling traffic on the I-10 free- more times at Oxnard and other airports way into Los Angeles, and because of the in Southern California before a final fog, the I-15 is no better. Similar messes 4,500 kg of payload is loaded into the are often seen at choke points through- aircraft and it returns to San Bernardino. out the world, where the package-delivery Refueling takes place just once, at the business faces a raft of problems. end of the day. Now imagine that the MD-11 landing in San Bernardino meets up with a number THIS VISION OF URBAN air mobility, of small aircraft, each fully fueled for a built on the promise of electric pro- day of flying, with no pilots on board and pulsion and on autonomous flight, is no no weather restrictions. The ground crew sci-fi dream but a practical project, one slides four fully loaded LD-2 containers that a number of companies are pursu- with 2,400 kilograms of cargo through the ing. Airbus has finished testing its Vahana, nose of each craft, closes them up, and a concept electric vertical takeoff and poof, they’re cleared for takeoff, despite landing (VTOL) aircraft that is meant to the thickening fog. The aircraft all take fly passengers at low altitudes within and off, arriving 30 minutes later at various between cities and towns. There is also nearby airports, like the one in Oxnard, the Cora, a creation of Google impresa- Calif., where they taxi to the ramps of the rios; it, too, is meant only for short dis- relevant package-delivery companies. tances and low altitudes. Neither of those There the ground crew removes the cargo, two aircraft can carry much cargo, sorts it, and loads the small aircraft with though, particularly in bad weather. new cargo, bound for the Beverly Hills Consider how much easier it would package-sorting facility. be to use such methods to move cargo

32 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG No Runway? No Problem: Go Straight Up

1. Data fed from all the sensors [blue dots] are fused into a single picture of the plane’s surroundings by a sensor-interface computer, which monitors nearby air traffic and computes pathways a safe distance away. An artificial- intelligence landing 2. The computer system is used to spot sends a message obstacles from above. to the operator on the ground that a possible conflict is approaching; the GROUND operator then makes the decision to OPERATOR change the flight path.

LANDING SENSOR- AIR SYSTEM INTERFACE TRAFFIC SENSORS COMPUTER CONTROL

3. If the operator 4. The drone can complete does nothing to avoid its mission even if it loses airborne or land- communication with the based obstacles or operator and with air traffic bad weather, the control in general. It simply computer will take AUTOPILOTS follows a preplanned the necessary steps flight route, detecting and on its own, including avoiding traffic on the way. going to one of its three autopilots.

instead of people. If there are no passen- can go to and from places no crewed rival either containerized or bulk cargo can gers on board, you can lose the heavy, can safely reach. be quickly loaded and secured. The air- bulky gear that assures passenger safety. We call it the Rhaegal. If need be, it can craft’s high-flotation “tundra tires” and Replace pilots and you can also dispense lift almost 2,500 kg (5,500 pounds) of four-post landing-gear arrangement allow with the instruments that help them see cargo straight up from the ground, like a it to land in mud, snow, sand, marsh, or where they’re going, as well as the equip- helicopter; if a short runway is available, deep puddles, and an integral loading ment that soundproofs the cabin and it can take off in the standard way, then ramp with rollers can be used to ease supports the windows, floor beams, bulk- fly straight ahead carrying as much as loading of pallets or containers. heads, and so forth. In some cases, an 4,500 kg (10,000 pounds). That’s more Because the Rhaegal has a maximum aircraft can weigh 25 percent more with than the new Cessna 408 SkyCourier can gross weight above 600 kg (1,320 pounds) human-factor equipment than without it. manage, and the Rhaegal flies much faster it falls under U.S. Federal Aviation Admin- My company, Sabrewing Aircraft, in and higher. Also, it is designed to load and istration Regulation Part 23, which Camarillo, Calif., was founded to exploit unload without the help of forklifts, pal- requires that it be remotely monitored these advantages. By starting with a clean- let jacks, or other specialized equipment. and controlled and that it remain in con- sheet concept that was never meant to The Rhaegal sits low to the ground, tact with air traffic control at all times. fly people, only cargo, and thus with no whether on tarmac or even a sand Its operator, who can be hundreds or one on board to be put at risk, the aircraft dune, then tilts its nose upward so that even thousands of miles away, controls

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 33 CARGO DRONES

the aircraft via a satellite link. In this avoid any air traffic that may be follow- craft of any size operating in controlled way, the local air traffic control author- ing an intersecting flight path. The same airspace. This system tracks all flights no ity speaks to the operator through the rule applies to the Rhaegal: It must do matter what paths they take, allowing for aircraft, just as if the operator were sit- this job by itself, without operator input. far more flexible routing than the older, ting in the cockpit itself. This system, known as the Detect and ground-based radars could manage. Prior to takeoff, the operator loads into Avoid (DAA) system, uses a mix of sen- the computer an exact flight plan, pro- sors, among them an anticollision radar NOT ALL TRAFFIC PROBLEMS are in vided by the air traffic control authorities, (made by Garmin), a camera-based sys- the air; some are on the ground. that includes procedures for departing tem that can spot conflicting air traffic and Cars or trucks may be moving around or in any weather and also establishes the provide autopilot commands to avoid it even parked, for instance, when a park- frequencies, routes, and a clearance to (made by Iris Automation), and a lidar, ing lot itself serves as the landing zone. the aircraft’s final destination. That way or laser-ranging system, to detect power The Rhaegal uses an artificial-intelligence it can find its way home even if it loses lines and other small obstructions at close landing system to spot obstacles from communication with the operator or air range (made by Attollo Engineering). The above, including vehicles, people, rocks, traffic control. DAA system also uses what is called auto- and uneven surfaces. This landing sys- The U.S. Federal Aviation Administra- matic dependent surveillance–broadcast tem can recognize many types of obsta- tion (FAA) requires that a human pilot (ADS-B), a satellite-navigation system now cles and clearings, including landing pads of a conventional aircraft must see and mandated by the FAA for virtually all air- aboard ships at sea.

