01 Spectrum 2024-Med

6 Privacy-Protecting The Humanoids Are A Better Blue Big FOR THE
Chips Fully homomorphic Coming Warehouse changes for OLED TVs TECHNOLOGY
INSIDER
encryption speeds up tests in 2024 and smartphones
P.38 P.44 P.54 JANUARY 2024
Top Tech
2024
How to Keep
Deepfakes From
Derailing
Democracy
More Technology
Developments
in the Year Ahead
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VOLUME 61 / ISSUE 1 JANUARY 2024
Top Tech
2024 23
Faster chips, better Wi-Fi,
brighter displays, and more are
coming in the year ahead.
This Election Year,

Look for Content
24
Credentials
As deepfakes proliferate,
digital manifests can prove
trustworthiness.
By Eliza Strickland
High-Voltage DC
Power Roars Ashore
28
in Europe
A major installation will
connect the Shetland Islands
to Scotland.
By Peter Fairley
Intel Hopes to
Leapfrog Its
32
Competitors
The chipmaker is adding new
transistors and new power-
delivery tech simultaneously.
By Gwendolyn Rak
AI Will Surveil the

Paris Olympics
34
Antiterror algorithms will
proceed under a supposedly
temporary law.
By Lucas Laursen
Chips to Compute
With Encrypted
38
Data Are Coming
Fully homomorphic encryption
44 could make data unhackable.

By Samuel K. Moore
Year of the Humanoid

AGILITY ROBOTICS
Bipedal robots seek to prove their

commercial viability.
By Evan Ackerman ON THE COVER:
Illustration by Giacomo Bagnara
JANUARY 2024 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG 1

VOLUME 61 / ISSUE 1 JANUARY 2024
50
Back to the
Moon, Almost
Astronauts will explore deep space
for the first time in 50 years.
By Andrew Jones
Kelp Farms Make

Carbon Capture a
40 A Behind-the-Screens
Change for OLED
54 EDITOR’S NOTE
It’s a make-or-break year for
4
technologies emerging from years

Growth Industry A new blue OLED material is in development.
These systems combine about to transform displays.
seaweed harvesting and By Tekla S. Perry NEWS 7
carbon sequestration. Direct Lithium Extraction
By Prachi Patel Magnetic Mapping
The Short List Penny-Size Accelerator
The Brain-Implant
Company Going for
42 Eleven more tech milestones to watch
for in 2024. By Gwendolyn Rak
HANDS ON
Try a new analog computer
16
Neuralink’s Jugular Energy From Earth’s Core 27 for a digital world.

Synchron’s stentlike Battery-Backed Ovens 31
Triage Tech to the Rescue 33 CAREERS 19
electrodes are leading the race
Zero Trust, Some Confidence 36 Greta Bekerytė is one
to the clinic.
Flight-Testing Killer Drones 37 of the top women
By Emily Waltz
Visible’s Antiactivity Tracker39 in the EV industry.
Amazon’s Space-Based Internet 41
Wi-Fi’s Big Bet on
Reliability
48 Hailing Air Taxis in Paris
Solar-Powered Test Drive
43
49
FIVE QUESTIONS
Joy Buolamwini explains
22
ERIC BORDELON/NASA
Wi-Fi 7 brings new techniques Supersonic Sustainably why it’s okay for
to combat poor signal quality. Fueled Aviation 51 AI to slow down.
By Michael Koziol Rubin Observatory’s
Supersize Camera 53 PAST FORWARD 64
The Cheery Charm of
the Clapper
2 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG JANUARY 2024

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EDITOR’S NOTE BY HARRY GOLDSTEIN
Senior Editor
Samuel K.
Moore had an
embarrassment
of riches to
choose from as
he curated
this issue.
The Future
We Saw Coming
Is Now
Technologies we’ve been following
for years will be huge in 2024 More recently, fully homomorphic encryption
(FHE) has burst onto the scene. Moore, who’s been
covering the Cambrian explosion in chip architec-
A
s IEEE Spectrum editors, we pride our- “Eliza’s tures for AI and other alternative computing modal-
selves on spotting promising technologies story about ities since the mid-teens, notes that, like the robotics
and following them from the research battling challenge, DARPA was the initial driver.
phase through development and ulti- “You’d expect the three companies DARPA
mately deployment. In every January issue, we focus
misin funded to come up with a chip, though there was no
on the technologies that are now poised to achieve formation guarantee they’d commercialize it,” says Moore,
significant milestones in the new year. and who wrote “Chips to Compute With Encrypted
This issue was curated by Senior Editor Samuel deepfakes Data Are Coming” [p. 38]. “But what you wouldn’t
K. Moore, our in-house expert on semiconductors. actually expect is three more startups, independently of
So it’s no surprise that he included a story on Intel’s gives me DARPA, to come out with their own FHE chips at
plan to roll out two momentous chip technologies some hope the same time.”
in the next few months. for the Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry’s story about phos-
For “Intel Hopes to Leapfrog Its Competitors” phorescent OLEDs, “A Behind-the-Screens Change
future,”
[p. 32], Moore directed our editorial intern, Gwen- for OLED” [p. 54], is actually a deep cut for us. One
dolyn Rak, to report on the risk the chip giant is
Moore says. of the first feature articles Moore edited at Spectrum
taking by introducing two technologies at once. We way back in 2000 was Stephen Forrest’s article on
began tracking the first technology, nanosheet tran- organic electronics. His lab developed the first phos-
sistors, in 2017. By the time we gave all the details in phorescent OLED materials, which are hugely more
a 2019 feature article, it was clear that this device was efficient than the fluorescent ones. Forrest was a
destined to be the successor to the FinFET. Moore founder of Universal Display Corp., which has now,
first spotted the second technology, back-side power after more than two decades, finally commercialized
delivery, at the IEEE International Electron Devices the last of its trio of phosphorescent colors—blue.
Meeting in 2019. Less than two years later, Intel pub- Then there’s our cover story about deepfakes and
PORTRAIT BY SERGIO ALBIAC; MOORE:JEAN KUMAGAI
licly committed to incorporating the tech in 2024. their potential impact on dozens of national elec-
Speaking of commitment, the U.S. military’s tions later this year. We’ve been tracking the rise of
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has deepfakes since mid-2018, when we ran a story about
played an enormous part in bankrolling some of AI researchers betting on whether or not a deepfake
the fundamental advances that appear in these video about a political candidate would receive more
pages. Many of our readers will be familiar with the than 2 million views during the U.S. midterm elec-
robots that Senior Editor Evan Ackerman covered tions that year. As Senior Editor Eliza Strickland
during DARPA’s humanoid challenge almost 10 reports in “This Election Year, Look for Content
years ago. Those robots were essentially research Credentials” [p. 24], several companies and industry
projects, but as Ackerman reports in “Year of the groups are working hard to ensure that deepfakes
Humanoid” [p. 44], a few companies will start up don’t take down democracy.
pilot projects in 2024 to see if this generation of Best wishes for a healthy and prosperous new
humanoids is ready to roll up its metaphorical year, and enjoy this year’s technology forecast. It’s
sleeves and get down to business. been years in the making.

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be r
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THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND SCIENCE JANUARY 2024
The evaporation process

in lithium brine ponds can
take months or even years,
leaving behind depleted
brines that then must
be disposed of or pumped
back into the ground. By
contrast, direct lithium
extraction doesn’t require
any evaporation ponds.
H
ENERGY igh in the Andes mountains
where the borders of Argen-
Lithium Extraction Gets tina, Bolivia, and Chile inter-

sect, white expanses of salt
stretch for thousands of kilometers.
Faster and Maybe Greener, Under these flats lie reservoirs of brine
that contain upwards of 58 percent of
Too New technologies the world’s lithium.
MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
For decades, producers have
double production while extracted that lithium by pumping the

water up to the surface and letting it
polluting less evaporate until the lithium salts become

concentrated enough to filter out. The
process takes 12 to 18 months, leav-
ing behind piles of waste containing
other metals. It also evaporates nearly
2 million liters of local water resources,
BY PRACHI PATEL harming indigenous communities.

NEWS
The Direct-Extraction Difference game-changing technology for

lithium supply,” because it could
TRADITIONAL POND unlock new sources of lithium,
according to a recent report by
Lead time 1 day 5 hours 9 to 18 months Goldman Sachs. But in contrast to
Lime plant shale’s fracking risks, DLE brings
Brine Concentrated brine environmental benefits, reducing
land and water use, and waste.
Lithium ions Lithium ions “We pump up the brine, take
out only lithium, and put the brine
back underground,” says Jeremy
Patt, chief technology officer at
Pre-pond Evaporation Summit Nanotech, based in Cal-
Lime ponds gary, Alta., Canada. “The goal is to
not add any chemicals or change
the temperature or pH of the
WELLS LIME PLANT PONDS brines. So you get more lithium
Extraction Removing Solar evaporation out with minimal disruption.”
of brine magnesium precipitates salts Summit is one of more than
from ground from brine and increases lithium a dozen young companies pilot-
concentration
ing new DLE processes with the
DIRECT LITHIUM EXTRACTION (DLE) intent of commercial production
as early as 2025. The world’s top
Lead time Hours to days lithium producers, Albemarle
Cl K and SQM Lithium, plan to test
Na Cl
their own DLE technologies this
Cl Mg
Cl K year. In China, a handful of com-
ClNaNa Cl Cl Cl Adsorption The most popular DLE method
Cl Mg involves the physical adsorption and removal
mercial projects already use Chi-
Cl Na LiCl Cl Cl
of the lithium from brine. nese DLE innovator S unresin’s
Cl
technology.
Li
Carmakers, meanwhile, are
Water recovery lining up to secure DLE lithium
supplies: GM is backing Austin,
LiCl
Texas–based EnergyX and Tes-
la’s lithium supplier Livent, which
DLE Lithium
chloride has a DLE facility in Argentina,
modules
production while BMW buys lithium from
Livent and has invested in the
California startup Lilac Solu-
Brine reinjection without changes tions. Chile announced in April
except lithium removal that all new lithium projects by
private companies that want to
partner with Chile will have to
Direct lithium extraction (DLE) offers an alternative to the way lithium
is mined and refined. When using conventional methods, manufacturers need speed up their commercializa-
months of lead time before concentrated lithium is available. DLE requires tion of DLE technologies.
only days of lead time. Most DLE projects today rely
on adsorption. The idea is to trap
lithium molecules on the surfaces
of tiny beads made of carefully
With the EV and energy-storage markets acceler- chosen materials and physical structures. According
ating, demand for lithium will increase over 20 times to interviews with industry experts, most companies
by 2040, according to CleanTech Lithium. To keep today use a variation of the aluminum adsorbents
up, many companies are now developing processes first invented 60 years ago.
to chemically or physically filter out lithium from Summit Nanotech’s aluminum-based particles
brines and inject the brine back underground. These are highly porous, and their surface is designed to
direct lithium extraction (DLE) technologies take days interact electronically with lithium ions, explains
instead of months and could double the production Patt. The pores have diameters comparable to those
of lithium from existing brine operations. Much of lithium ions, which help it grab over 90 percent of
as shale extraction did for oil, DLE is a “potential lithium from brine; traditional evaporation recovers

between 40 and 65 percent. Summit pumps brine Ford has signed a deal to buy 25,000 tonnes of
through columns tens of feet tall and several feet wide lithium a year from one of these projects.
that are packed with the sorbent, Patt says. Once the Heavyweights in the oil-and-gas industry are
adsorbent is loaded with lithium, the metal is washed also starting to branch out into lithium, accord-
off with warm water, leaving the sorbent to be reused ing to the Financial Times. ExxonMobil recently
and the water to be recycled. “Our proprietary sor- purchased salty brine deposits containing lithium
bent and water-recovery process are our two big in Arkansas, and Chevron is also looking at pro-
technology pillars,” he says. ducing lithium.
In the five years since it was founded, Summit has The ability to tap into diverse domestic sources
ramped up its technology and incorporated it into a of lithium is of special interest to the United States
pilot plant in Santiago, Chile, to which it brought the government, says Holly Stower, an analyst at the
brine in trucks, Patt says. The company is now build- Cleantech Group. “As the United States transi-
ing a demonstration plant, he adds, that will process tions to a low-carbon economy, the Department
25 cubic meters of brine per day and is drawing up of Energy wants to ensure that they have a steady
plans for its first commercial plant. and secure lithium supply that is resilient to geo-
Livent and Sunresin use their own aluminum sor- political risk, and DLE enables that,” she says.
bents. Three Chinese lithium producers have been The DOE is investing millions in new DLE tech-
using Sunresin’s technology since 2017, and five more nologies to extract lithium from geothermal brines
projects are underway, according to Goldman Sachs. in the United States, such as the Salton Sea in Cali-
Livent, however, was the first, having deployed fornia, which the National Renewable Energy Lab-
DLE commercially back in 1998. The company con- oratory estimates could provide over 24,000 tonnes
centrates brines in small ponds before running them of lithium a year. The DOE’s biggest purse—US
through the DLE process, using less land and water $5 million—has gone to EnergyX, which also has
than traditional evaporation ponds. According to received $50 million from General Motors.
Goldman Sachs, the company increased production Which technology for DLE will win is still
to 27,000 tonnes a year in 2019, and plans to produce unclear. There is as yet “no clear winner in terms
another 50,000 tonnes a year by 2026. of what customers want and what the technology
California startup Lilac Solutions is taking a dif- can provide,” Stower says. But all the DLE sepa-
ferent approach to DLE called ion exchange. The ration technologies being piloted now are already
company uses tiny beads that look just like adsor- used for other purposes, says Goldman Sachs
bent beads but behave entirely differently, says analyst Hugo Nicolaci, and that should speed up
CEO David Snydacker. The beads absorb lithium in commercialization. “Expect the first real wave of
exchange for a hydrogen ion. Then, Snydacker says, DLE projects from later in the decade,” he says.
the company uses a dilute acid
to flush out the lithium.
Ion exchange is a common
process, used for everyday pur-
poses such as in home water JOURNAL WATCH Technology of China, in Chengdu,
softeners. But developing an says his team’s approach is centered
ion-exchange material for lith- “Nanoswimmers” around a fleet of semiautonomous
ium has “been a holy grail,” says Reveal Microtumors nanoswimmers that “gravitate”
toward cancer. In their theoretical
Snydacker. “For 20 years, large
companies have been trying to scenario, the swarm’s speed and
make ion exchange work.” Only Lately, researchers have been aggregation pattern is measured
ceramic materials can absorb exploring the use of injectable periodically, upon which clinicians
lithium with high selectivity, nanoparticles—also known as would magnetically guide the swarm
but the challenge is to make a “nanoswimmers”—that can quickly toward the tumor.
durable ceramic that can sur- home in on a microscopic tumor. Through simulations, the
vive brine and acid washes. This approach shows promise for researchers show that this “spot
Although previous ceramic early detection of small tumors sampling technique” can be used to
ion-exchange materials have that may not show up on traditional steer the semiautonomous swarm
degraded after only 10 cycles, imaging technologies. In a study toward the target using 90 percent
he says, Lilac’s material lasts published in the IEEE Internet of fewer monitoring resources.
for more than 2,000 cycles. Things Journal, one team has found “We foresee that commercializa-
Australian lithium devel- a way to guide these nanoswimmers tion of the technology will happen
oper Lake Resources is now to a tumor faster while using fewer in the next three to five years after
piloting Lilac’s technology resources. completion of proof-of-concept
at two remote project sites, Yifan Chen, a professor at the animal experiments,” Chen says.
according to Snydacker, and University of Electronic Science and —Michelle Hampson

