Amelia's Weekly Fish Fry

U Can Touch This! BeBop Sensors Brings a Sense of Touch to Robots and More!

You just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.
- Isaac Asimov

Robotic innovation and the future of human-machine interfaces take center stage in this week’s Fish Fry podcast! Keith McMillen (CEO, Founder - BeBop Sensors) joins me to chat about BeBop’s Intelligent Sensing Technologies which can transform any surface into a touch surface that naturally blends into its environment. We dig into the details of BeBop’s RoboSkin that can provide robots with the sense of touch and discuss why Keith believes that intelligent interfaces will change how we interact with machines in the future. Also this week, I take a closer look at a new robotic learning method called WHIRL developed by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University that could make teaching robots easier than ever before.

The Next Wave of Semiconductor Innovation

In this week’s Fish Fry, we are talking about electrostatic multi-nozzle printing technology, industrial microfabrication, and life-like lasers! Walter Braun (COO – Scrona) and I investigate the biggest challenges facing the microfabrication industry today, why Walter believes that the next wave of semiconductor innovation will rely on novel semiconductor packaging, and the details of Scrona’s multi-nozzle printing technology. Also this week, I examine new self-organizing lasers built by a team of researchers from Imperial College London and University College London that could lead to new materials for sensing, computing, light sources, and displays.

 

 

Fast Times in Supply and Demand: How the EDDI Report Can Help Determine How Difficult Sourcing Will Be

“What gets measured gets improved.”  - Peter Drucker

In this week’s Fish Fry podcast, Daniel Schoenfelder from Altium joins me to discuss the EDDI (Electronic Design to Delivery Index) report, how it can help you source components for your next design and what it can tell us about where the supply chain stands today.  Also this week, I take a closer look at a new machine learning algorithm developed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory that can predict how long a lithium-ion battery will last.

Faster AI! Go! Go!

We are covering one of my favorite subjects this week: Artificial Intelligence! My guest is Nick Romano, Co-Founder & CEO of Deeplite AI. We investigate their new Deeplite Runtime which makes AI models smaller and faster in production deployment, why smart manufacturing is a great application for Deeplite AI, and why ultra-compact quantization is key to making AI smarter, faster, and smaller than ever before. Also this week, I examine "Raw Zero-Shot" – a new AI learning method developed by a team of researchers at Kyushu University that has potential to make AI more robust and reliable in the future.

 

 

The Currency of Data: Liquid Instruments’ Innovative Take on Software Defined Instrumentation

Software defined instrumentation takes center stage in this week’s Fish Fry podcast! Ben Nizette and I chat about how Liquid Instruments is changing the face of test and measurement. We examine each of their hardware platforms and investigate why this kind of flexible, modular, reconfigurable, and shareable instrumentation is the way of the future. Also this week, I check out the first commercially viable flexible plastic microprocessor chips developed by a team of researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and British flexible electronics manufacturer PragmatIC Semiconductor.

 

The Road Forward for IoT: Cellular, LoRa, and WiFi - Oh My!

The Internet of things is not a concept, it is a network, the true technology enabled network of all networks” - Edewede Oriwoh

In this week’s Fish Fry podcast, Marc Pegulu from Semtech and I chat about the future of IoT, the pros and cons of the various networks we need to support our Internet of things ecosystem, and where LoRa and LoRaWAN fit in the grand scheme of IoT. I also examine how an off-the-shelf IoT wearable device is able to detect COVID-19 infection before symptoms appear for the first time. 

 

Sowing the Seeds of Change: How Sustainability and Extending Product Life Cycles Can Help Ease Our Supply Chain Woes

We are sowing the seeds of innovation in this week’s Fish Fry podcast! Peggy Carrieres from Avnet and I investigate the global supply chain challenges facing our engineering community today. We take a closer look at the role sustainability will play in the future of electronic design and how Avnet’s visual libraries called "Avail" can help you navigate a variety of supply chain and design chain issues. Also this week, I highlight a group of researchers from the University of Florida who have grown plants in lunar soil for the first time! I examine how this research could not only help develop food sources for future astronauts living and operating on the Moon and on Mars, but also how it could help us overcome stressful conditions in food-scarce areas here on Earth. 

Let’s Just Fly There! How the Center for Autonomous Vehicles in Air Transportation Engineering is Charting a Course for Flying Taxis

I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty. - Amelia Earhart 

In this week’s podcast, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Professor Naira Hovakimyan joins me to discuss how the development of the new Center for Autonomous Vehicles in Air Transportation Engineering (AVIATE) at UIUC will help charter a course for flying taxis! We investigate Hovakimyan’s L1 adaptive flight control system and the role it will play in the development of this kind of autonomous aircraft. We also chat about the different technologies developed by team members at UIUC in association with this project and how various universities and companies including Georgia Tech, MIT, Boeing, Kitty Hawk and Google Wing are coming together to make flying taxis a reality. Keeping with our high flying theme this week, I also check out the details of a new air utility vehicle called the Speeder 2 unveiled by Mayman Aerospace at the recent Draper Venture Network CEO Summit in California.

Let’s Get Spaced Out! New Space-Qualified FRAM and the Discovery of New Black Holes

In this week’s podcast, we are headed to space! First, I investigate how a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discovered a hidden treasure trove of black holes in dwarf galaxies and how their research could help unlock the mysteries surrounding a supermassive black hole in our own galaxy. Keeping with our space theme, Helmut Puchner (Infineon VP and Fellow of Aerospace and Defense) also joins me to discuss a new space-qualified serial interface FRAM. We chat about why this technology is more energy-efficient than other devices used for space applications and the advantages this particular serial interface FRAM brings to the table versus other memory devices.

 

AI to Save the Day: Athinia Uses Artificial Intelligence and Big Data to Help Solve Semiconductor Challenges

Can big data and artificial intelligence help solve the problems plaguing the semiconductor industry? That is exactly the topic of this week’s Fish Fry podcast! Athinia CEO Laura Matz joins me to discuss how Athinia is using AI and big data to solve critical semiconductor challenges. We discuss collaboration across the semiconductor industry, how Athinia is creating new insights in material optimization, and why military-grade requirements for data security are integral to Althinia’s cloud infrastructure and operations.