Rhaegal, WINGSPAN: 18 METERS CRUISE SPEED: 180 KNOTS VERTICAL TAKEOFF PAY- LOAD: 2,450 KILOGRAMS RANGE: 1,000 NAUTICAL by the LENGTH: 18 METERS MILES (1,850 KILOMETERS) CONVENTIONAL TAKEOFF PAYLOAD: 4,540 KG Numbers HEIGHT: 3.7 METERS CEILING: 6,700 METERS

34 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG if the craft is hovering, it can land even if it loses the thrust of an entire duct unit.

RHAEGAL GETS ITS POWER from a turboshaft engine, which is basi- cally a gas turbine designed specifically to turn a rotor rather than generate thrust, as a jet engine would do. This engine drives a generator that sends power to electric motors, which turn rotor blades. These are like propellers, but they are shrouded to provide more thrust than an open rotor would and to protect both people on the ground and the blades themselves when landing near bushes or trees. The point of this turbo- electric drivetrain is to provide high efficiency in cruise flight and also high power during takeoff and landing. That heightened efficiency allows it to emit an estimated 70 percent less carbon than the Cessna 408 SkyCourier while carrying twice the load four times farther. And RHAEGAL’S ROLLOUT CAME in early May, and flight tests will begin at Edwards Air because of its turbo design, it can be Force Base, in California. Oliver Garrow [left], Sabrewing’s chief technology officer, is standing next to Lukas Flenner, the design leader. made “greener” still by using biofuel. The airframe of the first Rhaegal was completed in March 2020, and we expect flight testing will have begun by the time Data fed from all the sensors are fused lows a preplanned flight route, detecting this article appears. Sabrewing has been into a single picture of the plane’s sur- and avoiding traffic on the way and then in discussions with the FAA since 2017, roundings by a sensor-interface computer, landing at a remote location. and permission to start type certification— which monitors nearby air traffic and com- The Rhaegal’s all-composite airframe is which assures the safety of a new type of putes how to keep a safe distance away. built in sections that can be quickly and aircraft—could come shortly. When that happens, the computer sends easily repaired or even replaced in the Certification is no small administra- a message to the operator on the ground field, with a minimum of hand tools. This tive matter: Type certification for even that a possible conflict is approaching; modular design means that inspections a small private airplane can easily cost the operator then makes the decision to that used to ground aircraft for weeks or US $50 million to $100 million, but a change the flight path. If the operator does even months can now be accomplished cargo UAV should cost just a fraction as nothing, the computer will take the nec- in hours. The Rhaegal is well suited for much to certify. And the Rhaegal stands essary steps on its own. Wherever the military applications: It can fly high and first in line for such certification, ahead aircraft goes, the computer can detect fast enough to avoid ground fire or fly low of all other electric cargo carriers using bad weather up ahead and provide the to avoid radar, enabling it to bring vital vertical takeoff and landing. data to the operator, who together with supplies to isolated units. It’s even versa- So don’t be surprised if you look up air traffic controllers can make changes tile enough to whisk four casualties and sometime soon and see a Rhaegal cruis- to avoid storms, in some cases by flying two medics to a mobile hospital within ing above your head. And some Decem- well above them. the “golden hour” after an injury occurs, ber in the not-too-distant future it might What’s more, the Rhaegal is semi greatly increasing the patient’s chances be playing Santa Claus to kids in both autonomous, meaning that it can of survival. In addition, the Rhaegal has a remote villages and large industrial cen- complete its mission even if it loses com- proprietary system that allows it to land ters throughout the world. n munication with the operator and with safely if its propulsion system is damaged: POST YOUR COMMENTS AT spectrum.ieee.org/

SABREWING AIRCRAFT COMPANY AIRCRAFT SABREWING air traffic control in general. It simply fol- It can either glide to a safe landing spot or, cargodrones-jun2020

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 35 THE SEAS HAD TURNED ROUGH as a sudden squall whipped up the winds enough to howl through the rigging. And with those winds came a powerful smell of oil. Soon I could see the characteristic rainbow sheen from my position on the rail of this fishing trawler. It was May of 2016, and we were in the Gulf of Mexico, about 16 kilometers off the southeast coast of Louisiana. • “Skimmer in the water,” bellowed Kevin Kennedy, an Alaskan fisherman turned oil-spill remediation entrepreneur. Ropes groaned as the boat’s winches lowered his prototype oil-recovery system into the heaving seas. As the trawler bobbed up and down, Kennedy’s contraption rode the waves, its open mouth facing into the slick, gulping down a mix of seawater and crude oil. • The stomach of Kennedy’s device, to continue the analogy, was a novel separator, which digested the mixture of seawater and oil. By virtue of its clever engineering, it excreted essentially nothing but water. At the top of the separator’s twin tanks, the collected oil began to swell. When enough had accumulated, the oil was sucked safely into a storage tank. Then the cycle would begin again. >