NEWS
presented in July at the 2023 ACM

SIGCHI Conference on Designing Inter-
active Systems, the authors uncovered a
social dynamic wherein a power imbal-
ance favors the wearer of “smart” glasses.
The researchers go on to offer insights
on how the tech industry can design
more-inclusive AR technologies.
“This AR-filter interaction is likely
to happen in the future with the com-
mercial emergence of AR glasses,” says
Xiyu Jenny Fu, a doctoral student at
Cornell University’s Bowers College of
Computing and Information Science and
one of the two lead authors of the study.
“How will that look like, and what are the
social and emotional consequences of
interacting and communicating through
AR glasses?”
That was the main question Fu and
her collaborators—including lead author
Ji Won Chung, a doctoral student at
Brown University’s Human-Computer
Interaction (HCI) Research Lab, and
Designers of augmented-reality glasses don’t often create their technologies
with nonusers in mind, say researchers from Brown and Cornell Universities. coauthor Malte Jung, an associate pro-
But as AR devices proliferate, their designers will need to take into account fessor of information science at Cor-
the often-changed social dynamic these technologies can bring about. nell—aimed to answer. They randomly
grouped 10 participants into pairs, with
one person in each pair wearing Specta-
CONSUMER ELECTRONICS cles, AR glasses loaned by Snap, the com-
pany behind Snapchat. This prototype
AR Glasses Upset the version of Spectacles is equipped with a

camera and five filters that can transform
a nonwearer into a bear, a cat, a clown, a
Social Dynamic deer, or a pig-bunny.
Each participant pair engaged in a
Anticipating power imbalances desert-survival exercise: listing items
they would need to survive in the desert.
in the mixed-reality future Wearers reported feeling more relaxed;

the face filters eased their nervousness
LEFT: SNAP; RIGHT: CORNELL UNIVERSITY AND BROWN UNIVERSITY

and reduced their social anxiety while
they talked to strangers. The experience
BY RINA DIANE CABALLAR wasn’t so rosy for nonwearers. They felt
uneasy not knowing what was happen-
ing on the other side of the AR glasses:
R
emember that viral video-call Just like sunglasses, the dark lenses
mishap in which a lawyer got made it difficult for them to read the
stuck with a cat filter turned on? wearers’ social cues.
Imagine yourself in his shoes. Additionally, nonwearers felt dis-
Let’s say you’re talking to someone wear- empowered by their inability to control
ing eyewear akin to “smart” sunglasses their own appearance and how they
that can discreetly overlay a cat filter on were seen by others. Some participants
your face without your knowledge. How even raised concerns about the nefar-
would that make you feel? ious potential uses of AR glasses, such
Researchers at Cornell University as filters that could impose nudity onto
and Brown University teamed up to someone’s body, deepfakes generated
explore how this scenario would play with their likeness, or being secretly
out in a world with more ubiquitous recorded without their consent.
augmented-reality usage. In their study, The study participants also took part

in a design session, where they were Moreover, involving nonusers is espe-
asked to sketch ideas that might improve cially key in developing more-equitable
the AR glasses for both wearers and non- tech products and creating more-in-
wearers. Most of the ideas included fea- clusive experiences. “That’s one of the
tures only for the wearer. points why previous AR iterations may
“When we think about design in HCI, not have worked—they designed it for
there is often a tendency to focus on the the individual and not for the people
primary user and design just for them,” surrounding them,” says Chung. She
Jung says. “Because these technologies adds that a shift in mindset is needed to
are so deeply embedded in social inter- actively make tech that doesn’t exclude
actions and are used with others and people, which could lead to social sys-
around others, we often forget these tems that promote engagement and
‘onlookers,’ and we’re not designing with foster a sense of belonging for everyone.
them in mind.” Jung says he ultimately envisions
Some participants suggested features the study helping to raise awareness
like an indicator light to inform nonwear- of the social opportunities and risks
ers when AR glasses are being used to that come with designing for a looming
change the user’s appearance, as well as mixed-reality future.
a holographic projection so others can “It’s about understanding how these
view what the wearer sees. This type of devices shape how we interact with others
participatory design approach can help and how they perceive us, and how these
“better capture and simulate a positive technologies affect our ability to form and
interaction in the lab when doing usabil- maintain social relationships,” he says.
ity testing and prototyping,” Fu says. “These are what make us human.”
AEROSPACE
World’s Biggest
Aircraft Clears
for Flight
Last October, as IEEE Spectrum wrote
in our exclusive report, the U.S. Federal
Aviation Administration granted Google
cofounder Sergey Brin’s company LTA
Research clearance to fly its prototype
Pathfinder 1 electric airship. According to
the company, Pathfinder is intended for
humanitarian purposes as well as cargo
transport. As of press time, the ship,
shown here on 8 November, is
undergoing flight-operations
testing at Moffett Field, in
Mountain View, Calif.
LTA RESEARCH

NEWS
The World Magnetic Model, a global map of Earth’s magnetic field, helps navigation systems correct for the difference
between magnetic north and true north. Now a competition is underway that’s seeking new approaches to chronicling and
updating every subtle pull in the compass needle, everywhere on the planet.
T
AEROSPACE he World Magnetic Model is essential for
navigation. The model, which compiles
MagQuest Seeks New precise measurements of Earth’s magnetic

field at points across the globe into one
map, provides data on the constantly shifting mag-
Global Magnetic Map netic field. But the current system for collecting that
vital data is getting old.
The map that helps your Now, a U.S. intelligence agency is in the final
stages of a competition to develop new technology
phone know left from right to replace that aging system. The hope is to one day
produce an even more accurate World Magnetic
is getting an update Model, which is critical given its use in cellphones,

aircraft, and military applications. “We’re using this
every day to figure out if we’re going left or right,”
says David Roy-Guay, CEO of SBQuantum, one
NOA/NCEI/CIRES
company participating in the competition.

“The World Magnetic Model is the magnetic
model used in any and all navigation systems,” says
BY GWENDOLYN RAK Mike Paniccia, the program manager for the model.

The map is maintained by the National Geo-
spatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), part of
the U.S. intelligence community and the
Department of Defense, which releases an
updated version every five years to main-
tain the accuracy of navigation systems. The
latest model was issued in 2020.
Currently, the World Magnetic Model
relies on the European Space Agency’s
Swarm mission, which was launched in
2013. Ten years later, the three large satel-
lites are in need of a successor, Paniccia says.
Enter MagQuest, a multimillion-dollar
competition conducted by the NGA and
the NASA Tournament Lab to seek new
approaches to mapping Earth’s magnetic
field. The competition—begun in 2019 and
led by Paniccia—is now in the midst of its
final phase. The agency announced on 27
September that all remaining teams have
successfully completed the first part of this
phase, which included constructing and test-
ing instruments at NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center. Now, the qualifying teams
will build and launch satellites to take these
devices into space.
Three teams remain in the competition:
tech startup SBQuantum, London-based
company Iota Technology, and an engineer-
ing lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Each team has designed its own instrument
and a small satellite to house it.
All three teams will launch their devices,
known as magnetometers, in CubeSats. Competitors are vying for the rights to develop the technologies
for an updated World Magnetic Model. Iota Technology’s CubeSat
These miniaturized satellites are much
[top] will measure field intensities over its boom arm, one meter
smaller than Swarm’s “school-bus satel- from the satellite’s main body. Meanwhile, SBQuantum has developed
lites,” Paniccia says, and the new approach a small, diamond-based magnetometer [bottom] to track slight varia-
could significantly reduce costs for gather- tions in Earth’s magnetic field.
ing magnetic-field data.
Shrinking the magnetometers down to fit
into a CubeSat is particularly challenging because der team has designed their CubeSat to run on
the instruments tend to be finicky, Paniccia adds. as little power as possible to reduce the space-
Traditionally, accurate measurements have craft’s magnetic noise, which Marshall says the
been achieved by placing two magnetometers on company will be working to reduce further still
a long boom to separate them from the rest of the before launching.
satellite’s electrical systems. One magnetometer SBQuantum also uses one quantum device for
measures the field’s magnitude, while the other both magnitude and direction data. By using the sen-
adds information about its precise direction. That’s sor’s quantum properties, the device also avoids dis-
the approach taken by Iota Technology, on a much tortions that can result from temperature changes
smaller scale, says Hugo Shelley, the company’s in classical instruments, says Roy-Guay. The tech
TOP :IOTA; BOTTOM: SBQUANTUM
founder. Compared with the Swarm satellites’ startup is now partnering with a previous compet-
4-meter-long booms, he says, the team’s helical itor, Spire Global, to develop the CubeSat for their
boom will extend just 80 centimeters. quantum magnetometer.
Instead of a pair of magnetometers, the CU The three teams say they plan to launch their
Boulder team uses one monolithic system. Robert satellites in 2025 to test the technology’s viability
Marshall, an associate professor at the university in space. Following the competition, the NGA plans
and team leader, says his team is using a single to enter into a data-purchase agreement with one
rubidium-based magnetometer. And, instead or more of the MagQuest teams to help create the
of placing the instrument on a boom, the Boul- 2030 World Magnetic Map.

NEWS
P
article accelerators range in
size from a room to a city. How-
ever, scientists are now looking
closer at chip-size electron
accelerators, according to a new study in
the journal Nature. Potential near-term
applications for the technology include
radiation therapy for zapping skin
cancer; over the long term, it could create
new kinds of laser and light sources.
“The idea for this is almost as old as
the laser,” says study senior author Peter
Hommelhoff, a physicist at the Univer-
A silicon chip with 42 photonic accelerators of various lengths is about the sity of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in Germany.
size of a 1 euro cent coin. “Sometimes, research just takes time,
and we see that realizing something is
SEMICONDUCTORS much more demanding than just throw-
ing the idea out.”
Penny-Size Accelerator Packs a Punch For their study, the physicists fabri-
cated a tiny channel 225 nanometers wide
Nanoscale electron guns can help zap and up to 0.5 millimeters long. An elec-
tron beam entered one end of the channel
cancers and drive new lasers and exited the other end. The researchers
shone infrared-laser pulses 250 femto-
seconds long on top of the channel to help
BY CHARLES Q. CHOI accelerate the electrons’ journey down.
Inside the channel, two rows of up to 733
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silicon pillars, each 2 micrometers high, timeters for the electron source,” adds
interacted with these laser pulses to gen- study lead author Tomáš Chlouba, a
erate accelerating forces. physicist who is also at the University
The electrons entered the accelerators of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
with an energy of 28,400 electron volts, Hommelhoff notes that it is relatively
traveling at roughly one-third the speed difficult for their structures to accelerate
of light. They exited it with an energy of electrons that are somewhat slow, such
40,700 eV, a 43 percent boost in energy. as the roughly 30,000-eV electrons they
“We had hoped that the 0.1- and experimented with. “The structures
0.2-millimeter-long accelerator struc- become more efficient when the elec-
tures work, and after we saw that they trons approach the speed of light, when
did, we just went on and tried also the their energy is approaching 1 million
longer ones we made,” Hommelhoff says. electron volts,” he says.
The applications for these nanopho- Although the researchers experi-
tonic electron accelerators depend on mented with structures made from sili-
the energies they can reach. Electrons con because it’s fairly easy to work with,
of up to about 300,000 eV are typical silicon doesn’t have a high threshold for
for electron microscopy, Hommelhoff damage, Hommelhoff says. Structures
says. For treatment of skin cancer, made of glass or other materials may
the energy of 10 million eV is needed. allow much stronger laser pulses and
Whereas such medical applications thus more powerful acceleration, he says.
currently require an accelerator 1 meter The researchers are interested in
wide—and additional large, heavy, building a small-scale accelerator, “maybe
and expensive parts to help drive the with skin-cancer treatment applications
accelerator—“we could in principle in mind first,” Hommelhoff says. “This is
get rid of both and have just a roughly certainly something that we should soon
1-centimeter chip with a few extra cen- transfer to a startup company.”
LEARN. TRANSFORM. ADVANCE.

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TECH TO TINKER WITH
Just as with NASA’s Apollo simulators, an analog computer handles the

physics of a lunar landing, while a digital computer displays data.
A Brand New Analog

O
nce upon a time, if you
cracked open the pages of
IEEE Spectrum you could
Computer Go beyond spot full-page advertise-
ments for analog computers, boasting
digital with the THAT of their ease of use and even—in the
case of one model built into a cart with
wheels—their portability. Engineers
connected potentiometers and op-
amps to set up representations of knot-
ty differential equations and read the
BY STEPHEN CASS solutions as varying output voltages.
16 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG JANUARY 2024 Illustrations by James Provost

JANUARY 2024
But then digital computers conquered all,

making analog computing as obsolete as
radio coherers, mechanical televisions,
and punched cards. Almost.
Like other written-off technologies
that have seen comebacks such as vinyl
records, Nixie tubes, and airships, analog
computers have their adherents striving
for a revival. In 2017, Yannis Tsividis
wrote a feature article for Spectrum
describing his research at Columbia Uni-
versity into the possibilities of digital-
analog hybrid computer chips. The
digital element offers ease of use, while
the analog element provides energy-
efficient solutions to many real-world
types of problems.
When the article was published, I
thought it made some compelling points,
but as a casual experimenter I didn’t
really have a good on-ramp to analog
computing. That changed last year when
I saw that startup Anabrid was offering
a brand-new analog machine, the
US $513 THAT.
Anabrid’s main gig is developing
hybrid analog-digital chips of the sort
pioneered by Tsividis.
Its THAT is intended to raise aware-
The THAT analog computer [left]
ness of the possibilities of modern analog has sockets for connecting various
computing. THAT is an acronym for The components, such as integrators,
Analog Thing, and it’s a small open- that correspond to mathematical
operations. I displayed its outputs
source machine composed largely of using an LCD screen [top right],
discrete op-amp integrated circuits. protoboard interface [middle right]
The THAT is smaller than the and Arduino Uno [bottom right].
industrial-grade machines of yore, with
just eight potentiometers for setting
parameters and five integrators, along the THAT’s output voltages—for me it
with a collection of supporting summers, felt only appropriate to hook up an old
inverters, comparators and so on. But the analog oscilloscope that I’d cadged from
THAT is not just a cut-down toy. Multiple my older brother some time ago on gen-
THATs can be chained together if more eral principles.
processing power is required, and a It was time to try some computing. As
hybrid connection port is provided to it’s been a minute since I last took down
make it easier to interface a THAT with Erwin Kreyszig’s Advanced Engineering
a digital computer. Mathematics to ponder differential equa-
Like the analog computers that once tions, I was glad to see that the THAT’s
graced the advertisements in Spectrum, accompanying manual is chock-full of
the THAT is programmed by wiring up examples and patch diagrams. Soon I was
elements that perform mathematical watching Euler spirals and simulations
functions with short patch cables. You of neural spiking bloom into phospho-
need to provide your own way to display rescent life, observing their evolution as

HANDS ON
0.03 0.03 This did entail sacrificing some pre-

–1
–1 cision. Internally, the THAT represents
1 2 Altitude h quantities using a range between -10 and
Gravity g SJ +10 volts. That full range would curdle
the analog-to-digital converters built
Scale T 0.06 into most microcontroller boards, so the
v(t) = – (g–T)dt
–1 THAT compresses and shifts that range
3 for the hybrid port. There, voltages vary
h(t) = h(0)- v(t)dt Scale F
Fuel level F between 0 V and 3.3 V. The Arduino Uno
5 operates at 5 V, and reads with 10-bit
F(t) = F(0)— aTdt Thrust T 0.1 precision, so the altitude and fuel level
4 end up approximated as numbers
A between 337 and 675. But that’s tolerable,
A+B>0
+1 given that my LCD has only 320 vertical
pixels at most to display the spacecraft’s
A+B<0 location above the surface.
B I made up an Arduino protoboard
with connectors for the LCD shield and
On the left are the differential equations that model the flight a ribbon cable running to the THAT’s
of the lunar lander in their textbook form. On the right is how
they are encoded into the elements provided by the THAT, such as hybrid port. It is possible to exert some
integrators and comparators. The numbers inside circles refer to active control of the THAT via the hybrid
the potentiometers used to set the values of parameters. port, for example, commanding it to reset
to its initial conditions and solving an
equation. However, with only two analog
I twisted potentiometers to adjust inputs available after accommodating
parameters. the LCD shield, I was using the Arduino
But I wanted to test out the hybrid as a purely passive display.
approach. The natural choice was to I wrote a program to display the lunar
build on Anabrid’s demo patch for a surface and the player’s spacecraft in
lunar-lander game: Starting above the classic vector-like style. Fuel is displayed
surface with a limited amount of fuel, a as a dwindling horizontal bar. Speed is
spacecraft is in grip of the moon’s gravity. computed and displayed by sampling the
The player must control the spacecraft’s spacecraft’s altitude about 10 times per
engine throttle by turning a potentiom- second and dividing the change in alti-
eter so that the spacecraft lands before tude by the time interval between mea-
the fuel runs out. surements. When the altitude reaches
With an oscilloscope, the game lacks zero, the speed is checked and the player
a certain visual élan, with the fuel and is told if they landed safely, damaged their
altitude readings displayed as two hori- spacecraft, or were destroyed on impact.
zontal lines. And a critical element of any The program then waits until the THAT
lunar-lander game is also missing— is reset for another attempt.
determining whether or not the space- Somewhat to my surprise, my hybrid
craft’s speed at the moment of landing It felt only contraption worked smoothly. Space-
results in a graceful touchdown or a fresh
crater. But these deficiencies could be appropriate craft rose and fell on the display in accor-
dance with the laws of physics encoded
addressed digitally.
For my digital computer and graphics
to hook up in the THAT’s nest of wiring, and lived
or died depending on my skill with the
display, I dug out an Arduino Uno and a an old analog throttle. As an intro to a form of comput-
small LCD touchscreen shield. The LCD
display uses nearly all the pins on a reg- oscilloscope I’d ing now alien to nearly all engineers, the
THAT is about as well designed an
ular Arduino Uno, but two analog inputs
remained available to read the voltages
cadged from my on-ramp as you could wish for. Now it’s
time to take down Kreyszig and start
representing altitude and fuel. older brother. exploring my own physics models!

