Research

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University will partner with other institutions on one of the National Quantum Information Science (QIS) Research Centers, Q-NEXT, led by Argonne National Lab. The work of Q-NEXT will focus on commercialization of new technologies and ensure that the U.S. remains at the forefront in this advancing field. Researchers at SLAC and Stanford will work on numerous topics including quantum sensors and networks, materials characterization and simulations.

Stanford's TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy through its Innovation Transfer Program has granted $4.8 million to 78 projects since it's fall 2013 start. Over the past nine months, 13 new projects teamed Stanford faculty and students advancing technological and business model innovations.

A new paper in Nature Energy from Stanford, MIT and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, calls for five major advances in how we convert, store and transmit thermal energy. Approximately 90 percent of the world's energy use involved generation or manipulation of heat, including the cooling of buildings and food. The analysis calls for an urgent need for breakthroughs in thermal science & engineering which could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least one gigaton, which is about 3 percent of energy-related GHG emissions globally.

In a recent paper, Stanford Graduate School of Business and University of Toronto researchers laid out a theoretical framework for companies to consider when designing and delegating decisio

To keep employees and customers safe from COVID-19, and adapt to the economic fallout created by the pandemic, established companies can take lessons from the world of startups. Success at the outset should be measured by one metric: customer engagement. To be adaptable, companies should quickly define problems, have a bias for action and be open to testing novel ideas. Link

In this Future of Everything podcast on diversity in engineering, Sheri Sheppard, professor, mechanical engineering, who got her start in engineering working at GM, Ford and Chrysler discusses the need for engineering curriculum to have an interdisciplinary approach and explore the "peopleness" in challenges engineers work to solve.

A team of researchers from Stanford, Facebook AI Research, and McGill University has developed a tool that measures how much electricity a machine learning project uses and how much that means in carbon emissions.

Are individuals owed explanations when AI makes decisions that affect their lives? Kate Vredenburgh, HAI and McCoy Family Center for Ethics and Society postdoctoral fellow (seen at left), discusses what it would mean to implement such a right. If AI developers know they will have to justify their work during implementation the hope is this would create incentives for building more morally justifiable algorithms. Link

In the face of COVID-19 to keep workers safe and continue operations, companies have ramped up remote work and are aggressively automating some operations and exploring machine learning (ML). Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford HAI's Digital Economy Lab, along with scientists from CMU and MIT, have identified tasks most suitable for ML. While more tasks in lower wage jobs could be replaced by ML, no occupation is immune.

To understand what it takes for sustainability efforts to deliver lasting benefits, Stanford scientists looked through some of the biggest sustainability efforts from the past 25 years to understand what makes solutions hold at large scale. Strong multi-stakeholder, multi-level coalitions formed around ambitious objectives are needed to create transformation at scale.