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.
The UN Climate Change Conference COP25 began on October 31 and runs through November 12 in Scotland. Stanford experts in a range of fields discuss their hopes for the talks as well as major themes likely to influence negotiations, keys to success and more.
Stanford researchers have released a blueprint for how to build a National Research Cloud, a system to provide greater access to compute power and data to enable basic academic and non-commercial research.