36 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG With the right technology, oil spills on the water could be cleaned up much more effectively BY LARRY HERBST Fishing for Oil SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 37 How much oil there was on the water “I thought if I built a better mousetrap, Such disasters not only ravage huge, here was a subject of great dispute. But everyone would want one,” Kennedy complex, and delicate marine ecosys- its source was clear enough. In 2004, says. “Instead, the world has decided tems, but they are also economically Hurricane Ivan blasted through the Gulf they’re okay with mice.” devastating: The damage to tourism and of Mexico triggering submarine land- commercial fisheries is often measured slides that toppled a drilling platform There are countless oil tankers, barges, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. erected by New Orleans–based Taylor rigs, and pipelines that operate in, To deal with such fiascoes, engineers, Energy. The mangled tops of Taylor’s around, and through U.S. coastal waters. chemists, and inventors have devised, subsea oil wells were then buried under Every year, some of them leak some of sometimes on the fly, a grab bag of equip- some 20 meters of mud. But all that loose their contents. In a typical year the leak- ment, systems, chemicals, and proce- mud didn’t do much to stem the flow age amounts to no more than a million dures for collecting the oil and removing of oil and gas from many of these wells. gallons or so. But every now and then it, or for breaking it up or burning it in Efforts to contain the flow from the a monster mishap spills considerably place to lessen its environmental impacts. shattered wells, conducted between more: In 1989, the Exxon Valdez tanker Today, the oil-spill-management mar- 2009 and 2011, saw only partial success. ran aground on a reef and gushed some ket is a roughly US $100-billion-a-year Oil continued to flow from some of these 11 million U.S. gallons (42,000 cubic industry with hundreds of companies. wells and rise to the surface for years meters) of oil into the pristine waters But multiple studies of the biggest epi- to come. of Prince William Sound, Alaska. In 2005, sodes, including the Deepwater Horizon While this oil spill posed a nasty threat Hurricane Katrina unleashed more than disaster, have questioned the industry’s to the marine environment, it served as 8 million gallons (30,000 cubic meters) motives, methods, track record, and even a valuable testing ground for Kennedy’s from Louisiana storage facilities. And its utility. invention. This former fisherman has even those incidents pale in compari- After decades in the industry, Kennedy, spent a small fortune to prove he has son with the Deepwater Horizon disas- a small player in a big business, has created an effective system for clean- ter in 2010, in which a drilling rig leased unique perspectives on what ails it. ing up oil spilled on the water, one that by BP exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, His involvement with oil spills stretches works well in real-world conditions. But killing 11 people and ultimately releas- back to 1989, when he bought his first for all he can tell so far, it’s a system that ing some 210 million gallons (almost fishing boat and paid for a license to

nobody wants. 800,000 cubic meters) of oil. trawl for shrimp near Prince William (4) HERBST LARRY PAGES: THESE AND PAGES PREVIOUS

38 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG THICK OF THINGS: One of Kevin Kennedy’s oil skimmers was deployed at a Superfund site on the shores of Lake Superior, where it was able to separate a highly viscous creosote oil from lake waters.

Sound. He couldn’t have chosen a worse Fast forward to 2010 and the Deepwater ical dispersants—measures for address- time to begin a fishing career. On the Horizon disaster. The amount of oil ing the problem that pose environmental first day of the shrimping season, the released into the water by that well blow- hazards of their own. Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, out seemed limitless—as did the money and Kennedy found himself drafted as available to try to clean things up. Des- In 2011, in the wake of the Deepwater a first responder. He spent more than perate for solutions, BP was exploring Horizon spill, the XPrize Foundation four months corralling oil with his nets every avenue, including leasing oil-water mounted the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup and using his fish pumps to transfer the separators built by actor Kevin Costner’s XChallenge, named for the philanthro- unending gobs of sticky mess into his oil-cleanup company, Ocean Therapy pist and wife of Eric Schmidt, the former boat’s hold. Solutions, now defunct. BP ultimately executive chairman of Google. The pur- Meanwhile, millions of dollars of oil- spent some $69 billion on its response pose of the contest was to foster technical skimming equipment was airlifted to the to the disaster, including legal fees. advances in the oil-spill cleanup indus- nearby port of Valdez, most of it ulti- In the midst of those frenzied cleanup try. Kennedy submitted his system on mately proving useless. Kennedy has efforts, Kennedy packed up a hastily something of a lark and was startled to witnessed something similar every time assembled oil-recovery system and drove learn he was chosen as one of 10 final- there’s a spill nearby: There may be lots from Anchorage to Louisiana. He pre- ists from among hundreds of entrants, of cleanup activity, but often, he insists, sented himself to BP, which worked out including some of the biggest names in it’s just to put on a good show for the cam- a contract with Kennedy. But before he the oil-spill field. eras. In the end, most of the oil winds up could sign it, the oil well was capped. “All the global players were there: on the beach—“Nature’s mop,” he calls it. Although enormous oil slicks still cov- Lamor, Elastec, Nofi. Some of these are In 2004, Kennedy participated in the ered the sea, Kennedy was no longer hundred-million-dollar companies,” says cleanup that followed the grounding of allowed to participate in the cleanup. Only Kennedy. “When I finished packing up the cargo ship Selendang Ayu—a tragic an emergency, the relevant regulators felt, the shipping container to go down to accident that cost six sailors their lives gave them the flexibility to try out new the competition, I think I had $123 left and released 336,000 gallons (1,272 technology to address a spill. With the in my checking account.” His life sav- cubic meters) of fuel oil into Alaskan emergency now officially over, cleanup ings depleted, Kennedy was forced to ask waters. After that incident, he became would be done strictly by the book, follow- friends for donations to afford the plane convinced he could design gear him- ing specific U.S. Coast Guard guidelines. ticket to New Jersey, where the competi- self that could effectively recover the First and foremost, only equipment tion was being held. oil spilled on the water before it hit the from a very short list of certified systems Located in Leonardo, N.J., the Depart- beach. His design employed fishing nets would be used. So Kennedy watched ment of the Interior’s Ohmsett facil- and fish pumps, normally used to trans- from the shore as others went to work. ity houses a giant pool more than fer fish from the nets into the holds of Less than 3 percent of the oil from the 200 meters long and almost 20 meters fishing vessels. (Fish pumps use vacuum BP spill was ever recovered, despite bil- wide. Researchers there use computer- instead of whirling impellers, meaning lions spent on efforts that mostly involved ized wave generators to simulate a variety no chopped-up fish.) burning the oil in place or applying chem- of open-water environments. Whereas

TRIAL WITHOUT FIRE: Kevin Kennedy’s apparatus has been subjected to various controlled tests. In 2011, such tests were conducted as part of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup XChallenge [left]. In 2017, a smaller version of Kennedy’s apparatus underwent testing to obtain an ASTM rating [right]. In both cases, the tests were performed with a thick layer of oil [red] on the water’s surface, a condition that Kennedy points out rarely occurs in a real spill.

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 39 WHEN OIL Kevin Kennedy’s open-water oil-spill cleanup system is AND WATER being marketed under the name Sea Otter by his company, DO MIX PPR Alaska. Here’s how it works.

