In this Future of Everything podcast, Dorsa Sadigh, assistant professor, computer science and electrical engineering discusses her work drawing on cognitive neuroscience, psychology and behavioral economics to train robots to better understand humans and how to give humans the skills to more seamlessly work with robots.
In early 2021, Congress instructed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to come up with a voluntary risk framework for AI systems. Policy experts at Stanford and other institutions say NIST should start by updating existing frameworks rather than creating new ones.
A Stanford researcher studies past industrial revolutions to glean insights on today's competition in AI. He argues that the key to a nation's economic power is less about which one is first to develop the new technology but to figure out how a wide range of industries can make practical use of them all.
This report reviews the key themes and takeaways from the Oct 2021 series of roundtables with Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy, Stanford Center at Peking University, and Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center's China Program who partnered with Peking University's Institute of Energy.
In a series of recent papers, a Stanford GSB researcher and a group of colleagues argue that corporations should be required to disclose their CO2 emissions in their annual reports. The UK enacted such a policy in 2013 and the researchers show that the affected companies reduced their carbon emissions by 8% over the next several years compared with similar European firms.
Recycling batteries is expensive, and inefficient involving toxic chemicals. A project supported by the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, and StorageX is looking to design batteries built-for-recycling. The team is also interested in exploring sustainable catalysts for fuel cells applying the same built-for-recycling approach.
As lithium batteries cycle, islands of "dead" or detached lithium metal are cut off from the electrodes, decreasing the battery's capacity. Researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Lab and Stanford, have discovered a way to make this "dead" lithium creep like a worm toward one of the electrodes, partially reversing this unwanted process and increasing its lifetime by nearly 30%.
Frequency microcombs, specialized light sources, are spaced so precisely that this system is used to measure all manner of phenomena and characteristics. Microcombs are currently in development that have the potential to enhance countless technologies, including GPS systems, telecommunications, autonomous vehicles, greenhouse gas tracking, spacecraft autonomy and ultra-precise timekeeping.
Forced labor, modern slavery and human trafficking are endemic issues in global supply chains. Re:Structure Lab, a new project involving researchers from Stanford, Simon Fraser University and Yale, examines the ways in which global supply chains can be restructured to eliminate human rights abuses out from labor.
Researchers from the Stanford Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Lab have developed a robotic hand capable of handling a wide variety of items. The multi-jointed fingers topped with gecko-inspired adhesives, creates a strong hold via microscopic flaps. Below the adhesives, finger pads, a collapsible rib structure, ensures equal forces on the adhesive pads.
