A research study by the Stanford Graduate School Business on the motorcycle industry found that the longer a company has served a particular market, the more challenging change will be. While specialization can lead to popularity and profits, long lasting specialization and changing consumer tastes, can be fatal especially with competitors ready to address these new trends.
An international team of experts propose that autonomous systems of all kinds from self-driving cars, care-bots and other robots should learn from the aviation industry by implementing a black box to analyze accidents when they occur and create an audit trail.
Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy and Woods Institute for the Environment will fund three new research projects to make and use plastics more sustainably. One project lead by William Tarpeh, assistant professor, chemical engineering, reimagines manufacturing for plastic car components.
A discovery of a relatively simple pretreatment of catalysts based on palladium could lead to new types of catalytic flares and cleaner-burning car engines that would keep tons of the heat-trapping gas out of the skies.
Scholars propose a way to help mobile robots choose when to communicate with the cloud without latency or lost data issues. Marco Pavone and postdoctoral scholar Sandeep Chinchali used deep reinforcement learning algorithms to smartly and sparingly tap into the cloud to improve perception while reducing demands on data channels.
Stanford engineers have overcome a key obstacle that has limited the widespread adoption of phase-change memory which is thousands of times faster than conventional hard drives. “The big appeal of phase-change memory is speed, but energy-efficiency in electronics also matters,” Eric Pop, professor of electrical engineering said.
The Sustainable Procurement Barometer, a survey of more than 350 companies, found that most firms remained committed to integrating sustainability into their supply chains even with the challenges of the pandemic.
In their new book, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot, three Stanford scholars show how we can collectively shape a technological future that supports human flourishing and democratic values.
Using tools from autonomous vehicles, the research team from Mykel Kochenderfer's lab has built an augmented cane which helps people detect and identify obstacles, move around those object and follow routes both indoors and outdoors. The smart cane weighs only 3 pounds and can be built from off-the-shelf parts and free, open-source software for $400.