Two floating arms, arranged in the shape of a V, channel oil floating Oil and water flow through a pipe to the separator chambers. A one- 1 on the surface as the system is towed forward into a spill. 2 way valve in the pipe prevents backflow.

Oily water flowing horizontally Oil and water separate, while An open float valve (whose ball Releasing the vacuum allows 3 from the intake pipe fills one 4 both are being raised above 5 floats above water but below 6 water to flow out the bottom of the two chambers, which are situ- sea level by virtue of a vacuum applied oil) allows oil to be extracted, closing one‑way valve until the water level in ated side by side. by a pump through the pipe above. before water can be sucked out. the chamber reaches sea level.

the industry standard for an oil skim- fish pump. In addition, Kennedy’s system 10 finalists to be tested. Perhaps due to mer was 1,100 gallons of oil per minute, used lined fishing nets to capture the oil inexperience, perhaps to carelessness, the organizers of this XPrize competi- at the surface. This equipment would be Ohmsett staff left the valves to the col- tion sought a machine that could recover familiar to just about anyone who has lection tank closed. Kennedy’s equip- upwards of 2,500 gallons per minute worked on fishing boats, which are often ment roared to full power and promptly with no more than 30 percent water in the first on the scene of an oil spill. So exploded. The massive fish pump had the recovered fluid. there would be a minimal learning curve been trying to force 5,000 gallons a min- Kennedy had cobbled together his for such first responders. ute through a sealed valve. The pressure skimmer from used fishing gear, includ- When the XPrize competition began, ruptured pipes, bent heavy steel drive ing a powerful 5,000-gallon-per-minute Kennedy’s team was the second of the shafts, and warped various pressure seals.

40 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Chris Philpot Replacement parts arrived with just an hour to spare, narrowly allowing Kennedy to finish his test runs. Although his damaged pump could no longer run at full capacity, his skimmer delivered impressive efficiency numbers. “On some of the runs, we got 99 percent oil-to-water ratio,” he says. Kennedy didn’t win the contest—or the $1 million dollar prize his fledgling company sorely needed. The team that took first place in this XPrize competition, Elastec, fielded a device that could pump much more fluid per minute, but what it collected was only 90 percent oil. The second-prize winner’s equipment, while also pumping prodigious volumes of fluid, collected only 83 percent oil. Although Kennedy’s system demonstrated the best efficiency at the XPrize competition, buyers were not forthcom- ing. It wasn’t surprising. “The real problem is you don’t get paid by the gallon for recovered oil,” says Kennedy, who soon discovered that the motivations of the people carrying out oil-spill remediation often aren’t focused on the environ- OVERLOOKED GULF TRAGEDY: A Taylor Energy platform located 16 kilometers from ment. “It’s a compliance industry: You’re the Louisiana coast was toppled during Hurricane Ivan in 2004 and leaked oil for the required to show you have enough equip- next 14 years. The total volume of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico rivaled that of the ment to handle a spill on paper, regardless Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010. Kevin Kennedy [bottom right] visited the Taylor spill in 2016 to test his Sea Otter oil skimmer [top] under real-world conditions, where the floating of whether the stuff actually works or not.” oil varied from a thin sheen to thick patches [bottom left]. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: When there’s an oil spill, responders are typically hired by the day instead of being throughput capacity over a 24-hour Even though he thought the rules made paid for the amount of oil they collect. So period by 20 percent...to determine no sense, Kennedy needed to get his there’s little incentive for them to do a if you have sufficient recovery capac- equipment certified according to proce- better job or upgrade their equipment to ity to respond to your worst-case dis- dures established by ASTM International a design that can more efficiently sepa- charge scenario.” (an organization formerly known as rate oil from water. If anything, there’s Reliance on the equipment’s rated American Society for Testing and Mate- a reverse incentive, argues Kennedy: throughput, as determined by tank test- rials). So in 2017 he paid to have his equip- Clean up a spill twice as quickly, and ing, and assumed effectiveness is at the ment tested to establish its official ratings. you’ll make only half as much money. heart of the agreement hammered out Those recovery ratings are determined The key term used by regulators in between government and oil companies by placing skimmers in a test tank with this industry is EDRC, which stands for in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster. a 3-inch-thick (almost 8-centimeter) Effective Daily Recovery Capacity. This It’s a calculation of what theoretically layer of floating oil. They are powered is the official estimate of what a skim- would work to clean up a spill. Unfor- up for a minimum of 30 seconds, and mer can collect when deployed on an tunately, as Kennedy has seen time and the amount of oil they transfer is mea- oil spill. According to the regulations of again on actual spills, performance in sured. It’s an unrealistic test: Oil spills the Bureau of Safety and Environmen- the field rarely matches those paper esti- almost never result in a 3-inch layer of oil. tal Enforcement, EDRC is computed by mates, which are based on tests that Oil slicks floating on the ocean are usu-

LARRY HERBST (3) HERBST LARRY “multiplying the manufacturer’s rated don’t reflect real-world conditions. ally measured in | CONTINUED ON PAGE 49

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 41 FACE TIME: Makoto Nishimura [left] and his team designed Gakutensoku’s head so that it could express human affect. THE SHORT, STRANGE LIFE OF THE FIRST FRIENDLY ROBOT

Japan’s Gakutensoku was a giant pneumatic automaton that toured through Asia— until it mysteriously disappeared BY YULIA FRUMER

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 43 IN 1923, A PLAY FEATURING ARTIFICIAL HUMANS OPENED IN TOKYO.