SHARING THE EXPERIENCES OF WORKING ENGINEERS BY EDD GENT
Careers:
Greta Bekerytė
Her journey from cleaning offices to being one
of the top women in the EV industry
G
reta Bekerytė started out cleaning
offices and ended up designing electron-
ics for EV charging stations. It’s amazing Hardware engineer Greta Bekerytė was named one of
what you can accomplish in your career the Top Women in EV in 2022 by organizers of the
when you follow your dreams. EV Summit, a leading global e-mobility event.
It wasn’t easy. Bekerytė moved from her native
Lithuania to Norway in 2010 to take advantage of
the country’s free university tuition, but first she
had to find a way to support herself. She took the Bekerytė recalls being impressed that someone
cleaning job, and scrimped and saved to pay for Nor- could understand those strange symbols. Instead of
wegian reading and writing classes, a requirement drawing, she pretended she was working at an office
to attend a university. It took her four years, but she as an engineer who understood the schematics.
was finally able to afford the tuition for the language “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, are there really
courses, which cost thousands of U.S. dollars. “Don’t listen people who understand what this is?’” she says. “So
She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in indus- to others, I was interested in that kind of thing quite early.”
trial automation and circuit design, followed by a just listen Bekerytė’s father, who worked in construction
master’s in robotics and signal processing, both to yourself. and also fixed cars, was another major influence. He
from Norway’s University of Stavanger. Find that was a DIY enthusiast willing to try his hand at just
Today she works as a hardware engineer at about anything, from electronics to plumbing. She
Zaptec, which makes electric-vehicle charging sta-
thing that was always curious about his projects and remem-
tions and is also based in Stavanger. For her contri-
you are really bers him teaching her to solder at the tender age of 7.
butions to the field, in 2022 she was selected as one interested in While Bekerytė excelled in math and science,
of the Top Women in EV by the organizers of the and go for it.” she also was interested in music and art. By the
EV Summit, a leading global e-mobility event. time she graduated high school, she had mapped
Bekerytė credits her success to following her out three potential career paths: an orchestra con-
heart. “Do what you love,” she says. “Then you will ductor, an architect, or an engineer. All she knew
be able to go through all the challenges that come for certain was that she wanted to excel in whatever
up, and you will have the dedication and drive to she pursued.
actually become what you want to become.” “I always knew I wanted to be a specialist: a
person that others would go to because they knew
Growing up in Šiauliai, Lithuania, Bekerytė seemed something really well,” she says.
destined to become an engineer. She recalls that That would turn out to be more challenging than
when she was about 5 years old, a friend of her moth- expected.
er’s, who worked as an electrical engineer at a com-
ZAPTEC
pany that built power transformers, handed her some Bekerytė graduated from high school in 2010, the
old schematics from her job to use as drawing paper. same year Lithuania drastically increased its tui-

CAREERS
tion run by the Norwegian global power engineering

firm Aker Solutions, also in Stavanger. Bekerytė’s
team was tasked with improving the operations
at an oil-rig construction plant using Internet of
Things devices. Her team didn’t win, but the com-
pany was so impressed with her that it offered her
a job as a safety automation systems engineer. The
job involved designing signaling systems on subsea
oil wells. She started two weeks after graduating.
In 2021 she was contacted by Zaptec for the posi-

tion of a hardware engineer who would help design
its electric-vehicle charging stations. She accepted
the offer.
Few companies have roles involving hands-on
hardware development, she says, something she
loved doing in school. The job entails building
devices in the lab and running testing and verifi-
cation programs.
“It is my dream job,” she says.
A hardware engineer requires a deep under-
standing of electronics and strong mathematical
skills, plus knowledge of computer architecture and
Greta Bekerytė works on the Zaptec Go electric-vehicle charging low-level programming, she says.
station. It weighs 1.3 kilograms and charges up to 22 kilowatts. Another, often underappreciated aspect of the
job, is having good communication skills, Bekerytė
says. “You frequently have to interface with non-
technical teams like marketing,” she explains. “That
tion for state universities. Not wanting to financially Employer: means you need to be able to explain technical
burden her parents, Bekerytė decided to relocate Zaptec, details in ways that nonexperts can understand.”
with her boyfriend to Norway, where they’d pursue Stavanger, Norway
degrees and find work. That path, however, was Title: Although she’s still learning, being named
tougher than they anticipated. Hardware engineer one of the top women in EV has given Bekerytė
Higher education is free in Norway, but the global industry-wide recognition for her work.
job market in 2010 was still in the doldrums fol- Education: The award came as a surprise, Bekerytė says,
Bachelor’s degree
lowing the 2008 financial crisis. Despite diligently in industrial because she was nominated by a colleague without
looking for jobs for six months, they had no success automation and her knowledge. But she was flattered and glad to
and decided to move back to Lithuania. circuit design; find that there was an award recognizing women
“We didn’t have any money for rent or food,” master’s degree in in a male-dominated field.
Bekerytė recalls. “We decided that on Saturday we robotics and signal She says her colleagues jokingly call her a uni-
processing, both
would buy ferry tickets, but on Friday I got called from the University corn because women working in the EV industry are
for a job interview.” of Stavanger, so rare. She thinks providing visibility to women is
She was hired to clean offices, and her boyfriend in Norway important to overcome stereotypes about who can
found a job washing the inside of oil tankers. Since and should work in the field.
both jobs were sporadic, it took four years to save For the most part, she says she’s faced few barri-
enough money to pay for the language classes. ers because of her gender. But there have been times
when she has felt she had to fight to gain the respect
After completing the one-year language course of others.
at the University of Stavanger in 2016, Bekerytė “Sometimes I’ve felt that I need to prove myself
enrolled in the school’s bachelor’s degree program a little bit more than others do,” she says.
in industrial automation and circuit design. But if you do what you love, Bekerytė says, all
The course was demanding, particularly since barriers are surmountable. She admits her journey
she was still working part time. Out of 48 students to becoming an engineer was tough, and the only
who began the program, only 10 completed it. She thing that got her through was her deep curiosity
decided to continue on at the university and pursue for the subject.
a master’s degree in robotics and signal processing. “Don’t listen to others, just listen to yourself,” she
ZAPTEC
Toward the end of her studies in 2019, she got her says. “Find that thing that you are really interested
big break. She applied for an engineering competi- in and go for it.”

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Q&A BY ELIZA STRICKLAND
What can concerned engineers at big tech

companies do about algorithmic bias and
other AI ethics issues?
Buolamwini: I cannot stress enough the importance
of documentation. In conducting algorithmic audits
and approaching well-known tech companies with
the results, one issue that came up time and time
again was the lack of internal awareness about the
limitations of the AI systems that were being
deployed. [Documentation] that provides an oppor-
tunity to see the data used to train AI models and
5 Questions
the performance of those AI models in various con-
texts is an important starting point. Then the ques-
tion becomes: Is the company willing to release a
system with the limitations documented or are they
willing to go back and make improvements?
for Joy How can AI researchers convince their

companies to take AI ethics seriously?
Buolamwini
Buolamwini: It can be helpful to not view AI ethics
separately from developing robust and resilient AI
systems. If your tool doesn’t work as well on women
or people of color, you are at a disadvantage com-
Why AI should move slow and fix things pared to companies who create tools that work well
for a variety of demographics. If your AI tools gen-
erate harmful stereotypes or hate speech, you are at
risk for reputational damage that can impede a com-
J
oy Buolamwini, an AI researcher, first made pany’s ability to recruit necessary talent, secure
waves with a TED talk in which Buolamwini, future customers, or gain follow-on investment.
who is Black, showed that facial detection
systems didn’t detect her face unless she put You write that “the choice to stop is a viable
on a white mask. She’s also the founder of the Algo�- Joy Buolamwini and necessary option,” even when tools
rithmic Justice League. Buolamwini’s new book, earned her Ph.D. have already been adopted. Would you like
from MIT Media
Unmasking AI, reminds engineers that default set- to see a course reversal on today’s popular
Lab and founded
tings are not neutral, that convenient datasets may the Algorithmic generative AI tools?
be rife with ethical and legal problems, and that Justice League to Buolamwini: Facebook (now Meta) deleted a billion
benchmarks aren’t always assessing the right things. fight for people who faceprints around the time of a [US] $650 million
have experienced settlement after they faced allegations of collecting
algorithmic
You’ve worked hard to find data-collection face data to train AI models without the expressed
discrimination. Her
methods that feel ethical to you. Can you work was the subject consent of users. [Such] actions show that when
imagine a world in which every AI researcher of the documentary there is resistance and scrutiny, there can be change.
is so scrupulous? Coded Bias, and
Joy Buolamwini: When I was earning my academic her new book is What’s your opinion on superintelligent
Unmasking AI: My
degrees and learning to code, I did not have exam- AI posing an existential risk to our species?
Mission to Preserve
ples of ethical data collection. Basically if the data What Is Human in Buolamwini: The “x-risk” I am concerned about is
was available online, it was there for the taking. It a World of Machines the x-risk of being excoded—that is, being harmed
can be difficult to imagine another way of doing (Random House, by AI systems. I am concerned with lethal autono�-
things if you never see an alternative pathway. I do 2023). mous weapons and giving AI systems the ability to
believe there is a world where more AI researchers make kill decisions. I am concerned with the ways
For a longer version
exercise more caution with data-collection activi- of this interview, see in which AI systems can be used to kill people slowly
ties, because of the engineers who reach out to the spectrum.ieee.org/ through lack of access to adequate health care, hous�
-
Algorithmic Justice League looking for a better way. joy-buolamwini ing, and economic opportunity.
22 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG JANUARY 2024 Photo-illustration by Stuart Bradford

TOP
T ECH
2024
Deepfakes in elections, humanoid robots in the workforce,
and other things to watch for in the year ahead
Buckle up! This is going to be a rollercoaster of a year veillance tech will be watching you. If that creeps you
in technology. out, knowing that new privacy-enhancing chips are
Seventy-eight countries are holding major elec- coming might cheer you up.
tions this year, and they’re doing so in an environment This year will also see multiple moonshots; one
where fake images have grown more realistic and will even have a human crew. If you’re lucky, you might
more prevalent. But take heart—2024 is also the year watch those missions on an advanced display built
you’ll start to encounter countermeasures to keep with a better kind of blue pixel. On its way to you, that
you grounded in reality. display might even be handled by a humanoid ware-
To take your mind off those elections, you might house robot.
head to the Paris Olympic Games. But while you’re There’s much more to 2024 inside this issue. We,
watching the events, a network of AI-enhanced sur- the editors of IEEE Spectrum, hope you enjoy it. 

TOP TECH 2024
Last April, a campaign ad

appeared on the Republican
L
National Committee’s
YouTube channel. The ad
showed a series of images:
President Joe Biden cele-
brating his reelection, U.S.
city streets with shuttered
banks and riot police, and immigrants surging
across the U.S.–Mexico border. The video’s caption
read: “An AI-generated look into the country’s pos-
sible future if Joe Biden is reelected in 2024.”
While that ad was up front about its use of AI,
most faked photos and videos are not: That same
month, a fake video clip circulated on social media
COMPUTING that purported to show Hillary Clinton endorsing the
Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. The
extraordinary rise of generative AI in the last few
years means that the 2024 U.S. election campaign
won’t just pit one candidate against another—it will
also be a contest of truth versus lies. And the U.S.
This Election
election is far from the only high-stakes electoral
contest this year. According to the Integrity Institute,
Year, Look
a nonprofit focused on improving social media, 78
countries are holding major elections in 2024.
01
Fortunately, many people have been preparing
for Content
for this moment. One of them is Andrew Jenks,
director of media provenance projects at Microsoft.
Credentials
Synthetic images and videos, also called deepfakes,
are “going to have an impact” in the 2024 U.S. pres-
idential election, he says. “Our goal is to mitigate
that impact as much as possible.” Jenks is chair of
the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authen-
ticity (C2PA), an organization that’s developing
technical methods to document the origin and his-
tory of digital-media files, both real and fake. In
Media organizations combat deepfakes November, Microsoft also launched an initiative to
and disinformation with digital manifests help political campaigns use content credentials.
By Eliza Strickland The C2PA group brings together the Adobe-led
Content Authenticity Initiative and a media prove-
nance effort called Project Origin; in 2021 it released
its initial standards for attaching cryptographically
secure metadata to image and video files. In its
system, any alteration of the file is automatically
reflected in the metadata, breaking the cryptographic
seal and making evident any tampering. If the person
altering the file uses a tool that supports content cre-
dentialing, information about the changes is added
to the manifest that travels with the image.
Since releasing the standards, the group has been
further developing the open-source specifications
and implementing them with leading media com-
panies—the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
(CBC), and The New York Times are all C2PA mem-
bers. For the media companies, content credentials
are a way to build trust at a time when rampant
misinformation makes it easy for people to cry

Illustration by Giacomo Bagnara JANUARY 2024 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG 25
new assertion and new digital signature would *both be added to the manifest.*
So the new version of the manifest would have both the blue layer for the new assertion
and another layer behind it to represent the new digital signature.
I thought the new digital signature could be a different color to imply that
TOP TECH 2024
a different entity had signed it. Possible to make that change?
“fake” on anything they disagree with (a phenom-

enon known as the liar’s dividend). “Having your ORIGINAL PHOTO ALTERED PHOTO
content be a beacon shining through the murk is
really important,” says Laura Ellis, the BBC’s head
of technology forecasting.
This year, deployment of content credentials will
begin in earnest, spurred by new AI regulations in
the United States and elsewhere. “I think 2024 will PROVENANCE
NEW
INFORMATION
be the first time my grandmother runs into content ASSERTION
credentials,” says Jenks.
NEW DIGITAL
WHY DO WE NEED CONTENT CREDENTIALS? SIGNATURE
The crux of the problem is that image-generating

tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney make it easy for
anyone to create realistic-but-fake photos of events DIGITAL MANIFEST
SIGNATURE
that never happened, and similar tools exist for video.
While the major generative-AI platforms have pro-
tocols to prevent people from creating fake photos
or videos of real people, such as politicians, plenty of
hackers delight in “jailbreaking” these systems and MANIFEST
finding ways around the safety checks. And less-rep-
utable platforms have fewer safeguards.
Against this backdrop, a few big media organiza-
tions are making a push to use the C2PA’s content
credentials system to allow Internet users to check
the manifests that accompany validated images and
videos. Images that have been authenticated by the
C2PA system can include a little “cr” icon in the
corner. Users can click on it to see whatever informa-
tion is available for that image—when and how the
image was created, who first published it, what tools
they used to alter it, how it was altered, and so on. In the content- CONTENT CREDENTIALS
However, viewers will see that information only if credentials system,
they’re using a social-media platform or application an original photo
is supplemented
that can read and display content-credential data. with provenance pean Union’s AI Act, now being finalized, requires
The same system can be used by AI companies information and a that synthetic content be labeled. And in the United
that make image- and video-generating tools; in that digital signature States, the White House recently issued an executive
case, the synthetic media that’s been created would that are bundled order on AI that requires the Commerce Department
be labeled as such. Some companies are already on together in a to develop guidelines for both content authentication
tamper-evident
board: Adobe, a cofounder of C2PA, generates the manifest. If another
and labeling of synthetic content.
relevant metadata for every image that’s created user alters the photo Bruce MacCormack, chair of Project Origin and
with its image-generating tool, Firefly, and Micro- using an approved a member of the C2PA steering committee, says the
soft does the same with its Bing Image Creator. tool, new assertions big AI companies started down the path toward
The move toward content credentials comes as are added to the content credentials in mid-2023, when they signed
manifest. When
enthusiasm fades for automated deepfake-detection voluntary commitments with the White House that
the image shows
systems. According to the BBC’s Ellis, “we decided up on a Web page, included a pledge to watermark synthetic content.
that deepfake-detection was a war-game space”— viewers can click the “They all agreed to do something,” he notes. “They
meaning that the best current detector could be used content-credentials didn’t agree to do the same thing. The executive
to train an even better deepfake generator. The detec- logo for information order is the driving function to force everybody into
tors also aren’t very good. In 2020, Meta’s Deepfake about how the the same space.”
image was created
Detection Challenge awarded top prize to a system and altered.
that had only 65 percent accuracy in distinguishing WHAT WILL HAPPEN WITH CONTENT
SOURCE: C2PA
between real and fake.

CREDENTIALS IN 2024
While only a few companies are integrating con-
tent credentials so far, regulations are currently being Some people liken content credentials to a nutrition
crafted that will encourage the practice. The Euro- label: Is this junk media or something made with real,
26 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG JANUARY 2024 Illustrations by Elias Stein

wholesome ingredients? Tessa Sproule, the CBC’s panies like Meta are now thinking about the user
director of metadata and information systems, says experience, she says, and are also pondering
she thinks of it as a chain of custody that’s used to practicalities. She cites compute requirements as an
track evidence in legal cases: “It’s secure informa- example: “If you add a watermark to every piece of
tion that can grow through the content life cycle of content on Facebook, will that make it have a lag
a still image,” she says. “You stamp it at the input, that makes users sign off?” Leibowicz expects
and then as we manipulate the image through crop- regulations to be the biggest catalyst for

ping in Photoshop, that information is also tracked.” content-credential adoption, and she’s eager for
Sproule says her team has been overhauling inter- more information about how Biden’s executive order
nal image-management systems and designing the will be enacted.
user experience with layers of information that users Even before content credentials start showing
can dig into, depending on their level of interest. She up in users’ feeds, social-media platforms can use
hopes to debut, by mid-2024, a content-credentialing that metadata in their filtering and ranking algo-
system that will be visible to any external viewer using rithms to find trustworthy content to recommend.
software that recognizes the metadata. Sproule says “The value happens well before it becomes a con-
her team also wants to go back into their archives and sumer-facing technology,” says Project Origin’s
add metadata to those files. MacCormack. The systems that manage informa-
At the BBC, Ellis says they’ve already done trials tion flows from publishers to social-media platforms
of adding content-credential metadata to still “will be up and running well before we start educat-
images, but “where we need this to work is on the ing consumers,” he says.
[social media] platforms.” After all, it’s less likely If social-media platforms are the end of the
that viewers will doubt the authenticity of a photo image-distribution pipeline, the cameras that
on the BBC website than if they encounter the same record images and videos are the beginning. In
image on Facebook. The BBC and its partners have October, Leica unveiled the first camera with
also been running workshops with media organi- built-in content credentials; C2PA member com-
zations to talk about integrating content-creden- panies Nikon and Canon have also made prototype
tialing systems. Recognizing that it may be hard for cameras that incorporate credentialing. But hard-
small publishers to adapt their workflows, Ellis’s ware integration should be considered “a growth
group is also exploring the idea of “service centers” step,” says Microsoft’s Jenks. “In the best case, you
to which publishers could send their images for val- start at the lens when you capture something, and
idation and certification; the images would be you have this digital chain of trust that extends all
returned with cryptographically hashed metadata the way to where something is consumed on a Web
attesting to their authenticity. page,” he says. “But there’s still value in just doing
MacCormack notes that the early adopters aren’t that last mile.” 
necessarily keen to begin advertising their content
credentials, because they don’t want Internet users
to doubt any image or video that doesn’t have the
little “cr” icon in the corner. “There has to be a crit-
ical mass of information that has the metadata JOURNEY TO THE CENTER
before you tell people to look for it,” he says. OF THE EARTH
Going beyond the media industry, Microsoft’s
new initiative for political campaigns, called Con- To unlock the blasting radiation be a key part of
tent Credentials as a Service, is intended to help terawatt potential from a gyrotron to achieving net-zero
candidates control their own images and messages of geothermal vaporize the hard emission goals by
energy, MIT startup rock beneath. 2050, according to
by enabling them to stamp authentic campaign Quaise Energy is At these depths, Quaise executives.
material with secure metadata. A Microsoft blog testing a deep- Earth reaches
post said that the service “will launch in the spring drilling rig in 2024 500 °C. Accessing
as a private preview” that’s available for free to that will use high- this superhot
political campaigns. A spokesperson said that Mic- power millimeter geothermal
waves to melt a energy could
rosoft is exploring ideas for this service, which column of rock
“could eventually become a paid offering” that’s down as far as 10 to
more broadly available. 20 kilometers. Its
The big social-media platforms haven’t yet made “deeper, hotter, and
public their plans for using and displaying content faster” strategy
will start with old
credentials, but Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and oil-and-gas drilling
media integrity for the Partnership on AI, says structures and
they’ve been “very engaged” in discussions. Com- extend them by

