All Features
Rachel Gordon
First published Dec. 7, 2020, on MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) news.
In a classic experiment on human social intelligence by Warneken and Tomasello, an 18-month-old toddler watches a man carry a stack of books toward an unopened cabinet. When the man reaches the…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
A team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists has simulated the droplet-ejection process in an emerging metal 3D-printing technique called “liquid metal jetting” (LMJ), a critical aspect to the continued advancement of liquid metal printing technologies.
In their paper, which…
Matthew Hutson, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
When Stefanie Tellex was 10 or 12, around 1990, she learned to program. Her great-aunt had given her instructional books, and she would type code into her father’s desktop computer. One program she typed in was a famous artificial…
David Chandler
Advanced metal alloys are essential in key parts of modern life, from cars to satellites, from construction materials to electronics. But creating new alloys for specific uses, with optimized strength, hardness, corrosion resistance, conductivity, and so on, has been limited by researchers’ fuzzy…
Corey Brown
The ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic has forced companies of all types to rapidly update policies and procedures governing how they share information in response to a world that is constantly changing around them. For the manufacturing sector in particular, their workforce is more spread out than…
Michael Taylor
Digital applications in manufacturing are not only becoming increasingly accepted; they are expected. However, for smaller manufacturers, the process of making this switch can be daunting. Initial expenses, as well as the cost of training employees, is enough to stop the process altogether.
But…
Merilee Kern
The benefits of simulation-based training are indisputable and innumerable. Given its power and efficacy, this methodology is used in sectors beyond aerospace and military, where it gained its initial foothold. These include everything from manufacturing and retail to healthcare, fitness, fashion,…
NIST
When the words “artificial intelligence” (AI) come to mind, your first thoughts may be of super-smart computers, or robots that perform tasks without needing any help from humans. Now, a multi-institutional team including researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)…
Chip Bell
Ever notice how some people always get the best table, the upgraded room, or the best cut of meat at the market? Great customer service is not an accident. Those who are served well follow a recipe that turns even a cold initial encounter into a warm one. Here are five tips for almost always…
Phanish Puranam, Julien Clément
Covid-19 has dealt most businesses a heavy blow, but the pandemic has at least one under-acknowledged upside. By moving organizations from the office into the virtual space, the pandemic has cracked open a treasure trove of data that can be used to streamline and optimize how organizations operate…
Jeffrey Phillips
First, a slight diatribe. Why is it that company leaders think their people can do successful innovation when they don’t share a common language? In this article’s title I’ve used the word “disruptive,” and by this I mean innovation in the “third horizon”—incremental, breakthrough, and disruptive.…
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Knowable Magazine
If you were to contact a group of recycling professionals, as one recent survey did, and ask them to list all the ways that consumer product manufacturers drive them crazy, you’d probably hear a lot about “shrink sleeves”—those full-body, shrink-to-fit plastic labels found on beer cans, yogurt…
Sanjay Mishra
As the weather cools, the number of infections of the Covid-19 pandemic are rising sharply. Hamstrung by pandemic fatigue, economic constraints, and political discord, public health officials have struggled to control the surging pandemic. But now, a rush of interim analyses from pharmaceutical…
Joerg Niessing, Fred Geyer
A new digital era of business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing is upon us. It’s driven by corporate customer demand for online access to their suppliers’ offerings and expertise. Taking advantage of this shift is challenging because it requires moving from deeply embedded B2B sales and…
Nader Moayeri
I am part of a grassroots effort at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that is developing an exposure notification system for pandemics in general, though we hope it could be used in at least a limited fashion during the current Covid-19 pandemic. We are fortunate at NIST to…
Klaus Wertenbroch
From a customer perspective, the only thing more frustrating than being denied a product or service is when that denial comes without a satisfactory explanation. As humans, our ability to deal with disappointment depends on understanding why it happened. Without an acceptable rationale, we’re apt…
Robert Sanders
The U.S. Department of Defense and more than 80 companies, universities, states, and research institutes will invest at least $275 million during the next seven years to scale up the microbial production of biomolecules. The effort will enable a growing biomanufacturing industry to supply a broad…
Anju Dave Vaish
T his year’s unprecedented lockdown happened just as we started moving forward with our 2020 goals. There has been a lot of speculation about Covid-19 and its consequences, much of it dire, but there has also been something that has kept us all rolling: the human mindset. With constraints come new…
Eric Whitley
Any company that decides to enter the mattress business is no doubt entranced by one undeniable fact: Everybody needs one.
Those companies that start producing and selling mattresses also quickly run into a harsh fact: Everybody already has one.
Purple saw opportunity. It looked at the positives…
Judith Su
My Little Sensor Lab at the University of Arizona develops ultrasensitive optical sensors for medical diagnostics, medical prognostics, environmental monitoring, and basic science research. Our sensor technology identifies substances by shining light on samples and measuring the index of refraction…
Gleb Tsipursky
Does the phrase “garbage in—garbage out” (GIGO) ring a bell? That’s the idea that if you use flawed, low-quality information to inform your decisions and actions, you’ll end up with a rubbish outcome. Yet despite the popularity of the phrase, we see such bad outcomes informed by poor data all the…
Hamza Mudassir
Disney has announced a significant restructuring of its media and entertainment business, boldly placing most of its growth ambitions and investments into its recently launched streaming service, Disney+. The 97-year-old media conglomerate is now more like Netflix than ever before.
What this means…
Erik Fogelman, Jeff Orszak
With the increasing power of digital technology, the idea of a connected manufacturing system that can sense, analyze, and respond will soon be a reality. This idea—called “intelligent edge”—combines computing power, data analytics, and advanced connectivity to allow responses to be made much…
Anil Ananthaswamy, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
The unlikely marriage of two major artificial intelligence approaches has given rise to a new hybrid called neurosymbolic AI. It’s taking baby steps toward reasoning like humans and might one day take the wheel in self-driving cars.
A few…
K. C. Morris
The Covid pandemic has highlighted the role that manufacturing plays in our society. Manufacturing is important not only for improving our quality of life but also for the necessities of life, from food to toilet paper to transportation and safe and secure housing. As our society has evolved, we…