Rossum’s Universal Robots—or R.U.R., as it had become known— had premiered two years earlier in Prague and had already become a worldwide sensation. The play, written by Karel Čapek, describes the creation of enslaved synthetic humans, or robots—a term derived from robota, the Czech word for “forced labor.” Čapek’s robots, originally made to serve their human masters, gained consciousness and rebelled, soon killing all humans on Earth. In the play’s final scene, the robots reveal that they possess emotions just like we do, and the audience is left wondering whether they would also achieve the ability to reproduce—the only thing still separating robots from humans. The play was deeply disturbing for Makoto Nishimura, a 40-year-old professor of marine biology at the Hokkaido Impe- rial University, in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo. As Nishimura would later explain in a newspaper article, he was troubled because the play convincingly portrayed “the emergence of a perverse world in which humans become subordinate to artificial humans.” A machine modeled on a human being but designed to work as a slave implies that the model itself (that is, we humans) are slaves, too, he argued. policemen were introduced, and in his writings Nishimura More concerning for Nishimura was that a struggle between also mentions mechanical receptionists, boat operators, and humans and artificial humans was an aberration, something traffic cops. He may have seen some of these machines while that went against nature. he was living in New York City from 1916 to 1919 and pursuing Perhaps he wouldn’t have been so upset by a work of fiction a doctorate at Columbia University. if he hadn’t witnessed how this fantasy was already becom- From our perspective, those machines seem more like curi- ing a reality in his world. He was familiar with early European osities than working devices. But for Nishimura, their potential and Japanese automata—mechanical figures devised to exhibit to perform useful labor was as convincing as today’s new AI autonomous behaviors. While some of these mechanical won- and robots are to us. As a scientist he had witnessed attempts ders displayed noble or creative abilities, like playing musical to create artificial cells in the laboratory, which only reinforced instruments, drawing, writing calligraphy, or shooting arrows, his belief that artificial human beings would one day populate others carried out mindless tasks. The latter were the ones Earth. The question was, what kind of artificial humans would that troubled Nishimura. those be, and what kind of relationship would they have with By the end of the 19th century, the world had also seen a vari- biological humans? ety of “steam men”—walking humanoids powered by internal In Nishimura’s opinion, the character of artificial humans—or steam engines (later models were powered by electric motors any technology, for that matter—was determined by the inten- or gasoline engines) that appeared to pull carriages or floats. tions of their creators. And the intent behind carriage-pulling, Many of these were developed in the United States. In the steam-powered humanoids was to create workers enslaved

early 20th century, mechanical nurses, beauty queens, and by their human masters. That, in Nishimura’s mind, would CHISHIKI KAGAKU ABOVE: AND PAGES PREVIOUS

44 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG GENTLE GIANT: Makoto Nishimura [above, to the left of Gakutensoku] and an assistant, Bōji Nagao, pose with the robot, which was more than 3 meters tall, including its pedestal. The mechanism inside its head [left] allowed it to move its eyes, mouth, and neck.

inevitably lead to the formation of an R.U.R.-style exploited A curious thing about Nishimura’s decision to underclass that was bound to rebel. build a robot was that he wasn’t an engineer Fearing a scenario that he described as humanity “destroyed and possessed no expertise in mechanical or by the pinnacle of its creation,” Nishimura decided to inter- electrical systems. He was a marine biologist vene, hoping to change the course of history. His solution with a Ph.D. in botany. When he first encoun- was to create a different kind of artificial human, one that tered Čapek’s R.U.R., he was finishing an article on the cytol- would celebrate nature and manifest humanity’s loftiest ogy of marimo—aquatic moss balls endemic to the cold Lake ideals—a robot that was not a slave but a friend, and even an Akan in northeast Hokkaido. inspirational model, to people. In 1926, he resigned his pro- Yet it was precisely his background in biology that motivated fessorship, moved to Osaka, and started building his ideal Nishimura. An avid supporter of evolutionary theory, he was artificial human. nevertheless skeptical of the idea of “survival of the fittest” Nishimura’s creation was a direct response to one partic- and loathed the rhetoric of social Darwinism, which pitted ular machine: Westinghouse’s Televox, which debuted in humans against one another. Instead he favored “mutual aid” 1927. Televox was a clunky, vaguely primate-shaped being as the key driver of evolutionary change. He claimed that the designed to connect telephone calls. It exemplified all that core natural dynamic was collaboration, and that success by Nishimura had come to fear. The creation of such a slavelike one individual (or one species) could be broadly beneficial. artificial human was not just shortsighted but also contrary “Today, human advances are framed in terms of a ‘conquest to what Nishimura, the scientist, conceived of as the laws of of nature,’ ” Nishimura wrote in Earth’s Belly (Daichi no har-

HIROSHI MATSUO/OSAKA SCIENCE MUSEUM SCIENCE MATSUO/OSAKA HIROSHI nature. It was an abomination. awata), a 1931 book detailing his philosophy of nature. “Rather

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 45 than reflecting awe of the natural world, such triumph is more about kindling the struggle between humans.” But look at REBUILDING human society, he urged: “We cannot ignore the fact that THE GIANT ROBOT humans achieved civilization through collaborative effort.” Nishimura’s take on evolution and natural hierarchies had a THAT SMILED profound effect on his views of artificial humans. This set him There were no blueprints or apart from European writers like Samuel Butler, H.G. Wells, detailed specifications, but and Čapek, who favored the “survival of the fittest” model Japanese researchers were and postulated that the success of humanoid machines would able to create a faithful copy spell doom for humankind. Nishimura insisted that flesh-and- of Gakutensoku blood humans could benefit from the evolution of artificial humans—if the artificial humans were designed to be inspira- In 1992, Gakutensoku was featured in a promotional tional models rather than slaves. film titled Osaka—the Dynamic City. The movie The artificial human Nishimura created was indeed meant portrayed the city as a futuristic technological hub, with Gakutensoku symbolizing Osaka’s long to awe. Picture a giant seated on a gilded pedestal with its eyes history of innovation. For the purpose of the movie, closed, seemingly lost in thought. In its left hand, it holds an producers commissioned a small-scale model. But electric light with a crystal-shaped bulb, which it slowly lifts even though the model looked like Gakutensoku, the inner mechanism was entirely redesigned with more into the air. At the exact moment the lightbulb illuminates, modern technology, such as electric motors and digital the giant opens its eyes, as if having a realization. Seemingly controllers. After the movie was shot, the model was pleased with its eureka moment, it smiles. Soon, it shifts its moved to the Osaka Science Museum. In 2007, one of the museum’s researchers, attention to a blank piece of paper lying in front of it and begins Nōzō Hasegawa, decided that having a “fake” to write, eagerly recording its newfound insights. model didn’t do justice to the technological legacy Nishimura refused to call his creation a “robot.” Instead, he of Gakutensoku, and set about creating a more faithful, historically accurate reconstruction. The bestowed upon it the name Gakutensoku, which means “learn- reconstruction process began in April 2007 and took ing from the rules of nature.” He considered his creation the first a little over a year at a cost of 20 million yen (about US $200,000). Hasegawa didn’t have much to go on—just a few photos and articles by Nishimura and others. The photos were black-and-white, old, and somewhat blurry, and most were taken from the same angle. Moreover, looking at the different photos, Hasegawa realized that Nishimura must have made changes to the design over time, since the photos were not all consistent.