TOP TECH 2024
ENERGY The days are numbered for the

Lerwick Power Station, whose
T diesel generators have supplied

electricity to the Shetland Islands
for over 70 years. Starting around
the middle of 2024, the Shetlands—
High-Voltage
and also part of mainland Scotland—will be powered
by the 443-megawatt Viking wind farm, consisting of
DC Power
103 wind turbines on the main island of Shetland.
But what’s most interesting about the mammoth,
02
£580 million project isn’t so much the turbines as
Roars Ashore
the subsea transmission link that will connect the
wind farm to the Scottish mainland. Peak demand
in Europe
in the Shetlands is only about 44 MW, so at any given
time as much as 90 percent of the Viking output
could flow south via the link. The 260-kilometer,
320-kilovolt high-voltage direct-current (HVDC)
transmission system, based on technology from
Hitachi Energy, in Zurich, marks a milestone in an
ongoing transformation of the European power grid:
It will plug into the first truly dynamic multiterminal
Scotland’s next-generation transmission HVDC network in Europe.
network foreshadows a global grid This newer HVDC technology is opening up new
transformation By Peter Fairley opportunities. “European grid operators are adopt-
ing HVDC as the technology of choice for their
bulk-transmission needs in the future,” says Cornelis
28 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG JANUARY 2024 Illustration by Giacomo Bagnara

Plet, vice president for DNV, a consultancy that Area of
detail
advises on power systems and risk management.
According to Plet, wind energy is driving an
acceleration of HVDC installations in Europe. By
2030, the European Union seeks to roughly double,
to 42.5 percent, the share of energy met by renew-
ables. Officials are prioritizing projects that tap the Shetland/
relatively consistent and strong winds that blow Kergord
farther offshore, more than 75 km, say—a distance Lerwick
for which the high capacitance of insulated power
cables renders AC transmission impractical. Grid
operators are also installing subsea DC intercon-
nections in other regions to share wind-energy sur-
pluses and connect to backup supplies, such as
Scandinavia’s giant hydropower reservoirs. Further-
more, subsea and underground HVDC cables
increasingly look like the most viable way to push Caithness/
added wind power across congested national grids Spittal
Thurso
and densely populated landscapes.
NEW TECHNOLOGY DRIVES AN HVDC RENAISSANCE

Dunbeath
Driving this expansion in HVDC are major technical
advances. Historically, HVDC lines conveyed power
from one single point to another. The level of power
transfer needed to be set, and its direction could not Inverness
be instantaneously reversed—as would be necessary
if the lines were part of a network. However, starting Moray/
around 25 years ago, the path to multiterminal HVDC Aberdeen
Blackhillock
systems was established by big improvements in the
converters that change high-voltage alternating cur-
rent to DC, and vice versa.
The key advance was the implementation of volt-
age source converters (VSCs). Among other features, S COT L A N D
they allow operators of a transmission line to inde-
pendently control not only the real power flowing on Edinburgh
a line, but also the reactive power, which is the prod-
Glasgow
uct of the voltage and the current that are out of phase
with each other. Another feature of the new systems
is modularity: Most modern VSCs are implemented
as an integrated set of modules, in a system called a
modular multilevel converter (MMC).
AN OFFSHORE
The converters are made up of submodules, and
the higher the voltage being converted, the greater WIND FARM
the number of submodules. These submodules, in THAT’S ACTUALLY
turn, are typically based on capacitors and high- ON LAND
speed insulated-gate bipolar transistors. Energy ENGLAND
from the AC source is stored in DC capacitors in Power generated by the
the submodules. The capacitors are then charged 443-megawatt Viking
wind farm, in the Shetland
and discharged in sequence to exchange energy Islands, will feed a three-
with the AC network. terminal HVDC network,
The Shetland link will create a three-terminal with the possibility of two
system by adding on to an existing HVDC cable fur- more terminals in the WA L E S
ther south. From the Shetland HVDC converter future. The southernmost G R E AT
station, near the wind farm, DC is transmitted via
terminal is at Blackhillock,
Scotland, the site of
B R I TA I N
the subsea cable to an existing converter station, Europe’s second-largest
near the cable’s landfall on Scotland’s northern tip. substation.
Map by Elias Stein JANUARY 2024 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG 29

TOP TECH 2024
An inverter there can feed into the mainland AC grid. An HVDC the AC networks they trade power with. That feature
Or the DC power coming from the island can bypass converter hall at gave ABB’s VSC-based systems an instant niche
an undisclosed
that first mainland converter, continuing south to a where there was literally no AC grid to lean on: send-
location is outfitted
third converter station that’s 160 km closer to with voltage ing electricity ashore from distant wind farms.
Scotland’s big-city consumers. Or the system’s con- source converter The technology caught a tailwind in 2010 when
troller can flip the entire game plan, sending elec- technology, from ABB’s leading HVDC rival, Siemens, commercial-
tricity north to Shetlands consumers just as quickly Hitachi Energy. ized the modular design that has since swept the
as its winds can shift. It is based on market. Siemens’s MMC submodules switch only
modular, multilevel
What makes that dynamic power juggling pos- converters. once per AC cycle, cutting losses from about
sible is the flexible control over current and voltage 1.7 percent to 1 percent per converter. MMCs are
that is the hallmark of VSC technology. Over the now the standard configuration and are used in the
past three decades, China pushed traditional HVDC United Kingdom’s newest offshore wind farm, off
technology based on current source converters and the coast of Yorkshire, which has 1,080 submodules
thyristors to massive scale to send hydro, coal, and and began delivering power in October.
wind power thousands of kilometers to its coastal European grid operators have deployed about
industries and megacities. To do so, engineers had 50 gigawatts of VSC-based HVDC technology to
to build the world’s most robust AC networks, with date. Another 130 GW is planned for the continent
huge amounts of reactive-power compensation and over the next 10 years, according to a September
a lot of filtering to prevent harmonic feedback. 2023 report that Plet cowrote for a U.S. grid research
VSC is a fundamentally different technology, pio- and advocacy consortium.
neered in the late 1990s at Swiss-Swedish engineer-
HITACHI ENERGY
ing giant ABB, whose power-grid business was EUROPE AND CHINA RACE FOR “MESHED” GRIDS
recently acquired by Hitachi Energy. Unlike the tra-
ditional current source converters, VSCs can regulate So far, Germany has the most ambitious program.
their own voltage. That means they can help stabilize A trio of HVDC systems will take wind power

coming from offshore into northern Germany and being considered for “a couple” of offshore proj-
move it inland to southern Germany. But far more ects. “We are ready to tender at 525 kV,” he claims.
HVDC transmission capacity will be needed to One of Germany’s cross-country HVDC projects
accommodate an anticipated surge in offshore wind. will demonstrate an alternate approach: an MMC
For example, Dutch-German grid operator TenneT converter design with “full-bridge” modules capable
recently signed €30 billion (US $33 billion) in con- of opposing and stopping gigawatts of DC power.
tracts for 14 sets of converters and subsea cables to The cost: twice as many pricey, power-consuming
be operating by 2031—some in Germany and the insulated-gate bipolar transistors per module.
rest in the Netherlands. That scale is cutting costs In 2020, Meshed HVDC grids seem like science fiction
and speeding delivery by helping its vendors— Chinese utility in a U.S. grid context—home to just 3 percent of
GE Renewable Energy, Hitachi, and Siemens— giant State modern HVDC installations, according to Plet’s
finance capacity expansions. Grid started report. But several states have plans to follow
Germany has also led standardization, with an up the world’s Europe’s HVDC lead. New Jersey selected a system
eye to expanded DC grids down the line. TenneT first meshed of HVDC links to connect its first offshore wind
asked all of its suppliers to offer compatible 525-kV DC grid— farms, for example, and California is considering
HVDC systems with room for extra switchgear, cre- a four-node, an offshore HVDC “patch cord” to boost its north-
ating the option to interconnect today’s segments 500-kV ring south power flows.
in larger networks. near Beijing. But securing the equipment won’t be easy,
Other European states have joined the emerging according to experts. Emmanuel Martin-Lauzer, a
525-kV standard. The United Kingdom’s audacious U.S. business-development director for Paris-based
network plan specifies a dozen 525-kV offshore wind cable manufacturer Nexans, recently likened
links that its electricity system operator deems nec- Europe’s project pipeline to a “black hole” devour-
essary by 2030. Among them is a possible five- ing the world’s supply of HVDC cable.
terminal system linked end-to-end astride the North Plet says some U.S. transmission developers
Sea coast—to minimize both the converter stations have put down “tens of millions of dollars” to
purchased and the cable crossings and landfalls dug secure a place in production queues—a “big risk”
across sensitive coastal ecosystems. In addition, the since poorly coordinated state and federal grid-
United Kingdom plans to push its growing wind approval processes kill off many projects. Devel-
harvest south toward London via six more offshore opers will also pay dearly to staff up, he says, given
HVDC cables, running shore-to-shore like patch the dearth of U.S. electrical engineers with HVDC
cords in an old-time telephone switchboard. expertise. Adding it up, Plet figures that U.S. HVDC
Ultimately, European grid planners foresee a day development may lag Europe’s by a decade. 
when today’s HVDC projects interconnect to form
a meshed DC network stretching across the North
Sea and beyond. That will require something extra:
an HVDC circuit breaker capable of nearly instan-
taneous operation at 525 kV.
Cutting off AC power is more straightforward “BATTERIES INCLUDED”
because its voltage zeroes out every time the current INDUCTION OVENS
reverses direction. HVDC systems currently exploit
that zero-crossing to handle faults, using AC breakers Now we’re cooking electrical outlets
to power down the converters and thus squelch the with gas—but soon, and cost hundreds
continuous current flowing between them. But con- we may be cooking of dollars to install.
with induction. A That’s why startups
verter stops and restarts will be too disruptive to large growing number like Channing
HVDC networks. “When you go to four or five ter- of consumers Street Copper and
minals, the system becomes too big to shut down,” are switching Impulse Labs are
says Andreas Berthou, Hitachi Energy’s group senior to induction- working to make
vice president and global head of HVDC. based stoves and induction ovens
ovens to address easier to install
In 2020, Chinese utility giant State Grid started environmental by adding built-in
up the world’s first meshed DC grid—a four-node, concerns and batteries that
500-kV ring near Beijing complete with 16 propri- health risks supplement regular
etary HVDC breakers. But Western sources say associated with wall-socket power.
there’s been no independent assessment of its gas ranges. But Channing Street
while these new Copper plans to roll
operation. appliances are more out its battery-
All of the big HVDC suppliers are working on energy efficient, boosted Charlie
circuit breakers. Hitachi Energy’s proprietary unit most models appliance in early
has been verified at 350 kV, and Berthou says it is require modified 2024.
Illustration by Elias Stein JANUARY 2024 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG 31

TOP TECH 2024
With the
addition of
back-side
power delivery
[bottom half]
you’ll hardly
be able to see
Intel’s other
innovation—
new transistors
in a vanishingly
slim layer of
silicon [center
line].
S E M I C O N D U C TO R S
For the past five years,
Intel has lagged behind
F
Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Co. and
Intel Hopes to
Samsung in advanced chip
manufacturing. Now, in an
attempt to regain the lead,
Leapfrog Its
03
the company is making a

bold—and risky—move, introducing two novel
Competitors
technologies in its desktop and laptop Arrow Lake
processor, due out in late 2024. Intel hopes to
leapfrog its competitors with new transistor tech-
nology and a power-delivery system that would be
the first of its kind.
Over the past two decades, Intel has led the field
in making key changes to the transistor architecture,
says Chris Auth, Intel’s vice president of technology
development and director of advanced transistor
The chipmaker bets on new transistors, development. The company’s chip production, how-
power-delivery tech, and a nascent foundry ever, has a more checkered past: In 2018, Intel
business By Gwendolyn Rak couldn’t deliver its first 10-nanometer CPU on time,
and manufacturing of the chip was postponed a year,
creating a shortage of CPUs made using its 14-nm
technology. In 2020 there were delays again, this
time for the 7-nm node (rebranded as Intel 4). The
company has been playing catch-up ever since.
RibbonFET, Intel’s nanosheet transistor, will
INTEL
replace today’s FinFET technology. FinFET tran-

sistors had provided CPUs with low power require- technology changes at once, and in the past this has
ments and greater logic circuit density by wrapping often been a recipe for disaster,” he says.
the transistor’s gate around its channel region on Intel’s innovation needs to be delivered with reli-
three sides instead of just one. But as the FinFETs able production to attract and maintain customers,
have scaled down in size, these devices have Hutcheson adds, especially as it continues to shift
approached the limit of their gates’ ability to control its business toward a semiconductor foundry model
current. Nanosheet transistors, such as Samsung’s by separating its manufacturing and product groups.
Multi-Bridge-Channel FET, provide better control In a foundry model, it’s essential that customers can
because their gates completely surround the channel trust the manufacturer, he says. Due to the long-
region. Intel expects up to 15 percent improvement term investment from development to delivering a
in energy efficiency with RibbonFET when it is product, customers are “basically betting the farm
introduced in the upcoming Intel 20A processing TRIAGE TECH TO about two years out.”
node—the company’s latest semiconductor manu- THE RESCUE
Company executives are well aware of the risk
facturing process technology. The “A” in 20A refers they’re taking, given the setbacks and delays Intel
to the angstrom—though, like “nanometer” in the In the second half faced with the 10-nm node. While the industry is
previous chip-naming convention, it no longer refers of 2024, the U.S. “built on taking risks,” Auth says, “that was a case
to a specific measurement in the product. Defense Advanced where we took on too much risk, and we’re definitely
Research Projects
The introduction of a new power-delivery Agency will begin
cognizant of that mistake.”
scheme—which is generally called back-side power the first round of its So, to reduce the risk involved in the upcoming
and which Intel calls PowerVia—is a more dramatic Triage Challenge, 20A node, Intel added an internal node pairing
change. “Ever since Robert Noyce made the first a competition to PowerVia with the current generation of FinFET.
integrated circuit, everything’s been on the front develop sensors According to test results presented in June 2023,
and algorithms
side for interconnects,” says Auth. This will be the adding PowerVia alone led to a 6 percent perfor-
to support triage
first time that manufacturers will use the surface efforts during mass- mance gain. This internal stepping-stone has
on the other side of the wafer, too, separating power casualty incidents. allowed the company to test out back-side power
from processing. That decoupling is important According to a delivery and address any issues, both in terms of
because power and signal lines have different DARPA video process and design.
presentation from
optimizations: While power lines perform best with On the process side, for example, Intel needs to
last February, the
low-resistance, high-gauge wires, signal lines need agency is seeking figure out how to properly align and link the front
more space between them to ensure minimal new ways to help and back sides of the chip with nanometer-size ver-
interference. medics at two tical connectors called through-silicon vias that are
“It’s kind of a new playground,” says Julien stages of treatment: 1/500 the size of previous connectors. Another chal-
Ryckaert, vice president for logic technologies at During primary lenge comes in maintaining the flat surfaces needed
triage, those most
Imec. The move to nanosheet technology is conven- in need of care will to pattern the chips when working with both sides
tional, but Ryckaert expects opportunities for inno- be identified with of the silicon wafer, Auth says.
vative new features with back-side power. sensors from afar. Given this need for even more precision in man-
Then, when the ufacturing, it’s worth considering the projected cost,
patients are stable, says Mark Horowitz, a professor of electrical engi-
TWO TECHNOLOGIES AT ONCE medics can decide
the best treatment neering at Stanford University. Historically, cost per
Intel decided to introduce both technologies simul- regimens based transistor decreased as manufacturers scaled to
taneously about five years ago, around the same time on data gleaned better technologies. Now, these cost improvements
it lost its lead over competitors. Typically, these types from noninvasive are generally plateauing. “Transistors are not getting
of projects operate on a decade-long timeline. As Intel sensors. The three cheaper as fast as they used to,” Horowitz says.
rounds will continue
got closer to implementing the new transistors and through 2026, Meanwhile, designers have to rethink the inter-
power-delivery network, its executives saw that these with prizes totaling connect lines and layout. By moving the power lines
timelines were set to intersect. So, to get ahead of its US $7 million. to the back side of the chip with PowerVia, Auth
competitors and avoid waiting for the next node to says, “you’re undoing about seven years of front-side
introduce one or the other, the company decided to interconnect learning.” Engineers had to relearn
pair the technologies. Both are seen as “key linch- how to find defects and properly dissipate heat, for
pins” toward Intel’s ambitious goal to regain the lead example. Despite the steep learning curve, Intel
in processing technology by 2025, Auth says. anticipates significant benefits from the combina-
“Intel used to be the conservative one,” says Dan tion of the new technologies.
Hutcheson, vice chair of TechInsights. Previously, With each advance addressing an independent
TSMC was more aggressive in its risk-taking, and aspect of scaling, the new transistor and
the company more frequently missed the mark. Now, power-delivery network can be seen as comple-
the situation has flipped, Hutcheson explains. “It’s mentary, according to Imec’s Ryckaert. He sus-
a very risky move to try to implement two major CONTINUED ON PAGE 56

TOP TECH 2024
P R I VA C Y
As skiers schussed and swerved
A
in a snow park outside Beijing
during the 2022 Winter Olym-
Paris
pics, a few may have noticed a
string of towers along the way.
Olympics
Did they know that those towers
were collecting wavelengths
across the spectrum and scouring the data for signs
Host a New
of suspicious movement? Did they care that they
were the involuntary subjects of an Internet of
Event:
04
Things–based experiment in border surveillance?

