Pre-COVID-19 three-quarters of U.S. workers - approximately 118 million people- commuted to work solo. Working on ways to improve people's mental and physical health, Pablo Paredes, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford School of Medicine and director of the Pervasive Technology Lab, id developing non-intrusive ways to detect and alleviate stress during the commute.
The Automated Vehicles Symposium held virtually this year during the last week of July, featured plenary sessions and over 40 breakout sessions across the four-day event. The opening keynote was moderated by Chris Gerdes, professor, mechanical engineering with Tracy Murrell, Matthew Schwall, and Qi Hommes Waymo, Waymo, on the question of transitioning to driver-out. Some of the highlights and key take-aways are summarized in this article by Richard Bishop.
Snorkel AI, a project from the Stanford AI Lab which recently emerged out of stealth, enables clients to input data-related expertise into a system to generate the most accurate algorithms and models possible. Data labeling for machine-learning systems can be an expensive, time-intensive process. Instead, experts provide rules they work by and not just labels, enabling the Snorkel AI system to effectively label data itself. Applications include major banks, genomics, self-driving car data and COVID patient triaging.
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
Launched in May 2019, Stanford's Long-Range Vision shifted priorities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate solutions, enhance knowledge and education and support our diverse community. A central part of the Long-Range Vision is not only to advance the creation of knowledge, but to also speed the time to translate that into solutions beyond the university.
Ines Azevedo, Associate Professor, Stanford Energy Resources Engineering, along with co-author Dr. Fan Tong, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, examined the most beneficial vehicle fuel technology for transportation in the US and the trade-off between decarbonization and air pollution mitigation. The results show electric vehicle use must accompany clean energy grids to mitigate both climate change and air pollution. Link
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
