It now seems clear that over the next five to ten years, we are going to be dealing with a Brave New Grid: a grid with new, volatile sources of both supply and demand. The operational processes that have worked until now will cease to be effective, because in addition to all of the above, the changing climate will bring more extreme weather events and make it even harder to manage energy load and generation. We’re already seeing regional operators like PJM, CAISO, and MISO move to comply with FERC Order 825, which requires the transition from hourly settlements to 5-minute settlements, in an effort to promote more fine-grained price signals for generators and ensure that market participants respond efficiently and reliably to rapidly-changing grid conditions.
It also seems clear that the unique combinations of these new grid stressors and the influx of newly available smart meter data (as well as the modern advances in AI and cloud computing) represent an astounding opportunity to build new data services and infrastructures to help regional operators, utilities, energy suppliers, and ratepayers navigate the complexities of this new reality and adapt to the age of the fully smart grid.
With this inevitable energy future in mind, I am proud to announce that I have founded a company to accelerate the transition, called Amperon. My co-founder, Sean Kelly, is a 12 year energy trading veteran. In the ten months since our founding, we’ve built our product, made great strides in a number of pilot deployments, and closed our pre-seed round with some incredible investors and angels including Notation, SV Angel, Lattice Ventures, Ramez Naam, Chris Wiggins, Erik Nordlander, Jon Stritar, Robert Winter, Scott Kidder, Joe Lallouz, and Aaron Henshaw.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is launching a huge expansion of its Electronics Resurgence Initiative, boosting the program to US $1.5 billion over five years. And while some of the research efforts will be just what you’ve come to expect from the agency that brought you disposable drones, self-driving cars, and cameras that can see around corners, a lot of this new money is going toward ideas that could fundamentally change how chips are designed.
If it all works out, the effect could be to make small groups of engineers capable of feats that would take 100 engineers to achieve today. “We envision a much more specialized, secure, and heavily automated electronics community, which will change how everything is done in electronics, top to bottom,” says DARPA’s ERI director Bill Chappell. And that means your job is probably going to feel the effects.
Extra Extra
Health insurance brokers can use data such as purchase history – are you a woman who started buying plus-sized clothing? or changed your name? – to potentially raise rates. HIPPA only protects health data, not plus-sized purchase data, so legally, it’s fair game. With which health outcome do insurers think those plus-sized purchases correlate? The onset of mental illness, still an area that is under-covered in the U.S.
Vicki Niu arrived at her freshman orientation at Stanford, in 2014, with dreams of changing the world with technology. At Stanford, professors consulted for Facebook and Google, and students took classes in buildings named for Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Google, Yahoo, and Snapchat had been started by students while they were on campus. “I remember before coming here, I looked up a list of Stanford alumni, and was like, I can’t believe these people started all these companies,” Niu told me. “It had to be this place that made people so exceptional.”
But even as a freshman—years before popular sentiment began to turn against the tech industry—Niu took issue with an engineering culture that she saw as shallow. “I saw my really bright peers starting these new social networks and anonymous question-asking apps,” she said. “And I just didn’t understand how smart people were working on problems that seemed so inconsequential to me.” So, in the spring of her freshman year, she and three classmates launched CS + Social Good, Stanford’s first student group focused on the social impact of computer science. “We wanted to create a community of people that valued impact,” she said. “To remind computer scientists that they have skills to do things that matter and remind folks who are already doing impact-oriented work how technology is a tool they could also leverage.”
Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Utah, was awarded close to $2 million over four years to lead two projects for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s new Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) “Page 3” programs. Gaillardon and the rest of the awardees were announced on Monday, July 23 at the first annual ERI Summit in San Francisco, California.
The ERI aims to overcome the imminent roadblocks that will limit the growth of electronics capacities and computing capabilities.
EurekAlert! Science News, University of California-San Diego
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The University of California San Diego has been awarded $11.3 million over four years from DARPA to lead a multi-institution project which aims to develop electronic design automation tools for 24-hour, no-human-in-the-loop hardware layout generation.
The project, called OpenROAD (Foundations and Realization of Open, Accessible Design), supports the Intelligent Design of Electronic Assets (IDEA) program within DARPA’s larger Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI). ERI is led by DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), and aims to address the impending engineering and economic challenges now confronting the advancement of microelectronics after 50 years of relentless progress.
For the first time, scientists have imaged the entire brain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in enough detail to detect the individual junctions, or synapses, between every neuron. The resulting database of images could help researchers map the neural circuits that underlie every sniff, buzz, and aerial maneuver in a fly’s behavior.
“This data set—and the opportunities it creates—are … arguably one of the most important things to have happened in neurobiology recently,” says Rachel Wilson, a neurobiologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the new work. “Anyone in the world who is interested can download the data set and determine whether any two neurons … talk to each other.”
The 100,000-neuron fruit fly brain is elementary compared with the roughly 100 billion neurons in our own skulls.
Data scientists are a group of highly educated people; highly valued and increasingly important in the modern world, many of them are lucky enough to be able to pick and choose where they work. An organisation dedicated to improving the data science job market, then, might not appear at first glance to be the most obvious business strategy.
But for the founders of Brainpool.ai, their experiences demonstrated to them that it was not just an opportunity, but a necessity. Kasia Borowska, managing director, Dr Paula Parpart, head of research and Dr Peter Bebbington, CTO, are on a mission to improve the data science job market.
