Top Tech 2019

THE U.S. GETS HOW ETHEREUM WILL IT’S SHOWTIME FOR HARD-DRIVE SERIOUS ABOUT WIND CLEAN UP ITS ACT PEROVSKITE CELLS FACE-OFF 800–MW array will A vast project aims to Can a new tech ensure Two contenders vie power the Northeast rein in power use solar’s conquest? for a $24 billion industry P. 25 P. 29 P. 37 P. 44 SpaceX VS. FOR THE TECHNOLOGY INSIDER | 01.19 Blue Origin The biggest rivalry in space TOP heats up P. 22 TECH SpaceX's Starship/Super Heavy (aka “BFR,” left) and Blue Origin's 2019 New Glenn rocket (right) SPECIAL REPORT Zurich Instruments introduces the first commercial Quantum Computing Control System NEW

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29 ETHEREUM WILL CUT BACK 44 THE FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE ITS ABSURD ENERGY USE OF THE DISK DRIVE The cryptocurrency company plans to cut Seagate Technologies and Western Digital its electricity consumption by 99 percent. have developed dueling technologies to TOP By Peter Fairley advance magnetic storage. By Amy Nordrum 33 TAXIS WITHOUT DRIVERS— OR STEERING WHEELS 48 SILICON ANODES WILL GIVE Cars that safely drive themselves while LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES A BOOST TECH unsupervised demand new road rules. Cells with silicon-rich anodes will let By Philip E. Ross batteries hold more energy. By David Schneider 35 PHONE SERVICE BY BALLOON When mobile phones are a population’s 50 SPACEX’S 2019 lifeline but rurual areas lack infrastruc- SPACE-INTERNET WOES ture, look to the sky. Despite a successful test satellite launch, By Michael Koziol Starlink faces tech and business challenges. We give you the By Michael Koziol editorial team’s picks 37 PEROVSKITE SOLAR CELLS: READY FOR PRIME TIME SHORT TAKES for projects to watch Oxford PV will bring its tandem perovskite Breakout tech stories to keep an eye solar cells to market this year. on in 2019. By Tekla S. Perry this year: 24 cutting- By Jean Kumagai 23 Israel’s Lunar Lander • 26 Super edge endeavors that conducting Wind Turbines • 28 3D Metal 40 A NEW SPIN ON ROBOT Printing • 31 Learning About AI • 34 Flying showcase technology ACTUATORS Car Sales • 36 Electric Planes • 39 China’s Can a startup solve the actuator issue with Green Power • 42 Bullet Trains Surge its stronger, faster direct-drive motor? around the world. P. 21 • 43 Finland’s Advanced Nuke • 46 Weather By Erico Guizzo Forecasting • 49 Darth Vader in VR • 42 MACHINE LEARNING 51 DIY Multichip Modules 25 THE U.S. FINALLY GOES PREDICTS HOME PRICES BIG ON OFFSHORE WIND Real estate is big business—especially for Construction is set to begin on the 800-MW home price-estimation algorithms. Vineyard Wind Project. By David Schneider By Jean Kumagai 27 “IRON MAN” SUITS ARE COMING TO FACTORY FLOORS Assembly-line workers will soon wear On the cover Illustration for IEEE Spectrum by Blood Bros. robotic exoskeletons for super strength. By Eliza Strickland

22 SPACEX AND BLUE ORIGIN FACE OFF You’re used to seeing rivalries between countries play out in space. Now watch two U.S. companies jockey for position. By Jeff Foust

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY Edmon de Haro SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 01 DEPARTMENTS_01.13DEPARTMENTS_01.19

07 14 06 Online News Resources Opinion spectrum.ieee.org Drone Delivery for The Poco Evolution The Trillion-Device World Meet the World’s Human Organs How a camera turned into a ARM CEO Simon Segars says the Creepiest Robot When every second matters, aerial programmable hand-held console. coming fifth wave of computing is far The Robot Rankings section is one of transport may be the best option. By Grant Sinclair more than a mere Internet of Things. the most popular in IEEE Spectrum’s by Michelle Hampson By Tekla S. Perry Robots Guide. And while robots 16 Tools & Toys: The Consumer move up and down the rankings 09 Plant Breeders Want to Auto- Electronics Hall of Fame 03 Back Story almost every day, one robot has mate Their Most Tedious Tasks 17 Geek Life: A Partial 04 Contributors remained at the top of the Creepiest 10 Microsoft Seeks AIs That Can Resurrection of Minitel 18 Internet of Everything: Timing Is Key Ranking for months: Telenoid, a Play Minecraft Together 18 Q&A: Why We Write 19 Numbers Don’t Lie: Energy remote-presence device from 12 A Safer Way for Lithium-Ion Bad Software Intensity and Passenger Travel Japan—and a very creepy robot. To Batteries to Fail 60 Past Forward: My Friend Furby 20 Reflections: What Makes a see the full rankings, go to https:// Great University? robots.ieee.org/robots/

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Tech Insider / Webinars The Institute Available at spectrum.ieee.org/webinars Available at theinstitute.ieee.org

On-Demand Webinar: System Simulation and Control— Improve the Overall TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMS CLOTHING INDUSTRY Performance of Your Mechatronic Systems Using Altair Activate Learn how smart fabric is being used in garments such as On-Demand Webinar: Fully Coupled Internal Space Charging Simulations athletic wear and work gear. With EMA3D-Internal On-Demand Webinar: Overcome Critical Power Consumption Testing INTRODUCING MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT Life Challenges Fellow Kurt E. Petersen is being recognized for his pioneering work in microelectromechanical systems.

White Papers NEW ETHICS CERTIFICATION PROGRAM The IEEE Available at spectrum.ieee.org/whitepapers Standards Association has introduced one of the first programs that develops metrics and processes for autonomous and Simulating Lightning Attachment and Strikes on Aircraft intelligent systems. Boost Automotive Test Efficiency with HIL Testing

IEEE SPECTRUM (ISSN 0018-9235) is published monthly by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2019 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., 3 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016-5997, U.S.A. Volume No. 56, Issue No. 1, North American edition. 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: $21.40 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

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02 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG BACK STORY_

RECIPE FOR A HARD DISK ometimes, the hardest part of telling a story is NEW deciding what to leave out. Amy Nordrum, IEEE Spectrum’s high performance news manager [above], faced some tough decisions after spending a day at Seagate Technology’s research and develop- industrial connectors ment facility in Fremont, Calif., while reporting “The Fight for for demanding applications the Future of the Disk Drive,” for this issue. She was there to learn about heat-assisted magnetic recording Introducing the NEW S (HAMR), one of two technologies that manufacturers hope will M225 2.00mm pitch, allow them to write four to five times as much data to every disk within cable-to-board industrial a hard drive. During her visit, she even donned clean-room gear and saw connector range. how magnetic disks are made—an extremely precise industrial process that involves a surprising amount of guesswork. Featuring an innovative 3-finger Every magnetic disk starts out as a piece of flat glass shaped like contact which provides resistance against industrial a doughnut. A conveyor belt carries a tray of them into massive levels of vibration and shock. multimillion-dollar machines (part of one is shown in the photo). Once inside, each doughnut is heated and whisked through a series of The unique rubber locking collars vacuum-sealed chambers that produce a steady chorus of phtt, phtt, phtt and fixing pin system enable as they open and close to admit and discharge the glass rings. fast and secure mating with Inside these chambers hang sheets of magnetic materials, such as added strain relief. iron and platinum. In a process called “sputtering,” ions from a gaseous plasma blast the sheets and shake loose the particles within. Then, as Current rating of 3A each smooth glass doughnut passes by, some of the particles adhere per contact to it, forming a thin magnetic layer on both sides of the disk. Later, Polarized and fully technicians burnish each disk’s surface and add lubricant. shrouded housings In order to improve hard-drive performance, Seagate researchers Temp range: -55°C to +125°C must constantly tweak how they deposit the many layers of a disk. Every day, the company’s machines sputter hundreds of disks at varying temperatures and pressures. 225 Steve Hwang, Seagate’s vice president of development, told Nordrum the exercise is “almost like cooking,” adding, “certainly there’s a theoretical understanding” of what might improve a disk’s performance. “But a lot of times,” he says, “it’s real trial and error.” ■ harwin.com/m225

CITING ARTICLES IN IEEE SPECTRUM IEEE Spectrum publishes an international and a North American edition, as

01.19 indicated at the bottom of each page. Both have the same editorial content, but because of differences in advertising, page numbers may differ. In citations, you should include the issue designation. For example, Past Forward is in IEEE

SEAGATE Spectrum, Vol. 56, no. 1 (INT), January 2019, p. 56, or in IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 56, no. 1 (NA), January 2019, p. 60.

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 03 Harwin M225 IEEE Spectrum Jan 19.indd 1 11/12/2018 16:08 CONTRIBUTORS_

EDITOR IN CHIEF ADVERTISING PRODUCTION +1 732 562 6334 Jeff Foust Susan Hassler, [email protected] ADVERTISING PRODUCTION MANAGER EXECUTIVE EDITOR Felicia Spagnoli, [email protected] Foust is a senior staff writer at Glenn Zorpette, [email protected] SENIOR ADVERTISING PRODUCTION COORDINATOR SpaceNews. In this issue, he reports EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, DIGITAL Nicole Evans Gyimah, [email protected] on two private space companies: Elon Musk’s Harry Goldstein, [email protected] SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin [p. 22]. He’s MANAGING EDITOR EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD covered both companies extensively—he attended Elizabeth A. Bretz, [email protected] Susan Hassler, Chair; David C. Brock, Sudhir Dixit, Limor the first launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket SENIOR ART DIRECTOR Fried, Robert Hebner, Joseph J. Helble, Grant Jacoby, Leah Mark Montgomery, [email protected] Jamieson, Jelena Kovacevic, Deepa Kundur, Norberto last February, for example—and figures there’s SENIOR EDITORS Lerendegui, Steve Mann, Allison Marsh, Jacob Østergaard, lots more in store for 2019. Can he be impartial in Stephen Cass (Resources), [email protected] Umit Ozguner, Thrasos N. Pappas, H. Vincent Poor, John Rogers, his reporting? “Sure,” says Foust. “I don’t own a Erico Guizzo (Digital), [email protected] Jonathan Rothberg, Umar Saif, Takao Someya, Maurizio Tesla, although I do shop at Amazon.com.” Jean Kumagai, [email protected] Vecchione, Yu Zheng, Kun Zhou, Edward Zyszkowski Samuel K. Moore, [email protected] Tekla S. Perry, [email protected] MANAGING DIRECTOR, PUBLICATIONS Michael B. Forster Philip E. Ross, [email protected] Michelle Hampson David Schneider, [email protected] EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave., 17th Floor, Hampson, a freelance writer in Brandon Palacio, [email protected] New York, NY 10016-5997 Vancouver, reports in this issue about PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR Randi Klett, [email protected] TEL: +1 212 419 7555 FAX: +1 212 419 7570 ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Erik Vrielink, [email protected] BUREAU Palo Alto, Calif.; Tekla S. Perry +1 650 752 6661 drones that deliver human organs [p. 7]. The SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR daughter of a scientist who frequently talked Eliza Strickland, [email protected] DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, about cell biology at dinnertime, she finds her own NEWS MANAGER Amy Nordrum, [email protected] MEDIA & ADVERTISING Mark David, [email protected] conversations lately turning to human evolution ASSOCIATE EDITORS and the new gene-editing technologies such as Willie D. Jones (Digital), [email protected] CRISPR. “I love how technology is being explored Michael Koziol, [email protected] REPRINT SALES +1 212 221 9595, ext. 319 SENIOR COPY EDITOR Joseph N. Levine, [email protected] REPRINT PERMISSION / LIBRARIES Articles may be to enhance humans,” Hampson says. “It kind of COPY EDITOR Michele Kogon, [email protected] photocopied for private use of patrons. A per-copy fee must frightens me, but I love it at the same time.” EDITORIAL RESEARCHER Alan Gardner, [email protected] be paid to the Copyright Clearance Center, 29 Congress ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT St., Salem, MA 01970. For other copying or republication, Ramona L. Foster, [email protected] contact Managing Editor, IEEE Spectrum. CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Evan Ackerman, Mark Anderson, Emile Holmewood Robert N. Charette, Peter Fairley, Tam Harbert, Mark Harris, COPYRIGHTS AND TRADEMARKS IEEE Spectrum is a David Kushner, Robert W. Lucky, Prachi Patel, Morgen E. Peck, registered trademark owned by The Institute of Electrical Holmewood is the artist behind the Tokyo- Richard Stevenson, Lawrence Ulrich, Paul Wallich and Electronics Engineers Inc. Reflections, Spectral based illustration studio Blood Bros., DIRECTOR, PERIODICALS PRODUCTION SERVICES Peter Tuohy Lines, and Technically Speaking are trademarks of IEEE. named for a 1990s video game. He created the cover EDITORIAL & WEB PRODUCTION MANAGER Roy Carubia Responsibility for the substance of articles rests upon the and several of the illustrations for this issue’s Top SENIOR ELECTRONIC LAYOUT SPECIALIST Bonnie Nani authors, not IEEE, its organizational units, or its members. PRODUCT MANAGER, DIGITAL Shannan Dunlap Articles do not represent official positions of IEEE. Readers Tech report. Known for colorful images inspired by WEB PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Jacqueline L. Parker may post comments online; comments may be excerpted for Japanese manga and anime, Holmewood describes MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION SPECIALIST Michael Spector publication. IEEE reserves the right to reject any advertising. his style as “prechewed digital bubblegum molded into form, then flattened underneath a piece of glass. Flavors include pamplemoose, cheddar cheese, marshmallow, frog, and salmon.”

IEEE BOARD OF DIRECTORS CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER Karen L. Hawkins Robert W. Lucky PRESIDENT & CEO José M.F. Moura, [email protected] +1 732 562 3964, [email protected] +1 732 562 3928 FAX: +1 732 465 6444 CORPORATE ACTIVITIES Donna Hourican This month marks the 36th anniversary PRESIDENT-ELECT Toshio Fukuda +1 732 562 6330, [email protected] TREASURER Joseph V. Lillie SECRETARY Kathleen A. Kramer of Lucky’s Reflections column forIEEE MEMBER & GEOGRAPHIC ACTIVITIES Cecelia Jankowski Spectrum [p. 20]. Lucky spent decades working PAST PRESIDENT James A. Jefferies VICE PRESIDENTS +1 732 562 5504, [email protected] as a telecom engineer and manager at Bell Labs Witold M. Kinsner, Educational Activities; Hulya Kirkici, STANDARDS ACTIVITIES Konstantinos Karachalios and then Telcordia Technologies, and he invented Publication Services & Products; Francis B. Grosz Jr., Member +1 732 562 3820, [email protected] an adaptive equalizer that quadrupled the speed & Geographic Activities; K.J. “Ray” Liu, Technical Activities; EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES Jamie Moesch Robert S. Fish, President, Standards Association; Thomas M. +1 732 562 5514, [email protected] of telephone modems. An IEEE Fellow, he is Coughlin, President, IEEE-USA CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER & also a member of the U.S. National Academy of DIVISION DIRECTORS ACTING CHIEF HUMAN RESOURCES OFFICER Renuka P. Jindal (I); David B. Durocher (II); Vijay K. Bhargava Engineering and has served on a constellation Thomas R. Siegert +1 732 562 6843, [email protected] of high-profile advisory boards. (III); John P. Verboncoeur (IV); John W. Walz (V); Manuel Castro (VI); Bruno C. Meyer (VII); Elizabeth L. “Liz” Burd (VIII); TECHNICAL ACTIVITIES Mary Ward-Callan Alejandro “Alex” Acero (IX); Ljiljana Trajkovic (X) +1 732 562 3850, [email protected] REGION DIRECTORS MANAGING DIRECTOR, IEEE-USA Chris Brantley Babak Beheshti (1); Wolfram Betterman (2); +1 202 530 8349, [email protected] Gregg L. Vaughn (3); David Alan Koehler (4); Robert C. Brian Santo Shapiro (5); Keith A. Moore (6); Maike Luiken (7); Mardalena IEEE PUBLICATION SERVICES & PRODUCTS BOARD Santo is editor in chief of EDN, an online Salazar-Palma (8); Teófilo Ramos (9); Akinori Nishihara (10) Hulya Kirkici, Chair; Derek Abbott, John Baillieul, Sergio periodical for design engineers. A staff DIRECTOR EMERITUS Theodore W. Hissey Benedetto, Ian V. “Vaughan” Clarkson, Eddie Custovic, Samir editor at IEEE Spectrum in the late ’80s, he wrote M. El-Ghazaly, Ron B. Goldfarb, Larry Hall, Ekram Hossain, the 2009 article “25 Microchips That Shook the IEEE STAFF W. Clem Karl, Om P. Malik, Aleksander Mastilovic, Carmen World” (forerunner to our Chip Hall of Fame) and EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & COO Stephen Welby S. Menoni, Paolo Montuschi, Lloyd A. “Pete” Morley, Sorel +1 732 502 5400, [email protected] Reisman, Gianluca Setti, Gaurav Sharma, Maria Elena Valcher, the newly launched Consumer Electronics Hall of CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER Cherif Amirat John Vig, Steve Yurkovich, Bin Zhou, Reza Zoughi Fame, an excerpt of which is on p. 16. Santo lives +1 732 562 6399, [email protected] IEEE OPERATIONS CENTER in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Lisa, an iPod, GENERAL COUNSEL & CHIEF COMPLIANCE OFFICER Jack S. Bailey, +1 212 705 8964, [email protected] 445 Hoes Lane, Box 1331 numerous iPads, iPhones, and Android phones, a PUBLICATIONS Michael B. Forster Piscataway, NJ 08854-1331 U.S.A. Playstation 4, a half-dozen laptops, and a rice cooker. +1 732 562 3998, [email protected] Tel: +1 732 981 0060 Fax: +1 732 981 1721

04 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG IoT calls for fast communication between sensors.

Visualization of the normalized 3D far-field pattern of a slot-coupled microstrip patch antenna array.

Developing the 5G mobile network may not be the only step to a fully functioning Internet of Things, but it is an important one — and it comes with substantial performance requirements. Simulation ensures optimized designs of 5G-compatible technology, like this phased array antenna. 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 5G and IoT technology designs. comsol.blog/5G SPECTRAL LINES_ 01.19

drive everything we will do for the next couple of decades,” he said. And we are at the earliest stages of this wave. That means “there is the opportunity for an awful lot of invention,” according to Drew Henry, Arm senior vice president. Because the 5th Wave of computing is all about devices that communicate, Segars took attendees on a quick tour through the history of mobile communications: 2G created the ability to send text messages, 3G involved being able to load music and videos onto a device, and 4G made it possible to stream video and music, thanks to low network latency. 5G, he said, will be the biggest change of all. Net- work providers will no longer be thinking about the number of people or screens in the world they need to serve, but about how many things they need to connect. What will this mean for the user? We’ll have to wait and see—and the waiting will take...five years. “I’m sure that in five years’ time,” Segars said, The Trillion-Device World “when I look back, I will see something that relies on all these connections, on the high-capacity net- ARM CEO Simon Segars says the coming works. There will be some service we just all take 5th Wave of computing is far more than a for granted.” mere Internet of Things “I just don’t know what that business will be,” he adds. “The question is—who will invent it?” t’s not exactly clear which emerging technology will bring the next Looking beyond five years into the future, Segars major advance that rocks the world but, like an episode of “Sesame predicted that in 2035, one trillion intelligent devices Street,” there’s a good chance that it will be brought to you by the will be connected through 5G networks. number “5.” ¶ That was the theme of the keynote addresses that Marcelo Claure, the chief operating officer of kicked off Arm TechCon, a gathering of 4,000 embedded-systems SoftBank and chairman of Sprint, which is owned specialists held in San Jose, Calif., late last fall. Arm CEO Simon by SoftBank, echoed that prediction and calculated Segars started off by counting through computinghi story: Wave 1, that it would translate into US $11 trillion in eco- I the era of mainframe computing; Wave 2, personal computing and nomic value created by the gadgets. software; Wave 3, the Internet; and Wave 4, mobile and cloud computing. “There is a lot of money to be made,” Claure said. ¶ That brought him to Wave 5, something that’s not so easy to define, at An optimistic note on which to begin the New least at this very early stage. It will, Segars indicated, involve computers Year. —Tekla S. Perry in everything, but simply thinking of it as the Internet of Things is too narrow. The 5th Wave, he said, “is an era of computing that will be data A version of this article appears in our “View From driven. Traditional algorithmic computing will give way to data flow- the Valley” blog. ing through machines and decisions being made based on what data is telling us.” ¶ “We are thinking about the system, how it works end to end; it is the In light of the U.S. government’s Thanksgiving- combined computing power that is this 5th Wave,” weekend release of its Fourth National Climate he added. ¶ The 5th Wave will also make tradi- Assessment, and the United Nation’s Climate Change Meeting in Poland last month, we decided to resurface tional ways of measuring computing power obso- efforts being made to mitigate the economic, health, lete, Segars pointed out: “We shouldn’t measure and environmental impacts of climate change. devices in megahertz, gigaflops, or tera-whatever. Some of these were described in our June special issue, Blueprints for a Miracle. The magnitude of It is about the system: the devices, network, and the the challenge is great, but the rewards of creating cloud all coming together.” ¶ This wave “is going to postcarbon technologies will be even greater.

create massive change across the tech sector and

06 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Greg Mably 72 HOURS: MAXIMUM TIME SPAN BETWEEN RECOVERY AND TRANSPLANT OF A DONOR KIDNEY

When a patient who SPECIAL DELIVERY: A frustrated needs an organ trans- transplant surgeon tested whether DRONE DELIVERS drones could transport organs to plant is finally matched with a the operating room. donor, every second matters. HUMAN KIDNEY The longer the delay between the removal of a donor organ and its transplantation into a recipient, the poorer the organ The organ was flown several kilometers functions afterward. To maximize the chances of success, by a drone without incurring damage organs must be shipped from point A to point B as quickly and as safely as possible—and a recent test run suggests that drones are up to the task. One surgeon’s personal experience at the operating table, waiting for organs to arrive, prompted him to think of new forms of delivery. “I frequently encounter situations where there’s simply no way to get an organ to me fast enough to do a transplant, and then those life-saving organs do not get transplanted into my patient,” says Dr. Joseph Scalea, of the Uni- versity of Maryland Medical Center, in Baltimore. “And that’s

JOE SCALEA JOE frustrating, so I wanted to develop a better system.”