This summer, at the Paris Olympic Games, secu-
rity officials will perform a much bigger experiment
Algorithmic
in the heart of the City of Light, covering the events,
the entire Olympic village, and the connecting roads
Video
and rails. It will proceed under a temporary law
allowing automated surveillance systems to detect
“predetermined events” of the sort that might lead
Surveillance
to terrorist attacks.
This time, people care. Well, privacy activists do.
“AI-driven mass surveillance is a dangerous political
project that could lead to broad violations of human
rights. Every action in a public space will get sucked
into a dragnet of surveillance infrastructure, under-
mining fundamental civic freedoms,” said Agnes
Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary gen-
Security Olympics spin-offs are coming for eral, soon after the law passed.
you, and you, and you By Lucas Laursen Yet the wider public seems unconcerned. Indeed,
when officials in Seine-Saint-Denis, one of the Paris
districts hosting the Olympics, presented information
about a preliminary AI-powered video surveillance
system that would detect and issue fines for antisocial
behavior such as littering, residents raised their hands
and asked why it wasn’t yet on their streets.
“Surveillance is not a monolithic concept. Not
everyone is against surveillance,” says anthropology
graduate student Matheus Viegas Ferrari of the Uni-
versidade Federal da Bahia, in Brazil, and the Univer-
sité Paris 8: Saint-Denis, in Paris, who attended the
community meeting in Seine-Saint-Denis and pub-
lished a study of surveillance at the 2024 Olympics.
Anyone who fumes at neighbors who don’t pick
up after their dogs can identify with the surveil-
lance-welcoming residents of Seine-Saint-Denis. If,

Illustration by Giacomo Bagnara JANUARY 2024 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG 35
TOP TECH 2024
however, the surveillance system fines one neglect-

ful neighbor more than another because its algo-
rithm favors one skin color or clothing style over
another, opinions could change.
Indeed France and other countries in the Euro-
pean Union are in the midst of hammering out the
finer details of the European Union’s AI Act, which
seeks to protect citizens’ privacy and rights by regu-
lating government and commercial use of AI. Already,
poor implementation of an AI law related to welfare
policy has felled one European government.
It seems the temporary surveillance law–the
video-processing clause of which expires in March
2025–was written to avoid that outcome. It insists
that algorithms under its authority “do not process
any biometric data and do not implement any facial
recognition techniques. They cannot carry out any
reconciliation, interconnection or automated link-
ing with other processing of personal data.”
Paolo Cirio, an artist who once printed posters
of police officers’ faces and put them up around
Paris in an unsanctioned exercise in crowd-sourced A surveillance crowd analysis. The technique goes back a long
facial recognition, sees such language as progress. camera watches time, and many aspects of many kinds of crowd
“The fact that even during the Olympics in France, over the sledding behavior have been studied; it has even been used
center at the 2022
the government has to write in the law that they’re Winter Olympics. to prevent hens from murdering each other. And
not going to use biometric tech, that’s already some- while crowds may be irrational, the study of crowds
thing incredible to me,” he says. “That’s the result is a science.
of activists fighting for years in France, in Europe, A crowd, however, may not really offer anonymity
and elsewhere.” to its members. European civil-society groups
argued in an open letter that the surveillance would
SAFETY IN NUMBERS? necessarily require isolating and therefore identify-
ing individuals, depriving innocent people of their
What officials can do instead of biometric analysis privacy rights.
and face recognition is use computers for real-time Whether this is true is unclear; the fast evolution
of the technologies involved makes it a difficult
question to answer. “You don’t have to identify the
people,” says data scientist Jonathan Weber of the
University of Haute-Alsace, in Mulhouse, France,
ZERO TRUST, TWO-THIRDS CONFIDENCE and coauthor of a review of video crowd analysis.
Instead, programmers can train a neural network
on people-like shapes until it reliably identifies
“Trust but verify” networks and VPNs. departments will hit human beings in subsequent video. Then they can
is now a proverb This is achieved the cybersecurity train the neural network on more sophisticated pat-
ROBERT MICHAEL/PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY IMAGES
of the past in with methods deadline, according

terns, such as people falling over, running, fighting,
cybersecurity policy like multifactor to a 2023 report.
in the United States. authentication even arguing, or carrying a knife.
By the end of the and other access “The alerts we raise are not based on biometrics,
2024 fiscal year, controls. About two- just a position, such as whether a person is lying on
in September, all thirds of security the ground,” says Alan Ferbach, cofounder and CEO
U.S. government professionals of Videtics, a company in Paris that submitted a bid
agencies will be employed by
required to switch to federal agencies are for part of the 2024 Olympics security contract.
a Zero Trust security confident that their Videtics is already selling software that detects falls
architecture. All in buildings, or illegal dumping outdoors, neither
users must validate of which requires identifying individuals.
their identities But that might not be enough to satisfy critics.
and devices—
even when they’re Even just categorizing people’s behavior “can be
already connected equally invasive and dangerous as identifying
to government people because it can lead to errors, discrimina-
36 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG JANUARY 2024 Illustrations by Elias Stein

tion, violation of privacy and anonymity in public want more surveillance to use some inciting event,
spaces and can impact on fair trial rights and like an attack or a big event coming up, to justify
access to justice,” says Karolina Iwańska, the digit,” says Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst
ital civil space advisor at the European Center for at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-
Not-for-Profit Law, a civil-society organization society organization in San Francisco. “The infra-
based in The Hague. It has filed an amicus brief on structure stays in place and very easily gets
the Olympics surveillance law to France’s Consti- repurposed for everyday policing.”
tutional Council. Even if France The French Olympics law includes an expiration
Weber is particularly concerned with how stops using date, but Iwańska calls that arbitrary. She says it
skewed training data could lead to problematic its video- was made “without any assessment of necessity or
crowd-analysis AIs. For example, when the ACLU processing proportionality” to the two months of the Olym-
compared photos of U.S. congressional representa- algorithms in pics and Paralympics.
tives to mug shots, the software disproportionately public places Other historians of security technology and the
falsely identified darker-skinned people as matches. after the Olympics have pointed out that countries often treat
The potential biases in such an algorithm will Olympics law the Olympics like a security trade fair. And even if
depend on how its software developers train it, says expires, other France stops using its video-processing algorithms
Weber: “You have to be very careful and it’s one of countries may in public places after the Olympics law expires, other
the biggest problems: Probably you won’t have tons purchase them countries may purchase them from French compa-
of video of people with dangerous behavior available from French nies for their domestic use. Indeed, after China’s
to train the algorithm.” companies for 2008 Olympics, Ecuador and other countries with
“In my opinion, we have to certify the training domestic use. mixed human rights records purchased surveillance
pipeline,” Ferbach says. Then different companies equipment based on systems displayed at the 2008
could develop their own models based on certified Olympics. The surveillance industry, in France and
training sets. “If we need to certify each model the elsewhere, stands to gain a lot from the exposure.
cost will be huge.” EU regulators have yet to resolve Human rights in other countries may suffer.
how the AI Act will address that. The Olympics have also served as a testbed for
If software developers can put together enough ways to subvert annoying security measures. When
real-life or simulated video of bad behavior to train officials installed a fence around the Lake Placid
their algorithms without bias, they will still have to Olympics Village in 1980, athletes kept leaning
figure out what to do with all the real-world data against the fence, setting off alarms. After some
they collect. “The more data you collect, the more time, security officials noticed the alarms weren’t
danger there is in the future that that data can end working at all. It turned out that somebody, per-
up in the public or in the wrong hands,” Cirio says. haps even a security official, had unplugged the
In response, some companies use face-blurring alarm system. 
tools to reduce the possibility of a leak containing
personal data. Other researchers propose recording
video from directly overhead, to avoid recording
people’s faces.
Other researchers are pulling in the opposite KILLER DRONES DEPLOYED FROM THE SKIES
direction by developing tools to recognize individ-
uals or at least differentiate them from others in a
video, using gait analysis. If this technique were A new class of LongShot program and effectiveness
applied to surveillance video, it would violate the missile-firing and will be flight- of both air-to-air
French Olympics law and sidestep the privacy- drones will take to tested this year to missiles and the
the skies in 2024. prove its feasibility current class of
preserving effects of face blurring and overhead Like a three-layer in air-based fighter jets while
video capture. That the law proscribes biometric aerial nesting doll, combat. Its goal is new aircraft are
data processing while permitting algorithmic event the missile-stuffed to extend the range introduced.
detection, “seems to be nothing more than wishful drone is itself
thinking,” says Iwańska. “I cannot imagine how the released from the
belly of a bomber
system is supposed to work as intended without while in flight. The
necessarily processing biometric data.” uncrewed aircraft
was developed by
SURVEILLANCE CREEP energy and defense
company General
Atomics as part
Another question that troubles Olympics security of the Defense
watchers is how long the system should remain in Advanced Research
place. “It is very common for governments that Projects Agency’s

TOP TECH 2024
PROCESSORS
Trust no one.
It’s not just a throwaway line
Chips to
T from TV thrillers. It’s becoming
the goal of computer security,
and a technology that can make
Compute
it a reality has arrived. Called
fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, it allows
software to compute on encrypted data without
With
ever decrypting it.
05
The possibilities are enormous: huge leaps in
Encrypted
medical research and patient care without exposing
patient data, more effective tools against money laun-
dering without regulators actually seeing anyone’s
Data Are
bank-account information, self-driving cars that can
learn from each other without snitching on their driv-
Coming
ers, analytics about your business without poking
into your customer’s “business,” and much more.
Although FHE software has made some inroads
in protecting financial and health care data, it’s been
held back by the fact that it can take as much as a
millionfold more effort on today’s computers. But in
2024, at least six companies will be testing or commer-
cializing the first chips that accelerate FHE to the point
Fully homomorphic encryption could where computing on encrypted data is nearly as quick
make data unhackable as computing on unencrypted data. And when that’s
By Samuel K. Moore the case, why would you do it any other way?

“I think this is the coolest technology of the last processing, a Fourier transform is a mathematical
20 years,” says Todd Austin, a hardware security tool that turns a signal in time, such as the oscillation
expert at the University of Michigan, whose startup of voltage in a circuit, into a signal in frequency. One
Agita Labs does a different form of secure comput- of the key side effects is
ing in the Amazon and Microsoft clouds. “It breaks that any math you can do
the cardinal rule of computer security—that every- in the time domain has its
thing is hackable—because you deny the program- equivalent in the fre-
mer the ability to see the data.” quency domain. So you “It’s a new
can compute in either time chapter in
DATA PROTECTION REGULATIONS AREN’T ENOUGH or frequency and come up the history of
with the same answer. computing.” —
Regulatory efforts to protect data are making The genius of fully Ro Cammarota,
strides globally. Patient data is protected by law in homomorphic encryption Intel
the United States and elsewhere. In Europe the Gen- is that it uses lattice cryp-
eral Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guards tography—a form of quan-
personal data and recently led to a US $1.3 billion tum-computer-proof
fine for Meta. You can even think of Apple’s App encoding—as the mathe-
Store policies against data sharing as a kind of matical transformation. The problem with this
data-protection regulation. approach is that the transformation leads to a big
“These are good constraints. These are con- change in the type and amount of data and in the
straints society wants,” says Michael Gao, founder sorts of operations needed to compute. That’s where
and CEO of Fabric Cryptography, one of the startups the new chips come in.
developing FHE-accelerating chips. But privacy and Computing with FHE means doing transforms,
confidentiality come at a cost: They can make it more addition, and multiplication on “a very long list of
difficult to track disease and do medical research, numbers, and each number in itself is very large,”
they potentially let some bad guys bank, and they can explains Rohloff. Computing with numbers that might
prevent the use of data needed to improve AI. require more than a hundred bits to describe is not
“Fully homomorphic encryption is an automated something today’s CPUs and GPUs are inherently
solution to get around legal and regulatory issues good at. If anything, GPUs have been going in the
while still protecting privacy,” says Kurt Rohloff, opposite direction, focusing on less precise math done
CEO of Duality Technologies, in Hoboken, N.J., one using smaller and smaller floating-point numbers.
of the companies developing FHE accelerator chips. CONTINUED ON PAGE 57
His company’s FHE software is already helping
financial firms check for fraud and preserving
patient privacy in health care research.
Despite the relatively slow pace of today’s unac-
celerated FHE, it works because “we address use
cases where it’s not really a computation bottleneck, VISIBLE’S ANTIACTIVITY TRACKER
use cases where there is a human in the loop,” such
as lawyers negotiating data-use agreements, Rohloff
says. Adding a new kind of hardware to his company’s Long COVID and This year, according COVID and fatigue.
software won’t just speed FHE, it will let it tackle chronic fatigue to Leeming, Visible The app will also
bigger human-in-the-loop problems as well, he says. often go unseen will launch a collect data from
by others. But it’s premium version of consenting users
important that the app that uses a to help research
HOW FULLY HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION WORKS people with these specialized heart- these conditions.
invisible illnesses rate monitor. While
At first glance, it might seem impossible to do mean- understand how most wearables are
ingful computation on data that looks like gibberish. different activities meant for workouts,
affect their Leeming says these
But the idea goes back decades, and was finally made
symptoms so they armband monitors
possible in 2009 by Craig Gentry, then a Stanford can properly pace are optimized for
graduate student. Gentry found a way to do both addi- their days. That’s lower heart rates
tion and multiplication without calculation-killing why one man with to help people
noise accumulating, making it possible to do any form long COVID, Harry with both long
of encrypted computation. Leeming, decided
to create Visible, an
One comparison you can use to understand FHE app that helps users
is that it’s analogous to a Fourier transform. For monitor activity and
those of you who don’t remember your college signal avoid overexertion.

TOP TECH 2024
C L I M AT E Last January, in the waters off

Cebu City in the Philippines,
L researchers first deployed a huge

flexible ring seeded with seaweed
and spanned by spokelike ropes
Kelp Farms
and tubes. Every nightfall, cranks
mounted on a floating platform lower the ring
25 meters below the surface to expose the seaweed
Make Carbon
to cooler, more nutrient-rich water. At daybreak, the
cranks pull the ring back up to the surface to soak
06
Capture
up sunlight and carbon dioxide.
The Climate Foundation, the Seattle-based com-
pany behind the project, has found that this deep
a Growth
cycling makes kelp grow three times as fast as it can
when kept in shallow waters, as seaweed farmers do
Industry
now. The extra kelp can be turned into food, fertilizer,
and fuel, or it can be committed to the deep, locking
away countless tonnes of carbon for centuries.
These conclusions about kelp growth were pre-
dicted by the Climate Foundation’s computer
models, supported by small-scale tests at the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution, and validated by
field tests conducted since 2019 in the Philippines.
Solar-powered systems are already This year, the startup plans to scale up to a
sequestering carbon in the briny deep 10,000-square-meter offshore kelp platform, which
By Prachi Patel it expects to be economically sustainable.
An innovative kelp farm

lowers the growing ring to
deep nutrient-rich waters
every night.
ERIC SMITH/CLIMATE FOUNDATION

“Over the past decade, we’ve gone from design- ters, he notes, because fish and microbes feed on
ing systems on a chip in Silicon Valley to systems seaweed, then exhale it as carbon dioxide. He also
on a ship in the Pacific Ocean,” says founder and believes it’s better to
executive director Brian von Herzen, who has a Ph.D. use kelp than to let it
in computer science. “It’s our hope in 2024 to vali- sink. “[The] Climate
date our model and then, as [they] say in Silicon Foundation is trying “Over the past
Valley, design it once and build it a million times.” to harvest, which is decade, we’ve
The Climate Foundation is one of several start- great,” he says. But he gone from
ups growing kelp to remove carbon dioxide from believes the best designing
the ocean. What sets it apart is its ambitious vision strategy for mitigating systems on a
of fully automated, solar-powered, floating kelp climate change with chip in Silicon
farms to spur local economies and regenerate seaweed is to turn it Valley to systems
marine ecosystems while sequestering carbon. Last into fuels or plastics, on a ship in the
April, the plan earned the company a milestone construction materi- Pacific Ocean.”
award of US $1 million from the XPrize competition als, or additives that —Brian von
on carbon removal. suppress methane Herzen, Climate
The oceans naturally absorb a quarter of the emissions from cattle
Foundation
carbon that is released by the burning of fossil fuels. and rice paddies.
director
Today, technologies that use chemicals and mem- “Unless they go into
branes to help oceans absorb even more carbon are these product catego-
getting support from billionaire philanthropists and ries, it won’t have
governments. But growing kelp is a nature-based much climate-mitiga-
solution with fewer ecological risks, according to tion benefits.”
the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). This year, von Herzen says they’ll be testing both
Kelp is the planet’s fastest-growing plant, soaking the technology and the economics. Terrestrial solar
up 2,200 to 3,000 tonnes of CO2 per square kilometer is now the cheapest electricity, he says, and marine
each year—more than tropical rainforests, according solar could become even more affordable because
to the Climate Foundation. But the seaweed industry there’s no need to purchase land. And the platforms
is collapsing as climate change warms the upper are designed to create a new type of business in the
layers of the ocean, preventing nutrient-rich waters deep sea. “We’re designing an approach and a plat-
from rising from the depths. form that provides a scalable way of addressing food
When he started this project back in 2007, von security and climate gaps,” he says. The t echnology
Herzen planned to pump deep water up to the kelp. is “able to use mostly empty ocean.” 
But his concept has evolved. “That’s like bringing
the mountain to Mohammed because it might take
a million cubic meters of seawater per day to irri-
gate a large seaweed operation near the surface,”
he says. So his team decided “to bring Mohammed AMAZON LAUNCHES NEW
to the mountain” by moving the seaweed meshes INTERNET SERVICE—LITERALLY
up and down.
The platforms have Wi-Fi hot spots, and the team Amazon expects to start beta testing Starlink, meanwhile,
uses a cellular network to remotely control the to begin providing with customers has been active
motors that raise and lower the meshes. In von Internet service later this year. If since 2019 and
from space with successful, Kuiper already has 5,000
Herzen’s grand vision, satellite-based Internet could Project Kuiper by could be integrated satellites in orbit.
eventually be used to manage global fleets of kelp the end of 2024. into the suite of
platforms from shore. The US $10 billion Amazon Web
A quarter of the seaweed grown typically falls off project aims to Services. SpaceX’s
the platform and sinks 1,000 meters to the seafloor, expand reliable
broadband Internet
von Herzen says. At such depths, little oxygen is access to rural
present, and biomass doesn’t readily decompose. areas around the
The kelp that the team harvests currently becomes globe by launching
agricultural additives; it could also be used to make a constellation of
biofuels, fertilizers, or livestock feed. more than 3,000
satellites into low
Rod Fujita, director of research and development Earth orbit. While
for EDF’s oceans program, questions the approach the project will take
of growing kelp for combating climate change. It’s years to complete in
hard to measure how much carbon seaweed seques- full, Amazon is set