member of a new species, whose raison d’être was to inspire biological humans and facilitate human evolution by expanding our intellectual horizons. Nishimura rendered the word gakutensoku in katakana, a Japanese script also used for the scientific names of biological organisms. Nishimura envisioned future gakutensoku continuously evolving and becoming more complex.

Exactly how Gakutensoku operated has long intrigued historians and roboticists. Just a few years after its completion, the machine was lost under somewhat mysterious circum- stances (more on that later). A few photos of the original design exist. But our only glimpse into its inner workings comes from an article Nishimura wrote in 1931. A talented writer, he often sacrificed technical detail for the sake of captivating prose and poetic expression. CROWD PLEASER: Gakutensoku attracted and awed visitors at Gakutensoku’s chief mechanism was set in motion by an exhibitions in Japan, Korea, and China. To support the robot’s body, Makoto Nishimura [above, in hat and coat] and his team built a air compressor. Presumably the compressor was powered pedestal that displayed the robot’s name on the front panel. by electricity. The airflow was controlled by a rotating drum (2) MUSEUM SCIENCE MATSUO/OSAKA HIROSHI

46 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG Nishimura’s own articles offered only Hasegawa didn’t know, for example, whether the expression from collapsing “like a mad man,” superficial details on Gakutensoku’s wreath of leaves that adorned its head was gold as Nishimura described it. Replicating this construction and operation. For example, or green. mechanism proved beyond the means of the he described the height of Gakutensoku as Hasegawa was able to re-create Osaka Science Museum team. And so, although “8 shaku”—a Japanese unit of length, equal to Gakutensoku’s serene smile [above, left], the motions of the 21st-century Gakutensoku are 30.3 centimeters (11.9 inches)—“above the produced by the flow of air into the corners of the produced by compressed air, as in the original, chest,” which isn’t very specific if you don’t eyes and eyelids. He also enabled Gakutensoku the flow of air is controlled by a computer. know the dimensions of the rest of the body. to move its head and neck, as described in various The reconstructed Gakutensoku still greets Hasegawa had to analyze a photo in which articles and documents, as well as lift its crystal visitors to the Osaka Science Museum, reminding Nishimura appears next to Gakutensoku in order “inspiration light” and simulate a writing motion. us of the genesis of the wondrous humanoid to arrive at his estimation of 3.2 meters (from The reconstruction of Gakutensoku’s inner robots produced in Japan today, and echoing the floor, including the pedestal). Then there mechanism [above, right], however, was tricky. the motto Nishimura inscribed on the wall of was the question of Gakutensoku’s original Particularly challenging was the rotating drum his workshop: “According to the origins and colors. Nishimura said that it was painted gold, designed to gradually increase and decrease the evolution of living beings—from simple to but with only black-and-white photos available, the flow of air, to prevent Gakutensoku’s facial complex.” —Y.F.

affixed with pegs. When the mechanism was activated, the pegs at the idea of using pneumatics after playing the shakuhachi opened and closed the valves on numerous rubber pipes that (traditional Japanese bamboo flute) and experimenting with sent air to particular parts of Gakutensoku’s body and caused differences in the airflow. By varying the airflow and using -dif them to move. Similar to the mechanisms of classic automata, ferent kinds of rubber with different elasticities, Nishimura the arrangement of the pegs on the drum allowed for a rudi- was able to achieve complex, layered movement, which he mentary programming of the sequence of motions. Unlike described “as if within a big wave there were a medium-size in traditional automata, only the pegs and the drum were wave and inside it another tiny wave as well.” mechanical, while the rest of the mechanism was pneumatic. For Nishimura, the most important feature of Gakutensoku Nishimura strove to create “naturalness” in his machine. was its ability to express human affect. Again, this was the result As he described in his article, he sought to “transcend the of carefully modulating the compressed air flowing through mechanical look” and the noisiness and clumsiness of “tin- the rubber tubes. Prolonged pressure put on the outer bottom can” bodies by eliminating as much metal as possible from corners of the eyes and to the side of the mouth resulted in a Gakutensoku’s frame. Only the robot’s “skeleton” was made smile. Slight airflow applied to one side of the neck produced of metal. For his creature’s soft tissue, he used rubber, the a contemplative head tilt. Pleased with the results, Nishimura elasticity of which “made the movement much more natural, wrote that “compared to the American artificial humans, only smooth, and without any sense of forced action.” Additionally, ours has the ability to be expressive.” “unlike the American robots” that relied on steam, Gakutensoku But when the flow of air to Gakutensoku’s face was turned was set in motion by compressed air, which Nishimura consid- off, its facial expression suddenly and disturbingly collapsed.