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 07 He organized a group of researchers, including associates at the Uni- versity of Maryland’s department of aerospace engineering, to explore whether a drone could deliver organs. They selected a DJI M600 Pro for the experiment because its six motors lie directly below their respective rotors. That would keep the rotors far away from the smart cooler containing the organ (see top photo), and the separa- tion would spare the organ from any heat emitted by the motors. Next, the team designed a special- ized wireless biosensor to measure temperature, barometric pressure, altitude, vibration, and GPS location of the organ while it’s en route. With the drone and wireless biosensor ready, all the researchers needed was an organ to complete the experiment. Last March, they received news that a kidney—one not healthy enough to be used in a transplantation—was available for research. Over the course of roughly 24 hours, the kidney was shipped more than 1,600 kilometers to Baltimore, and the drone was set up for its first delivery mission. The results were published in the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine in November. In total, the bean-shaped organ was airborne for a little more than an hour over the course of 14 flight missions. For the farthest mission, the kidney flew 2.4 kilometers, a distance simi- PRECIOUS CARGO: Researchers measured whether a kidney, stowed in a cooler, could lar to the length of potential shipment be delivered safely by drone. A custom sensor inside the cooler monitored the temperature routes for donor organs between inner- and vibration of the organ during its trip. city hospitals. The researchers found that the temperature of the kidney remained stable, at a dual-engine turboprop King Air). Biop- patients closer to their life-saving organs cool 2.5 ˚C, throughout the test runs. Air sies of the kidney before and after drone quicker, and with better outcomes.” pressure corresponded with altitude, and transportation revealed no damage from Dr. Italo Subbarao, a senior associ- the drone-borne organ achieved a maxi- the journey, suggesting that the experi- ate dean at William Carey University mum speed of 67.6 kilometers per hour. ment—which the research team believes College of Osteopathic Medicine, in In an interesting twist, the kidney was is the first-ever use of a drone for organ Hattiesburg, Miss., studies how to use subjected to slightly fewer vibrations delivery—was a success. drones to deliver medical supplies to when transported in the drone compared “I think that what we did here is very remote areas after natural disasters. with how many it received on a control cool,” says Scalea. “This is the first He applauds the research group in

delivery mission in a fixed-wing plane (a step among a series that I think will get Maryland for their demonstration. (3) SCALEA JOE

08 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG “The study was elegantly done with a focus on short transport time and dis- AUTOMATED EYES WATCH tance, which is ideal to demonstrate potential feasibility,” Subbarao says. NEWS But he also says follow-up studies would PLANTS GROW need to show that it could work over longer distances and delivery times. Crop scientists hope to replace traditional So how soon can hospitals receive painstaking monitoring methods organs by drone delivery? Subbarao and Scalea both cite the same hurdles

moving forward: A drone operated in A decade ago, a group of Bas van Eerdt, business develop- the United States must remain within crop scientists set out to ment director at PhenoKey, in a pilot’s line of sight throughout the grow the same plants in the same ’s-Gravenzande, Netherlands. entire flight. And U.S. Federal Aviation way. They started with the same Breeders would like to be able to Administration regulations state that a breeds and adhered to strict grow- know whether a plant—or better, drone may not fly higher than 122 meters ing protocols, but nonetheless har- a whole crop—is growing on track (400 feet) above structures within the vested a motley crop of plants that and how it’s responding to local area in which it is flying. varied in leaf size, skin-cell den- weather conditions, by observ- These limitations will affect not only sity, and metabolic ability. Small ing the way it grows. Now, with the transport of vital organs but also differences in light levels and plant cheaper sensors and more pow- access to a swath of medical supplies handling had produced outsize erful artificial intelligence algo- for which drones are being explored as changes to the plants’ physical rithms, researchers are inching a delivery method. traits, or phenome. closer to that goal. Their hope is “Based on the national discussion The plunging price of genomic to make the typical 1.3 percent about drone technology, I think that sequencing has made it easier annual yield improvement in these things are going to be addressable to examine a plant’s biological crop production look more like and that we will be able to overcome instructions, but researchers’ Moore’s Law. each of them,” Scalea says. “Not without understanding of how a plant The go-to technique for this hard work, but I do think we can do it.” follows those instructions in a work is still optical imaging. Some After working on this project for three given environment lags. “There researchers are now writing soft- years, Scalea says he is thrilled that the is a major bottleneck for a lot of breeders to be able to get their CROP VISION: Photon Systems team was able to provide a proof of prin- Instruments, in the Czech Republic, sells ciple that drones are a viable option phenotypic evaluation in line with automated phenotyping systems for use for organ delivery. He is now working their genetic capabilities,” says in greenhouses and in the field. with other research groups and hospitals across the United States to identify scenarios for which drone delivery could work. Although the group’s recent experiment did not involve the kidney being transplanted into a living person, that is the obvious next step. Scalea believes that such an experiment will happen in the very near future, perhaps early in 2019. “Stay tuned,” he says. —Michelle Hampson

A version of this article appears on our Human OS blog.

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PHOTON SYSTEMS INSTRUMENTS SYSTEMS PHOTON organdelivery0119

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 09 ware to allow growers to use smart- spending millions on this research phone cameras to quantify some alongside major breeding compa- WHY AIs ARE parts of a crop’s phenotype. But nies such as Syngenta and Bayer. they are also adapting an array In the past, evaluating a new CHASING of more sophisticated imaging crop variety required breeders to technologies from aerospace and visit every plant in a test plot, take biomedical physics to the field. detailed notes, and rank all the CHICKENS IN Breeders in North Carolina and plants for the next round of breed- the Netherlands are using drones ing. “This is actually the limiting fac- MINECRAFT and greenhouses equipped with tor in the experiments that we run,” hyperspectral, fluorescent, and says roboticist and business devel- The path to a generally tomographic sensors to quantify oper Rick van de Zedde of Wagenin- more of their crop’s phenomes. intelligent AI might run gen University & Research, in the through this virtual universe Hyperspectral imaging can Netherlands. “It’s not really about reveal hidden damage from the cost; it’s more about the enor- insects. Magnetic resonance imag- mous amount of time that it takes.” If artificial intelligence (AI) ing (MRI) can detect droplets of Instead, PhenoKey annotates agents are to become real water as a seed absorbs it and fol- thousands of images of test crops, players in society, using low the seed through germination adding labels to identify charac- their machine abilities to and other stages of development. teristics such as flower bud count complement our human strengths, Positron emission tomography and leaf shape. The company uses they must first become players in the (or PET scans) allows research- these annotations to train its arti- video game of Minecraft. And to prove ers to peer through soil into flower ficial intelligence software on the themselves in Minecraft, they must bulbs and visualize the layout of traits of a specific type of plant. In work together to capture animals in a a plant’s root system. one case he presented a few years maze, build towers of blocks, and hunt The European Union spent some ago, van Eerdt says, a breeding for treasure while fighting off skeletons. €250 million (about US $300 mil- company spent no more than That, anyway, is the premise of a lion) between 2005 and 2015 on 50 person-hours improving an competition organized by Microsoft, plant phenotyping research infra- image analysis algorithm so that Queen Mary University of London, and structure, and American crop it could detect orchid buds with crowdAI (a platform for data-science giants and government agencies are 95 percent accuracy in a green- challenges). This month, the organiz- house full of plants—about a twen- ers will announce the winner—the tieth of the time it took to describe team that created an AI that could “There is a major the plants manually. best observe its Minecraft environ- Van de Zedde won €22 million in ment, determine which of three mis- bottleneck 2018 to build a new Dutch national sions it had to accomplish, and then for a lot of phenotyping research facility that collaborate with another AI agent to joins a small but growing number carry out that mission. breeders to of facilities around the world. By emphasizing adaptability and be able to The ultimate goal, van Eerdt cooperation, the organizers aimed to says, is to combine automated encourage research on AI agents that get their phenotyping with automated could one day interact with humans to phenotypic genomics screening. “If you have accomplish tasks in the real world. And a deep understanding of how your while an AI that can truly match the evaluation genetics work…and a model that intellectual capacity of a human is still in line with predicts phenotypic outcomes, the stuff of science fiction, researchers then in theory, it’s possible to pre- could take meaningful steps toward their genetic dict how your crop will look,” he that goal of artificial general intelli- capabilities” says. —Lucas Laursen gence (AGI) in Minecraft. The Multi-Agent Reinforcement ↗ POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee. — Bas van Eerdt org/plantcam0119 Learning in MalmO (MARLO) com-

10 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG PLAYTIME: Microsoft researchers hope that after collaborating with other AIs in a virtual game, it will be easier for AIs to learn to work with humans in the real world.

most of the work in these training sessions, each MARLO team had its own strategy to speed up or improve the learning. Minecraft is just one of many complex video games now being used by AI researchers, says Igor Mordatch, who leads multiagent research at O penAI, a nonprofit research organization based in San Francisco. O penAI hasn’t focused on Minecraft, instead creating AI agents that can play the multiplayer video game Dota2. “We’re building toward a good ecosystem of environments and bench- marks for reinforcement learning,” says Mordatch. “But there is a challenge now: How do we ensure that the AI is learning something useful in these games?” Hofmann says the AI agents that suc- petition is an offshoot from Project find a way to work together toward ceed in Minecraft can likely succeed in Malmo, begun in 2015 by AI researcher their common goal. other video games as well. It’s easy to Katja Hofmann at Microsoft Research An AI agent that could hypothesize imagine that AI could power the non- Cambridge, in England. Although about the goals of another agent would player characters in games, perhaps much exciting AI research has involved have a rudimentary form of what psy- giving these characters the ability to AIs mastering strategy games like chess chologists call “theory of mind,” the interact naturally and cooperate with and Go, Hofmann was looking for a human capacity to attribute mental human players. game that would allow an AI to learn states and intentions to other people. One competitor in the MARLO chal- a broader range of skills. Hofmann hopes that AI agents will lenge sees even more practical appli- “The moment we started talking eventually hone this ability by collabo- cations for his entry. Donghun Lee, a about Minecraft, it was obvious that rating with human players in Minecraft. researcher at the Electronics and Tele- this was a perfect environment for AI “Then the algorithms could learn to col- communications Research Institute, research,” she says. “It’s a world that laborate with humans,” she says, “and in South Korea, focused on getting his people join with no predefined goal.” learn what humans want.” AI agent to communicate effectively Project Malmo is a platform built on The AIs at play in the MARLO compe- and express its intentions. He says this top of Minecraft in which researchers tition were trained via reinforcement ability will feed directly into his IoT can perform many different kinds of learning, in which an AI learns through research. The proliferation of smart AI experiments, yet also compare their an intense course of trial and error. Each devices poses communication prob- results in a standardized way. team’s AI began by making random move- lems, Lee says, as many networked In the inaugural MARLO challenge, ments and observing their effects on the devices now need to work in tandem. in 2017, AI agents were asked to carry game. The competition environment “It’s not an easy job to manipulate all out a single mission: catching a pig. had rewards built into the game, so the these devices at once in a cloud,” he For the 2018 competition, the organiz- AI received points for certain achieve- says. But with multiagent reinforce- ers made it harder by designing three ments. Eventually, the AI figured out ment learning, he says, the IoT devices different missions that all require col- the actions that caused it to acquire could figure out how to work together. laboration. The AI competitors had points—and that resulted in a captured —Eliza Strickland to learn how to identify another AI chicken or found treasure. While the ↗ POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/

MICROSOFT agent in the environment, and then reinforcement-learning algorithms did minecraftai0119

NEWS

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 11 “For our purposes, ‘ELECTRO’ is actually the the actually is ‘ELECTRO’ purposes, our “For integratedsoft. 632-5636 /(204) [email protected] ASK FOR ANONLINE DEMONSTRATION • • • • • COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES THE OF YOUR POWER IDEAS THATSOFTWARE TO UP LIVES capable of handling the large models we require.” we models large the handling of capable and easy to learn and this product is more than than more is product this and learn to easy and preferred software tool for every-day engineering. engineering. every-day for tool software preferred It is important to have software that is very quick quick very is that software have to important is It Dr. Beriz Bakija, Siemens AG’s Energy Sector, Germany Sector, AG’s Energy Siemens Bakija, Dr. Beriz FROM CONCEPTTO PERFORMANCE ENABLING YOUR INNOVATION Intuitive andeasy-to-use interface BEM andFEMsolvers Precise field calculations usingourproprietary Program your own applications withAPI Search-based designsimulation New! “SmartWorkspace” com

when the battery is overcharged at a high voltage or if an an orif voltage at ahigh overcharged is battery the when polymer with holes in it, called a separator, that has been been has aseparator, that called it, in holes with polymer pensive and widely available.) available.) widely and pensive people hurt occasionally fires battery that enough frequently pens floated many proposals for how to make these batteries batteries these make for how to proposals many floated disclose what kind of material it uses, except to say it’s to say except inex it uses, of material kind what disclose inserts an ultrathin layer of material (just 1to 5 micro (just of material layer ultrathin an inserts Amionx happening, from To solvent. prevent this the izing vapor electrodes, two the between occurs short internal electrodes. of both rim outer the along runs collector rent ions from its anode to its cathode. cathode. to its anode its from ions made an advance that it says further lowers the risk of an of an risk the lowers further says it that advance an made mercial product by the year’s end. bythe product mercial SafeCore, makes it less likely that a battery will explode or explode will abattery that likely less it makes SafeCore, thick, slimmer than a human hair) between each electrode electrode each between hair) a human than slimmer thick, occur can condition runaway. This thermal to due fire catch the ions flow through an electrolyte consisting of a thin thin of a consisting electrolyte an through flow ions the There, cell. lithium of the middle the move ions across the and a device, to power circuit external an through travel and electrons the shuttling by simultaneously to electricity ions lithium charged of positively form the in energy cal explosion, and which it expects to license for use in acom in for use to license expects it which and explosion, safer even have engineers provide, cells lithium that storage energy temperature, this layer rapidly decomposes and creates an an creates and decomposes rapidly layer this temperature, and its respective current collector. (The company won’t company (The collector. current respective its and and negatively charged electrons. It converts this energy energy this It converts electrons. charged negatively and air gap within the cell. The effect is that electrons can no lon can electrons that is The effect cell. the within gap air Putting agapin right the Putting ger pass easily from an electrode to its current collector and and collector current to its electrode an from easily pass ger salt. To ferry electrons along, a metallic strip called a cur called strip ametallic along, electrons To ferry salt. lithium with seeded and solvent organic an with soaked batteries from exploding from batteries place stop can lithium-ion A SAFER WAY FOR BATTERIES TO FAIL Amionx says its patented battery technology, called called technology, battery patented its says Amionx When triggered by a sudden rise in current, voltage, or voltage, current, in rise byasudden triggered When With With The electrons and ions take different paths: the electrons electrons the paths: different take ions and The electrons First, a quick review: A lithium-ion battery stores chemi stores battery Alithium-ion review: aquick First, NEWS and cause major headaches for manufacturers. for manufacturers. headaches major cause and growing demand growing . Now Amionx catch fire and explode. Unfortunately, this hap this Unfortunately, explode. and fire catch can it short, internal an develops or charged over is abattery if But safe. extraordinarily For the most part, lithium-ion batteries are batteries lithium-ion part, most the For , a company in Carlsbad, Calif., has has Calif., Carlsbad, in , acompany for the high-capacity, low-cost high-capacity, for the m eters eters ------

AMIONX more suitable for commercialization prone to fires. And these manufacturers in the short term,” Fang says. aren’t likely to license SafeCore. ”You But Kohl says SafeCore won’t change applaud the effort,” he says, “but it’s the fact that some manufacturers use going to be a minor contributor to bat- low-grade materials and fail to imple- tery safety.” —Amy Nordrum ment proper quality control, which ↗ POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/ makes the batteries they produce more batterysafety0119

New Version! FLAME OUT: Punctures such as this one can cause lithium-ion batteries to catch fire by creating an internal short inside the cell.

be shuttled to the other side. “Think of it like a fuse,” says Bill Davidson , Amionx’s chief operating officer. “We literally create a gap inside the cell that cuts the flow of electricity.” The goal is for a battery to release energy slowly and safely, instead of all at once. Adding the SafeCore layer reduces the capacity of a cell by 1 to 3 percent, but Amionx says it also pro- longs the battery’s life. Amionx is now trying to license SafeCore to manufacturers, and the company’s executives believe it would be particularly useful for home energy-storage systems and electric vehicles, where safety concerns are high. Unlike other startups working on advanced battery technologies, Amionx isn’t starting from scratch— it’s a spinout of American Lithium Energy (ALE), which has designed custom lithium-ion batteries for the U.S. military for more than a decade. Amionx has also attracted investment from Qualcomm and published a white paper on its approach. Paul Kohl, a chemical engineer at Over 75 New Features & Apps in Origin 2019! For a FREE 60-day Georgia Tech, and Huazhen Fang, a Over 500,000 registered users worldwide in: evaluation, go to mechanical engineer at the University ◾ 6,000+ Companies including 20+ Fortune Global 500 OriginLab.Com/demo of Kansas, both say that Amionx is tak- ◾ 6,500+ Colleges & Universities and enter code: 8547 ◾ ing a unique approach to battery safety 3,000+ Government Agencies & Research Labs that they haven’t seen before. Other research has focused primarily on the separator, the electrolyte, or the cir- 25+ years serving the scientific & engineering community cuitry around the cell. “Compared to many other R&D efforts, this technology is more pragmatic, and could be

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 13 THE STRANGE EVOLUTION OF THE POCO A GAME-FRIENDLY KIT BEGAN AS A CAMCORDER

HE POCO IS A NEW KIT THAT LETS OWNERS SNAP TOGETHER A PROGRAMMABLE HANDHELD T video-game player. But it started life in 2009 as something completely different. The original concept was to make the first HD camcorder with a 14-megapixel photo capability, with a footprint about the size of a credit card. • The inspiration for this was the Flip Video camera, which was introduced in 2007 and sold in the millions as a cheap and easy way to capture digital video. My goal was to improve the design using new mobile-phone technology to produce a similarly easy-to- use product, but one packed into a much smaller case. • What happened next is a story about the need for adaptation in the face of changing circumstances. Fortunately, my family has some experience in handling what happens when concept meets reality: My father, Iain Sinclair, is an industrial designer who styled over 100 gaming systems for Saitek, and my uncle is Sir Clive Sinclair, who created the popular Sinclair line of home computers in the 1980s. • To create my camcorder, I first sourced an ultrathin 2.4‑inch AMOLED (active-matrix OLED) display from CMEL that seemed brighter and clearer than anything I’d seen before or since. A suitable camera

RESOURCES_HANDS ON SOC (system-on-chip) came from Ambarella. I also learned about a camera module from a German company that could handle HD video even in low light, and capture 14-megapixel still images. Test results for the combination of the SOC and camera-module sensor were comparable to those produced by a much larger Sony camcorder. • I added other technology such as postage-stamp-size

supercapacitors from Murata to power an LED flash. To keep the credit card footprint, I chose a magnesium body with ultrathin walls (4) DESIGN SINCLAIR GRANT

14 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG (expensive but otherwise impossible to they also wanted a kit they could assem- achieve using the cheaper alternative of ble in under an hour: The existing design injection-molded plastic). took around 10 hours, as the product I circulated the design in 2010 and was originally designed to be sold pri- immediately received a licensing offer marily preassembled by retailers. from a well-known camera brand that Back to the drawing board. We set- agreed to place an opening order for tled on a snap-fit design: The biggest 10,000 units. Other global distribution challenge here was providing enough offers followed, and I was introduced to space for densely packed components three of the largest camera manufac- to breathe, and to allow for swelling of turers in the world. What could possi- the lithium battery, all without the as- bly go wrong? sembled casing springing apart. After a Problems began when CMEL devel- few months we had working samples— oped supply issues and discontinued and plenty of extra space under the the AMOLED display. Seiko stepped hood for hardware hacking! The Poco forward and offered a replacement was officially released in late 2018 and thin‑film-transistor display. It’s not has become popular with makers and as nice as the AMOLED (or as energy retrogamers, who use software emula- efficient) but still good, and it’s actually tors to run classic games. easier to hook up to the Ambarella SOC, In particular, positive feedback for eliminating a complex bridging circuit. the Poco has come from schools, which Then, the company that supplied were becoming frustrated with the the camera module went bust. A single-use nature of many mak er kits— few months passed and I heard that for example, a robot construction kit Olympus was entering the market with that was built for a single lesson but a similar size camera module based on rarely touched again. However, once a 16-megapixel camera sensor from they’ve assembled the Poco, students OmniVision, which I could use with a rival can enjoy programming games for it SOC from Zoran (now part of Qualcomm) using Pico-8, onboard software that that generated less heat—important, as simulates a simple idealized game tests showed that the magnesium body console, or using the built-in camera to got very hot with the original SOC. record observations in a nature class. My engineer and I visited Zoran in Indeed, because of the flexibility inher- China in 2012, which reluctantly al- ent in the current design, it’s easy for us lowed us to use its labs and borrow ref- to offer custom variations to consumers AN ELECTRONIC EVOLUTION: The Poco erence development boards (it usually began as a dedicated HD camera [top], but and businesses, such as a medical ver- deals only with camera giants). Return- adapting to supply-chain problems resulted in a sion incorporating antimicrobial silicone ing from China, we met with our Hong device based on the Raspberry Pi Zero W [middle] rubber keypads to test the reaction times that’s popular with retrogamers [bottom]. Kong manufacturing partner, a meet- of patients with head injuries. ing interrupted when the skyscraper we Part of being a successful pr oduct were in caught fire! developer is to soldier on through hard In late 2012, we finished the new times. The lessons I’ve learned are these: design. Everything fitted in the miniature module was available. I decided to use the Keep things as simple as possible and avoid form factor we needed. At last, phew! Right? US $10 Pi Zero W (which included Bluetooth too much high technology, while keeping Not so much. Months later, having finished and Wi-Fi) to replace the SOC module and abreast of emerging trends. Try to spec com- the PCB design, we were told that Zoran was evolve the Poco into a pocket computer for ponents already used in mass market products. pulling out of the camera market. It was time gaming, education, music, and photography. Be prepared for new product development to for a complete rethink. To keep costs low, we changed the body mate- require serious investment, and never rely on In 2014 I learned that the Raspberry Pi rial to a durable glass-reinforced polymer. We one supplier. Foundation was developing a new model added Twin joypads for gaming control. —GRANT SINCLAIR Raspberry Pi in a smaller size, the Pi Zero. In Feedback from customers was that they addition, a compatible 5-megapixel camera wanted more battery power for gaming, and POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/poco0119