TOP TECH 2024
For more than half a year,

six people have been going
F
about their lives with sensors
implanted in blood vessels in
their brains that enable them
to communicate directly with
their computers. The partici
pants, who are all severely
paralyzed, are taking part in a study that could change
their lives and mark a turning point in brain-computer
interface (BCI) technology. In 2024, they’ll find out if
the tech will continue on the path to the clinic.
Until now, only about 50 humans have ever had
BCIs implanted in their brains. And only a handful of
those people have been able to leave the laboratory
to use them in the real world, since most BCI implants
involve wires protruding from the head. The new
study is the largest human trial of a fully implantable,
at-home BCI system.
And no, the maker of this device isn’t Elon
Musk’s Neuralink. It’s a company called Synchron,
and it is quietly leading the race to bring a BCI
implant to market.
“Synchron is the very first to commercialize the
concept of BCI [implants] in a meaningful way, and
they’re paving the way for the whole field,” says Nick
Ramsey, a clinical neuroscientist at University Medical
Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands, who is not involved
in the development of Synchron’s device. It “might
BIOMED very well be on the market for a while before any
[other] devices are competing with it,” he says.
If Synchron’s system works, it will provide an
invaluable communication method to people with
severe paralysis. Many potential users suffer from
brain-stem stroke or degenerative diseases that have
The Brain-
left them “locked-in”: aware of their surroundings
but with no way of communicating other than blink
Implant
ing. With a BCI implant, they will be able to do basic
computer tasks—like sending messages and access
ing digital health services—without moving a muscle.
Company
Synchron first implanted its device in four people
07
in Australia. Then the company moved its opera
Going for
tions to Brooklyn, N.Y., and it’s now in the middle of
a U.S.-based feasibility study involving six more
people. By June the company expects to submit its
Neuralink’s
data to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for
review. If the results are good, the company will seek
Jugular
the agency’s blessing to move forward with a larger
study that will determine whether this BCI gets
approved for clinical use.
One big advantage of the Synchron device: It
doesn’t require open brain surgery. Instead, it’s deliv
ered like a stent. A 16-electrode array, trailing a lead
behind it, is inserted into the jugular vein in the neck
and snaked up a blood vessel near the brain’s motor
Synchron’s electrodes are delivered via cortex. When it reaches its destination, it springs
blood vessel By Emily Waltz out into a tubelike scaffold that fits against the inside

Synchron’s Stentrode
picks up neural signals
from inside a blood
vessel in the brain.
wall of the blood vessel. There, the Stentrode records

electrical activity coming from nearby brain tissue.
The Stentrode is connected by the lead to a small
receiver-transmitter in the chest, which wirelessly
sends data to an external digital device.
To communicate with a computer, a user of Syn-
chron’s system thinks about a specific motor move-
ment, such as moving his or her leg. Even though the 2023 the company conducted pilot studies in
user cannot physically move, these thoughts generate humans in which the film was placed temporarily
electrical activity in the motor cortex that’s fairly easy on the surface of the brain while people were under-
to detect. The external device then translates that going unrelated tumor surgery.
data into a simple computer command. But the complexity of these devices and their
The only computer commands Synchron’s system implantation procedures may add years of clinical
can currently generate are clicks and a scrolling func- testing while Synchron speeds toward regulatory
tion. The click command can be used in conjunction approval. “We are leaning into the simplicity feature
with special assistive software that slowly scrolls of our system,” says Synchron’s Oxley. The brain sig-
through Web pages highlighting different areas of nals that represent motor movement are predictable
interest that the user can click on. Synchron is limited and similar in every person, he says, so the patterns
to these two commands because of the quality of the can be immediately decoded; the user doesn’t have
brain signals that can be detected from inside a blood to spend weeks or months training a deep-learning
vessel. “We are recording population-level signals algorithm to recognize the person’s unique brain
from neurons, not single-unit-level signals,” says Tom patterns. “Our device works on day one,” he says. 
Oxley, CEO of Synchron.
This setup is considerably less sophisticated than
the BCIs coming from other companies and academic
groups. “The current research is geared toward cap- HAILING AIR TAXIS
turing more signals from a larger patch of cortex so AT THE OLYMPICS
that you are decoding more complex movements or
speech,” says Ramsey, who is credited with testing At this year’s enthusiasts and routes for tourists.
the very first implantable BCI in a human in 2016. “To summer Olympic tourists during Volocopter’s air
decode speech, you need at least 100 electrodes.” Games in Paris, the competition. taxis could make
attendees may Though the Paris the first
Synchron’s competitors include Elon Musk’s
be able to take an company is European city
Neuralink and rival Precision Neuroscience. Neura electric vertical- still awaiting to offer eVTOL
link’s BCI features 1,024 electrodes distributed across take-off-and- certification from services.
64 ultrathin threads, which must be surgically landing vehicle, the European Union
implanted by a custom robot. The company has tested or eVTOL, to get Aviation Safety
around the city. Agency, Volocopter
it in animals and in May 2023 said it had received a
Volocopter, in plans to offer three
green light from the FDA to test it in humans, after Bruchsal, Germany, routes between
the agency initially rejected the request.
SYNCHRON
hopes to make various parts of

Precision Neuroscience’s BCI features 1,024 elec- an air-taxi service the city, as well
trodes on a one-square-centimeter flexible film. In available to sports as two round-trip

TOP TECH 2024
Ten years ago, at the DARPA

Robotics Challenge (DRC)
T
Trial event near Miami, I
watched the most advanced
humanoid robots ever built
struggle their way through a
scenario inspired by the
Fukushima nuclear disaster.
A team of experienced engineers controlled each
robot, and overhead safety tethers kept them from
falling over. The robots had to demonstrate mobility,
sensing, and manipulation—which, with painful
slowness, they did.
These robots were clearly research projects, but
DARPA has a history of catalyzing technology with
R O B OT I C S a long-term view. The DARPA Grand and Urban
Challenges for autonomous vehicles, in 2005 and
2007, formed the foundation for today’s autono-
mous taxis. So, after DRC ended in 2015 with several
of the robots successfully completing the entire final
scenario, the obvious question was: When would
humanoid robots make the transition from research
Year
project to a commercial product?
The answer seems to be 2024, when a handful of
well-funded companies will be deploying their
of the
08
robots in commercial pilot projects to figure out

whether humanoids are ready to get to work.
Humanoid
One of the robots that made an appearance at
the DRC Finals in 2015 was called ATRIAS, devel-
oped by Jonathan Hurst at the Oregon State Uni-
versity Dynamic Robotics Laboratory. In 2015, Hurst
cofounded Agility Robotics to turn ATRIAS into a
human-centric, multipurpose, and practical robot
called Digit. Approximately the same size as a
human, Digit stands 1.75 meters tall (about 5 feet, 8
inches), weighs 65 kilograms (about 140 pounds),
Legged robots from eight companies and can lift 16 kg (about 35 pounds). Agility is now
vie for jobs By Evan Ackerman preparing to produce a commercial version of Digit
at massive scale, and the company sees its first
opportunity in the logistics industry, where it will
start doing some of the jobs where humans are
essentially acting like robots already.
ARE HUMANOID ROBOTS USEFUL?
“We spent a long time working with potential cus-

tomers to find a use case where our technology can
provide real value, while also being scalable and prof-
itable,” Hurst tells me. “For us, right now, that use case
is moving e-commerce totes.” Totes are standardized
containers that warehouses use to store and transport
items. As items enter or leave the warehouse, empty
totes need to be continuously moved from place to
place. It’s a vital job, and even in highly automated
warehouses, much of that job is done by humans.
Agility says that in the United States, there are
currently several million people working at

Agility Robotics’ Digit carries
an empty tote to a conveyor
in an Amazon research and
development warehouse.
AGILITY ROBOTICS

TOP TECH 2024
AGILITY ROBOTICS: DIGIT APPTRONIK: APOLLO 1X TECHNOLOGIES: NEO FIGURE: FIGURE 01
Digit is most accurately Apptronik has worked on more IX’s soft, tendon-based robot Figure was founded just a few
described as “bipedal” rather than half a dozen humanoid is designed to have very low years ago, but its robotics team
than “humanoid.” It has two robots over the past eight years, inertia, so that it’s safe for is very experienced, tracing
legs, but its legs look more like including NASA’s Valkyrie. humans to be around. The robot its heritage back through the
those of an ostrich rather than Apollo is the culmination of all will weigh just 30 kilograms, DARPA Robotics Challenge. By
a human’s. This is a side effect this experience and is designed with a carrying capacity of up to iterating very quickly through
of Agility’s design process, the for manufacturability. Apptronik 20 kg. 1X, backed by OpenAI, hardware prototypes, Figure
goal of which was to maximize plans to field its robots in 10 hopes that Neo will become “an expects to demonstrate a
the efficiency and robustness of pilot projects in 2024, with a full all-purpose android assistant to commercially viable humanoid
legged locomotion. commercial release of Apollo your daily life.” within the next 18 months and
in 2025. scale from there.
t ote-handling tasks, and logistics companies are

having trouble keeping positions filled, because in
Robots potential relative to the cost and performance of
human workers. “What we’re encouraging people
some markets there are simply not enough workers
available. Furthermore, the work tends to be dull,
to Look to think about,” says Shelton, “is how much they
could be saving per hour by being able to allocate
repetitive, and stressful on the body. “The people for in their human capital elsewhere in the building.” Shel-
2024
doing these jobs are basically doing robotic jobs,” ton estimates that a typical large logistics company
says Hurst, and Agility argues that these people spends at least US $30 per employee-hour for labor,
FROM LEFT: AGILITY ROBOTICS, APPTRONIK, 1X
would be much better off doing work that’s more including benefits and overhead. The employee, of
suited to their strengths. “What we’re going to have course, receives much less than that.
is a shifting of the human workforce into a more Agility is not yet ready to provide pricing infor-
supervisory role,” explains Damion Shelton, Agility mation for Digit, but we’re told that it will cost less
Robotics’ CEO. “We’re trying to build something than $250,000 per unit. Even at that price, if Digit
that works with people,” Hurst adds. “We want is able to achieve Agility’s goal of a minimum of
humans for their judgment, creativity, and deci- 20,000 working hours (five years of two shifts of
TECHNOLOGIES, FIGURE
sion-making, using our robots as tools to do their work per day), that brings the hourly rate of the
jobs faster and more efficiently.” robot to $12.50. A service contract would likely add
For Digit to be an effective warehouse tool, it has a few dollars per hour to that. “You compare that
to be capable, reliable, safe, and financially sustain- against human labor doing the same task,” Shelton
able for both Agility and its customers. Agility is says, “and as long as it’s apples to apples in terms of
confident that all of this is possible, citing Digit’s the rate that the robot is working versus the rate that

FOURIER INTELLIGENCE: GR-1 SANCTUARY AI: PHOENIX TESLA: OPTIMUS UNITREE ROBOTICS: H1
Singapore-based Fourier Sanctuary AI’s goal is to “create Tesla has some unique Unitree, founded in China in
Intelligence is already mass- the world’s first humanlike advantages when it comes to 2016, is well known for making
producing its GR-1 robot. intelligence in general-purpose building and deploying robots. quadrupedal robots that are
Fourier’s background is in health- robots.” To accomplish this, the The company has substantial capable and very low-cost.
care robotics, and the company company has been collecting experience in battery technology, Unitree’s first humanoid will
sees potential applications extensive amounts of data of as well as in sensing and cost less than US $90,000 and
for GR-1 in medical and humans teleoperating its robots computing for mobile systems. is designed to be an affordable
rehabilitation contexts, although through complex manipulation And Tesla is potentially its own hardware platform for robotics
the robot will also be available to tasks. Sanctuary AI hopes first customer for humanoids, research, or for companies that
researchers seeking a humanoid to leverage that data to train finding work for them in its want to focus on developing
development platform. its robots to perform those car factories. software rather than hardware.
tasks autonomously.
the human is working, you can decide whether it than 750,000 robots deployed across its warehouses,
makes more sense to have the person or the robot.” including legacy systems that operate in closed-off
Agility’s robot won’t be able to match the general areas and more modern robots that have the neces-
capability of a human, but that’s not the company’s sary autonomy to work collaboratively with people.
goal. “Digit won’t be doing everything that a person These newer robots include autonomous mobile
can do,” says Hurst. “It’ll just be doing that one robotic bases like Proteus, which can move carts
process-automated task,” like moving empty totes. around warehouses, as well as stationary robot arms
In these tasks, Digit is able to keep up with (and in like Sparrow and Cardinal, which can handle inven-
SANCTUARY AI, TESLA, UNITREE ROBOTICS
fact slightly exceed) the speed of the average human tory or customer orders in structured environments.
worker, when you consider that the robot doesn’t But a robot with legs will be something new.
FROM LEFT: FOURIER INTELLIGENCE,
have to accommodate the needs of a human body. “What’s interesting about Digit is, because of its
bipedal nature it can fit in spaces a little bit differ-
AMAZON’S EXPERIMENTS ently,” says Emily Vetterick, director of engineering
at Amazon Global Robotics, who is overseeing Dig-
The first company to put Digit to the test is Amazon. it’s testing. “We’re excited to be at this point with
In 2022, Amazon invested in Agility as part of its Digit where we can start testing it, because we’re
Industrial Innovation Fund, and late last year going to learn where the technology makes sense.”
Amazon started testing Digit at its robotics research Where two legs make sense has been an ongoing
and development site near Seattle. Digit will not be question in robotics for decades. Obviously, in a
lonely at Amazon—the company currently has more CONTINUED ON PAGE 58

TOP TECH 2024
T E L EC O M Wi-Fi is one of the most aggra-

vating success stories. Despite
W how ubiquitous the technology

has become in our lives, it still
gives reasons to grumble: The
service is spotty or slow, for exam-
Wi-Fi’s
ple, or the network keeps cutting out. Wi-Fi’s reli-
ability has an image problem.
Big Bet
When Wi-Fi 7 arrives this year, it will bring with
it a new focus on improving its image. Every Wi-Fi
09
generation brings new features and areas of focus,
on
usually related to throughput—getting more bits
from point A to point B. The new features in Wi-Fi 7
Reliability
will result in a generation of wireless technology
that is more focused on reliability and reduced
latency, while still finding new ways to continue
increasing data rates.
“The question that we posed ourselves was, ‘What
do we do now?’ ” says Carlos Cordeiro, an Intel fellow
and the company’s chief technology officer of wire-
less connectivity. “What Wi-Fi really needed to do at
The next generation of the wireless tech that point was become more reliable…. I think it’s the
retackles a common complaint time that we should be looking more at latency and
By Michael Koziol becoming more deterministic.”
The renewed focus on reliability is motivated by
emerging applications. Imagine a wireless factory
robot in a situation where a worker suddenly steps
in front of it and the robot needs to make an imme-
diate decision. “It’s not so much about throughput,

