Press Coverage

In "The Code," Margaret O'Mara, an academic historian, chronicles Silicon Valley by focusing less on the actual technology than on the people and policies that led to its success. She highlights the critical role of Stanford University and the federal defense funding dollars which went to Stanford and a growing number of subcontractors in the region. Several other factors fueled Silicon Valley's success such as the Small Business Investment Act and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.

In this op-ed piece, Dr. Sharon Chinthrajah, clinical associate professor, cites the dangerous air pollution levels in the Bay Area. Low-income communities bear the greatest burden of pollution with disproportionately high rates of asthma among children. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District's Clean Cars for All program offers low-income individuals from communities impacted more by pollution an opportunity to lease or purchase electric vehicles. Plans are in place to expand this program to the entire Bay Area by the end of the year.

Automotive News interviews CARS Exec Director Stephen Zoepf about what students need to know to contribute to future transportation systems: "Students are being drawn into this space ... we felt is that students were graduating Stanford with the technical knowledge that they need to contribute in that space, but they didn't necessarily have that sense of responsibility."

AB5, passed by the California state assembly puts hard limits on what type of worker qualifies as a contractor. If passed, the bill would have far reaching effects for gig economy workers, businesses and the state. Stephen Zoepf notes that "There's lots of experimentation early on in any new business and many of those experiments fail." The California Senate is expected to vote on the bill later this summer.

Researchers from Stanford and the University of Warsaw in Poland have used Street View images of people's houses to determine how likely they are to be involved in car accidents. When factors related to the insured homes are added to the insurer's state-of-the-risk model, they improve its predictive power by 2%.

Chris Gerdes, one of the researchers featured in this PBS episode working on the next generation of self-driving automobiles, discusses some of the technological advancements of the car tracking the 9,000-year history of the automobile from origins in dog-sleds to the Model T.

To help autonomous vehicles drive safely at the limits of handling for situations such as obstacle avoidance or encountering a patch of ice, Stanford researchers used data from two test tracks: one from a low-friction environment with ice and snow and the other from Thunderhill Raceway in Willows, CA for high-friction data to develop a neural-network based system. In testing, the AI based system outperformed a more traditional physics-based system.

In this forthcoming Cornell Law Review paper, Stanford legal scholars Bryan Casey and Mark Lemley discuss the definition of "robots" run by "artificial intelligence" and how humans may be treated as a robots under certain laws. The pace of technical change makes the likelihood of legal scholars agreeing on how to distinguish humans from machines unlikely.

Both Google and Microsoft in latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission have included a warning to investors under "Risk Factors" of the risks of smart machines and the potential for ethical and legal issues.

In this interview with Renewable Energy Magazine, Arun Majumdar, senior fellow at Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy, seen here at left, discusses electric vehicle adoption in the United States, the grid infrastructure and the new services and models in the automotive industry.