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 15 RESOURCES_TOOLS & TOYS

engineer for Sony’s Pressman recorder, a THE SONY WALKMAN pricey item targeted at professional jour- THE GADGET THAT LET nalists. Ohsone delivered a stripped-down, playback-only version of the Pressman. PEOPLE CREATE A MOBILE At the time, sales of Sony’s portable record- PERSONAL SOUNDTRACK ers were in a downward spiral. Ibuka and the other Sony cofounder, Akio Morita, figured that if personal recorders weren’t selling, maybe personal players would. Morita demanded BLUE AND GRAY: The distinctive a less expensive version of the device made design of the original for Ibuka. From a technology standpoint, there Walkman made its was nothing new in the Walkman. But from the rapid adoption by consumers very standpoint of form and function, it was radical. visible. This model is The first Walkman, the TPS-L2, was in- now a sought-after troduced in Japan in 1979. It was first mar- collector’s item. keted in the United States in 1980 as the Soundabout (and as the Stowaway or FreeStyle in o ther countries), but it soon became the Walkman. No matter what name was on it, it had a blue and silver metal case, weighed roughly 400 grams, measured 150 by 90 by 35 millimeters, ran on a pair of AA batteries, and sold for about $150. The first model came with two stereo headphone jacks, so two people could listen at the same time. The purchase price included a pair of specially designed headphones that weighed only 50 grams, possibly because the readily avail- IEEE Spectrum has launched its Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, able headphones at the time weighed as much a companion to its Chip Hall of Fame. The Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame or more than the Walkman, and such a combi- celebrates the greatest gizmos of the last 50 years, by telling the often- nation struck Sony’s designers as absurd. surprising tales of their creation. For the full list of inductees, and to submit Fortuitously, the introduction of the Walkman your own, visit the hall online, but here’s one story to whet your appetite: how overlapped with the start, in the United States, the Sony Walkman came to be. of the running fitness craze; runners enthusi- astically adopted them to bring along jams that would help them get through a workout. Sony noticed and in response brought out a bright oughly half of all people alive one guy wanted to listen to classical music on yellow model, in what became a line of rugged R today were born after the airplanes without annoying his fellow passen- devices they called Walkman Sports. Walkman cassette player was in- gers. It helped that this guy—Masaru Ibuka— Sony would go on to sell 186 million troduced. Thanks to the blockbuster Guard- cofounded Sony Corp., so his whims got a lot cassette-playing Walkmans by 1998. As stor- ians of the Galaxy movie, though, many of more attention than most people’s. age formats evolved, so too did the Walkman, them can still recognize this iconic blue- Sony was already building portable cas- and Sony cranked out models that played and-silver box. But if you weren’t there in sette products, but almost all of them empha- CDs, and then MP3 files. To this day, Sony still 1979–80, it’s hard to appreciate what a sized recording, mostly for the voice dictation sells portable digital media players bearing head-spinning revelation the thing was, market. Almost all. In 1978, Sony introduced a the Walkman name. With the recent revival how radically it changed the way music was nominally portable system, the TC-D5. It had of interest in retro sound systems—mostly played and consumed, or the stunning speed great sound, but it was bulky and also cost vinyl-based, but including cassettes too— with which it became seemingly ubiquitous. roughly US $1,000. Ibuka had been using working TPS-L2s go for hundreds of dollars Surprisingly, for something with such a it to get his mobile opera fix, but he asked on eBay today. —BRIAN SANTO huge impact on pop culture, the Walkman had for something easier to carry. The request POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/

a highbrow genesis. It came about because landed on the desk of Kozo Ohsone, the lead walkman0119 SONY

16 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG RESOURCES_GEEK LIFE

the service for US $5.1 million. The 3615 SM LOG ON LIKE IT’S 1985 service began to decline, however, and was ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR retired around 1992. But visitors to the Ace Hotel in New York MINITEL SERVICES HAS BEEN City last December were able to access RESURRECTED 3615 SM using original terminals during a series of events hosted by Julien M ailland and Kevin Driscoll, authors of Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (MIT Press, 2017) and found- ers of the Minitel Research Lab, USA. This was possible because last year Hannaby resurrected 3615 SM, just because “It was fun to see that old system working again.... I took my original code.... It was 16 bits and we had to work this out on this new architecture. Now it’s working on the cloud.” For the Ace Hotel event, Hannaby built a special interface to transfer the Minitel terminal traffic over the Internet. For anyone who missed the event, there’s an even easier way to try out the servic e: Just point your browser to sm.3615.live (works best in a small window!). Hannaby’s Web-friendly implementation provides an emulated Minitel keyboard, important for navigating the service. For ost cyberspaces are like lost PARLEZ-VOUS MINITEL? At New York City’s example, typing a word in a chat room and cities. You can read about their Ace Hotel, the author tries to remember his high- pressing the “E nvoi” key will send the text to L school French at a live Minitel terminal connected architecture and learn about the via the Internet to the 3615 SM service. the screen for all to see, while typing a word mark they made on history, but you can’t ex- and tapping “ Retour” sets that text as your plore the place yourself. Even when the hard- 1985. Hannaby had just graduated as a doc- screen name instead. The implementation ware or software that folks used to visit those tor, while Lagarde had graduated a few years also defaults to Minitel’s original download spaces remains, once the last server goes off earlier. “We wanted to do something about speed of 1,200 bits per second for authen- line, all that’s left are the memories. Unless, communication at large, so we thought that ticity, but you can override this if you wish. that is, one of the original builders decides to a service for doctors was a good idea,” says Hannaby notes that the code still has a few do some reconstruction. Hannaby. However, they rapidly developed rough edges, but he’s working on polishing Such a builder is Daniel Hannaby, who a large mainstream audience. Hannaby sus- things to make it as usable as possible. became a 1980s version of a dot-com pects the name they chose accidentally So dive in! (If you don’t speak French, millionair e thanks to the Minitel network. helped—the “SM” stood for “serveur médical,” open a tab to your favorite online translator This network is the greatest lost cyber- but in French, as in English, the letters “SM” to decode the menus.) Explore as an engi- space of all: The service was shut down in can have, ah, racier connotations. Hannaby neer would any historical architectural com- 2012 after the Internet eroded its popular- and Lagarde were also technical innova- plex, looking at how people solved problems ity. But, as detailed in a June 2017 feature tors: They developed hardware that let us- with the materials available to them. See how in IEEE Spectrum , in the 1980s and early ers download files from the Minitel network tasks were completed and human connec- 1990s, millions of French people used ded- to PCs and Macs. tions forged in a slow environment with vir- icated Minitel terminals to do many of the The growth of 3615 SM caught them by tually no graphics capability. And like all good things we associate with the Internet today: surprise: Originally, they hosted the ser- adventurers, return home thinking about send emails, buy things, read news and vice on two 8-bit 6502 CPU-based per- things with a broader perspective. forums, and chat in real time. sonal computers connected via a multi-line —STEPHEN CASS One of the most popular pay-by-the- modem. “It was so popular the modem minute chat and forum services accessed [overheated] and took fire... so the office POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/ minitel0119 via Minitel was called 3615 SM. It was cre- burned down,” says Hannaby. In 1987, media

DANIEL HANNABY DANIEL ated by Hannaby and François Lagarde in tycoon Robert Maxwell bought 51 percent of | RESOURCES CONTINUES ON PAGE 52

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 17 INTERNET OF EVERYTHING_BY STACEY HIGGINBOTHAM OPINION

quickly shut off or send an alert to avoid an expensive mistake or a potential work- place safety issue. Real time really matters. However, for the IT networks that companies are now trying to bring into factories, the emphasis is typically on cost- effective technologies such as Ethernet that do their best to deliver information without any specific guarantee of quality. Unlike the protocols for factory automation, these networks are designed to gather all of the information at a switch before passing it along the network. So the network might slow down for a bit while a software update is delivered, and in the case of a highly congested network, the data may not get delivered at all. But factories can’t afford buffering or missed packets between their machines, which is why the IEEE is adding time- sensitive networking protocols to the Ether net standard. Time-sensitive networking helps prioritize different types of traffic so machine traffic can take precedence over a nonessential software update or a file sync. KEEPING THE INDUSTRIAL I first saw demonstrations of the technology in early 2017 at National Instruments’ Io T IN SYNC Industrial IoT Lab, but it has since gained ground in many manufacturing areas. In October 2018, Texas Instruments released TIMING IS THE UNSUNG HERO of the Internet. Timing enables sync- an embedded processor for factory equip- ing databases halfway around the world, trading stocks from thousands ment that enables time-sensitive network- of miles away and allowing calls and data to traverse mobile networks ing at gigabit speeds. A month later the undistorted. Understanding when a packet of information is sent and OPC Foundation, which is trying to create how to reassemble packets in the correct order when they’re received is crucial to a unified protocol for factory automation, our modern networks. • And now timing has to take the best of the Internet and said it would standardize the movement marry it with the rigors and reliability of the factory-automation network as manu- of data in its OPC UA protocol over time- facturers bring in more information technology to their existing factory-automation sensitive networks. systems. One way to do that is through an emerging standard called time-sensitive Pekka Varis, chief technologist for cat- networking, which embeds a shared understanding of time into devices connected alog processors at Texas Instruments, by Ethernet . • Traditionally, for highly accurate timing, you place quartz timing chips says that factories might soon have one in every piece of equipment or force each machine to call back to the cloud to get Ethernet cable replacing the two net- the time. But quartz-based clocks on every machine in a factory would be too expen- works that currently handle IT and oper- sive, and calling back to a cloud-based clock is not secure. That’s why engineers are ational technology. turning to Ethernet and time-sensitive networking. • If Ethernet can help machines Two years ago, I would have said this deliver the right message in a specified amount of time, it can eliminate dozens of would never happen, but the market pricey proprietary protocols used today. Different industrial machines often have for time-sensitive networks is grow- their own data protocols, and being able to replace them with one Ethernet-based ing. I suppose you should never bet protocol can also bring better scale and distribution benefits to the world of industrial- against Ethernet. n technology protocols. The proprietary protocols in traditional factory automation • ↗ POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/ emphasize reliability and speed. After all, if a machine has a problem it needs to ethernet0119

18 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Greg Mably NUMBERS DON’T LIE_BY VACLAV SMIL OPINION

for checking in, 45 minutes for the ride from Manhattan to LaGuardia, and 15 minutes for the ride from Logan to downtown Boston. That raises the total to 175 minutes. In a rational world, one that valued convenience, time, low energy intensity and low carbon conversions, the high-speed electric train would always be the first choice for such distances. Europe is natural train country, and it has already made that decision. Yet even though the United States and Canada lack the population density to justify dense networks of such connections, they do have many city pairs that are suited for fast trains. But not one of those pairs has a fast train. Amtrak’s Acela ENERGY INTENSITY OF line does not even remotely qualify, as it averages just a measly PASSENGER TRAVEL 110 km/h (68 mph). There was a time when America had the best trains in I HAVE NO ANIMOSITY TOWARD CARS AND PLANES. For decades the world. In 1934, 11 years after GE I have depended for local travel on a succession of reliable Honda Ci vics, made its first diesel locomotive, the and for years I have flown intercontinentally at least 100,000 miles annu- Chicago, Bur lington & Quincy railroad ally. At these two extremes—a drive to an Italian food store, a flight from began to run its streamlined stainless Winnipeg to Tokyo—cars and planes rule. • Energy intensity is the key. When I’m the steel Pioneer Zephyr, a 600-horsepower only passenger in my Civic, it requires about 2 megajoules per passenger-kilometer (447-kilowatt), eight-cylinder, two-stroke in city driving. Add another passenger and that figure drops to 1 MJ/pkm, compara- diesel-electric unit. This power made it ble to a half-empty bus. Jet airliners are surprisingly efficient, commonly requiring possible for the Zephyr to beat today’s around 2 MJ/pkm. With full flights and the latest airplane designs, they can do it at Acela on its Boston–to–New York City less than 1.5 MJ/pkm. Of course, public-transit trains are far superior: At high pas- run by hitting an average of 124 km/h senger loads, the best subways need less than 0.1 MJ/pkm. But even in Tokyo, which on the more than 1,600-km-long run has a dense network of lines, the nearest station may be more than a kilome ter away, from Denver to Chicago. too far for many old people. • But none of these modes of transportation can equal Is it quite unrealistic to hope for a the energy intensity of intercity high-speed trains. These are typically on routes of comeback? Could it be possible that 150-600 km (about 90-370 miles). Older models of Japan’s pioneering bullet train, a century later, in 2034, we might the shinkansen (“new main line”), had an energy intensity of around 0.35 MJ/pkm; have sleek high-speed trains averag- more recent fast-train designs—the French TGV and German ICE—t ypically need just ing close to 300 km/h between Boston 0.2 MJ/pkm. That’s an order of magnitude less than airplanes. • No less important, and W ashington, D.C., between San high-speed trains are indeed fast. The Lyon-Marseille TGV co vers 280 km (170 miles) Francisco and Los Angeles, between in 100 minutes, downtown to downtown. In contrast, scheduled commercial flight Toronto and Montreal? n time for about the same distance—300 km from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to ↗ POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/ Boston’s Logan Airport—is 70 minutes. Then you must add at least another 45 minutes energyefficiency0119

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY Stuart Bradford SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 19 REFLECTIONS_BY ROBERT W. LUCKY OPINION

The fact that the speaker had been successful shows that anyone sufficiently bright and motivated can succeed. How- ever, the other famous dropouts cited seem to imply that perhaps some students are so good that they don’t even need Harvard. But Harvard needs students like them. My own belief is that in the end, the students make the school. I often think that at the Greats, the faculty itself is superfluous. Just get that group of students together and get out of the way. Good things will happen. Many of the not-quite-great schools aspire to become Greats. They can hire excellent faculty, which often includes graduates of the Greats. But the hardest thing to get is that large number of exceptional students. The brand of the Greats endures, and so many of the best students want a degree from the Greats. The listing of the Greats in the various college guides has not changed in many decades. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Greats attract the great, and the cir- MAKING A GREAT UNIVERSITY cle continues indefinitely. Students graduating from the Greats often aspire to research and entrepreneur- I HAVE THE PERCEPTION THAT A HANDFUL of universi- ial careers, reflecting the cultures of their ties get the lion’s share of credit for engineering achievement. institutions. They also have a ready-made It seems that their faculty and alumni receive an outsize pro- network of soon-to-be-famous fellow stu- portion of awards and academy memberships. I don’t need to dents and the support and endorsement name these schools, as I think you know which they are, but for the sake of well-known faculty. The combination of description I’ll call them the “Greats.” You can consider that your own of aspirations and pedigree can result in school is one of the Greats if you wish. • Your immediate reaction might favorable starting positions in industry be that this perceived level of acclaim is obviously merited. That may be and academia. First jobs can be critical in so, but I think it deserves some further consideration. Perhaps it’s like the path of a career, and achievements in observing that so many of the U.S. Supreme Court justices come from those early years are often later retrospec- Harvard. Why does that happen? Surely there are many other excellent tively recognized and honored by awards. law schools, just as there are many very good engineering schools. There Nonetheless, in my time as a research must be something else involved besides the good education available at manager, I usually forgot what schools so many other schools. • We might agree that the Greats get the best and engineers had graduated from after a few brightest students. However, there are many more of the best and brightest years. There is a half-life to a pedigree of that attend other good universities, which I will lump together as the “not three or four years. The network of valu- quite greats.” A big difference, however, is that virtuallyevery student at able associates diffuses and outsiders are the Greats is exceptional, and this is relatively rare elsewhere. • I recently absorbed. Engineers are accepted for who heard a talk by a successful technology entrepreneur. He confessed that they are and what they have become. he had been a college dropout and this had given him a bad opinion of Other engineers have a good sense of who his own capabilities. But, people said to him, successful billionaires Bill the good engineers are, and that matters Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had also been college dropouts. To which he a great deal in all that follows. n replied, “Yes, but they dropped out of Harvard; I dropped out of commu- ↗ POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/ nity college. It’s different.” reflections0119

20 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY James Steinberg TOP TECH 2019

a time for making promises, frequently broken, about the things we’ll IT’S JANUARY, do in the coming year. Well, here’s our promise to you: 2019 is going to be a year of dazzling technological ferment, and we’ll be there to cover it, starting with this issue. • Here we’ve made our best guesses as to what will make news in the world of tech this year—and kick-started that coverage. The two dozen topics in this special report include low-cost solar cells with high efficiencies, a cryptocurrency that doesn’t waste energy, hard drives with greater capacities, the provision of cellular service to rural Africa using base stations floating in the stratosphere, and more. Read on to celebrate the New Year with a bevy of technical advances likely to be making news soon. And keep checking in with us all year long as we bring you the most important developments in tech. It’s a promise we’ll keep.

ILLUSTRATION BY Blood Bros. SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 21 TOP TECH 2019

22 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Blood Bros. TOP TECH 2019

informal code name for the project.) In late November, Musk announced a name change for the BFR—to Starship SPACEX AND for the crewed upper stage, and Super Heavy for the lower booster stage. That booster will have 31 of the company’s Raptor engines, which are under devel- BLUE ORIGIN opment, while Starship will be outfit- ted with seven Raptor engines. Both stages are intended to be reusable, and Starship will be able to carry dozens FACE OFF of people to destinations far beyond Earth orbit. SpaceX has modified the design of this colossal vehicle a couple of times since conceiving it in 2016. The most press time), with two more scheduled recent version was described at a press The biggest before the end of the year, representing conference this past September at the about 20 percent of roughly 100 world- company’s California headquarters. rivalry in space wide launches. This version, Musk said, would be able The company stands out in another to place 100 metric tons on the surface heats up way—it’s the only one to recover and of Mars, provided that the spaceship’s The commercial space business has reuse its rockets. Landings of its upper stage was refueled in Earth orbit blossomed over the past decade. Two Falcon 9 first stages have gone from before departing for the Red Planet. companies, though, have grabbed being novelties, often with explosive “I think it looks beautiful,” he added, the spotlight, emerging as the most failures, to a routine aspect of most noting the similarity to a fictional ambitious of them all: Blue Origin missions. Last May, SpaceX introduced rocket ship of graphic-novel fame. and SpaceX. its latest version of the Falcon 9, called “I love the Tintin rocket design, so I kind At first glance, these two companies the Block 5, the first stage of which is of wanted to bias it towards that.” look a lot alike. They are both led by designed to be flown 10 or more times. billionaires who became wealthy from Although the Falcon 9 will be the Internet: Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin SpaceX’s workhorse for years to come, earned his fortune from Amazon.com, the company added a new vehicle to its To the Moon, Israel! and Elon Musk of SpaceX got rich initially stable three months before introduc- Israel’s SpaceIL from Web-based businesses, notably ing the Block 5. Last February, the com- is aiming to get a lunar lander to PayPal. Both companies are develop- pany launched the first Falcon Heavy, the moon in the ing large, reusable launch vehicles capa- which includes three Falcon 9 first first half of 2019. ble of carrying people and satellites for stages lined up in a row. The Falcon The company initially formed government and commercial custom- Heavy is capable of placing more than to compete for ers. And both are motivated by almost 60 metric tons into low Earth orbit, far Google’s Lunar XPrize, but the contest messianic visions of humanity’s future more than any existing launch vehicle deadlines passed with the prize money unclaimed. SpaceIL’s lander will catch a beyond Earth. This coming year, we’ll can accomplish. ride to geosynchronous orbit on a SpaceX likely see some major milestones as these But even the Falcon Heavy pales in Falcon 9 rocket, piggybacking on an Ttwo titans continue to jockey for position. comparison with what SpaceX is now Indonesian telecommunications satellite. Then the plan is for the lander to orbit developing, a vehicle that until recently Earth three times, steadily climbing, until Over the past few years, SpaceX has was called the Big Falcon Rocket, or the moon’s gravitational field catches become one of the most active launch BFR. (The R-rated interpretation of that the craft and begins reeling it in. After touching down on the moon, the lander companies on the planet. In 2018 alone, acronym wasn’t lost on the rocket’s will study the moon’s magnetic field and SpaceX performed 20 launches (as of developers, who initially used it as the also send back photos and videos.