WHEN DO I GET MY WI-FI 7?
but you really want to make sure that your [data]
packet gets across the first time that you send it,” The closest thing that a Wi-Fi generation has to a
says Cordeiro. Beyond industrial automation and “release date” is when the Wi-Fi Alliance releases
robotics, augmented and virtual reality technologies its certification, which is a process for ensuring that
as well as gaming stand to benefit from faster, more wireless products meet the industry’s agreed-upon
reliable wireless signals. standards for security,
interoperability, and
MULTI-LINK OPERATIONS AND MORE device protocols. Wi-Fi
Certified 7—slated for the
The key to a future Wi-Fi you can depend on is first quarter of 2024—is “What Wi-Fi
something called multi-link operations (MLO). “It the culmination of years of really needed
is the marquee feature of Wi-Fi 7,” says Kevin Rob- collaborative work by the to do at that
inson, president and CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance. SOLAR-POWERED wireless industry to deter- point was
MLO comes in two flavors. The first—and simpler— TEST DRIVE mine what features should become more
of the two is a version that allows Wi-Fi devices to be included in the new gen- reliable.”
spread a stream of data across multiple channels in The next car you eration. After agreement —Carlos
buy might be
a single frequency band. The technique makes the
powered by the
on features, there is Cordeiro, CTO
collective Wi-Fi signal more resilient to interference sun. Long awaited months of validation work of wireless
at a specific frequency. by potential on early implementations
Where MLO really makes Wi-Fi 7 stand apart customers and of those features to ensure connectivity
from previous generations, however, is a version crowdfunders, solar they all work, separately at Intel
that allows devices to spread a data stream across electric vehicles and together, according to
(SEVs) made
multiple frequency bands. For context, Wi-Fi uti- by the startup Robinson. Early Wi-Fi 7
lizes three bands—2.5 gigahertz, 5 GHz, and as of Aptera Motors implementations are
2020, 6 GHz. are set to hit the tested at the organization’s
Whether MLO spreads signals across multiple road in 2024, the R&D lab in Santa Clara, Calif. Finally, the new fea-
channels in the same frequency band or channels company says. Like tures are locked in and the Wi-Fi Alliance releases
the cooler cousin
across two or three bands, the goals are the same: of an SUV, these
its certification program.
dependability and reduced latency. Devices will be three-wheeled Separate from the Wi-Fi Alliance’s certification
able to split up a stream of data and send portions SEVs feature a process, the IEEE will ratify a new version of the
across different channels at the same time—which sleek, aerodynamic 802.11 standard. The two are not entirely equivalent—
cuts down on the overall transmission time—or design to cut down not everything specified in the standard makes it into
on drag. The latest
beam copies of the data across diverse channels, in the Wi-Fi Alliance certification. Regardless, the new
version of the
case one channel is noisy or otherwise impaired. vehicle combines version—802.11be—should be ratified later this year
MLO is hardly the only feature new to Wi-Fi 7, plug-in capability as well, after the Wi-Fi 7 certification release.
even if industry experts agree it’s the most notable. with solar panels When Wi-Fi Certified 7 is released, manufactur-
Wi-Fi 7 will also see channel size increase from that cover its roof, ers will bring their devices to one of 20 authorized
allowing for a
160 megahertz to a new maximum of 320 MHz. test labs around the world to confirm that their
1,600-kilometer
Wider channels means more throughput capacity, range on a single devices conform to the specs laid out by the Wi-Fi
which means more data in the same amount of charge and up Alliance. Most importantly, certified devices are
time. That said, 320-MHz channels won’t be uni- to 65 km a day guaranteed to work together properly.
versally available. Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spec- from solar power. Wi-Fi 7 routers, chips, and other devices are
trum—and in some regions, contiguous 320-MHz Aptera says it already available, ahead of Wi-Fi Certified 7’s release.
aims to begin
chunks of unlicensed spectrum don’t exist because early production in This is standard practice: Companies release their
of other spectrum allocations. 2024, with the first Wi-Fi 7–compatible products and undergo the official
In cases where full channels aren’t possible, 2,000 vehicles set certification when it becomes available. Qualcomm’s
Wi-Fi 7 includes another feature, called puncturing. to be delivered Davidson explains that it’s common for companies
“In the past, let’s say you’re looking for 320 MHz to investors. to work from earlier IEEE draft standards once it
somewhere, but right within, there’s a 20-MHz inter- becomes clear what features and requirements the
ferer. You would need to look at going to either side next wireless generation will include.
of that,” says Andy Davidson, senior director of Meanwhile, work is already underway on what
technology planning at Qualcomm. Before Wi-Fi 7, will become Wi-Fi 8. “Think of it as a pipeline,” says
you’d functionally be stuck with about a 160-MHz Robinson. “While the Wi-Fi Alliance is putting the
channel either above or below that interference. finishing touches on commercializing a new gener-
“With Wi-Fi 7, you can just notch out the interfer- ation of Wi-Fi, standards organizations like the IEEE
ence…. You’ve still got an effective 300-MHz chan- are already looking forward to what is going to go into
nel,” says Davidson. the next generation.” 

TOP TECH 2024
The crew of Artemis II

are [from left] Mission
Specialist Jeremy
Hansen, from Canada
and Pilot Victor J. Glover,
Commander Reid
Wiseman, and Mission
Specialist Christina Koch,
all from the United States.
A E R O S PA C E
Back to NASA gears up
the Moon,
10
for the world’s first

crewed deep-space
mission in 50 years
Almost
By Andrew Jones
KIM SHIFLETT/NASA

Before the end of this year, four cabin should ever lose air pressure, Orion’s spacesuits
B
people will climb into a space- can protect and sustain the crew for six days.
craft, fly to the moon, and swing Thermodynamics presents another steep chal-
around it before returning to lenge for deep-space travel. A craft returning to the
Earth. Yes, been there, done Earth’s surface from low orbit reenters the atmo-
that. But not for 51 years. sphere at around 7.8 kilometers per second; one
NASA’s Artemis II mission, returning from the moon can top 11 km/s, raising
a warm-up for a lunar landing planned for 2025, will the temperature on the leading edge to around
mark the first time astronauts have gone beyond low 2,800 °C. Orion’s heat shield will cope thanks to its
Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 mission, in 1972. 186 blocks of Avcoat, a material that carries off heat
“It’s a demonstration that the U.S. is recovering as it gradually burns away.
technical capabilities it lost two or three generations
ago and is on track to returning astronauts to the MORE THAN FLAGS AND FOOTPRINTS
moon,” says Bleddyn Bowen, associate professor at
the University of Leicester, in England. “It will be Meanwhile, work is ongoing to make Artemis more
refreshing to see an actual, crewed mission around than a mere reprise of the Apollo “flags and foot-
the moon after decades of concept art, vague prom- prints” visits. Part of this ambition hinges on a lunar
ises, presidential and congressional dithering.” orbital station called the Lunar Gateway, a key com-
The 10-day mission, which retraces the 2022 ponent of the Artemis architecture. The modular
flight of the uncrewed Artemis 1, will test life- Gateway will be the first space station beyond Earth,
support systems. That, in turn, will prepare for the providing a place for people to live, conduct science
2025 Artemis III mission, which will land astronauts experiments, and refuel for trips to the moon. It will
near the moon’s south pole. The huge Space Launch support lunar surface operations and, potentially,
System (SLS) rocket will send an Orion spacecraft provide a staging post for voyages beyond the moon.
into orbit, the systems will be checked out, the Some 25 countries are involved, with NASA taking
solid-fuel boosters will be jettisoned, and a liquid- the leading role. “Coordinating across time zones,
propellant rocket will kick Orion into an elliptical borders, and cultures can be challenging,” notes Dylan
high orbit, reaching an apogee of 110,000 kilome- Connell, a NASA public affairs officer. “But overcom-
ters. Then comes the burn for the moon. ing these obstacles ensures that when the United
The crew will fly 7,400 km beyond the far side of States goes to the moon this time, we’re going together
the moon, which it will pass just one time. That way with our allies.” Such cooperation also requires
the Orion can use the moon’s gravity as a slingshot interoperability standards that extend to the com-
to send it on course for its four-day return trip. The mercial partners in the wider Artemis program.
crew will experience their own Earthrise, the iconic
image from Apollo 8, which though it may lack the
profound impact of the original could yet herald a
new dawn for exploration.
Because of cosmic radiation, travel in deep space FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET
requires greater protections and capabilities than
those needed for the International Space Station, Boom Technology is designed to aviation fuel, made
which orbits just a few hundred kilometers above is developing an be capable of without petroleum.
the earth, within the Earth’s magnetic field. “Orion airliner, called flying twice as The company
has been designed to keep humans alive and safe— Overture, that fast as today’s says it already has
even during an emergency—hundreds of thousands flies faster than commercial planes, orders in place
the speed of and Boom says it from commercial
of miles from home for extended periods, where sound. The U.S. expects the plane airlines and is
getting back to Earth takes days to weeks,” says company says to be powered aiming for first
Rachel Kraft, of NASA’s Exploration Systems Devel- it’s set to finish by sustainable flight by 2027.
opment Mission Directorate. construction of
The Lockheed Martin–made Orion and its Euro- its North Carolina
“superfactory”
pean Service Module, manufactured by Airbus, pack in 2024. Each
in serious radiation protection and radiation- year Boom plans
hardened electronics, deep-space guidance, and long- to manufacture
range navigation and control. Along with storage as many as 33 of
space for exercise equipment and propellant, Orion the aircraft, which
the company
provides nine cubic meters of habitable space, includ- claims will be the
ing a bathroom and a galley. It has enough supplies world’s fastest
on board to keep a crew alive for three weeks. If the airliner. Overture

TOP TECH 2024
According to NASA’s current conception, the

eventual mission that will return people to the moon’s Who’s Shooting
for the Moon?
surface will start with SLS boosting the Orion space-
craft to a docking with Gateway. There, two of the
astronauts will transfer to a Starship Human Landing
System, a lunar lander variant of Starship, from
SpaceX, for the descent to the lunar surface. After a
series of moonwalks, the astronauts will return to the
MISSION TYPE PLANNED LAUNCH
Gateway aboard the Starship, and then travel back to
Earth aboard the Orion.
But Gateway has been criticized as an unneces- Queqiao-2 (China) Relay satellite March 2024
sary complication that could delay a return to the (+2 cubesats)
moon. Some analysts have gone so far as to suggest
that such a delay could prove advantageous to China, Chang’e-6 (China) Sample return May 2024
which aims to land two astronauts on the moon
before 2030. Lander (+hopper, Q1 2024
IM-2 (Intuitive Machines)
Proponents of Gateway point out that it could cost relay satellite, rovers)
even more to redesign Orion and its service module
to allow it to get into and back out of low lunar orbit
by using its own main engine instead of docking at IM-3 (Intuitive Machines) Lander (+relay Q2 2024
Gateway. Nico Dettmann, head of the Lunar Trans- satellite, rovers)
portation Group within the European Space Agency’s
Directorate for Human and Robotic Exploration, says Artemis II (NASA) Crewed circumlunar November 2024
flight
Gateway is an important element in the overall
Artemis architecture. “It will allow, amongst other Griffin lander (Astrobotic) Lander (+NASA’s Late 2024
things, sustainable lunar surface missions and know- rover VIPER)
how for deep-space operations.”
The Lunar Gateway has morphed under the vary- Hakuto-R 2 (Ispace) Lander and rover 2024
ing pressures of visions and budgets but now its com-
ponents are nearing launch. The Habitation and
Logistics Outpost (HALO), built by Northrop Grum-
DESTINY+ (Japan) Lunar flyby 2024
man, is able to host an Orion crew of four for 30 days. toward asteroid
The Power and Propulsion Element (PPE), developed
by Maxar Technologies, will provide power and high-
rate Ka-band and X-band communications between
Gateway and Earth for video and voice transmissions (ESPRIT), will have two parts. The first—the
to support crewed missions as well as attitude control HALO-Lunar Communication System—will launch
and orbital transfer capabilities for the station. with the HALO. The second, the ESPRIT Refueling
S-Band and X-band radios will connect Gateway with Module, will be a habitable element along with pres-
vehicles on the lunar surface, such as the Starship. surized fuel tanks and docking ports. It is slated to
PPE’s two large rollout solar arrays, each the size launch in 2029 with Artemis V.
of NFL end zones, will generate the energy that will Dettmann described several major challenges
ionize and accelerate xenon gas in an electric propul- in developing the ESPRIT, including designing
sion system. HALO’s fabrication and testing is near- refuelable electric-propulsion systems, deployable
ing completion in Italy. PPE’s primary structure is radiators, and environmental-control and life-
being tested in Palo Alto, Calif., and the electric pro- support systems.
pulsion thrusters are being tested in Cleveland.
HALO and PPE are scheduled to launch on a SpaceX HELLO TO ARMS
Falcon Heavy rocket in November 2025.
The 10,000-kilogram International Habitat The Gateway External Robotics Systems—provided
(I-HAB) is an ESA contribution, being developed by by the Canadian Space Agency and featuring the
prime contractor Thales Alenia Space, with contri- Canadarm3 robotic arm manipulator, a more auton-
butions from Japan in the form of the Environmental omous version of the Canadarm2 used on the Inter-
Control and Life Support System. I-HAB will supple- national Space Station—will help maintain, repair,
ment HALO with 10 cubic meters of habitable space. and inspect Gateway, while also capturing visiting
Another module, the European System Providing spacecraft. It will launch with Artemis V. Artemis VI,
Refueling, Infrastructure and Telecommunications scheduled for 2030, will deliver Gateway’s airlock

The European Much more manageable are the series of robotic
Service Module for moon missions planned to start in 2024, highlighting
NASA’s Artemis II the diversification of interest in the moon. In May,
mission is shown
suspended from a
China will attempt to send a multistage spacecraft
crane in May at the to grab the first-ever samples from the lunar far side.
Kennedy Space Chang’e-6 aims to collect 2 kilograms of material
Center, in Florida. from the intriguing South Pole-Aitken Basin, includ-
ing material excavated from the moon’s mantle. It
will be supported by a communications relay satel-
lite named Queqiao-2. Because earthbound observ-
ers can directly view only the near side of the moon,
Queqiao-2 will have to bounce signals between
Chang’e-6 and Earth.
There will also be commercial missions, with U.S.
firms Astrobotic Technology, Firefly Aerospace, and
Intuitive Machines planning to send a variety of
spacecraft to the moon as part of NASA’s Commer-
cial Lunar Payload Services program. They’ll be
working on much smaller budgets than the tens of
billions being spent on SLS, Orion, and Gateway.
Japan’s SLIM lander launched in September 2023
and will attempt to land in January 2024. Japanese
commercial firm Ispace will make its second attempt
module, which will provide transfer capabilities for to land on the moon with the Hakuto-R Mission 2.
crew and science payloads. Finally, a mission that would gain serious attention
Vehicle System Manager software will allow Gate- is a potential SpaceX uncrewed demo of its Starship
way to operate autonomously when not crewed, Human Landing System late in the year; a spacecraft
which will be the case for at least nine months each integral to the Artemis III landing.
year. The station will orbit in a complex, seven-day, A new era of exploration is at hand. Astronauts
highly elliptical trajectory that will take it 1,500 km will push into deep space. Human habitations will
over the moon’s north pole before swinging out as orbit distant planets. They will wring fuel from pri-
high as 70,000 km above the south pole. The stability meval ice. And their journey begins this year, with
of this orbit reduces fuel consumption and thus cuts a return to the moon. 
costs. And, more important, it gives the station
extended periods to directly view the south pole,
where shadowed craters appear to shield deposits of
ice. Mission planners are hopeful that the water ice
exists in quantities sufficient to be a useful source of FIRST LIGHT FOR VERA RUBIN
hydrogen and oxygen for fueling rockets. The first
Artemis astronauts will enter Gateway on the Artemis Vera C. Rubin telescope will When operational,
IV mission, some time after September 2028. The Observatory, home photograph an area the Rubin
mission’s rocket will launch both an Orion spacecraft to the largest the size of 40 full Observatory will
and the I-HAB, which will dock with Gateway. The digital camera ever moons every night help astronomers
astronauts will then head to the lunar surface on constructed, is from its perch atop inventory the solar
expected to open a Chilean mountain. system, map the
SpaceX’s Human Landing System. its eye to the sky That means it can Milky Way, and shed
for the first time capture the entire light on dark matter
ON TO MARS in late 2024. The visible sky every and dark energy.
observatory features three to four nights.
Gateway is designed to operate for at least 15 years. an 8.4-meter
wide-field telescope
In the more distant future, Gateway could be used to that will scan
AMANDA STEVENSON/NASA
assemble a separate spacecraft for long-duration the Southern

missions to Mars. But such missions face many Hemisphere’s skies
immense challenges, any one of which could prove over the course
to be a showstopper. Besides the problems of deep- of a decade-
long project.
space flight, there are the dizzying expenses of devel- Equipped with a
oping the key platforms, along with question marks 3,200-megapixel
over the sustainability of the Space Launch System. camera, the

TOP TECH 2024
CONSUMER
A Behind-
the-Screens Blue phosphorescent
11
materials fix OLED
Change for
display weaknesses
By Tekla S. Perry
OLED

OLED displays dominate excitons emit light. The result is a phosphorescent
cellphones and have grabbed OLED. It’s potentially 100 percent efficient and
O
a big piece of the high-end doesn’t generate damaging heat.
TV market, thanks to their Phosphorescent red OLEDs have been around for
crisp images, deep black about two decades; green has been available for one.
levels, and wide viewing But creating blue—which has the highest energy level
angles. of the three colors—has been a challenge.
But OLED technology “We’ve had a lot of bright chemists and physicists
doesn’t do better than the alternative—LCDs—in working on this problem for years,” Hack says. “The
longevity or brightness. And energy efficiency is a more energy involved, the more likely bad things
toss-up, depending on the images being displayed. can happen, so it’s been hard to get long lifetimes.
This year, OLED will get a big boost in all three of But we will have it available in 2024.”
those metrics, when blue phosphorescent OLED “The physics are very challenging, because those
(PHOLED) materials become commercially available. short, high-energy wavelengths of light are almost
Universal Display Corp. (UDC), which has been chas- destroying the material as they are being generated,”
ing this technology for decades, says it has finally says Jeff Yurek, vice president of marketing for
caught it and is about to begin mass production. Nanosys, a quantum-dot manufacturer that is now
“A lot of research groups have worked on it, many a division of Shoei Chemical. “It’s also hard to do a
people have published on it, but we believe we have true 450-nanometer blue [the standard wavelength
it,” says Michael Hack, vice president of business for blue], not 460 or 470. Some people had written
development at UDC. this off as impossible to achieve.”
And while cellphone and TV manufacturers are UDC’s PHOLEDs are to date the only ones of
characteristically mum about upcoming designs, any color commercially available, points out ana-
they will likely rush blue PHOLEDs into their lyst Robert J. O’Brien, cofounder of the market-
devices as soon as they can. research firm DSCC, and UDC is already supplying
red and green PHOLEDs to just about every man-
FLUORESCENT VS. PHOSPHORESCENT OLEDs ufacturer of OLED displays. UDC isn’t saying how
much of a premium blue PHOLEDs will command
To appreciate why a blue PHOLED is such a big over traditional blue OLEDs. But Hack says that as
deal, you have to understand the difference between part of a display, the cost of the OLED materials of
conventional OLEDs and the newer, phosphores- any variety is minimal.
cent ones. And then you have to consider how
today’s OLED displays are structured. BLUE PHOLEDs FOR LONGER CELLPHONE BATTERY LIFE
OLEDs—organic light-emitting diodes—con-
vert electrical energy directly into photons. They What will the availability of blue PHOLEDs mean?
have multiple layers, including a cathode, an anode, That depends on the display that will incorporate
and an emissive layer. When current passes them.
through an OLED, electrons leave the cathode and Today’s smartphone displays use OLEDs
holes leave the anode; they recombine in the cen- directly, without color filters. Each pixel has three
tral emissive layer, joining into excitons and releas- OLED subpixels: red, green, and blue. At present,
ing either light or heat as they decay. only the red and green subpixels use phosphores-
Depending on how the spin states of the mole- cent OLEDs, and so the blue must rely on the
cules line up, this process can generate two types of less-efficient fluorescent OLED. That means the
excitons: singlets and triplets. Singlets are typically
outnumbered by triplets three to one, explains
UDC’s Hack. That’s a problem, because in tradi-
tional—that is, fluorescent—OLEDs, only the sin-
glets emit photons, while the triplets release their “A lot of research groups have
energy as heat. And that’s inefficient: Displays using worked on it, many people have
fluorescent OLED materials turn only 25 percent of published on it, but we believe
incoming electrical energy into light. The excess we have it.” —Michael Hack,
heat can eat away at a device’s life-span. Universal Display Corp.
When heavy metals are added to the mix of
organic compounds that make up OLEDs, Hack
says, the spin states change, and even the triplet

