Stanford researchers presented their work on developing better, faster ways of providing human guidance to autonomous systems at the June Robotics: Science and Systems conference. The team's process to providing instruction to robots combines demonstrations and user preference surveys, with the goal of combining data from both of these sources for robots to better learn about humans' preferred reward function.
To prevent the possibility that hackers could misuse a chip's features to carry out criminal threats, Stanford engineering professors have adapted their algorithms to help prevent this type of unintended consequences. Originally developed to automate the process of finding bugs in chips and fixing these before manufacturing, their technique called Symbolic QED, has been used to debug chips developed for vehicle braking and steering systems.
In his commencement address at Stanford Stadium, Tim Cook, Apple CEO, urged students, "Graduates, at very least, learn from these mistakes. If you want to take credit, first learn to take responsibility." View the Stanford commencement gallery and other commencement highlights at this link.
Researchers from Stanford and the University of Warsaw in Poland have used Street View images of people's houses to determine how likely they are to be involved in car accidents. When factors related to the insured homes are added to the insurer's state-of-the-risk model, they improve its predictive power by 2%.
CARS Co-director Marco Pavone has been awarded the Early-Career Spotlight Award from the Robotics Science and Systems Foundation which acknowledges the outstanding accomplishments and exceptional potential of early-career researchers in robotics.
A new initiative, Q-FARM, between DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford, joins forces to make progress in the field of quantum information science (QIS). In this Q&A two Q-FARM scientists explain what is QIS and how they will explore the quantum world through projects funded by DOE QIS awards in high-energy physics.
A new combustion chamber developed by Matthias Ihme's lab, associate professor, mechanical engineering, will improve engine efficiency by more than 10%, getting more thrust from less fuel. The team has developed a small-scale prototype which they believe more precisely controls the ratio of air to fuel inside the combustion chamber.
Stanford professor Charbel Farhat, Aeronautics and Astronautics, an expert in computational fluid and structural dynamics and fluid-structure interaction, worked with the Jet Propulsion Lab to develop computer simulations to help JPL improve their parachute designs to be used for future Mars rovers like the rover Curiousity which touched down on Mars in 2012. Future missions are likely to require larger payloads and require larger parachutes.
Stanford researchers found that after people experienced augmented reality (AR) their interactions in their physical world changed as well - even with the AR device removed. These findings that using AR can change where you walk, how well you do on tasks and how you connect socially with other physical people in the room mirrors much of the research this group has done on virtual reality.
Stanford grads who founded Airity Technologies, are working to disrupt the high-voltage power supplies market to open up whole sectors of new applications for mobility and energy systems by providing smaller, cheaper, faster, or more efficient power supplies. The idea for Airity started when co-founder Luke Raymond, a former student working with assistant professor Juan Rivas-Davila, was researching power conversion, studying new approaches for amplifying one voltage to a higher one.