ILLUSTRATION BY Anders Wenngren SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 23 TOP TECH 2019

Speaking in early September at an space policy workshop in Washington, in the capsule for six people. Timing event to celebrate the 60th anniver- D.C., this past October. The company of the first tourist flight is unclear, sary of the Defense Advanced Research has completed a new 70,000-square- though. “I’m hopeful it will happen Projects Agency, SpaceX’s chief oper- meter (750,000-square-foot) factory in 2019,” Bezos said when asked when ating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, said for constructing the rocket just out- commercial flights would start, during that the company will begin making side the gates of the Kennedy Space an interview at the Wired 25 confer- the first “hop tests” of the BFR’s upper Center, in Florida, and it’s currently ence last October. At the same time, he stage (Starship) in late 2019. building a testing and refurbishment included the appropriate notes of cau- facility nearby, which is expected to be tion: “I was hopeful it would happen in Blue Origin, by contrast, has yet to completed in early 2019. Blue Origin 2018. I keep telling the team that it’s not launch anything at all into orbit. But is also modifying a dormant launch- a race. I want this to be the safest space the company has similarly big ambi- pad at nearby Cape Canaveral for its vehicle in the history of space vehicles.” tions. It’s working on a rocket it calls operations and has signed up several New Glenn (named after John Glenn, commercial customers for New Glenn. Unlike Blue Origin, SpaceX has no the first American to orbit Earth), Powering New Glenn will be an apparent interest in suborbital space- which is scheduled to launch for the engine that Blue Origin has been devel- flight and is focusing instead on send- first time in 2021. The two-stage rocket oping called the BE-4. The company ing people into orbit, most immediately will be able to place 45 metric tons is also selling the engine to United using the Block 5 version of its Falcon 9 into low Earth orbit, with its first stage Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint ven- booster. SpaceX and Boeing both have designed to land on a ship at sea and ture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing NASA contracts to develop crewed be reused up to 25 times. that was formed in 2006 to serve U.S. spacecraft to transport astronauts “We’re in build mode right now,” said government customers. ULA will use to and from the International Space Bob Smith, CEO of Blue Origin, during a the BE-4 on the first stage of its Vulcan Station. Development of SpaceX’s Crew rocket, a successor to its existing Atlas Dragon, a variation of the Dragon space- and Delta vehicles. craft currently used for carrying cargo Last October, both Blue Origin and to the space station, is nearing com- ULA received contracts from the U.S. pletion. NASA released a schedule last Air Force to support development of October that calls for a final test flight of B their launch vehicles: $500 million the Crew Dragon, with people aboard for Blue Origin and nearly $1 billion it for the first time, this coming June. for ULA. (SpaceX did not receive an Blue Origin also anticipates flying award as part of this Air Force Launch people into orbit one day, on its New Service Agreement program, although Glenn rocket. The company partic- the company did not disclose whether ipated in earlier bidding rounds of it had even submitted a bid.) “It’s excit- NASA’s commercial crew program ing to see that we’ll be powering two and maintains an unfunded agree- launch vehicles in the United States Air ment with the agency, whereby NASA Force’s arsenal for decades to come,” will provide technical support for Blue Smith said at that workshop. Origin’s efforts in human spaceflight. New Glenn builds on the lessons Blue “All of our early flights will be payloads,” Origin has learned with its suborbital said Rob Meyerson, formerly the senior tourist vehicle, New Shepard, named vice president of advanced programs after Alan Shepard, whose 1961 subor- at Blue Origin, speaking of the com- bital trip made him the first American pany’s New Glenn rocket at a confer-

UP AND AWAY: Blue Origin’s New Glenn in space. New Shepard, featuring a reus- ence at MIT last March. “We’ll evolve rocket [top] will be capable of lifting able booster and capsule, is being tested to flying people probably seven, eight 45 metric tons into low Earth orbit, while at Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site. years down the road.” SpaceX’s Starship [bottom], if refueled in space, will be capable of ferrying Blue Origin plans to fly passengers Even further down the road, both

100 metric tons to the surface of Mars. soon on New Shepard, which has room Bezos and Musk see their companies SPACEX BOTTOM: ORIGIN; BLUE TOP:

24 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG TOP TECH 2019

truly enabling the expansion of humanity beyond Earth. But they have different visions of where we should go and how. Musk has long talked about his desire to make humanity “multiplanetary” and thus not vulnerable to a calamity, natural or human-made, affecting Earth. We should try “to become a multiplanet civilization...to ultimately have life on Mars, the moon, maybe Venus, the moons of Jupiter, throughout the solar system,” he said at the September press conference where he described the most recent version of the BFR. His primary focus, though, has been on Mars. The design of the BFR has been based on its ability to take large amounts of cargo and people to the surface of Mars to establish settlements there. In a 2017 speech, he said the first BFR cargo missions to Mars could launch in 2022, followed by crewed missions in 2024, a schedule he acknowledged was “aspirational.” Yet Musk has shown an increasing interest in missions to other destinations, particularly the moon. At THE U.S. FINALLY the September press conference, he announced that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa had paid for a BFR GOES BIG ON flight, scheduled for 2023, that will go around the moon. Maezawa, an art enthusiast who made his fortune in OFFSHORE WIND online fashion retailing, plans to fly on that mission accompanied by a small number of personally selected artists. Musk has also suggested that the BFR could support permanent stations on Sometime in 2019, construction on the moon. “We should have a lunar base The 800-MW Vineyard Wind, the first major offshore by now,” he said in that 2017 speech, but wind farm in the United States, will begin. he hasn’t disclosed any details about Vineyard Wind Workers will start prepping a pair of who would build it, or how. project is the undersea substations to be installed about Blue Origin has a similar view of 55 kilometers south of the Massachusetts humanity’s destiny. “Blue Origin U.S.’s first large mainland. A specially equipped trawler will believes in a future where millions of lay undersea transmission cable between people are living and working in space,” offshore wind the site and a landfall on Cape Cod. The the company states on its website. cable will connect to the switching station But Blue Origin has focused on going farm. It won’t be in Barnstable, and from there to the New to the moon, | CONTINUED ON PAGE 53 the last England power grid.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY Edmon de Haro SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 25 TOP TECH 2019

Meanwhile, the first of 84 wind turbines, “Vineyard Wind’s price is a game Massachusetts spent $100 million 9.5 megawatts each, from MHI Vestas changer,” says Bill White, who spoke upgrading its New Bedford Marine will be shipped to the site and installed in to IEEE Spectrum in September, when Commerce Terminal, to allow it to handle an array that will populate a 650-square- he was senior director of offshore wind massive turbine components. Despite kilometer expanse and generate some development at the Massachusetts such preparatory efforts, at press time local 800 MW. The exact timetable for all Clean Energy Center. (In October White fishermen were protesting the project, that work is uncertain, though. The joined the German renewable energy upset over the positioning of the turbines. developers—Copenhagen Infrastructure firm EnBW.) “Offshore wind is good Turbine technology has evolved Partners and Avangrid Renewables— for [combatting] climate change. It considerably since Cape Wind’s time, declined to be interviewed for this story. creates jobs. It meets the need for more Musial notes. “Back in 2003, we couldn’t The most remarkable thing about electricity as the Northeast’s power- place turbines south of Martha’s Vineyard. Vineyard Wind isn’t its size or scope or the generation fleet ages. Offshore wind has Now we can.” Cape Wind’s turbines were fact that it’s a first for the United States. been a no-brainer—except on cost. Now, to be 3.6 MW. “Now turbines are more It’s the 7.4 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour cost has almost been taken off the table.” than twice that size, which means you price that Vineyard Wind has agreed to The U.S. offshore wind market has need fewer of them.” Though the turbines charge for the wind farm’s electricity. been a long time coming, says Walt are also taller, they’ll be farther from shore. In the project’s second phase, the price Musial, manager of offshore wind at the Vineyard Wind is only the first of a will drop to just 6.5 cents, making it National Renewable Energy Laboratory number of large U.S. offshore wind projects competitive with coal and natural gas, (NREL). He’s worked on wind power for in the works. Next to the Vineyard Wind site but without the carbon emissions. For 35 years, so he’s intimately familiar with are several other sites leased to Deepwater comparison, electricity from the tiny the technical, economic, regulatory, Wind (recently purchased by the Danish five‑turbine, 30-MW Block Island wind and, above all, political hurdles that company Ørsted) and to Bay State Wind (a farm, which became operational in 2016 have stymied U.S. efforts, even as other partnership of Ørsted and the transmission off the coast of Rhode Island, is priced at countries embraced the technology. company Eversource). 24.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Epitomizing those struggles was Cape Meanwhile, New Jersey is soliciting Wind, which was to be built off the coast of 1,100 MW of offshore wind capacity, Cape Cod. Proposed in 2001, it won local, the largest ever for a U.S. state, with state, and federal approvals and major an eventual 3,500 MW by 2030. New Superconductors financial backing. But it also faced years of York state has set a goal of 2,400 MW of Spin Up in Wind legal challenges from people concerned offshore wind by the same year. Turbines about how the turbines, which would be Elsewhere in the world, France, Taiwan, visible from shore, would affect the area’s and Vietnam have invested heavily in EcoSwing, a consortium funded scenic beauty and wildlife. Finally, in 2017, offshore wind, joining the likes of China, by the European the developers canceled the project. Germany, and the United Kingdom. The Union’s Horizon “It was death by a thousand cuts,” total installed capacity of offshore wind is 2020 research program, is aiming Musial says. “But in a way Cape Wind was projected to reach 115 gigawatts by 2030, to start spinning the leader. We learned a lot, and now the a sixfold increase from 2017, according to the world’s first industry is on track.” Bloomberg New Energy Finance. commercial-scale superconducting wind turbine in 2019. (EcoSwing stands for The Massachusetts Clean Energy And new technologies continue to be “Energy Cost Optimization using Super- Center helped ensure that Vineyard deployed, including floating turbines, for conducting Wind Generators.”) In this test Wind’s fate didn’t mirror Cape Wind’s. use in deeper water where turbines can’t of the technology, intended to last at least a year, a superconducting drivetrain will “We recognized that offshore wind would be directly anchored in the ocean floor, be installed on an existing 3.6-megawatt come to Massachusetts but that there were and telescopic turbine towers, which can wind turbine in western Denmark. The obstacles, so...we’ve been doing all this be fully assembled onshore, towed to the machine replaces permanent magnets with electromagnets made from coils work to get ready,” White says. site, and then extended. of superconducting wire. The result is a That work included environmental “We spent years doing site develop- generator that is significantly smaller and surveys, planning for transmission lines, ment, industry cultivation, meeting with lighter. But the need to refrigerate the superconductors complicates installa- and funding a study of gray whales, which regulators,” NREL’s Musial says. “It’s tion and maintenance. may be affected by wind farm construction. finally paying off.” — JEAN KUMAGAI

26 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Anders Wenngren eponymous comic book and movies. But that bulky version kept the user “IRON MAN” SUITS tethered to the wall by a power cord— something that would presumably interfere with superhero activities— ARE COMING TO and the suit remained in R&D. Now, finally, Sarcos is coming out with a commercial exoskeleton: the FACTORY FLOORS Guardian XO. Wolff says the sleek battery-powered suit will be ready at the end of 2019. It’s intended not for the battlefield but rather for industrial which can turn an assembly-line settings such as factory floors, con- Full-body worker into a superhero? “We’re tak- struction sites, and mines, where it can ing orders,” says Sarcos CEO Ben Wolff. provide a substantial return on invest- exoskeletons The company has been working ment by boosting worker productivity on this wearable robotics technology and decreasing injuries. will give since 2000, when engineers in its Salt Wolff says his engineering team workers super Lake City headquarters began cobbling made breakthroughs in power man- together experimental supersoldier agement that enabled them to build strength suits for the U.S. military. A 2010 proto a practical and reasonably priced type, which enabled the wearer to suit. “It’s one thing to make a very What’s the most important thing for punch through wooden boards, earned expensive robot in the lab,” Wolff people to know about the full-body the nickname “the Iron Man suit” in says. “We’re finally at the point where exoskeleton from Sarcos Robotics, homage to the high-tech gear in the the exoskeleton’s capabilities cou-

ILLUSTRATION BY Blood Bros. SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 27 TOP TECH 2019

pled with the economics make it a viable product.” The XO will be available in two models: Workers wearing the basic XO will be able to repeatedly hoist 35 kilograms without strain, while those wearing the heavy-duty XO-Max will easily lift a 90-kg load. Each model has a battery that lasts for up to 8 hours and can be quickly swapped out. Sarcos isn’t the only company building wearables to augment the strength and endurance of industrial workers. Ekso Bionics, a California company best known for its medic al-grade exoskeletons that enable paraplegics to walk, recently came out with the EksoVest, an upper-body exoskeleton that supports workers’ arms as they perform overhead tasks. In 2017, Ekso began a pilot project with Ford Motor Co., and last year Ford expanded the trial to 15 factories around the world. The time may now be right for exoskeletons to proliferate in the work- place, says Rian Whitton, an analyst with ABI Research who recently authored a report on the exoskeleton

Printing Metal Will

Get a Lot Cheaper market. As the technology has matured STRONG AND SAFE: The Guardian XO, Traditionally, over the past decade, he says, market a powered exoskeleton from Sarcos 3D printers for Robotics, is intended to make industrial fabricating metal conditions have become more favor- workers more productive and protect items cost millions able. “In the Western world and Japan, them from injury. A worker wearing the of dollars and have we’re seeing a tightening of the labor heavy-duty XO-Max can repeatedly lift been capable a 90-kilogram load without strain. of printing just a market, especially when it comes handful of parts per to manufacturing,” Whitton says. day. The high price limited their use to large “There’s a real incentive for compa- manufacturers like Boeing and General Electric, which turn to them only for nies to invest in their workforce and muscle requires energy at every shapes too complicated to be machined or make people on the assembly line moment; there are parts of each step cast. Burlington, Mass., startup Desktop more productive.” where gravity does the work. Trans- Metal plans in 2019 to start selling a US $750,000 printing system designed The recent engineering advances in lating that lesson to an exoskeleton, for mass production of metal objects at the Sarcos lab came from studying the Wolff says, means the suit doesn’t 100 times the speed of today’s systems. human body’s energy -conservation have to power up every joint con- That’s not exactly priced for the average desktop, but it’s certainly poised to change strategies. Consider the biomechan- tinuously, and that means a longer

the game for midsize manufacturers. ics of walking, for example. Not every battery life. ROBOTICS SARCOS

28 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Anders Wenngren TOP TECH 2019

Sarcos didn’t design the XO for any particular application, but rather wanted to help people perform all ETHEREUM WILL CUT manner of tasks. A user manages an XO via a system that Wolff calls “get-out- of-the-way control.” Sensors through- BACK ITS ABSURD out the suit recognize how the wearer is moving his or her limbs, enabling the suit to instantly mimic the speed, ENERGY USE force, and direction of these move- ments. “The suit moves along with you; you don’t have to think about how to use it,” Wolff says. year Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation he While industrial exoskeletons are The crypto cofounded, and the broader open-source designed to protect their users, poten- movement advancing the cryptocurrency tial buyers may have other safety con- currency is all plan to field-test a long-promised cerns. At the standards organization overhaul of Ethereum’s code. If these ASTM International, Bill Billotte is reducing its developers are right, by the end of 2019 vice chairman of a committee that’s energy Ethereum’s new code could complete working on standards for exoskeletons. transactions using just 1 percent of the He says employers will need to think footprint energy consumed today. through some of the same questions Ethereum’s attempted rebirth will that arose when collaborative robots by 99 percent be one of the year’s “most fascinating started appearing on assembly lines. technologies to watch,” says Zaki Manian, “If you have one person wearing an Bitcoin soaks up most of the hype who is advising the cryptocurrency exoskeleton, but they’re working next and the opprobrium heaped on upstart Cosmos. Manian says Ethereum’s to other people who are not wearing cryptocurrencies, leaving its younger development process means that multiple exoskeletons, how do you make that and smaller sibling Ethereum in the coders and organizations must collaborate work?” he says. shadows. But Ethereum is anything but in the open, converge on specifications, Companies that are ready to put small. Its market capitalization was roughly invent all of the technology to implement their money down anyway will be US $10 billion at press time, and it has an them, and make them work together signing on for a “robot as a service” equally whopping energy footprint. seamlessly. “It is by far the most technically package, in which Sarcos will deliver Ethereum mining consumes a quarter ambitious open community project that the Guardian XOs, install the dock- to half of what Bitcoin mining does, but has ever been attempted,” says Manian. ing stations, and frequently visit the that still means that for most of 2018 it client’s facility for suit maintenance, was using roughly as much electricity Like Bitcoin, Ethereum relies on a block repairs, and upgrades. The cost of an as Iceland. Indeed, the typical Ethereum chain, which is a digital ledger of transac XO package, Wolff says, “is roughly transaction gobbles more power than an tions maintained by a community of users. the equivalent to a fully loaded, average U.S. household uses in a day. (It’s called a blockchain because new all costs included, $25 per hour “That’s just a huge waste of resources, transactions are bundled into “blocks” of employee.” Wolff argues that com- even if you don’t believe that pollution and data and written onto the end of a “chain” panies will save money by investing carbon dioxide are an issue. There are real of existing blocks that describe all prior in XOs, claiming that an exoskeleton consumers—real people—whose need transactions.) However, Buterin designed will improve a worker’s productivity Bfor electricity is being displaced by this Ethereum to do more than securely main by four to eight times, and will reduce stuff,” says Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old tain a ledger without a central authority. injuries to boot. His message to man- Russian-Canadian computer scientist who His vision was for Ethereum to become a ufacturing companies: “Think about invented Ethereum when he was just 18. global computer—one that’s decentralized, putting this robot on your payroll.” Buterin plans to finally start undoing his accessible to all, and essentially immune to —Eliza Strickland brainchild’s energy waste in 2019. This downtime, censorship, and fraud.

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 29 30 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Blood Bros. TOP TECH 2019

What gives the Ethereum blockchain What Ethereum’s PoW algorithm has not began a downward slide. In November such potential is its ability to store data, prevented, however, is explosive growth in it crashed below $120—low enough to support decisions, and automate the dis- the computing resources devoted to ether erase miners’ profit margin and to prompt tribution of value. It manages these tasks mining. The computational power directed some to slow down or turn off mining through smart contracts, programs writ- at that task grew more than 25-fold in rigs. According to a projection by the ten by users or developers in E thereum’s 2017, as the token’s value surged from $8 Digiconomist—a site created by Alex de custom coding language. Smart contracts to $862 and mining firms built dedicated Vries, a senior associate and blockchain have obvious business applications, but data centers full of general-purpose specialist at PricewaterhouseCoopers— the long-term hope is that apps built from graphics processing units, which are well- Ethereum’s miners likely cut their total them will eventually make Ethereum the suited to ether mining. energy consumption by more than half in ultimate cloud-c omputing platform. The resultant energy demand has less than 20 days. That lofty vision clashes with created a backlash from environmentalists. No surprise then that some utilities, Ethereum’s current reality. While there are such as Montreal-based Hydro-Québec, some multimillion-dollar apps running are setting higher electricity rates for on it, even Buterin says he suspects that miners. Such pushback from utilities and Ethereum is consuming more resources AIs Are Learning their regulators may further erode the than it returns in societal benefits. About You. Here’s security of PoW-based cryptocurrencies. The problem is all that mining. Like Your Chance to Restricted access to power and rising most cryptocurrencies, Ethereum energy costs will hinder new miners relies on a computational competition Turn the Tables from joining the game, accelerating the called proof of work (PoW) . In PoW, all AI4ALL, a concentration of mining power. As it nonprofit aimed participants race to cryptographically at increasing the concentrates, the risk of collusion and secure transactions and add them to the diversity of the fraud increases. blockchain’s globally distributed ledger. technologists building and It’s a winner-takes-all contest, rewarded working with For Buterin, slashing energy use has with newly minted cryptocoins. So the artificial intelligence, will be launching been part of the vision from Ethereum’s more computational firepower you have, free online courses in early 2019. The beginning. Most of Ethereum’s other courses, supported by a US $1 million the better your chances to profit. grant from Google, will be aimed at proponents agree. “It’s widely accepted PoW mining is difficult by design. The people interested in a career in AI, as in the Ethereum community that PoW idea is to prevent any one entity from well as those who just want to become uses far too much energy. For me it more AI-literate. AI4ALL started in controlling the blockchain. For example, 2017 with seed funding from Melinda is the No. 1 priority,” says Ethereum if a bitcoin miner’s computer system had Gates and Jensen and Lori Huang, contributor Paul Hauner, a cofounder of more than half of all the mining power on based on a pilot program at Stanford Australian cybersecurity and blockchain- University that offered summer the network, that miner could perpetrate camps for high school girls (a growing development firm Sigma Prime. frauds, such as revising long-c ompleted program that now has six locations Ethereum’s plan is to replace PoW transactions. Bitcoin users would have little around North America). with proof of stake (PoS)—an alternative recourse because miners are anonymous. mechanism for distributed consensus that In theory, PoW keeps mining a distrib- was first applied to a cryptocurrency with uted affair. In practice, however, the devel- Utilities and communities, meanwhile, see the launch of Peercoin in 2012. Instead opment of application-specific ICs (ASICs) financial risk and opportunity costs if they of millions of processors simultaneously that accelerate mining, produced by a cater to cryptocurrency miners that gobble processing the same transactions, PoS handful of chip fabs in China, has concen- up cheap electricity while creating few jobs. randomly picks one to do the job. trated power over many cryptocurrencies. Serving miners may require utilities to make In PoS, the participants are called Ethereum took the fight against equipment upgrades, which could become validators instead of miners, and the concentrated power one step further superfluous if cryptocurrency prices crash key is keeping them honest. PoS does by selecting a memory-intensive PoW and mining operations shut down. this by requiring each validator to put up algorithm for mining “ether,” as its value Recent market dynamics support the a stake—a pile of ether in Ethereum’s token is known. This ether-mining utilities’ concerns. The value of ether case—as collateral. A bigger stake earns algorithm penalizes the use of ASICs. peaked at $1,385 last January and then a validator proportionately more chances