OSAKA SCIENCE MUSEUM (2) MUSEUM SCIENCE OSAKA ered to be a more “natural” power. He claimed that he arrived Nishimura and his team had to invent a device to allow the

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 47 so that even those who could not see it in person had an idea of what it looked like. Then Gakutensoku disappeared. Nishimura himself never explained what happened. In an interview published in 1991, the scientist’s son Kō Nishimura said the automaton vanished en route to Germany during the 1930s. But Kō was only a child at the time of the disappearance. While I corroborated that Gakutensoku indeed traveled to Korea and China, I have found no record of its being sent to Germany. Even if the claim is true, we don’t know where exactly it vanished or who took it. Despite its mysterious disappearance, Gakutensoku left a legacy that continues to reverberate in Japanese pop cul- ture and robotics. During World War II, Japanese animators produced propaganda-heavy cartoons in which robots were depicted as inspirational heroes that used their supreme pow- CLUNKY CONTRAPTION: In the late 1920s, Westinghouse unveiled the Televox, portraying it as a futuristic robot ers to assist humans. In the 1950s, Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy servant. The Televox exemplified the idea of robots as the (Tetsuwan Atomu, or “Mighty Atom”) solidified the image of slavelike machines that Makoto Nishimura had come to robots as emotionally sophisticated saviors driven by their fear, motivating him to build Gakutensoku. empathy for other beings. I haven’t seen any concrete evidence that Tezuka knew of Gakutensoku, but he grew up in gradual release of air pressure, which they described as “mul- the same suburb of Osaka where Nishimura lived and worked tiple wart-shaped convex parts aligned on one rotating axis…. as a schoolteacher during the war. Only when this modification was put in place did Gakutensoku Gakutensoku itself was featured as a character in a 1988 finally stop looking like a mad man.” science-fiction movie titled Teito Monogatari (sometimes trans- Nishimura emphasized the similarities between the struc- lated as Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis), in which the robot helps ture of his artificial human and the anatomy of real human defeat the magical powers of a demonic villain. Nishimura, who bodies. He claimed, for instance, that the compressed air that died in 1956 at age 72, makes an appearance, played by his son circulated inside Gakutensoku had a function similar to that of Kō, who by then was one of Japan’s best-known actors. The blood. Humans acquire energy by consuming food, and they movie in turn inspired several books and TV shows exploring distribute this energy through their circulatory system. Arti- the origins of Japanese robots. In 1995 an asteroid spotted by ficial humans, according to Nishimura, did something similar: Japanese astronomers was named 9786 Gakutensoku. They acquired electrical energy, then distributed this energy Then there’s Gakutensoku’s impact on Japanese robotics. to different parts of their bodies by means of compressed air Above all, many robot makers are guided by the underlying flowing in rubber tubes. philosophy that machines are not in opposition to nature Nishimura’s deep interest in biologically inspired design but rather part of it. Robots built in Japan from the 1970s sometimes pushed him into philosophical semantics. “Humans on have a number of design characteristics reminiscent of naturally get energy from their mother’s womb, while artificial those outlined by Nishimura—a preference for silent motion humans get it from humans,” he wrote in Earth’s Belly. “So if and the use of pneumatics; an emphasis on the textures of humans are Nature’s children, artificial humans are born by the robot’s “skin” and “face”; and most important, an atten- the power of the human hand and thus might be referred to tiveness to how people perceive and respond to a robot’s as Nature’s grandchildren.” humanoid features. Since the ’90s Japanese roboticists have channeled increas- Gakutensoku debuted in September 1928 at ing efforts into cognitive robotics, exploring how humans an exhibition in Kyoto celebrating the recently think and behave in attempts to create likeable robot designs. crowned Emperor Shōwa (known in the West Their aim is to build robots that not only perform tasks but as Hirohito). Reflecting on the exhibition sev- also elicit positive emotional reactions in their users—robots eral years later in Earth’s Belly, Nishimura that are friendly, in other words. It would be a stretch to say reported that Gakutensoku awed the crowds. Despite its being that Nishimura single-handedly shaped Japan’s view of robot- over 3 meters tall, observers said that it “looked more human ics, but the fact remains that few Japanese today fear R.U.R.- than many expressionless humans.” The following year, like scenarios of humanity being annihilated by their robotic Gakutensoku was taken on tour and exhibited in Tokyo, Osaka, overlords. As if fulfilling Nishimura’s vision for a desirable and Hiroshima, as well as in Korea and China, where the arti- relationship between humans and artificial humans, the com- ficial human “work[ed] from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.” greeting spec- mon adage in Japan nowadays is that “robots are friends.” n tators. Newspapers in Japan, China, and Korea reported on

the exhibition and published photographs of the gentle giant, POST YOUR COMMENTS AT spectrum.ieee.org/japaneserobot-jun2020 IMAGES ARCHIVES/GETTY UNDERWOOD

48 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG FISHING FOR OIL be certified as having a compliant spill- tors that have deep inventories of low- CONTINUED FROM PAGE 41 response plan, he contends. In the event efficiency skimmers—equipment that is of an actual spill, Kennedy says, most of still compliant with current guidelines— millimeters. And the thickness of an oil that gear is useless: “Good luck cleaning could suddenly be forced to invest in sheen, like that seen at the Taylor spill, anything up with pumps and diapers!” new skimmers.” For many, moving the is measured in micrometers. In recent years, the Bureau of Safety goal posts would simply cost too much. “So many tests are really just a pumping and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) The current rules, with their lack of exercise,” says Robert Watkins, a consul- and a consultancy called Genwest have emphasis on efficiency, accept pump- tant with Anchorage-based ASRC Energy worked to develop a better guide, hoping a large amount of oily water into your Services who specializes in spill response. ing to replace Effective Daily Recovery tanks—a mixture that must then be dis- “But that isn’t a true demonstration of Capacity with a different metric: Esti- posed of as hazardous waste. The bet- response.” The value of ASTM ratings, mated Recovery System Potential (ERSP). ter goal is to remove only the oil, and he explains, is allowing a reproducible This new measure looks at the entire sys- Kennedy’s equipment is about as good as “apples-to-apples” comparison of oil-spill tem functionality and delivers far more you can get in this regard, with its most equipment. He doesn’t argue, however, realistic numbers. recent ASTM-certified oil-to-water rating that apples are the right choice in the A highly efficient system like Kennedy’s being 99 percent. first place. would stack up favorably according to What’s more, that “test tank” rating Kennedy knows that it’s not difficult ERSP calculations. But according to Elise matches Kennedy’s experiences with to game the system to get high numbers. DeCola, an oil-spill contingency planning his equipment under real-world condi- According to ASTM’s testing rules, even expert with Alaska-based Nuka Research tions. Whether on the Taylor slick with its a monstrous pump that doesn’t separate and Planning Group, there has been lim- micrometer-thick sheen, a Lake Superior oil from water at all can still get credit for ited adoption of the ERSP calculator by Superfund site with spilled creosote as doing the job. If a company stockpiles the industry. viscous as peanut butter, or a toxic spill enough of those pumps in a warehouse “While BSEE recommends ERSP as in California’s Long Beach Harbor, his somewhere—or maintains enough barges an industry best practice, they do not efficiency numbers have always been loaded with oil-absorbent pads—it will require its use,” says DeCola. “Opera- very high, he claims.