Data science and data scientists always develop in academia, in the vaunted halls of some of the most prestigious universities in the world. Groundbreaking projects, innovative research and developments with the power to change the world have come out of academic data science departments.
But, the company’s founders discovered, there exists a big gap between these academic pursuits and the industries that could adopt and commercialise them. Businesses have typically struggled to access the type of research that could be helpful to them, and academia has found commercialisation difficult.
Bloomberg Technology, Natalie Wong and Stefanie Marotta
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Toronto’s tech scene is so hot the city created more jobs than the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle and Washington, D.C., combined last year, while leapfrogging New York in a ranking of “talent markets.”
Toronto was the fastest-growing tech-jobs market in 2017, according to CBRE Group Inc.’s latest annual survey, released Tuesday. The city saw 28,900 tech jobs created, 14 percent more than in 2016, for a total of more than 241,000 workers, up 52 percent over the past five years, CBRE said. Downtown, tech accounted for more than a third of demand for office space.
Canada’s biggest city took fourth place in “tech talent,” a broad measure of competitiveness, pushing New York down a notch and coming in just after the Bay Area, Seattle and the U.S. capital.
A sense of humor is important if you’re Marc Raibert. He’s the founder of Boston Dynamics, the robotics company that creates walking metal machines that look like they belong on the set of the Terminator reboot.
When his remarkably agile robots are knocked down, they get up and keep marching. They can take a beating from hockey stick-wielding humans. Some are very tall. They are heavy. They metal. They are “nightmare-inducing,” Raibert said during a conference last year. That’s how he described Handle, which resembles a horse standing on its hind legs, if its hind legs had rubber tires instead of hooves. Handle is truly terrifying.
Stirring warmer feelings is SpotMini: The four-legged bot stands 2 feet, 9 inches and looks only slightly post-apocalyptic. If one puts a cardboard delivery box on its back, the machine with 17 joints and 3D vision could be called a very good doggo.
Boston Dynamics has plans to take its robotic helpers mainstream next year.
When preparing the data, I scrutinized the hell out of the files. I wanted to make sure the variable names made sense to anyone who stumbled across the data, I quadruple checked all of the analyses. I posted the r script. Surely, there was nothing that I missed, right? 2/n
The 2020 census will be the first in the nation’s history to be conducted electronically, which will also mean more potential for outside interference.
Columbia Business School, Ideas and Insights, Colin Morris
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In their paper “What Makes Popular Culture Popular? Product Features and Optimal Differentiation in Music,” professors Michael Mauskapf of Columbia Business School and Noah Askin of INSEAD analyzed 60 years worth of tracks from the Billboard Hot 100, and found that the songs that chart highest tend to be less similar to their predecessors. When it comes to getting to the top of the charts, it pays to be different — though not too different.
“Breakout songs — those that reach the very top of the charts — simultaneously conform to prevailing musical feature profiles while exhibiting some degree of individuality or novelty,” Mauskapf and Askin explain. “They sound similar to whatever else is popular at the time, but also have enough of a unique sound to help them stand out as distinctive.”
The revised OpenRTB 3.0 spec released Tuesday makes major changes to the programmatic standard to stamp out bad ads and fraud. The IAB Tech Lab’s new spec is now open for public comment for 60 days.
The eight-year-old OpenRTB standard governs how demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) communicate with each other to buy and sell programmatic ads. But bad actors exploited the standard’s holes, leading to domain spoofing, location fraud, in-banner video and other issues.
“OpenRTB had evolved ‘organically,’ with organic not necessarily being a positive thing,” said Dennis Buchheim, SVP and GM of the IAB Tech Lab.
Boston, MA October 1-2. “Emerging high-throughput molecular profiling technologies and the increasing availability of clinical data for research provide major opportunities to accelerate precision medicine using advanced computational methods. This conference aims to connect the machine learning and cancer research communities to enable an exchange of ideas, and set the stage for future collaborations.” [$$$$]
Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Earth & Environmental Sciences
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Accessing archival data generated by environmental field, experimental and modeling activities has gotten much easier with the April 1 launch of ESS-DIVE (Environmental System Science – Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem)—a digital archive that serves as a repository for hundreds of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)-funded research projects under the agency’s Environmental System Science umbrella, which includes the Subsurface Biogeochemical Research and Terrestrial Ecosystem Sciences programs. The digital library also serves datasets that were previously stored in DOE’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center archive.
The digital library was built by a collaboration of scientists in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab’s) Computational Research Division (CRD) and Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA), the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) and digital librarians at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)—a research center based at UC Santa Barbara.
“At the New York Summit a few days ago we launched two new Amazon SageMaker features: a new batch inference feature called Batch Transform that allows customers to make predictions in non-real time scenarios across petabytes of data and Pipe Input Mode support for TensorFlow containers. SageMaker remains one of my favorite services and we’ve covered it extensively on this blog and the machine learning blog. In fact, the rapid pace of innovation from the SageMaker team is a bit hard to keep up with. Since our last post on SageMaker’s Automatic Model Tuning with Hyper Parameter Optimization, the team launched 4 new built-in algorithms and tons of new features. Let’s take a look at the new Batch Transform feature.”