ILLUSTRATION BY Anders Wenngren SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 31 TOP TECH 2019

at a turn, but it also means that a validator ton. In October 2017, when mining time an E thereum 2.0 software client, says caught cheating has lots to lose. had already nearly doubled to 30 seconds, Ethereum’s smart-contract language is a Moving to PoS will cut the energy the Ethereum team reset the clock, delay- tough medium for writing complex code. consumed per Ethereum transaction more ing PoW’s doomsday by about 12 months. “Writing smart contracts is a very con- than a hundredfold, according to Buterin: And they will likely hit snooze again shortly. strained environment for computing. You “The PoW part is the one that’s consuming It’s not that Team Ethereum is sleeping can’t do complicated things on it,” he says. these huge amounts of electricity. The in. In fact, Buterin says, Ethereum’s devel- Just a few months after the decision blockchain transactions themselves are opers have already slain most of the theo- to shift to Ethereum 2.0, its PoS not super computationally intensive. It’s just retical dragons associated with PoS. But specifications had been sketched out verifying digital signatures. It’s not some the process of turning those theoretical and over half a dozen teams were already kind of heavy 3D-matrix map or machine solutions into efficient software has been working on software implementations learning on gigabytes of data,” he says. moving slower than expected. using a variety of programming languages. Slashing computational power and Hauner’s group at Sigma Prime is energy use is not just an ecological move. developing its Ethereum 2.0 client using It also has a financial benefit, because Rust, for example. He expects this app it should reduce the rate at which fresh and others to be running PoS on beta ether is issued to encourage validators— networks, or “testnets,” early in 2019. extra money that dilutes a currency’s value. Buterin says public testnets could be “Because PoS validators aren’t expending handling another Ethereum 2.0 innova- all of this energy, we don’t have to reward tion—chains with multiple branches to them as much,” says Darren Langley, a boost transaction throughput—by the senior blockchain developer with Rocket end of 2019. But he warns that there Pool, in Brisbane, Australia, which is could still be “unknown unknowns” lurk- developing an app that will assemble ing that could set their timeline back. staking pools, paying interest to ether As a multibillion-dollar network, owners who join the pool. Ethereum obviously has a lot to lose if it Moving to PoS could also boost security. launches glitchy or insecure technology. Under PoS, the location of each validator’s To play on Ethereum’s PoS chain, hold- account is known and can be destroyed if ETHER EVANGELIST: Vitalik Buterin, ers of ether will have to deposit a smart that validator breaks the rules. Vlad Zamfir, inventor of Ethereum, hopes to contract on the original Ethereum chain finally demonstrate the blockchain Ethereum Foundation’s lead PoS devel- platform’s low-power format in 2019. that irreversibly transfers ether to the new oper, likens this to the Bitcoin community chain. Any missteps could jeopardize the gaining the power to incinerate the data entire ecosystem of developers and proj- centers of a miner who abuses his power. What provides hope for 2019 is a ects that use Ethereum’s smart contracts. By 2015, the advantages of PoS had radical new plan adopted by Ethereum’s But Ethereum also has a lot to lose if already convinced the Ethereum com- leaders in June 2018. Before then, they it delays much longer. An array of well- munity to make the shift, and leaders had anticipated building PoS into the capitalized projects—Cardano, Dfinity, such as Buterin had expected to do so existing Ethereum blockchain. In June, Eosio, and Manian’s Cosmos, to name in just a year or two. To make their inten- they decided to make a clean break and just a few—are hatching their own PoS- tions clear, Ethereum’s core developers to build an entirely new blockchain—one based blockchains. Like Ethereum, they reprogrammed their PoW code to create that operates solely via PoS. seek to prove that high security and high an exponential rise in mining difficulty. The two-chain solution—dubbed efficiency are not at odds. Known as the “Difficulty Bomb,” it began Ethereum 2.0—makes a world of dif- The first to unleash the potential for slowing the creation of new transaction ference for Ethereum’s programmers blockchain applications may well become blocks in late 2016 and was expected to because continuing on the original chain the computing platform of the future. The bring ether mining to a grinding halt a few would have meant writing the machin- others will probably wither away. “This years thereafter. ery of PoS as a sophisticated set of environment is naturally quite predatory,” This time bomb has, however, functioned smart contracts. Hauner, who is lead- Manian says. “There will be a single

more like an alarm clock with a snooze but- ing an effort called Lighthouse to build platform that survives.” —PETER FAIRLEY WELTERS/LAIF/REDUX GORDON 32 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN |W SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG TOP TECH 2019

omy ladder. But within some limited operational domain, they’ll have the look and feel of a fully robotized car. The question is how constrained that domain will be. Neither Waymo—a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company— nor GM Cruise agreed to speak for the record. But it’s possible to judge their progress indirectly. In December Waymo turned its pilot ride-hailing project near Phoenix into a limited commercial service by charging select participants a fee. But it’s clearly looking at a bigger target or it wouldn’t have contracted to buy 20,000 all-electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs over the next two years. GM Cruise says it will offer a commercial Level 4 ride service in 2019, operating within particular boundaries “at all times of day and night, and in light-to-moderate inclement weather.” It appears that the service will be available first in San Francisco. The limits of current technology may keep these cars from roaming far from TAXIS WITHOUT their minutely mapped bailiwicks, but to roam at all they’ll need clear rules from road-safety regulators. C handler, DRIVERS—OR Ariz., offered Waymo a pass, but a substantial rollout of any self-driving technology would require a uniform set STEERING WHEELS of regulations nationwide. So far, no country has offered one for Level 4 cars. This year Audi says it’ll be the first company in the world to sell a Level 3 car drives itself without supervision. car directly to the public, an Audi A8 However, a Waymo, the company spun out of sedan with a particular option. It’s Google’s self-driving car research, said called Traffic Jam Pilot, because it works U.S. national it would start a commercial Level 4 only at speeds under 50 kilometers per taxi service by late 2018, although that hour (37 miles per hour), and it requires rollout will hadn’t happened as of press time. And the driver to be prepared to take back need new road GM Cruise, in San Francisco, is com- the wheel after a warning—which is the mitted to do the same in 2019, using a definition of Level 3. regulations Chevrolet Bolt that has neither a steer- But Audi now plans to offer that ing wheel nor pedals. option only in Germany and nearby A COMING MILESTONE in the auto- These cars wouldn’t work in all con- countries with similar rules of the mobile world is the widespread roll- ditions and regions—that’s why they’re road. In the United States, the rules out of Level 4 autonomy, where the on rung 4 and not rung 5 of the auton- just aren’t there yet.

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The key U.S. regulator, the National perhaps not until well into the 2020s. Highway Transportation Safety The Future Finally Toyota is making similar estimates. Administration (NHTSA), was sup- Arrives: Flying Car “All the companies working in the posed to have issued new rules for Sales Begin field can certainly do it at Level 4— autonomous cars a few months ago. Seems like we’ve in a restricted enough domain,” That deadline came and went, though, been waiting says Gill Pratt, who runs the Toyota before the agency published what are for a flying car Research Institute. “But to what extent for, well, forever. merely voluntary guidelines. That’s Terrafugia , in would it be commercially viable?” not enough. There’s talk of reviving Massachusetts, Pratt says Level 4 won’t make eco- a U.S. Senate bill that would set a uni- says the wait will nomic sense until the cars can handle be over in 2019, when its Transition form policy, to go with a counterpart vehicle comes to market. The Transition, a very broad range of driving environ- bill that’s already cleared the House which will sell for about US $280,000, ments more safely than even the best of Representatives. is a two-seater auto/aircraft with human drivers can. “Are we really there wings that fold up, allowing you to drive To allow huge numbers of self-driving around town—or park in a home garage. as a society, and has government set up cars on the roads, “NHTSA requires The Transition’s hybrid motor runs on the rules?” he asks. “I think the answer a ton of data on the performance of automotive gasoline, not aviation fuel, is no. Sensitivity to crashes is very high.” and has an airborne range of about cars in the field, and if there are none, 640 kilometers with a top airspeed of Meanwhile, he says, there are ways it becomes a chicken-and-egg prob- 160 kilometers per hour. The company of making cars at least as safe without lem,” says Brad Stertz, Audi’s director advises buyers to follow local speed shoving the driver aside. Toyota plans limits while on the ground. of government affairs in Washington, to unveil its own experimental Level 4 D.C. “Cutting through all that was the car, called the Urban Teammate, at the aim of the two bills.” 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, a Maybe the Senate will act and NHTSA highly restricted environment. But fea- will yet come up with rules, missing tures from that system will eventually its deadline by just a year. Or two. trickle down into production cars, to Even so, perhaps a delay of that mag- serve purely as a backup to the driver. nitude isn’t such a big deal. Audi, for Such a partial step to true autonomy one, is in no big hurry to field Level 4 in tens of thousands of cars might pro- cars. Stertz says its Munich subsid- vide the data that regulators need to iary, Autonomous Intelligent Driving, formulate rules. That is, the industry is doing all the work on that system, might soon be using a lot of partially and the mother company won’t sell the automated chickens to provide some resulting robocars before their time— very valuable eggs. —Philip E. Ross

NO STEERING WHEEL: Nothing mars the view from the Cruise AV, a modified form of the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt. There are no pedals or rearview

mirrors, either. However, U.S. road-safety regulations still specifically require all these parts. GM(2)

34 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Anders Wenngren TOP TECH 2019

thing,” Candido adds—each balloon needs to stay in place in the stratosphere, providing coverage for one area for hundreds of days before being replaced. Candido has been with Loon for five years, long before the effort— then known as Project Loon— graduated from X, the Alphabet research and development subsidiary, in July 2018. Candido initially worked on developing the balloons’ navigation system, one of the key components needed to address the “one thing” keeping the idea from really lifting off. The challenge of how to navigate the balloons properly has changed drastically during Candido’s time at Loon, because over the years the understanding of how Loon would operate has changed drastically as well. “Pretty early on,” Candido says, “we had a much different concept of how Loon would work. The idea is that we would launch a lot of balloons and they would circle the globe like leaves on a river, going where the river takes them.” The engineers PHONE SERVICE imagined that after circling the planet, the balloons would be in roughly the same spot in which they began their journey. BY BALLOON This would allow the balloons to circle the globe in a long line, with balloons replacing one another overhead to provide coverage. As Loon launched more balloons for highest mobile phone usage in the world. its test flights—the company has now Loon will By comparison, it has fewer than 70,000 logged over 30 million kilometers— fixed landlines. the engineering team realized that they provide cellular And yet, outside of major cities like could control where the balloons would service from the Nairobi, the infrastructure for mobile travel. “Sometimes the most obvious telephony is lacking. That’s why, in 2019, answer comes to you much later on,” stratosphere telecommunications provider Telkom Candido says. “Why don’t the balloons just Kenya will begin turning to high-altitude not leave the coverage area?” It turns out to Kenya’s rural balloons built by the Alphabet subsidiary that this is possible, at least in most places, Loon to provide mobile phone service. for reasonable durations. millions “High-altitude balloons are actually a “I think the good thing for Loon’s project very reasonable way to approach this is that they’re staying near the tropics,” Kenya runs on mobile phones. There problem,” says Sal Candido, Loon’s says George Modica, a consulting are almost 43 million in use by Kenya’s head of engineering. “They’re high, they meteorologist with Atmospheric nearly 50 million citizens, meaning cover a lot of ground, and there are and Environmental Research, in the East African country has the 33rd no obstacles.” It’s simple “but for one Lexington, Mass. Modica says there

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY Edmon de Haro SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 35 TOP TECH 2019

are two things that could overwhelm a Electric Passenger changes of configuration so as to keep balloon’s navigation: the high-latitude the data moving . meteorological phenomenon called the Planes Take Off The balloons transmit data between polar vortex, or the stratospheric effects Startups are them using point-to-point millimeter- racing to get of winds when they pass over a large an electric or wave communications. Each Loon mountain range. Lucky for Loon, Kenya hybrid-electric balloon carries a triangular gondola experiences neither. passenger made of carbon composites and plane into the Each Loon balloon is actually two skies by the end containing—in addition to all the balloons in one. There is an outer balloon of 2019. Israeli company Eviation communications equipment it needs filled with helium to give the whole thing aims to test-fly its all-electric to provide LTE coverage for an area— Alice Commuter plane in 2019 and the lift it needs. That surrounds an inner certify it to carry passengers by three millimeter-wave radios on gimbals, balloon that’s filled with air, which can 2021. The company indicates that each roughly the size of a beach ball. The be pumped up or vented. When the inner the Alice Commuter will be able gimbals give the millimeter-wave radios to transport nine passengers up balloon is inflated, the helium in the outer to 1,000 kilometers. Zunum Aero, the flexibility to maintain a direct high- balloon is squeezed to a higher density, based in Bothell, Wash., is going bandwidth connection to the nearest reducing lift. By this means, Loon’s the hybrid-electric route. The first balloons in the network. As a result, the tests of its 27-passenger aircraft— engineers can control the balloon’s or at least of its major subsystems— balloon network doesn’t need extensive altitude to take advantage of different are likewise planned for 2019 in infrastructure on the ground to work. winds at different altitudes, allowing it to hopes that the plane will be ready to When Loon deployed balloons over carry passengers by 2022. Zunum travel where it needs to go. has already signed a customer— Puerto Rico in 2017 in the aftermath The engineers have gotten good charter air company JetSuite. of Hurricane Maria, each balloon was at navigating this system—they can connected to its own ground station. now hit their final destinations from That approach worked well for the island, thousands of miles away. In one series of according to Candido, but Puerto Rico tests, they were able to launch balloons Modica. “But it’s really no different than is much smaller than Kenya. If you’re from New Zealand and navigate them navigating to stay in the same position.” In already putting in ground stations to pair so precisely that they could provide cell either case, the same principle applies: with each balloon over a large area, he service to target areas in Argentina and raising or lowering the balloon’s altitude to points out, you might as well skip the Australia. In fact, the balloons that will catch the wind it needs. balloons and invest entirely in ground- ultimately provide cell service across Navigating the balloons wasn’t the based infrastructure. Kenya will be launched from Puerto only challenge Loon tackled to make the That’s why, in September 2018, it was Rico and travel across the Atlantic to whole system work. When your phone a big deal when Loon announced that it their final destinations. connects to a traditional terrestrial cell had successfully bounced data roughly “It does seem a little strange, sending the tower, it’s fairly straightforward. After all, 1,000 kilometers across a line of seven balloons from Puerto Rico to Kenya,” says the cell tower isn’t moving. balloons over California. The achievement Not so with balloons, which will allow ground stations in cities to send are constantly drifting around on data up to balloons overhead, which will stratospheric winds. “The thing that is relay signals to other balloons farther unique is that all our network nodes away. To realize this goal in Kenya, Loon are constantly moving,” says Candido. has already begun constructing ground Loon’s engineers developed ways the stations in Nairobi and Nakuru. network could keep up with its constant Loon plans to spend the first half of 2019 testing things, before Telkom Kenya begins using the balloon-based LOFTY AMBITIONS: A balloon lifts off from Loon’s launch site in Winnemucca, network to provide mobile phone service Nev. Loon is using its ability to navigate to the country’s rural millions. This first balloons across the stratosphere to permanent deployment should convince avoid having to build launch sites around the world. Instead, the company will float any skeptics that the approach isn’t so

the balloons from existing locations. loony after all. —MICHAEL KOZIOL LOON

36 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Anders Wenngren TOP TECH 2019

Toin University, in Yokohama, Japan. But those early lab prototypes were incredibly unstable and had an efficiency of just 3.8 percent. Since then, researchers and manufacturers have made steep gains in efficiency, and they’ve also addressed the devices’ stability and scalability. This past June, for example, Oxford PV posted its latest efficiency milestone of 27.3 percent. By contrast, the current record for silicon PV is 26.7 percent, and commercial silicon panels are far less efficient. Now the company is getting ready to introduce the world’s first commercial tandem silicon-perovskite solar modules, which combine a thin-film layer of perovskite material with a silicon solar device. The solar modules look and behave very much like traditional silicon solar panels, says Chris Case, Oxford PV’s chief technology officer. The main difference is that they produce more power. What makes these developments PEROVSKITE SOLAR so remarkable is that just seven years ago, the perovskite solar industry didn’t even exist. Now, dozens CELLS: READY of firms are vying to bring the technology to market. And hundreds of researchers worldwide are studying FOR PRIME TIME new perovskite materials and processing methods and refining their understanding of how the devices work. At press time, the number of academic facturing the future. The shiny, thin papers on perovskites was on track to In 2019, Oxford squares they’re assembling into flat top 5,000 for 2018, Case says (although modules promise to outperform the that number also includes reports on PV will bring best solar panels on the market. perovskites as photodet ectors, X-ray The pilot factory is owned by detectors, and LEDs). perovskite Oxford PV—a spinout from the And in just 10 years, perovskites University of Oxford, in England— have gone from fussy, low-efficiency solar cells to which since 2012 has worked on com- experimental devices to commercial- the market mercializing solar cells made from a grade products that meet or exceed type of crystal known as a perovskite. the performance of conventional solar At a factory on the outskirts of The first perovskite solar cells were cells. No other solar PV technology— Brandenburg en der Havel, Germany, announced just 10 years ago, by the not OLEDs, dye-sensitized or quantum- bunny-suited technicians are manu- research team of Tsutomu Miyasaka at dot solar cells—compares.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY Edmon de Haro SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 37 TOP TECH 2019

“We’re at a disruption point in his- tolerant. We can handle the mate- University, used the compound methyl tory,” Case says. “Right now, in most rial poorly and still get a competitive ammonium lead triiodide for its first places in the world, solar PV with- device efficiency.” Perovskites also perovskite cell. But there are hundreds out subsidies is cheaper than any lend themselves to a variety of low- of thousands of compounds that can other form of electrical generation.” cost production methods, including form that crystal structure, according Perovskites will ensure solar power’s spin coating and roll-to-roll printing. to Oxford PV’s Case. conquest, he says. NREL researchers have even developed Regardless of the chemistry, any “You can’t stop it. You can be the larg- a perovskite ink that can be painted on. perovskite solar cell has to meet three est oil company in the world, but you Berry predicts that constructing a basic criteria for commercialization: can’t stop this.” gigawatt-scale factory for perovskite stability, efficiency, and scalability. solar modules will eventually cost Case says his company has addressed What makes perovskites so attractive about a tenth of what it now costs to all three by combining thin films of sili- is that the materials are much better build a comparable silicon solar panel con and a perovskite into one “t andem” than silicon at converting photons factory. The end product can be flex- cell that can be produced using the into electricity. ible and nearly transparent, so experts same manufacturing methods used “One of my colleagues likes to say that envision using them as window glazing for today’s solar panels. if you were looking for the ideal mate- and as spray-on coatings for buildings. Back in 2012, when the company rial for solar, you would never pick sili- Perovskite originally referred to a began working on perovskites, Oxford PV con,” says Joseph Berry, who leads the mineral containing calcium, titanium, targeted pure-perovskite products that perovskite solar team at the National and oxygen, first discovered in 1839. could be coated on glass and used as Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), The word has since come to encom- windows and other components of in Golden, Colo. “The reason [silicon] pass a large class of compounds that has become such a dominant material have the same crystal structure as the has everything to do with the total R&D mineral. Their chemical composition VERSATILE CRYSTALS: Perovskite solar cells lend themselves to a variety of processing dollars that have been spent on silicon,” is described by the shorthand AMX3, methods. Oxford PV uses conventional silicon for integrated circuits as well as solar. where A is typically an organic mole- processing for its tandem perovskite cells [left]. “Silicon has to be pure and perfect cule, M is a metal (such as lead or tin), Energy Materials Corp. uses roll‑to‑roll printing [lower right]. A perovskite ink developed at to have the characteristics we covet,” and X is a halogen (such as iodine or the National Renewable Energy Lab can be WBerry says. “Perovskites are defect chlorine). Miyasaka’s group, at Toin painted on [upper right]. CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: OXFORD PV; DENNIS SCHROEDER/NREL; ENERGY MATERIALS CORP. MATERIALS ENERGY SCHROEDER/NREL; DENNIS PV; OXFORD LEFT: FROM CLOCKWISE

