AM signals: artificial librarian, carbon-composite 3D printing, antenna measurements
In an interview with The Boston Globe, GE chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt said the company is relocating to Boston because the city offers the right “ecosystem.” GE is focusing on high-tech industrial work, having shed most of its media and finance businesses, and wanted to be near a startup culture. In addition, GE’s growing presence in Europe made a Silicon Valley headquarters impractical.
Christopher Mims takes a look at carbon-fiber 3D printing. He talks with Greg Mark, chief executive of MarkForged Inc., a startup in Cambridge, MA, that sells a $5,000 machine that 3D-prints carbon-fiber composites. He also talks with Robert Swartz, founder and chief technical officer of Chicago-based Impossible Objects LLC, who says, “Our long-term goal is to replace injection molding.” Concludes Mims, “Once we can make things that are usable in the real world right at our desks—or at the nearest copy shop—3-D printing could have its ‘PC moment.’”
AMTA 2016—the 38th annual meeting and symposium of the Antenna Measurement Techniques Association—will convene October 30 through November 4 in Austin. Organizers have issued a call for papers. Sample topics include theory and applications of the measurement of antennas and radar scattering, indoor and outdoor test ranges, measurement standards and laboratory comparisons, and new instrumentation for testing. Abstracts are due May 2. Visit www.amta2016.org for more information.
Two students at Aberystwyth University are developing Hugh, a walking, talking artificial librarian that can guide students to relevant bookshelves. Electronics Weekly quotes Ariel Ladegaard, one of the developers, as saying, “The next phase is to look at how it moves around without bumping into people and library furniture, how it finds out where the books are, how it interprets voice commands, how it displays the information, and what it looks like.” Pasi Sachiti, the other developer, describes Hugh as a narrowly artificially intelligent robots.”