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SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 49 Kennedy attributes this performance to his unique sepa- ration system. It uses a pair of collection vessels, in which

w the oil floats to the top of the mixture taken in. A specially Best Ne Journal in 15 STM 20 designed float valve closes once the oil is drawn off the top. That extraction is done by a vacuum pump, which has the virtue of creating a partial vacuum, causing any water that gets caught up in the oil to boil off. The resultant water vapor is exhausted to the air before it can condense and dilute the Become a recovered oil. The fuel oil his system collects often has even lower moisture content than it did when it came fresh out published author of the refinery. Yet even with a skimmer that has remarkable perfor- in 4 to 6 weeks. mance, Kennedy has faced an uphill climb to find buyers. In 2016, he offered his equipment to Taylor Energy, only Published online only, IEEE Access is ideal to be turned down. For the next two years, he repeatedly for authors who want to quickly announce approached the Coast Guard, offering evidence that the Taylor Spill was larger than reported and insisting he had recent developments, methods, or new a potential solution. Even on a no-cure-no-pay basis, the products to a global audience. Coast Guard wasn’t interested. “The Coast Guard shines when it tackles major crises, like IEEE Access is a multidisciplinary Hurricane Katrina or the devastation in Puerto Rico,” says journal that allows you to: retired Coast Guard Capt. Craig Barkley Lloyd, now president and general manager of Alaska Clean Seas. “But this was a • Reach millions of global users through the slowly boiling frog.” IEEE Xplore® digital library with free access to all It wasn’t until 2018 that the Coast Guard was finally goaded to • Submit multidisciplinary articles that do not fit act. The Justice Department had hired Oscar Garcia-Pineda, a neatly in traditional journals consultant who had studied the Taylor Spill, to do an indepen- • Expect a rapid yet rigorous peer review— dent assessment, which found the spill to be far more expansive a key factor why IEEE Access is included in than previously reported. According to the new calculations, Web of Science (and has an Impact Factor) the total volume of oil released over time rivaled that of the • Establish yourself as an industry pioneer by epic Deepwater Horizon spill. Picking up on that analysis, in contributing to trending, interdisciplinary topics October 2018 a Washington Post story labeled it “one of the in one of the Special Sections worst offshore disasters in U.S. history.” In response to that newspaper article, the Coast Guard began • Integrate multimedia and track usage and to look for solutions in earnest. It quickly hired the Louisiana- citation data for each published article based Couvillion Group to build a giant collection apparatus that • Connect with readers through commenting could be lowered onto the seafloor to capture the leaking oil • Publish without a page limit for before it reached the surface. In the spring of 2019, Couvillion only $1,750 per article installed this system, which has since been collecting more than 1,000 gallons of oil a day. For 14 years after the Taylor spill commenced, oil covered large swaths of the sea, and not a single gallon of that oil was IEEE Access... recovered until Kennedy demonstrated that it could be done. a multidisciplinary The incentives just weren’t there. Indeed, there were plenty of open access disincentives. That’s the situation that some regulators, envi- journal that’s ronmentalists, and spill-cleanup entrepreneurs, including worthy of this former fisherman, are trying to change. With the proper the IEEE. equipment, oil recovered from a spill at sea might even be sold at a profit. During Kennedy’s trial runs at the site of the Taylor spill in 2016, the crew of the shrimp boat he hired began to realize spilled oil could be worth more than shrimp. With the right technology and a market to support them—those same men Learn more at: might someday be fishing for oil. n ieeeaccess.ieee.org 17-PUB-013 3/17 POST YOUR COMMENTS AT spectrum.ieee.org/oilcleanup-jun2020

50 | JUN 2020 | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG PAST FORWARD BY ALLISON MARSH

THE FIRST LAPTOP IN ORBIT It was about the size of a three-ring binder and weighed 4.5 kilograms. the Compass wasn’t intended for the consumer market. Instead, it found a Introduced in 1982, the Graphical Retrieval Information Display (GRiD) home with NASA, becoming standard equipment on space shuttle missions Compass was the first portable computer to feature a clamshell design. through the early 1990s. The space agency’s trust in the computer was The bright amber of the laptop’s 21.6-centimeter plasma screen could be not misplaced: Reportedly, the GRiD flying aboard Challenger survived “viewed from any angle and under any lighting conditions,” according to its the January 1986 crash. ■ maker, GRiD Systems Corp. The computer was also exceedingly rugged. Sales reps claimed they would drop one in front of prospective buyers to ↗ For more on the GRiD Compass,

MATT FLYNN/COOPER HEWITT/SMITHSONIAN DESIGN MUSEUM DESIGN HEWITT/SMITHSONIAN FLYNN/COOPER MATT show off its durability. With a price tag of US $8,150 (about $23,000 today), see spectrum.ieee.org/pastforward-jun2020

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | JUN 2020 | 51 The Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) is Germany’s university excellence center for digital engineering. The Faculty of Digital Engineering, established jointly by HPI and the University of Potsdam, offers a practical and engineering-oriented study program in computer science that is unique throughout Germany.

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