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buildings. “That’s still a great idea, but perovskite cells. “If you want to make EMC’s perovskite cells are based we realized that the path to commer- these things low cost to compete with on a device architecture developed cialization could be 5 to 10 years,” Case silicon, you have to do it fast,” DeLuca by Jinsong Huang and his team at the says. “We’re focused on delivering on says. “Our target is to use a 1.5-meter- University of North Carolina at Chapel a shorter horizon.” wide roll running at 50 meters a min- Hill. “Most people in this field use When sunlight enters Oxford PV’s ute. That’s the kind of speed you need what’s called a NIP structure,” Huang tandem cell, photons pass through to scale up.” says, referring to a device in which a a transparent electrode layer and Using vacuum deposition, as Oxford layer of negatively doped (or n-type) then hit the perovskite layer, which PV and other companies are doing, material sits on top, with a layer of absorbs at shorter wavelengths than means “you need to cook the film for undoped “intrinsic” material in the silicon does, toward the blue end of half an hour, so scaling up is more middle and positively doped (or p-type) the spectrum. The photons that aren’t material at the bottom. One downside absorbed then pass through a thin to NIP structures is that they require junction layer and encounter the sili- manufacturing temperatures of about con layer, which absorbs at somewhat China Pumps Up Its 200 °C, which adds to their cost and longer wavelengths. The net result Green Power Grid limits the methods that can be used is that more of the available light is The first to make them. absorbed by the cell. generator of EMC’s devices are PIN structures, “To make a tandem cell that’s 26 or China’s Fengning with p-type material on top. “We find pumped-storage even 30 percent efficient, you only hydroelectric they work much better and can be fab- need a perovskite layer that’s in the plant will be ricated using room-temperature pro- range of 15 to 17 percent, plus a normal commissioned cesses,” including roll-to-roll printing. in 2019. This approach to energy silicon layer that’s 20 percent efficient,” storage involves two reservoirs: “It’s definitely the fastest approach you Case explains. When there is extra generation can think of,” Huang says. “There are capacity on the grid—say, when already so many providers to make solar panels take advantage of a Oxford PV is far from alone in pursu- sunny day—the turbines work in things like polymer thin films. You ing tandem perovskites. Other play- reverse, pumping water from the don’t have to reinvent every piece ers include Toshiba and Panasonic lower reservoir to the higher one; of equipment.” when demand threatens to outpace in Japan and the Stanford spin-off supply, water from the upper reservoir Tandem PV. Meanwhile, a number flows through those turbines to the Despite the enormous gains and of companies continue to bet on pure- lower one, generating electricity. intense activity, though, some solar The Fengning plant will start with perovskite solar cells: Poland’s Saule 1,800 megawatts of generating researchers remain skeptical about Technologies, China’s Wonder Solar capacity and expand to 3,600 MW the potential of perovskites. In a and Microquanta Semiconductor, and by 2022. The second phase will recent interview for PV Magazine, incorporate variable-speed drive the U.S. startup Energy Materials technology from General Electric. the Australian solar pioneer Martin Corp. (EMC). Green noted that “there are all kind of Like Oxford PV, EMC didn’t set out instabilities that must be addressed,” to be a perovskite solar company. including sensitivity to moisture, oxy- “Initially, we were based in Atlanta, challenging,” DeLuca claims. Build- gen, and even light. developing something called optical ing a perovskite solar factory based “It is very hard to see a silicon man- antennas, which are a different way to on roll-to-roll processing should be sig- ufacturer adopting a product that is convert light into electricity,” says EMC nificantly cheaper than one based on more efficient but doesn’t have the cofounder and CEO Stephan DeLuca. traditional silicon technology, he adds. same stability as its baseline product— About three years ago, he says, “we real- A couple of years ago, EMC relocated because no manufacturer wants to get ized that the path to commercialization to Rochester, N.Y., to take advantage of a bad reputation regarding stability; was going to be long.” At that point, EMC the contract manufacturing facilities in fact, it could be fatal,” Green was switched to solar perovskites. offered by Eastman Kodak. At present, quoted as saying. The startup’s focus is on commer- EMC’s devices have five layers, which the EMC’s DeLuca says that not all cializing roll-to-roll processing for its roll-to-roll machine lays out in one pass. perovskites have that flaw. “The

ILLUSTRATION BY Anders Wenngren SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 39 TOP TECH 2019

reporting of instabilities in certain perovskite formulations and device stacks has been important to the understanding of the materials but has also resulted in a misconception that perovskites as a class of materials all act the same—that is, they are all unstable,” says DeLuca. The misconception may spring in part from the fact that methyl ammonium lead triiodide, which is still widely used by academic researchers, is one of the unstable compounds. “The right choice of the perovskite material and the other layers making up the device stack yields stable devices.” Case says that Oxford PV’s cells have been engineered to be stable and have passed every major acceler- ated lifetime test used for standard PV modules. The company will field the first modules in 2019 and it’s working with an as-yet-unnamed “major manufacturer of silicon solar cells and modules.” In September, the company launched a £5 million (US $6.4 million) A NEW SPIN ON five-year joint research program with the University of Oxford aimed at reaching 37 percent efficiency. If the ROBOT ACTUATORS program succeeds, the result will be solar modules with nearly twice the power-converting ability of today’s commodity panels. And even if A vast majority of robots use an electric Oxford PV doesn’t hit that mark, A Canadian motor coupled to a gearbox to move another company probably will. each of their wheels and joints. The motor For his part, NREL’s Berry says it’s startup is spins rapidly, as it’s optimized to do, important not to rush the technology developing a while the gearbox reduces the rotation by bringing products to market that speed of the output shaft, increasing haven’t been fully vetted. stronger direct- the torque in the process. This type of “When we started, I wasn’t a true actuator powers robots as varied as believer,” Berry says. “I was of the opin- drive motor industrial arms, walking humanoids, and ion that if there’s a fatal flaw, let’s kill Mars rovers. But it’s far from perfect: it and move on. Four years in, I think for robots Gear motors are often bulky and sluggish. there is a real opportunity for this tech- They can’t handle impacts and are nology to change the world. That’s not While robots are becoming more maintenance heavy. And if you need a an opportunity you get every day, and diverse and capable, there’s one lot of torque, be prepared to pay a steep you certainly don’t want to mess it up.” component that hasn’t changed much in price. Roboticists have long hoped to —Jean Kumagai the past half century: their actuators. find better alternatives.

40 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Blood Bros. TOP TECH 2019

Now a Canadian startup says there’s magnets and windings, direct drives Genesis says it addressed these indeed a better way to actuate robots. have several times as many. problems by simplifying the geometry of Genesis Robotics in Langley, B.C., One advantage direct drives have over the rotor and stator to reduce the number wants to replace regular motors with a gear motors is that you can control their of parts and integrate them as tightly as special kind of motor whose torque and torque more accurately by adjusting the possible. Klassen says his team shrunk speed can be controlled more precisely. winding current, without expensive force the size of the magnets, which sit only Because such a motor can turn at a sensors. Direct drives also have very low millimeters apart, while the windings, too, much slower pace, you can sometimes inertia, so they can accelerate extremely are closely embedded into the armature. use it to power a robot joint using no fast and even stop or reverse direction The structure is able to withstand the gearing at all, which is why the design is nearly instantaneously. And with no amplified magnetic forces within the known as a direct drive, even though in backlash—the slack in teeth couplings motor while still allowing for heat to many cases these motors are coupled that causes motion loss in gear motors— dissipate efficiently. with minimal gearing. direct drives are also very precise. “It’s got the strength, it’s easily Direct drives represent a decades- So why aren’t they widely used in manufactured, and it’s very inexpensive,” old technology, and you can find robotics? he says. them in industrial equipment as well Sangbae Kim, director of MIT’s The company has designed two as consumer products. But Genesis Biomimetic Robotics Lab, says LiveDrive models, one 250 millimeters claims that its LiveDrive design can roboticists have been exploring this type in diameter and another 110 mm. Public deliver three times as much torque as of actuation since at least the 1980s. demonstrations at trade shows have conventional direct drives of the same It’s already used in high-speed arms generally impressed observers, and weight, is 100 times as precise, and and haptic devices, and a number of Genesis is now collaborating with costs much less. The company has suppliers do offer direct drives for robot researchers to improve its motor specs. also invented a compact, lightweight applications. The challenge, he explains, “The diameter is a bit big, but on the gearbox, called Reflex, that can be is that these motors are rather big. You other hand, the width is very impressive,” made out of injection-molded plastic, can make them in compact sizes, he says Bram Vanderborght, a roboticist at reducing fabrication costs. In contrast, adds, “but the torque density will drop.” the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in Belgium, most high-performance actuators In other words, the motors might fit who’s an advisor to the company and has use strain-wave gears, which are nicely into your robot, but they won’t particularly expensive because they be powerful enough to make it move. MAGNETIC MUSCLES: Genesis must be machined to high tolerances. Another downside is that direct drives Robotics has designed a direct drive that “Robotics is so far forward with the generate a lot of heat, which means you integrates magnets and windings tightly in a compact package. The company controls, with the sensors, with the need to add fans or even water-cooling says its LiveDrive motor can deliver three AI,” says Genesis founder and chief systems to your design. times as much torque per weight as technology officer James Klassen. conventional direct drives. “What’s holding it back is actuation.” The 60-person company has been amassing patents over the past several years, and last April it received a large investment from Koch Industries, the giant conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan. Starting in 2019, Genesis will either sell or license its family of direct drives and gearboxes to robot makers. In their structure, direct drives aren’t that different from brushless DC motors, consisting of a rotor fitted with permanent magnets and a stator with copper windings. But while DC

GENESIS ROBOTICS GENESIS motors typically have fewer than a dozen

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 41 TOP TECH 2019

been testing the 250-mm LiveDrive. One possibility he’s considering is putting two or more LiveDrive units side by side to MACHINE LEARNING multiply the torque. “It’s a more modular system,” he says. Most robots will require more torque PREDICTS than LiveDrive alone can provide. That’s why Genesis created its Reflex gearbox. It’s based on a configuration HOME PRICES of planetary gears, with smaller gears revolving around a larger one. This design results in a more compliant, responsive actuator compared with recommender system, helped to revive those used in multistage gearing The real estate the popularity of these prizes. systems. Reflex will initially be made out In particular, the Netflix Prize helped of metal, but the goal is to fabricate it giant Zillow give rise to the current Zillow Prize com- using plastics, bringing down the cost petition, which challenges data scientists to a fraction of that of existing strain- will bestow to come up with a computerized system wave gears, which is a major reason why $1 million that can beat Zillow’s current method robotics hardware is so expensive. for predicting home prices, something For his part, Klassen says the best way for the best the company calls the Zestimate. to show off the benefits of his actuators Stan Humphries, chief analyt- is by putting them to use in real robots. estimates ics officer for the Zillow Group, in His team has designed robotic arms, Seattle, explains that the Zestimate legged robots, and exoskeletons and is In 1714, the British Parliament passed was the very first product Zillow cre- now building a home robot prototype. the Longitude Act, which offered ated when the company launched in “We love to build things, make things serious money to anyone who could 2006, it being critical to Zillow’s goal better,” he says. “We’re a bunch of devise a practical method to measure of becoming a premier information gearheads.” —ERICO GUIZZO longitude at sea. While the determina- portal in the real estate market. tion of longitude might seem a trivial Early on, Humphries says, the Zesti- thing in today’s world of smartphones mate was frequently wide of the mark: Boom Times and GPS satellites, at the time it was In estimating what a house would sell an immense technical challenge. It for, the algorithm had a median error for Bullet Trains took many years, but the strategy of 14 percent. He and his colleagues East Japan worked, leading to the development were able to reduce the error level to Railways (JR East) plans in 2019 of the marine chronometer, a hand- around 4 percent. But they wanted to test a new held mechanical marvel that undoubt- to do even better. So they decided to generation of edly saved the lives of countless sailors. “invite the global data-science com- bullet trains, the “Advanced Labs for Prizes have, of course, since been munity” to participate—an invitation Frontline Activity in used to spur innovation in many other that came with the possibility that if rail eXperimentation,” or Alfa-X. JR East spheres. “These were typically offered you were smart and lucky you might has indicated that it plans to push the train to 400 kilometers per hour in tests, by governments,” says Josh Lerner of win the $1 million Zillow Prize, which but in operation the company will hold it the Harvard Business School, who has will be awarded early in 2019. “Ever to a top speed of 360 km/h, bettering the studied the effectiveness of such prizes. since [the Netflix Prize], this has been speed of today’s bullet trains in Japan by 40 km/h. Meanwhile, Morocco is finally on But private companies are doing it, too. a glimmer in my eye,” says Humphries. track to put its first high-speed train into Lerner notes that the US $1 million Some 4,000 groups participated operation by early 2019, an effort that has Netflix Prize, awarded in 2009 to a in the first round of Zillow’s home- been plagued by delays. Tests in 2018 pushed that train’s speed to 357 km/h, team that devised an algorithm that valuation competition, which launched a record for Africa. could beat the company’s Cinematch in 2017. One hundred teams moved

42 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATIONS (2) BY Anders Wenngren TOP TECH 2019

It’s too early to know whether contestants will really devise something that improves on Zillow’s current scheme for home valuation, which is already pretty good. “We have a large team of AI professionals that work on this problem for us,” says Humphries. But he nevertheless thinks he will learn a lot from the many outsiders now vying for the Zillow Prize. That is, the prize isn’t just a publicity stunt. Zillow really expects to improve its Zestimate, he says. That goes a long way toward explaining why Zillow required that all 100 teams in the final round assign intellectual property rights for their software to the company. Of course, as Yogi Berra reportedly said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” One or more teams may soundly beat today’s Zestimate, earning the leader a cool million. Wolfinger certainly anticipates that this is going to happen. Of course, there’s a chance that Zillow’s AI professionals have done as well as anyone on to compete in the second and final statistical analysis. This isn’t W olfinger’s can at the moment. We’ll know for sure round, which is being judged now. The first time competing in something like any day now. —David Schneider grading criterion is how accurately this. Indeed, he has been very active the contestants’ systems were able, in on Kaggle, which hosts a variety of July 2018, to predict the actual sales machine-learning competitions. “I’m Finland Powers Up prices of a large set of U.S. homes that kind of a competitive person myself,” were sold in September and October. says Wolfinger. “I’ve always played Advanced Nuclear Participants in the first round could sports.” He notes that such competi- Reactor use only the input data that Zillow sup- tions skew sharply toward men with Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 plied, which consisted of the kinds of backgrounds in computer or data sci- nuclear reactor is close to finally information you might find in a munici- ences. “Ironically, I don’t see a lot of producing power pal property database or a typical real people from statistics,” he says. for customers. The estate listing. But for the second round, Is participating an expensive prop- latest schedule has fueling slated contestants were allowed to pull in data osition, given the computing power for January 2019, from other sources as well. needed to be competitive? Not really, connection to the national grid in May, At the top of the leaderboard in the in Wolfinger’s opinion. “A lot of guys and full power production in September. Construction of this third reactor at the first round was team that calls itself on Kaggle build their own machine- Finnish nuclear power plant on Olkiluoto Zensemble, made up of three data learning rigs,” he says. He warns that Island began in 2005. This reactor, the mavens from Australia, Israel, and you should expect your electricity first of an advanced European design, was originally due to begin producing the United States: Dmytro Poplavskiy, bill to go up if you do a lot of number power 10 years ago, but the project has Jonathan Gradstein, and Russ Wolfinger. crunching with one of those rigs. But he run dramatically behind schedule and Wolfinger is director of scientific dis- also notes that what gives one team an over budget. The initial cost estimate was €3.2 billion, whereas the latest projection, covery and genomics at SAS, a company edge over another is more about brain made in 2012, was €8.5 billion (about in Cary, N.C., that develops software for power than computing power. US $9.7 billion).

ILLUSTRATION BY Edmon de Haro SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 43 TOP TECH 2019

Inside a drive, a motor spins the hard disk at between about 5,000 and 11,000 revolutions per minute. And just THE FIGHT FOR 2 nanometers above the disk hovers the component that Seagate and Western Digital vehemently disagree on how to remake: the read/write head. This head THE FUTURE OF produces its own magnetic field, using it to flip the magnetic orientation of grains as needed to write a 0 or a 1. A sensor on the head reads data back by measuring THE DISK DRIVE fluctuations in the magnetic field above a disk as it flies over clusters of grains. Over time, designers have made these grains smaller and smaller, which allows more bits to be stored in the same area If one company’s solution proves on the disk. But to store even more, the Will lasers or superior, it will reshape a US $24 billion grains would have to become so small industry and set the course for a decade that ambient thermal energy could cause microwaves of advances in magnetic storage. them to flip spontaneously, wiping out Companies that wish to store huge the data they held. shape the next amounts of data do have other options, To prevent such erasures, generation but hard drives are still the go-to choice manufacturers have begun to use new for enterprise storage needs that fall materials, such as iron-platinum alloys, of magnetic somewhere between faster, more to make disks with magnetically “harder” expensive solid-state drives built on grains that will not randomly flip at room storage? flash memory, and slower, cheaper temperature. Unfortunately, that change magnetic tape. also makes it impossible for traditional For most of the past 50 years, the areal Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ read/write heads to flip a grain, because density of hard disks—a measure of how terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, they simply cannot generate a strong many bits of data that engineers can and Western Digital promises MAMR enough magnetic field and focus it on squeeze into a given area—increased drives that will hold roughly 16 TB such a small area. by an average of nearly 40 percent later this year. Western Digital expects What the hard-drive industry needs is each year. Lately, though, that rate has to quickly scale up to MAMR drives a way to flip the magnetization of grains slowed to around 10 percent. Everyone with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while that are more difficult to reorient than ever who works on magnetic storage is well Seagate believes it can achieve similar before. And that’s precisely what Seagate aware of this problem, but only in the capacities through HAMR, though it has and Western Digital say they’ve developed. past year or so have executives from not publicly stated a target date. Seagate Technology and Western Digital, Both companies are essentially Both HAMR and MAMR make use of a the leading manufacturers of hard starting from the same place, with hard simple strategy: Shoot some energy into drives, very publicly split on how to solve drives that share a few key components. the targeted grains on a hard disk and you it. In back-to-back announcements in The disk, for example, is a thin platter can temporarily make it possible to flip October 2017, Western Digital pledged that has been coated with some form their magnetic orientation with an external to begin shipping drives based on what is of magnetic material made up of magnetic field of practical magnitude. And known as microwave-assisted magnetic countless individual grains, each of as soon as the energy dissipates, the grains recording (MAMR) in 2019, and Seagate which is magnetized in one particular regain their immunity to spontaneous said it would have drives that incorporate direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all room-temperature flips. heat-assisted magnetic recording with magnetization pointing in the same At Seagate, researchers wanted to use F(HAMR) on the market by 2020. direction, represent a bit. a laser’s light, but shining a laser directly 44 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG TOP TECH 2019

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY Edmon de Haro SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 45 TOP TECH 2019

onto the disk would heat a spot that was (or three) crashed, the engineer could market intelligence firm IDC. “They too big, causing other grains to flip, too. quickly swap it out and the presentation have slightly more confidence that Somehow, they had to focus the laser’s could proceed. “On average, those drives the tech is less prone to reliability energy on an area narrower than the back then lasted maybe 10 hours,” Thiele issues over time because you’re not wavelength of the light beam itself. says. “But there was a broad distribution— generating as much heat.” To orchestrate this, the researchers some of them lasted 10 minutes, and built a head loaded with an infrared some of them lasted longer, and you never Western Digital believes that MAMR laser and directed a fraction of the light knew which one you had.” holds as much potential as HAMR and it produced to a tiny metal plate that To make HAMR drives more reliable, deserves a spot on the industry’s road measures just 200 nm across. Seagate Thiele’s team redesigned the head to better map, which currently lists only HAMR. researchers call this plate the “lollipop” direct excess light and heat away from the “We’ve proposed a parallel path, but because it’s shaped like a circle with a Seagate keeps insisting that HAMR has short peg that juts out to one side. longer-term viability, which we don’t When light reaches the lollipop, it agree with,” says Thao Nguyen, Western excites surface plasmons, which are In the Forecast: Digital’s senior vice president for head bunches of electrons of oscillating Better Local operations, who is leading his company’s density that can arise on the surface Weather push to make MAMR work. of most metals. These plasmons pass In the case of MAMR, the read/write energy to the peg, whose peculiar shape Prediction head is modified to include a device called provides the path of least resistance for The weather a spin-torque oscillator, which consists of may not be the energy to leave the lollipop. getting better, at least two magnetic layers. As a direct Once at the peg, the plasmons but forecasts current passes through the first, the spins discharge energy into a narrow sliver in the United of the electrons become polarized. Then, States will be. of the disk through what’s known as A big upgrade to the electrons pass through the second the lightning-rod effect. This electrical the U.S. weather prediction system, layer, which is deliberately built to have discharge heats the disk, and for a very the National Weather Service’s an opposite magnetic alignment. During Global Prediction Model, goes into brief period, the magnetization of the operation in 2019. This is the most this second stage, the spin-polarized grains in a small region can be reoriented significant change to the numerical incoming electrons influence those by a field produced by the read-write simulation software in 30 years. It within the magnetic layer, shifting its will allow the model to run faster head—before a heat-sink layer built into and simulate clouds and storms at magnetization slightly before passing the disk whisks the energy away. higher resolutions. That means more through to the other side. This scheme worked well enough in timely weather forecasts and big The interaction creates a wobble in the improvements on a local level—so if a early tests, but Jan-Ulrich Thiele, managing nearby storm isn’t going to affect you magnetic moments of electrons within technologist and senior director for directly, you’ll be able to leave your the second layer. This process emits a research and development at Seagate, umbrella at home. microwave field, which can be tuned to and his team soon ran into a major the resonant frequency of the magnetic problem: The peg of the lollipop, which material coating the hard disk—about was made of gold at that time, kept melting. lollipop, switched to a new material, and 15 to 20 gigahertz. As this field oscillates, It would work for a few minutes and then made the lollipop thicker. Now, Thiele says, it stirs up a similar wobble in a narrow turn into a tiny golden blob, rendering a HAMR head can write petabytes of data slice of grains on the disk below, making the drive useless. “We maybe were able without failing, and Seagate has built more them easier to flip. to write half a track of data, and then the than 50,000 HAMR drives in its quest to Nguyen claims that MAMR is 50 times whole thing would melt away,” Thiele says. perfect the technology. as reliable as HAMR. But Thiele and He recalls a nerve-racking presentation But some customers may shy away Steve Hwang, Seagate’s vice president that then-CEO Steve Luczo made to Wall from the technology based on concerns of development, are skeptical that the Street analysts in 2012 using a prototype about the long-term effects of heat spin-torque oscillator can produce HAMR drive. Seagate had shipped a box on a disk. “Probably most enterprise frequencies high enough to influence of 10 drives and sent along an engineer to customers like the MAMR technology even the smaller grains that will be used accompany Luczo so that if the first drive a little more,” says John Rydning of the for hard disks in the future.

46 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY Anders Wenngren Perpendicular recording Perpendicular recording Coils Write Coilspole Write pole

Reader Perpendicular Reader thin-filmPerpendicular sensorReader thin-film sensor mediumthin-film medium

“MAMR is, at best, probably a one-time play,” says Hwang. “In terms of areal density, it will push it just one more

generation or, maybe two.” Soft magnetic Soft magnetic Jian-Gang (Jimmy) Zhu, director of the Data Storage underlayerSoft magnetic underlayer Systems Center at Carnegie Mellon University, isn’t worried about MAMR’s ability to scale. By his calculations, a spin- Laser diode Waveguide Laser diode Waveguide torque oscillator could generate frequencies up to 40 GHz, HAMR allowing MAMR to support four or five times the capacity of HAMR Near-field Near-field transducerNear-field today’s drives. “In my opinion, it’s a nonargument,” he says. transducer (“lollipop”)transducer “Frequency is not an issue at all.” (“lollipop”) And Nguyen says Western Digital has noted “other effects,” which he describes as being “more than a microwave,” in experimental MAMR drives. Due in part to these effects, he says the company has achieved capacities beyond their expectations. Although he declined to provide details, he expects Western Digital to publish its findings in a scientific journal within a year or two.

Western Digital’s announcement in October 2017 of its Write poleWrite plans to commercialize MAMR set off a flurry of activity at pole MAMR pole Seagate’s headquarters. “We went back through all our MAMR assumptions and said, ‘It’s quite possible they can make a Reader Trailing shieldReader shieldTrailing MAMR device that will work,’ ” Thiele says. “We still think we shield shield can move faster with what we have, right now.” Zhu, whose models and theoretical work laid the foundation for MAMR development, feels MAMR is a step or two behind simply because companies have spent more than US $2 billion developing HAMR over the years, by his estimate, whereas they’ve spent only $100 million so far on MAMR. Ultimately, Seagate and Western Digital don’t need to convince each other—they only need to persuade Spin-torque oscillator Spin-torque oscillator customers that their technology is superior. Meanwhile, both companies are hedging their bets—Seagate continues to work on MAMR, and Nguyen of Western Digital claims its HAMR technology is “as advanced as” Seagate’s. It’s also possible that neither technology will prove the The Next Step clear winner. “I have yet to talk to any particular customer for Hard Drives who has fully bought into one exclusive of the other,” says Inside a traditional hard drive, a write element Mark Geenen, the founder of the Advanced Storage produces a magnetic field to flip grains and store Technology Consortium and a consultant. “I think you’ll have data. But in next-generation drives, grains are too companies that will buy either or both.” small to be flipped this way. With HAMR, a fraction For now, engineers at Seagate and Western Digital have of light from a laser excites surface plasmons on a their heads down, working to perfect HAMR and MAMR “lollipop,” which transfers energy to the grains, making under deadline pressure, and figure out how to guarantee it easier to flip them with a conventional magnetic that these new technologies can be reliably produced on field. For MAMR, a microwave field produced by a existing manufacturing lines in large volumes. Then, when component called a spin-torque oscillator similarly each company releases its first product, those massive influences grains and allows them to be flipped. gambles might finally begin to pay off. —AMY NORDRUM

ILLUSTRATION BY James Provost SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 47 TOP TECH 2019

Battery developers have been trying for years to figure out how to use SILICON ANODES silicon instead of carbon in anodes, because lithium ions combine with

silicon to form Li15Si4. The 15-to-4 ratio WILL GIVE LITHIUM- means a smaller amount of anode material can store a lot more lithium. Silicon anodes could thus provide ION BATTERIES much larger capacities. The rub is that silicon expands almost 300 percent in volume when A BOOST it reacts with lithium during charging. It then shrinks by the same amount during discharge. Repeated charge- discharge cycling causes the anode to begin to disintegrate. That in turn cre- cells have gotten incrementally better ates more surface area on the anode, New anodes over the years, they seem set for a big which then reacts chemically with the boost in 2019 through the increased electrolyte, damaging the battery. So will let batter- use of an element not unfamiliar to the batteries with silicon anodes tend not electronics industry: silicon. to hold up for long. ies hold more The reason lies in some fundamen- Happily enough, silicon’s expansion energy tal electrochemistry. Lithium-ion cells problem is not insurmountable. Even work by sending lithium ions from the now, some lithium-ion batteries have anodes that include particles contain- There was a time when budding positive electrode (in a battery, it’s ing silicon combined with silicon diox- inventors were advised to build a bet- called the cathode) to the negative ide (the stuff of sand) and coated with ter mousetrap. Nowadays, they’d do electrode (the anode) during charg- carbon. Elon Musk revealed in 2016 rather well to build a better lithium- ing. During discharge, lithium ions that the Tesla’s lithium-ion cells are ion battery. These are what power move in the opposite direction, from built that way. But to date, the amount our phones, laptops, portable power anode to cathode. So charging such of silicon in anodes has been minimal. tools, an increasing number of cars, a battery amounts to storing lithium Expect that to change in 2019. To even homes. Some places are turning in the anode. If your battery could begin with, a California startup named to giant lithium-ion batteries to store store more lithium, it would store Sila Nanotechnologies plans to com- energy from solar panels so that it can more energy. mercialize a silicon-rich anode material. be used after dark. While lithium-ion In the garden-variety lithium-ion battery used in smartphones, laptops, Company cofounder and Georgia Tech and most electric cars, the anode is professor Gleb Yushin says that Sila made of graphite, a form of carbon. has developed a “drop-in solution” for Lithium is stored in the electrode in existing battery manufacturers, which is slated to go into commercial produc- the form of LiC6, in which one lithium atom is surrounded by six car- tion in 2019. bon atoms. Depending on the application, use of this anode material will boost battery capacity initially by about 20 percent

SILA’S SILICON SAVIOR: These and eventually by 40 percent or bet- prototype cells, built with a silicon- ter. What’s more, explains Yushin, it rich anode material developed by Sila allows the anode to be reduced in thick- Nanotechnologies, help demonstrate a new approach for boosting the capacity ness by up to 67 percent, which in turn

of lithium-ion batteries. may permit the battery to be charged NANOTECHNOLOGIES SILA

48 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG TOP TECH 2019

from thin wafers of solar-grade silicon. But the company reconsidered that strategy after grappling with how to apply it to larger lithium-ion batteries for vehicles. “We realized that the solar-grade substrates could not scale,” says Lahiri. So Enovix revamped its approach and is now using a metal foil instead of a silicon wafer as the substrate for its battery. The overall geometry of the battery, however, remains the same. It’s just built differently—by stacking components, says Lahiri, who explains that keeping the anode stack under high pressure inhibits the expansion during charge and allows the anode to be made entirely from silicon and silicon oxides. “We think our battery will be from 30 to 70 percent better, depending on the application,” says Lahiri. If so, or if Sila comes through with an anode that can similar ly boost capacity by as much as nine times as fast. And it built with the new anode material can such double digits, it’ll really shake brings safety benefits as well, he claims, be used in its electric cars. Neverthe- up the battery industry, where nor- because it suppresses the formation of less, Yushin says “the initial products mally, as Lahiri quips, “people kill for threadlike metallic dendrites, which will be wearables,” for which the cost 5 or 10 percent.” can cause cells to short out internally of the battery is not such a critical fac- —David Schneider and burst into flame. tor and the amount of anode material Yushin says his company’s new required is much more modest, mean- anode material is composed of par- ing that his company can more easily ticles that are similar in size to the meet demand. Yushin expects lithium- Darth Vader Debuts graphite ones being used in anodes ion batteries with Sila anodes will be on the Oculus Quest now. But they contain silicon inside in millions of devices in 2019. Next up in the Star a porous scaffolding, which provides Sila probably won’t be the only com- Wars series is Vader room for the silicon to expand and pany to unveil a silicon-battery tech- Immortal, a three- contract without coming into contact nology this year. Another California part “experience,” as Lucasfilm with the electrolyte. This allows batter- company, Enovix, is expected to intro- calls it, for the ies made with this silicon-rich anode duce an anode that is made entirely of new Oculus Quest, material to perform well for 400 to silicon and silicon oxides. an untethered US $399 all-in-one virtual reality gaming 1,000 full charge-discharge cycles, Ashok Lahiri, cofounder and chief system that will be shipping in the second which is more than enough for most technology officer for Enovix, along quarter of 2019. The series will be set applications. “Even for electric cars, with two colleagues, described the inside Darth Vader’s castle on Mustafar at a time between Star Wars: Revenge of the you often don’t need more than 1,000 company’s battery technology in Sith and A New Hope, allowing viewers to cycles,” says Yushin. detail in these pages in 2017. At the get face-to-virtual-face with Vader and That helps explain the interest of time, Enovix planned to borrow fab- other iconic characters. It’s not the first time Lucasfilm has taken Star Wars into BMW, which is working with Sila to rication techniques from the semicon- the virtual world, but it promises to be the explore whether lithium-ion batteries ductor industry to construct batteries most immersive home experience yet.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY Edmon de Haro; ILLUSTRATION BY Anders Wenngren SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 49 orbit of 1,125 km. But the satellites remained in their initial orbits; SpaceX has never been clear about why. (SpaceX declined to comment for this story.) “The satellite problems clearly date back quite a number of months,” says Tim Farrar, president of the satellite consulting firm TMF Associates. “The propulsion system is one you check out pretty quick after launch. One of the satellites wasn’t able to move at all. The other one has tried to maneuver without much success.” Even so, Musk tweeted about the satellites’ strong, low-latency signals. He has acknowledged that the Starlink concept still has some challenges to overcome. But SpaceX nevertheless plans to launch the first wave of satellites in 2019, according to a statement by Patricia Cooper, the company’s vice president of satellite and government affairs. The company has not clarified the number of satellites or the launch schedule beyond mid-2019, though. Outside observers aren’t as optimistic about SpaceX’s chances. There is a SPACEX’S SPACE- consensus that SpaceX’s business model, even more than the technical challenges it faces, could doom the constellation INTERNET WOES of satellites it plans to deploy. And it’s a big constellation: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has currently approved SpaceX to launch this issue.] But last February, SpaceX 4,425 of these communications satellites Despite techni- launched two small satellites of its own. into low Earth orbit (LEO) and 7,518 more They were for an initial test of gear intended in very low Earth orbit (VLEO), for a total of cal glitches, the for use in a globe-spanning broadband nearly 12,000 satellites. company plans data network, called Starlink, made up According to filings with the FCC, the of thousands of small satellites. SpaceX LEO satellites will broadcast in the Ku CEO Elon Musk nicknamed the two test (12- to 18-gigahertz) and K (26.5- to to launch the a satellites Tintin A and Tintin B, after the 40-GHz) spectral bands, which are typical first of nearly beloved Belgian cartoon character known bands for communications satellites. The for his adventures. And just as their fictional VLEO satellites, however, will make use 12,000 satel- namesake often did, the satellites ran into of the V band, a higher frequency band lites in 2019 unexpected troubles. ranging from 40 to 75 GHz. After launch, Tintin A and B were The V band has been used for short, SpaceX has, of course, been ferrying supposed to propel themselves line-of-sight terrestrial applications, quite a bit of stuff into space lately. [See from their initial orbital altitude of because the frequencies are too high to “SpaceX and Blue Origin Face Off,” in 511 kilometers to their final operational penetrate walls and because moisture

50 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY Edmon de Haro TOP TECH 2019

in the atmosphere tends to absorb the The other challenge is on the ground. SPACEX AND BLUE signal over longer distances. SpaceX The ground stations communicating and other companies planning LEO and with these satellites will have to be more ORIGIN FACE OFF CONTINUED FROM PAGE 27 VLEO constellations, including Kepler flexible than those that communicate Communications, LeoSat, and OneWeb, with geosats. “With geosats, you point are betting that V band can nevertheless the antenna forever in the direction of not Mars, as an initial step beyond serve as a high-data-rate option for their the satellite,” says Manchester. Ground Earth. It has proposed developing near-Earth satellites. stations communicating with constellation a lunar lander called Blue Moon for An untested spectral band isn’t the satellites will have to track smaller satellites delivering cargo and, eventually, peo- only technical hurdle. LEO and VLEO moving across the horizon quickly, and the ple to the lunar surface. “At Blue, we constellations require a radical rethinking stations will also have to seamlessly begin believe there are certain steps that you of the way satellites communicate with one communicating with new satellites as they have to take,” Smith said. “We believe another and with stations on the ground. move into their field of view. that the moon is the next logical step. A traditional geostationary satellite Supposing that SpaceX can handle It has resources. It is an incredible gift.” can single-handedly provide continuous these technical challenges, the question Bezos, a Princeton University alum- coverage for up to a third of the globe. The that Farrar, Manchester, and others still nus, said he was inspired by Gerard trade-off for that expansive coverage is have is: How will Starlink make money? O’Neill, a Princeton physicist who in high latency and some degradation as the The new satellite broadband companies the 1970s proposed the development signal spreads out on its way down to Earth. depict themselves as squaring off of giant space settlements that could An individual satellite in a LEO or VLEO against one another in a race to build their be home to thousands of people. constellation can’t be reached from a constellations. But at the end of the day, “My role is to help build that heavy- specific location most of the time, simply SpaceX isn’t competing against OneWeb lifting infrastructure, because I have because Earth gets in the way—just as or Kepler. “They’re competing with Verizon,” the financial assets to do that,” Bezos it does for distant ships, which appear to says Manchester. “And that’s really tough.” said last May while accepting an award sink below the horizon when they travel far —MICHAEL KOZIOL created in memory of O’Neill, from enough away. “With these satellites, they’re the National Space Society. “That will maybe over the horizon for 5 minutes,” says set things up for this dynamic entre- Zac Manchester, an assistant professor of preneurial explosion that will lead to aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford Building Your Own this Gerry O’Neill world.” University. “You need to launch enough Multichip Module Those financial assets are in the form satellites and space them out such that you of his stake in Amazon.com, which can guarantee there’s always one above Without Breaking makes him the wealthiest man alive, the horizon.” the Bank worth more than $100 billion. He said While that’s hard enough, a space- zGlue, a startup he spends about $1 billion a year on Blue based network like SpaceX’s requires that has been Origin and suggested at the Wired 25 working on two more capabilities to be successful. ways to cheaply conference last October that his out- First, the satellites must be able to and easily build lays for the company may go up in 2019. communicate with one another directly. multichip modules “Blue Origin is the most important with custom Traditional geostationary satellites, or interconnects, thing I’m working on,” Bezos said, geosats, work by receiving a signal will be offering its technology to DIYers “but I won’t live to see it all rolled out.” from one location on Earth and directly and startup entrepreneurs in early Musk, too, speaking about coloniz- 2019. The company’s secret sauce is its beaming it somewhere else within its silicon substrate with reprogrammable ing Mars, has said, “I probably won’t coverage area. But satellites orbiting connections, built-in power management, live long enough to see it become self- close to Earth have such small coverage and memory. In the past, using the sustaining.” Clearly, these titans of company’s technology involved working areas—ones that are constantly moving— directly with zGlue engineers and was today’s gilded age are thinking hard that the signal received by one satellite practical only for large production runs. about their legacies, which despite will need to be bounced across the But this second-generation platform will their many other accomplishments allow designers to lay out a module using constellation and then back down to cloud-based tools and order batches as may end up being for what they do reach the right destination. small as 10 for under US $100 a module. in space. —Jeff Foust

ILLUSTRATION BY Anders Wenngren SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 51 epoxy ﬁlmadhesive ADHESIVE learn how +1.201.343.8983 •mainmasterbond.com 154 Hobart St., Hackensack, NJ 07601USA 154 HobartSt.,Hackensack, and electrical conductivity strength, thermalconductivity Specific grades offer highbond epoxy ﬁlm Scan to www.masterbond.com Does notrequire freezing Easy to store 0.003 inches Bond linesasthin Cures quicklywithheat Easy to apply can belaserordiecut Intricate shapes Uniform bondlinethickness

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an ? first advanced. Everyone decided thatsoft 2018). Adam Barr:Fiftyathereago was years ADAM BARR HAS SOME ANSWERS WRITE BAD SOFTWARE? WHY DO GOOD ENGINEERS Cass asked Barr for the answers. Smart Engineers Write Bad Code (MIT Press, ware engineering isnot really engineering “softwarewhere engineering” was theterm times the impactcanbeinternational in NATO Software Engineering Conference, Stephen Cass:So problem what isthe ence the next yearence the toprob trysolve- the to with software? eran programmer Adam Barr set out to ex of modernlife, the questionremains: Why is The Problem With Software:Problem With Whyplore inThe academics were off in the cloud,and the ac industrypeople thought theBut the lem. and we had to fix that. They had aconfer goes down. With software suchacriticalpart so muchof itsobad? That’s the question vet scope, as when anairlinebookingsystem RESOURCES CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17 | O RESOURCES_Q&A IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen ware failures. Usually it happens on apersonalscale,butsome- ur lives are plaguedby soft------A.B.: working with oneor two peopleonsome ware. Small being what you doinschool, tinued since then. So you don’t have an in- the samepeopleover itslifetime.... They’re So peopleget to industry, andall these things S.C.: How does that split manifest in terms on cranking outsoftware. That splithascon- out of academia,as you would normally ex of the actualcode that gets written? pect for something labeled engineering. The manageability pieces of software andlarge pieces of soft ple, andmostimportantly not necessarily by makes, which is worked onby multiplepeo - project. Large software is what industry really very different in what you have to do. goal of the bookis to raise awareness, get industry which isupheldby research coming academia, and vice versa. academia, dustry peopleinterested in talking more with industrypeople wereademics thought the like maintainability, readability, securability, ignoring the real problems andjust focused There’s a difference between small —they haven’t learned any of - -

RANDI KLETT Faculty Position The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Baylor University seeks faculty applicants for a Clinical Assistant/Associate Professor. Any area of expertise in ECE will be considered. Applicants must possess an earned masters or doctorate degree and that and have to reinvent it.... Companies like extensive industry experience, and demonstrate potential for excellent teaching; applicants for IBM had been studying this in the ’70s, and Clinical Associate Professor must additionally present evidence of deeper industry experience and achievement in teaching commensurate with the desired rank. The ECE department offers B.S., had made some progress on turning soft- M.S., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees and is rapidly expanding its faculty size. Facilities include the Baylor ware into an engineering discipline. That Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC), a newly-established research park minutes from the essentially all got thrown away. The invasion main campus. of people [during the personal computer rev- Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas, Baylor University is the oldest university in Texas. olution], from Bill Gates on down, basically Baylor has an enrollment of over 15,000 students and is a member of the Big XII Conference. ignored everything that came before them. Baylor’s mission is to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community. The department seeks to hire faculty with an active Christian faith; applicants are encouraged to read about Baylor’s vision S.C.: There seems to be a constant for the integration of faith and learning at www.baylor.edu/profuturis/. search for a silver bullet to fix software, Applications will be considered on a rolling basis starting January 1, 2019. Applications must include: whether it be getting rid of the GOTO 1) a letter of interest that identifies the applicant’s anticipated rank, statement or Agile programming. 2) a complete CV, A.B.: As I was writing the book I could see 3) a concise statement of teaching interests, that DevOps was acquiring that sense of 4) the names and contact information for at least three professional references. “Oh, this is the one thing that will cure all Additional information is available at www.ecs.baylor.edu. Should you have any questions on the software ills.” They’re all useful. Getting rid position, feel free to contact the search chair, Dr. Keith Schubert at [email protected]. of GO TOs was good. Agile has some good Upload materials via Baylor’s iApply system accessible at http://apply.interfolio.com/57439. things. DevOps is good in some ways. But Baylor University is affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas. As an Affirmative Action/Equal they get hyped as the be-all, end-all solution. Employment Opportunity employer, Baylor encourages candidates of the Christian faith who are minorities, I think that’s because they’re not backed by women, veterans, and persons with disabilities to apply. academia.... What’s missing is the ability to discriminate and say, “In these cases, Perl is a good language to use. In those cases, Perl is a terrible language.” Instead, people say, “Oh, wow. I taught myself Perl and I wrote this 20‑line script. I will now go use Perl for every programming problem that I encounter.”

S.C.: How can things get better? Has the shift to software as a service helped?

AB: Running software as a service clears away some of the myths. Because you can actually observe whether your software’s maintainable and secure and all those things. And you feel much more of the pain if it’s not, so it will hopefully knock a little sense into people.... In the life of a software developer, ILLUMINATE EDUCATE ENGAGE ENERGIZE my concern is that by the time you get out of college you’ve succeeded without having to The IEEE Foundation is leading a special campaign really learn a body of knowledge the way a to raise awareness, create partnerships, and generate financial lot of other engineering disciplines do. So resources needed to combat global challenges. there’s a period of time before you kind of clue in, and that could be avoided. [The aca- Our goal is to raise $30 million by 2020. demic side could teach] knowledge that was more relevant in the industry, so you’d be pro- DONATE NOW ductive sooner when you started. ieeefoundation.org

POST YOUR COMMENTS at https://spectrum.ieee.org/ adambarr0119

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 53

Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) of Robotics

The Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) at the → The Department of Mechanical and Process University of Washington, Seattle invites applications for multiple full- Engineering (www.mavt.ethz.ch) at ETH Zurich time tenure-track positions with a nine-month service period annually, invites applications for the above-mentioned from exceptional candidates with strong record of collaboration and position. creativity. Hiring will be made primarily at the Tenure-Track Assistant and Associate Professor levels with an anticipated start date of September → Successful applicants must demonstrate 16, 2019. More information about the Department, including background on our recent name change to ECE can be found at www.ece.uw.edu. an excellent international record of research accomplishments as robotics engineers We seek outstanding candidates committed to developing scalable, integrated and scientists. The new professor is expected electronics and networked computing systems. Competitive candidates will to establish an ambitious, world-class research have demonstrated strengths in the underlying fundamental science and technology and preferably a record of test-bed oriented experimental research program in the fast-evolving field of robotics. (as demonstrated by any mix of system/sub-system level prototyping, emulation Scientists and engineers from the entire spec- and software integration). Successful applicants will be able to articulate a next- trum of robotics, from perception and design generation application-oriented research agenda, with an emphasis on system up to modeling, control, and robot learning design, driven by key performance indicators such as efficiency, robustness, are encouraged to apply. Candidates should and security. New hires will be expected to lead curricular innovation, mentor demonstrate a core-area of scientific expertise cutting-edge student projects, and interact with local research-intensive and solid theoretical foundation with a desire industries in a vibrant technology-driven entrepreneurial community. Areas of interest include but are not limited to: quantum computing, multi-agent (semi) to apply this knowledge to solve important autonomous systems, 5G-oriented wireless and photonics networks, cloud and challenges in fields like service robots, search data-center networking & computing, computational hardware systems for and rescue, construction, precision agriculture, data-intensive applications, mmWave and THz imaging. or mobility and logistics. Specific areas of Applicants should have an earned Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering research may include (but are not limited to) or related field (or foreign equivalent), evidence of ability to develop an intelligent perception and scene understanding, independent research program, a strong commitment to both graduate and mobile manipulation and enhanced human- undergraduate teaching, and the potential to initiate and conduct research machine interaction, robot design, soft robots, across disciplines and lead collaborations. modeling and control, or robot learning. Our Department offers a highly collegial and collaborative culture, with broad

interdisciplinary research ties across campus. We are building a culturally Candidates should hold a PhD degree or equi- diverse faculty and encourage applications from women and minority valent in engineering and have an outstanding candidates, individuals with disabilities, covered veterans, and people from record of accomplishments in robotics. Further - other diverse and underrepresented groups. We look forward to learning how more, a strong motivation and indisputable the applicant’s experience or future plans for teaching, research, and service commitment to undergraduate (in German would support our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. or English) and graduate (in English) student Apply online at apply.interfolio.com/55851 with a cover letter, full curriculum teaching is expected. vitae, statements of research and teaching, three key papers, and the names of at least three references. A diversity statement from applicants is Assistant professorships have been established encouraged. Applications received by December 26th, 2018 will be given to promote the careers of younger scientists. priority consideration and the ad will remain open until January 31st, 2019. Open positions are contingent on funding. ETH Zurich implements a tenure track system equivalent to other top international universities. The University of Washington is a recipient of a National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Award to increase the participation → Please apply online: of women in academic science and engineering careers. The UW College of Engineering currently has 24.2% female faculty (ASEE 2017). www.facultyaffairs.ethz.ch University of Washington is an affirmative action and equal opportunity → Applications should include a curriculum employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment vitae, a list of publi cations, a statement of without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, genetic information, gender identity or future research and teaching interests, and expression, age, disability, or protected veteran status. a description of the three most important achievements. The letter of application should The University of Washington is committed to building diversity among its faculty, be addressed to the President of ETH Zurich. librarian, staff, and student communities, and articulates that commitment in the UW Diversity Blueprint (http://www.washington.edu/diversity/diversity- The closing date for applications is 1 February blueprint/). Additionally, the University’s Faculty Code recognizes faculty efforts 2019. ETH Zurich is an equal opportunity and in research, teaching and/or service that address diversity and equal opportunity family friendly employer and is responsive to the as important contributions to a faculty member’s academic profile and needs of dual career couples. We specifically responsibilities (https://www.washington.edu/admin/rules/policies/FCG/FCCH24. encourage women to apply. html#2432) And the University’s Office for Faculty Advancement promotes the hiring, retention, and success of a diverse and inclusive faculty at the University of Washington (http://www.washington.edu/diversity/faculty-advancement/).

54 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG Applications for faculty positions in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for tenure, research, and teaching-tracks.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Carnegie Mellon University is accepting applications from candidates in all areas of ECE for tenure, research, and teaching-track positions at its Pittsburgh, Kigali (Rwanda), and Silicon Valley campuses. We especially value individuals who can contribute to vertically integrated systems research that connects our department’s spectrum of strengths ranging from emerging nanoscale devices up to novel computing modalities exploiting heterogeneous integration.

Our department and the College of Engineering are ranked among the top programs in the United States both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We house and have ties to several multidisciplinary institutes and centers. We collaborate with colleagues around the world through a number of formal research and educational programs. We have extensive experimental and computing infrastructure, including state-of-the-art nanofabrication facilities.

We are a department strongly committed to all members of our community: students, faculty, and sta . Our vision is to be a creative driving force, within the university and worldwide, of the highest scholarly and entrepreneurial quality. Our mission is to inspire and educate engineers capable of pursuing fundamental scientic problems and important societal challenges. We strive to accomplish this with the highest commitment to quality, integrity, and respect for others. We are particularly interested in applicants who are committed to and have passion for a culturally diverse environment in research and/or teaching, and demonstrate a willingness to nurture the uniquely inclusive Carnegie Mellon environment. We take pride and active steps in considering a diverse applicant pool in terms of gender, race, veteran status, and disability. Carnegie Mellon University seeks to meet the needs of dual-career couples and is a member of the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC) that assists with dual-career searches.

For all tracks, we are seeking individuals who hold a Ph.D. in a relevant discipline and have demonstrated commitment to our core values: scientic truth, creativity, quality, innovation, and engineering solutions, all within a diverse and tight-knit community guided by respect and joy of doing. Faculty positions are primarily at the Assistant Professor level; however, appointments may be made at the rank of Associate Professor or Professor depending on the qualications.

Tenure-track faculty carry a moderate teaching load that allows time for quality research and close involvement with students. We expect you to establish and grow a strong research program, contribute to our teaching mission, and show your passion for mentoring and advising students.

Research-track faculty are not required to teach, but do so occasionally when of clear benet to the faculty and the department; you will be compensated for both teaching and advising Ph.D. students. You will typically focus on developing leadership within your area of research, developing research collaborations, and supervising Ph.D. students.

Teaching-track faculty typically focus exclusively on teaching and service, but may conduct research as well. We will rely on you to help strengthen our teaching and mentoring mission. The emphasis of the teaching track position in Silicon Valley is on Software Engineering (software engineering foundations, functional programming, large software systems, software analytics, cloud computing, and engineering of big data and AI-based systems). The emphasis of the teaching track position in Pittsburgh is on Computer Systems (digital system design, FPGAs, C and assembly programming, computer architecture, cyber-physical and embedded systems, etc.). The emphasis of the teaching track position in Africa is on Data Science, Cybersecurity, and Software Engineering.

Please submit an online application at www.ece.cmu.edu/about/employment-opportunities.html. We will consider applications tting our needs throughout the academic year. Carnegie Mellon is an EEO/Armative Action Employer -- M/F/Disability/Veteran. Department Head, Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics Tenured/Tenure-Track Faculty Positions Department of Electrical and Computer Drexel University invites applications for a tenured, full-professor Engineering, New York University position and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics (MEM) in the College of Engineering, to begin in The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Fall Quarter 2019. We are recognized for educating outstanding the New York University (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering invites engineers, for world-class research, and for service to the profession. applications for senior and junior tenured and tenure track positions, to We are seeking a dynamic and innovative leader who will lead the start September 2019. NYU is one of the top private universities in the department to the next level of national prominence. US. The Tandon School of Engineering has been on a remarkable upward trajectory over the past several years. Formerly known as Brooklyn Poly The Department Head will provide dynamic and visionary leadership and the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, Tandon has the distinction in all areas of scholarly activity, including teaching, research, of being one of the oldest engineering schools in the United States. service (internal and external), and entrepreneurial activities. The We have many immediate tenured/tenure track faculty openings. We Head will represent the department to a variety of stakeholders, invite applications in all areas of circuits, devices, computing systems, both internal (academic and administrative units on campus) and and machine learning, at all levels, with particular emphasis on external (alumni, industrial advisory board, prospective students, terahertz or quantum devices and circuits, next-generation computing parents, and alumni). architectures, and/or foundational theory for machine learning. We will appoint faculty in the area of machine learning to joint positions with the For a detailed description and application instructions: NYU Tandon Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). As www.drexeljobs.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=84015 part of our team, you will work closely with faculty colleagues, students, Drexel University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer, and industrial affiliate sponsors of several research centers including NYU WIRELESS, the NY State Center for Advanced Technology in welcomes individuals from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, Telecommunications (CATT), and the NYU Center for Cybersecurity (CCS). and believes that an inclusive and respectful environment enriches the University community and the educational and employment Our mission is to excel in research, innovation, and education. The ECE experience of its members. department is at the epicenter of an amazing high-tech start-up culture where student and faculty innovation and entrepreneurship activities are supported and nurtured, both in New York City and across NYU’s global network. We aim to inspire and educate engineers for the 21st century. We are committed to quality, integrity, and respect for each other. We ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER take pride in our high number of women students and students who ENGINEERING are the first in their family to go to college. We seek faculty who have a real passion for a culturally diverse environment. Tandon belongs to the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC), which assists with Computer Systems & Applications dual-career searches. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University You should have a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering, computer of California, Davis invites applications for a faculty position commencing engineering, computer science or a related discipline. You should in July 2019. The opening targets candidates with outstanding credentials show potential for excellence in teaching, research, and mentoring. For senior applicants, you should demonstrate a distinguished record of at all ranks. Qualified candidates in computer systems and applications scholarship, leadership, curricular innovation, entrepreneurship, and an will be priority areas of consideration. The search focus shall include, excellent research funding record. but not limited to, autonomous systems, data science, advanced computing algorithms, robotics, information processing, and cyber- You should submit a cover letter, current CV, research statement, teaching statement, names and contact information for three references, and physical systems. We are searching for innovative and collaborative recent teaching evaluations (if applicable). We will review applications researchers and educators who will contribute to a plurality of our beginning on November 1 and will continue until we fill the position. We department’s strong research areas. Preferences will be given to those encourage you to submit early. who have a solid plan and track record of working across discipline and leading a team. Candidates must have a Ph.D., a research record of high Please submit all application materials electronically at https://apply.interfolio.com/54634 distinction, a demonstrated commitment to teaching both undergraduate for circuits, devices, and computing systems (ECE position) and postgraduate levels, a strong commitment to service, and a track or at record or potential for attracting significant extramural research support. https://apply.interfolio.com/54628 Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Applications received for machine learning (joint ECE/CSE position). by January 10, 2019 will be given full consideration. Additional information NYU is an Equal Opportunity Employer. NYU does not discriminate due and application instructions can be found at http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/. to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender and/or UC Davis is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer and is gender identity or expression, marital or parental status, national origin, dedicated to recruiting a diverse faculty community. We welcome all ethnicity, citizenship status, veteran or military status, age, disability, unemployment status or any other legally protected basis, and to the qualified applicants, including women, minorities, individuals with extent permitted by law. Qualified candidates of diverse ethnic and racial disabilities and veterans. Inquiries can be directed to the chair of the backgrounds are encouraged to apply for vacant positions at all levels. search committee at [email protected].

56 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG GTRI seeks an experienced senior executive to fill the position of Senior Vice President and Director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

This is a significant, executive-level leadership opportunity located on the Georgia Tech campus in the vibrant Atlanta midtown area. A successful candidate will have served as a senior manager of a major research organization of multiple technical competencies with success in all aspects of leadership, management, and budgeting. Candidates must have a record of demonstrated success in strategy development and execution, effective and efficient management of operations, and organizational transformation in a dynamic environment focused on the development and deployment of innovations.

Experience in developing strategic relationships with senior leaders of national security sponsors is essential. He or she must demonstrate success in facilitating the growth of organizational leaders, and equip these leaders with the essential skills needed to secure national leadership in the areas of strategic interest to the organization.

Experience in linking across organizational boundaries to establish leadership in major research and development opportunities will be paramount, and this experience will be necessary to fulfill synergy expectations between GTRI and the broader body of research at Georgia Tech.

To confidentially explore this opportunity, visit: George Washington University Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Position in Signal and Image Processing

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the George Washington University (GWU) invites applications for a tenured/tenure-track The Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the faculty appointment starting in Fall 2019, in the area of signal and image processing Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and the University of (SIP). The appointment will be at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor. Florida invites applications for the Semmoto Professor of IoT, Applicants must have an earned doctorate in Electrical Engineering, Computer who will also be the Director of the Warren B. Nelms Institute Engineering, or a relevant discipline at time of appointment; must demonstrate for the Connected World. UF is the flagship campus of the State a solid publication record; must have established or exhibit potential to establish of Florida university system and ranks amongst the top 10 best a strong, externally sponsored research program, commensurate with the rank public US universities according to US News and World Report. they are seeking; and must be committed to excellence in teaching at both The department seeks a visionary leader with the experience undergraduate and graduate levels. and abilities to build a nationally recognized institute to conduct The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering welcomes all aspects of SIP, research and educate the next generation of IoT engineers. including but not limited to: (1) SIP using new machine learning and optimization tools, compressive sensing and sparsity, modeling by graphs, (2) SIP applications A $5M gift by David and Daryl Nelms in 2017 created the Warren to communications, biology, medicine, and security (3) SIP hardware and software. B. Nelms Institute of the Connected World at the UF. David Nelms is the CEO of Discover Financial and the gift honors The ECE Department has experienced significant research growth in the last few years. The department has 19 tenure-track faculty including 7 IEEE Fellows. More his father, an ECE alumnus. Another gift by ECE Alumnus and information about the department is available at http://www.ece.seas.gwu.edu/. serial entrepreneur Sachio Semmoto endowed the Semmoto Professorship in IoT. To apply, complete the online application at http://www.gwu.jobs/postings/57116. The ECE Department offers BS, MS and PhD degree programs Employment offers are contingent on satisfactory outcome of standard background screening. with an enrollment of about 600 full-time undergraduate The university is an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer that does not unlawfully discriminate in any of its programs or activities on the basis of race, color, students and 600 graduate students of which about 200 are religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity PhD students. Currently, the ECE Department has 54 tenured or expression, or on any other basis prohibited by applicable law. or tenure-track faculty members with rapid growth from 41 a few years ago. Among the active faculty are 14 IEEE Fellows, 16 NSF CAREER Award winners, and 5 PECASE winners. The Department’s external research expenditures were a record high $17 million last year and the largest in the College of Engineering. The Department enjoys strong rankings in U.S. News and World Report at 32nd overall (and 18th public) in the graduate program. The department has excellent ties with industry as evidenced by three NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers in the areas of IoT Infrastructure (MIST), Large-scale Machine Learning (CBL), and High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC).

The department seeks exceptional candidates with a PhD in ENHANCE YOUR IEEE engineering or science-related fields with an outstanding record of MEMBERSHIP BY JOINING THE scholarship and leadership in IoT-related research and education Power & Energy Society with a tangible demonstration of national and international recognition. Exceptional candidates from the Industry with Help shape the future a strong record of leadership in IoT may also be considered. of the industry and give If you are interested in applying, please also email your CV to your career a boost [email protected]. The applicant must apply by submitting an application via Interfolio http://apply.interfolio.com/57582. The Join the engaged members of PES who are advancing innovation and Search Committee will begin reviewing applications immediately. deepening their expertise in important The University of Florida is committed to non-discrimination areas such as: with respect to race, creed, color, religion, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, marital • Renewable energy • Bulk energy storage status, national origin, political opinions or affiliations, genetic • Distributed energy resources information and veteran status in all aspects of employment • Smart grids including recruitment, hiring, promotions, transfers, discipline, More Power to the Future™ terminations, wage and salary administration, benefits, and training. Learn more: ieee-pes.org/members

58 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering – Open Positions

• Tenure-Track Position: The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Lafayette College invites applications for a tenure track position at the assistant professor level beginning in July 2019. The department is especially interested in candidates with potential for interdisciplinary connections in areas including (but not limited to) embedded systems, robotics, computer architecture, the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, and autonomous systems. The department is seeking candidates with a passion for undergraduate teaching and mentoring and the ability to teach courses in the digital stem of the ECE curriculum. Candidates must demonstrate the potential to establish a research program that can engage undergraduates and result in the publication of scholarly work in peer-reviewed venues. Applicants should possess a Ph.D. in electrical and/or computer engineering.

• Visiting Position: The department anticipates a one-year visiting faculty position starting in July 2019 primarily in the area of electromagnetics and wireless communication, but ability to teach design projects would also be helpful. Applicants should possess a Ph.D. in electrical and/or computer engineering. Lafayette College is a small, highly selective undergraduate institution emphasizing superior education in engineering and the liberal arts. The College is located in the vibrant and historic city of Easton in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, which is 75 miles from both New York City and Philadelphia. The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department has approximately 75 students across all classes and features small class sizes, hands-on laboratory experiences, and strong support for faculty research and professional development. To apply, please submit a cover letter addressing how your scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and/or community service might support Lafayette College’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, your curriculum vitae, statement of teaching interests, a brief research plan and three letters of recommendation. Tenure-Track: http://apply.interfolio.com/55267 Visiting: http://apply.interfolio.com/58221 The review of applications for both positions will begin February 11, 2019. Lafayette College is committed to creating a diverse community: one that is inclusive and responsive, and is supportive of each and all of its faculty, students, and staff. All members of the College community share a responsibility for creating, maintaining, and developing a learning environment in which difference is valued, equity is sought, and inclusiveness is practiced. Lafayette College is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from women and minorities. In cultivating this community, the Engineering programs at Lafayette have taken a national leadership role in diversity as evidenced by the recent ASEE report listing Lafayette’s engineering programs among the top 10 in the nation for women on the faculty and among the top 20 for bachelor’s degrees awarded to women.

IEEE.tv gets a Micron Semiconductor Products, mobile makeover Inc. seeks System Design Engineers Bring an award- [10878.1175N] in Milpitas, CA. The ECE Department (https://engineering.wayne. winning network Responsible to enable Micron edu/ece/) at Wayne State University invites of technology mobile products at the customers applications for two faculty positions in computer programs with you. architecture, computer systems, cloud computing, Publication: IEEE Spectrum Magazine and chipset manufactures.Size: 7” x 4.75” Main edge Notes:computing, b/w machine learning, hardware security, mixed signal integrated circuits, RFICs, Job# 45512Go mobile or get the app. IO#: 45512-45512 Screen: focus is system level evaluation, autonomous systems, and embedded systems85 dpifor Mechanical:www.ieee.tv mbb Proofreader: IoT in automotive and health care applications. validation and failure analysis of Applications must be submitted at http://jobs. wayne.edu, posting #043981 or #043982, based customer platforms using Micron on research areas. The successful candidates must have the ability to develop and maintain a mobile products and development productive research program, supervise the thesis and dissertation research of graduate students, Assistant Professor, Electrical of tools required. Travel (domestic teach undergraduate and graduate courses and 12-MEMB-0345e IEEEtv 2x2.25Engineering, Final.indd Specialization 1 8/22/12 in 10:02 PM Digital/Embedded System or international) is required. contribute to service activities. Candidates should San Jose State University possess Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Mail resume to: Engineering or a closely related field. We expect to The Electrical Engineering Department at San Jose make the appointment at the Assistant Professor State University, California, is currently recruiting level but will consider exceptional candidates at the Tenure Track Assistant Professor in the area of Janelle Fuller, HRBP Associate Professor level. Wayne State University Digital/Embedded System, with an expected start Micron Technology, Inc. is a premier, public, urban research university date of August 2019. Applicants must have a Ph.D. located in the heart of Detroit where students in Electrical and/or Computer Engineering with 540 Alder Drive from all backgrounds are offered a rich, high academic and/or industry experiences in embedded quality education. Our deep-rooted commitment to excellence, collaboration, integrity, diversity systems, modern processor microarchitectures, Milpitas, CA 95035 and inclusion creates exceptional educational hardware/software co-design, system on chip, opportunities preparing students for success testing and verification, and hardware/firmware Must reference Job Title/ in a diverse, global society. WSU encourages aspects of mobile computing platforms. Application 10878.1175N when applying. applications from women, people of color and other deadline: January 21, 2019. Application procedures underrepresented people. WSU is an affirmative is at https://apply.interfolio.com/53873 EOE action/equal opportunity employer.

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2019 | 59 PAST FORWARD_BY ALLISON MARSH

Cuddly or creepy, the Furby was the must-have toy of 1998, and more than 40 million sold in the toy’s CODED first three years. When you turned it on, its round eyes blinked open, the fuzzy ears twitched, and the voice box squeaked, “Dah-ay-loh u-tye.” The literal translation of this Furbish greeting is “big light up,” but the ani- FOR matronic furball was just saying good morning. Over time, the Furby’s language ability seemingly evolved, as CUTENESS source code running on the 6502 microprocessor inside mimicked the learning process. Other programming cues had the toy deliver a kiss in response to being tickled or petted. Kids may have thought they were training their Furby, but the Furby was actually training them. ■ ↗ For more on the Furby, see https://spectrum.ieee.org/pastforward0119 MARK RICHARDS/COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM HISTORY RICHARDS/COMPUTER MARK

60 | JAN 2019 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG Ideas that shape your world start here.

Carnegie Mellon University attracts a certain type of student: motivated, inventive and driven to make a difference. Students come to Carnegie Mellon to learn, create and innovate with the very best. They leave with the passion, connections, credentials and lifelong friends who will help them change the world. www.qatar.cmu.edu

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