TOP TECH 2024
A Behind-the-Screens this year, says O’Brien, and most likely from Sam-
sung first, for a couple of reasons.
Change for OLED For one, Samsung is ready, he says. The compa-
ny’s researchers have been developing phosphores-
cent blue OLEDs for years, regularly publishing
blue subpixel is generally much larger than the papers about their efforts. So they are likely far along
other two, in order to produce the required bright- in planning how they will use it in display design.
ness without reducing lifetimes. These displays won’t just show up in Sam-
Replacing the fluorescent blue with phosphores- sung-branded products. In addition to making dis-
cent blue will mean a more balanced pixel structure plays for its own phones, Samsung supplies them to
and could enable higher-resolution displays in the many other manufacturers. The company is the
future. In the near term, the switch will lead to an biggest display supplier for iPhones, O’Brien says.
approximate 25 percent gain in efficiency; manu- Samsung will also likely be the first to incorpo-
facturers can take advantage of this to increase bat- rate blue PHOLEDs into TV displays, both because
tery life, reduce the size of the battery, or enable a of its research jump and because the impacts on
brighter display. And in any of those cases, reducing its all-blue OLED display will be greater than those
extraneous heat generation should increase the life- on LG’s mixed-color approach.
time of all the surrounding electronics. Looking into the future, O’Brien sees blue
PHOLEDs as making OLED displays more compel-
BLUE PHOLEDs ENABLE CHEAPER, BRIGHTER TVs ling overall. Expect them to start moving beyond
phones and large-screen TVs into tablets, note-
TV manufacturers use OLEDs a little differently books, and computers, where LCD technology has
than phone-display makers do, and they have dif- yet to give ground. 
ferent approaches.
Samsung’s OLED TV displays use only blue
OLEDs, creating the necessary red and green sub-
pixels through the use of quantum dots, a material
that takes in light energy at one wavelength and
emits it at another. So the switch from the current
fluorescent blue to phosphorescent blue will make
Samsung’s displays much more efficient. It will also Intel Hopes to Leapfrog
Its Competitors
make them easier and cheaper to manufacture, says
analyst O’Brien. To get the necessary brightness out
of today’s fluorescent blue OLEDs, Samsung now CONTINUED FROM PAGE 33
uses three layers of the material. PHOLEDs will
allow Samsung to cut that number to two, O’Brien pects Intel’s decision to introduce back-side power
says, and possibly even one. Or Samsung could during the FinFET-to-nanosheet transition was
choose to stick with three layers, at least in some made to entice customers, by providing a more
premium models, and boost brightness significantly, significant benefit than either advance could
says Yurek, at Nanosys. deliver by itself. There may not be many future
LG, another major manufacturer of OLED TVs, generations that will use nanosheet transistor tech.
builds its displays by combining layers of red, green, “Very rapidly, we’re going to see the saturation of
and blue OLEDs. The red and green layers are phos- nanosheet,” Ryckaert predicts.
phorescent, and the blue is fluorescent. When com- Intel expects to be ready for manufacturing 20A
bined, they create white light that is then separated in the first half of 2024. TSMC plans to begin pro-
into subpixels using color filters. The current design duction of chips with its N2 nanosheet technology
requires two blue layers in the stack; PHOLED blue in early 2025. Production of N2P chips—a version
should allow LG to cut that to one layer. with back-side power delivery—is expected to
As with cellphone displays, the switch to blue begin by 2026. Samsung has already introduced
PHOLEDs in TVs should boost display longevity. nanosheet transistors in its 3-nm node in 2022 but
Says Hack, “Lifetimes are best when devices are cool hasn’t officially announced a timeline for imple-
and use less current.” menting back-side power.
Hutcheson believes that all chipmakers are on
WHO WILL DEPLOY BLUE PHOLEDs FIRST? the same path toward back-side power; Intel is just
the first to take the leap. If the company pulls it off,
When will displays incorporating blue phospho- that risk could allow it to regain the lead, he says.
rescent OLEDs get into consumer hands? Possibly “There’s a lot riding on this.” 

Chips to Compute With called Luminous that sought to accelerate AI.
Impressed and a little concerned with the amount of
Encrypted Data Are Coming data his customers had, Gao wanted to see what
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 39 encrypted computing could do about maintaining
people’s privacy while still helping businesses benefit
The FHE accelerator chips, by contrast, can stream from the information. The result is a chip that Fabric
huge volumes of data through hardware that does expects to be in mass production within the year.
integer math on numbers that are thousands of bits For Campbell, Calif.–based Cornami, FHE was
long to accommodate encryption’s precision needs. an opportunity to repurpose a new type of parallel
Each accelerator has its own way of dealing with computing architecture. The architecture was orig-
these streams of huge numbers. But they’re all after inally designed to speed computing by allowing
the same goal—making FHE as fast as today’s unen- programs to be broken up into completely indepen-
crypted computing. dent streams of instructions, which could then flow
through the processor’s many cores without the
DARPA DRIVES FHE delays of having to share resources.
When chip-industry veteran Walden C. “Wally”
The quest for hardware that can accelerate FHE Rhines came across Cornami in 2019, the company
got its biggest boost in 2021, when the U.S. Defense was planning to apply the architecture to machine
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) learning, but the field was already too crowded, he
began a project called DPRIVE. The goal was to build says. Instead, fresh off some work for DARPA on
hardware that could radically reduce the time it took FHE, he steered the startup in that direction. Rhines,
for FHE computing tasks, from weeks to just sec- who is now CEO, says Cornami will have a product
onds or even milliseconds. Three participating “Ultimately, ready in 2024 that will let FHE match plain-text
teams—led by Duality Technologies, Galois, and if it’s fast computation speeds.
Intel—are on track to deliver chips designed to make enough and Optalysys, in Leeds, England, is looking to take
FHE perform within a factor of 10 of traditional cost effective advantage of optical computing’s inherent agility
computing or even better in 2024. enough, with Fourier transforms. It’s long been known that
These chips will be crucial if FHE is to break out there’s no a fairly straightforward optical system can instantly
of its current niche. “While algorithm and software reason not produce the Fourier transform of a two-dimensional
development has taken us far, it’s not nearly far to use FHE.” image. Optalysys was founded more than a decade
enough for FHE to be practical in any but a small —Nick New, ago to exploit this phenomenon, and it has built
and narrow set of applications,” says Galois’s David Optalysys systems over the years for defense-related tasks like
Archer. A distinction of the Galois hardware, called finding patterns in cluttered images.
Basalisc, is the use of asynchronous clocking so that With the increasing availability of silicon pho-
the various types of circuits used to do FHE opera- tonics tech, the company has been able to adapt its
tions can run at their own speed. transform-powered technology for encryption and
For the Intel team’s chip, Heracles, they came up FHE, CEO Nick New says. “FHE is an area that is
with a way to decompose FHE’s huge numbers into absolutely dominated by” transforms that can be
short data words that are just 32 bits. The smaller done in optics, he says. The startup plans to have a
words lead to a lower computing latency. They also product ready in the second half of 2024.
mean Intel can squeeze in more computational units
and more pathways for data to reach those units, FHE’S ROAD AHEAD
explains Ro Cammarota, chief scientist for privacy-
enhanced computing research at Intel. “Ultimately, if it’s fast enough and cost effective
The Duality team, whose chip is called T
rebuchet, enough, there’s no reason not to use FHE,” says New.
sees its advantage as having a design that’s made to “But there’s a long way to go to get to that point.”
support and accelerate the FHE software the startup Intel’s Cammarota sees the accelerator chips as
has already commercialized. “We started from just the starting point. FHE will also need software
applications to drive our software and then have development tools to make programming easier as
that software drive our hardware,” says Rohloff. well as standardization. The two are in progress even
without chips in hand, but there are many ways to do
FHE STARTUPS SMELL OPPORTUNITY FHE and standardization work is in its early stages.
Once industry has all three ingredients—soft-
At least three other companies went after FHE ware, standards, and hardware—researchers can
hardware independently of DARPA’s DPRIVE. begin to see what else these accelerator chips can
Gao founded Fabric Cryptography after leaving do. “It’s a new chapter in the history of computing,”
his previous startup, an optical computing company says Cammarota. 

TOP TECH 2024
Year a permanent home as part of its workflow. “Amazon

isn’t interested in a general-purpose robot,” Vetter-
of the Humanoid ick explains. “We are always focused on what prob-
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 47 lem we’re trying to solve. I wouldn’t want to suggest
that Digit is the only way to solve this type of prob-
world designed primarily for humans, a robot with lem. It’s one potential way that we’re interested in
a humanoid form factor would be ideal. But balanc- experimenting with.”
ing dynamically on two legs is still difficult for The idea of a general-purpose humanoid robot
robots, especially when those robots are carrying that can assist people with whatever tasks they may
heavy objects and are expected to work at a human need is certainly appealing, but as Amazon makes
pace for tens of thousands of hours. When is it clear, the first step for companies like Agility is to
worthwhile to use a bipedal robot instead of some- find enough value performing a single task (or per-
thing simpler? haps a few different tasks) to achieve sustainable
“The use case for Digit that I’m really excited growth. Agility believes that Digit will be able to
about is empty-tote recycling,” Vetterick says. “We scale its business by solving Amazon’s
already automate this task in a lot of our warehouses empty-tote-recycling problem, and the company is
with a conveyor, a very traditional automation solu- confident enough that it’s preparing to open a fac-
tion, and we wouldn’t want a robot in a place where tory in Salem, Ore. At peak production the plant will
a conveyor works. But a conveyor has a specific eventually be capable of manufacturing 10,000 Digit
footprint, and it’s conducive to certain types of robots per year.
spaces. When we start to get away from those
spaces, that’s where robots start to have a functional A MENAGERIE OF HUMANOIDS
need to exist.”
The need for robots doesn’t always translate into Agility is not alone in its goal to commercially
the need for robots with legs, however, and a com- deploy bipedal robots in 2024. At least seven other
pany like Amazon has the resources to build its companies are also working toward this goal, with
warehouses to support whatever form of robotics hundreds of millions of dollars of funding backing
or automation it needs. Its newer warehouses are them. Apptronik, 1X Technologies, Figure, Fourier
indeed built that way, with flat floors, wide aisles, Intelligence, Sanctuary AI, Tesla, and Unitree [see
and other environmental considerations that are “Robots to Look for in 2024,” p. 46] all have commer-
particularly friendly to robots with wheels. cial humanoid robot prototypes.
“The building types that we’re thinking about [for Despite an influx of money and talent into com-
Digit] aren’t our new-generation buildings. They’re mercial humanoid robot development over the past
older-generation buildings, where we can’t put in two years, there have been no recent fundamental
traditional automation solutions because there just technological breakthroughs that will substantially
isn’t the space for them,” says Vetterick. She describes aid in the development of these robots. Sensors and
the organized chaos of some of these older buildings computers are capable enough, but actuators remain
as including narrower aisles with roof supports in complex and expensive, and batteries struggle to
the middle of them, and areas where pallets, card- power bipedal robots for the length of a work shift.
board, electrical-cord covers, and ergonomics mats There are other challenges as well, including cre-
create uneven floors. “Our buildings are easy for ating a robot that’s manufacturable with a resilient
people to navigate,” Vetterick continues. “But even supply chain and developing the service infrastruc-
small obstructions become barriers that a wheeled ture to support a commercial deployment at scale.
robot might struggle with, and where a walking robot The biggest challenge by far is software. It’s not
might not.” Fundamentally, that’s the advantage enough to simply build a robot that can do a job—
bipedal robots offer relative to other form factors: that robot has to do the job with the kind of safety,
They can quickly and easily fit into spaces and work- reliability, and efficiency that will make it desirable
flows designed for humans. Or at least, that’s the goal. as more than an experiment.
Vetterick emphasizes that the Seattle R&D site There’s no question that Agility Robotics and the
deployment is only a very small initial test of Digit’s other companies developing commercial humanoids
capabilities. Having the robot move totes from a have impressive technology, a compelling narrative,
shelf to a conveyor across a flat, empty floor is not and an enormous amount of potential. Whether that
reflective of the use case that Amazon ultimately potential will translate into humanoid robots in the
would like to explore. Amazon is not even sure that workplace now rests with companies like Amazon,
Digit will turn out to be the best tool for this partic- which seems cautiously optimistic. It would be a fun-
ular job, and for a company so focused on efficiency, damental shift in how repetitive labor is done. And
only the best solution to a specific problem will find now, all the robots have to do is deliver. 

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Full/Associate/Assistant ProfessorininRobotics
Full/Associate/Assistant Professor Robotics
(Ref.No.:
(Ref. No.:FST/EME/FAAP/11/2023)
FST/EME/FAAP/11/2023)
TheThe DepartmentofofElectromechanical
Department Electromechanical Engineering
Engineering(EME)
(EME)ofofthethe Faculty
Faculty
of of Scienceand
Science andTechnology
Technology (FST)
(FST) ofof the
the University
UniversityofofMacau
Macauinvitesinvites
applications for the position of Full/Associate/Assistant Professor in
applications for the position of Full/Associate/Assistant Professor in
Robotics. It will be a joint position with the Centre for Artificial Intelligence
Robotics. It will (CAIR)
and Robotics be a joint position
of the with
Institute the Centre for
of Collaborative Artificial (ICI).
Innovation Intelligence
This
andposition
Robotics (CAIR) oftothe
is intended Institute of
complement andCollaborative Innovation
strengthen existing (ICI).
faculty This
staff
position is intended to complement and strengthen existing faculty
expertise. We are seeking candidate with a proven track record in scientific staff
expertise.
research,We anare seekingresearch
innovative candidate withand
vision, a proven track record
a commitment in scientific
to education.
research, an innovative research vision, and a commitment to education.
EME offers Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees programmes.
EMECurrently,
offers it Bachelor’s,
has 15 academic staff and
Master’s andaround 200 undergraduate
Doctoral students,
degrees programmes.
150 graduate.
Currently, it has 15 UM is the only
academic public
staff andcomprehensive university in Macao.
around 200 undergraduate students,
150English is its UM
graduate. working language.
is the UM iscomprehensive
only public among the top 1% in ESI rankings
university in Macao.
in Engineering. In the THE World University Rankings,
English is its working language. UM is among the top 1% in ESI rankings the Engineering
and Technology
in Engineering. In programme
the THE Worldis ranked among the
University 126th – 150th.
Rankings, CAIR is
the Engineering
dedicated to advancing the research in the fields of artificial intelligence
and Technology programme is ranked among the 126th – 150th. CAIR is
and robotics, CAIR possesses expertise in robotics, and it is expected that
dedicated to advancing
more high-profile the work
research research
will bein the fields
carried outofandartificial intelligence
interdisciplinary
andcollaboration
robotics, CAIR possesses
in robotics expertise
research in robotics,
will further and it is expected that
be promoted.
more high-profile research work will be carried out and interdisciplinary
collaboration
The candidates in robotics
must have research
an earned willPhD
further beinpromoted.
degree related areas. Preference
will be given to candidates with research and teaching experience at the
One of the
Thetertiary
candidates mustlevel.
education haveToanaccord
earned thePhD degree
future in relatedcandidates
development, areas. Preference
with
willspecialization in frontier robotics
be given to candidates technologies
with research with potential
and teaching medicalatorthe
experience
precision
tertiary intelligent
education manufacturing
level. To accord the applications are preferred.
future development, Specific but
candidates with
not limited fields include:robotics
(1) bio-inspired robotics;with
(2) bio-medical robotics; or
most influential
specialization in frontier technologies potential medical
(3) multi-scale
precision precision
intelligent manipulation
manufacturing robotics; are
applications and preferred.
(4) targeted deliverybut
Specific
notmicro/nano robotics.
limited fields include: (1) bio-inspired robotics; (2) bio-medical robotics;
reference resources
(3) multi-scale precision manipulation robotics; and (4) targeted delivery
Applicants should visit https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/ for more details,
micro/nano
and applyrobotics.
ONLINE.
for engineers
Applicants should visit https://career.admo.um.edu.mo/ for more details,
and apply ONLINE.
around the world.

For over 100 years, Proceedings of the IEEE
Global Institute of Future Technology (GIFT hereafter) at Shanghai
Jiao Tong University invites applications for tenure-track or tenured has been the leading journal for engineers
professoriate and research scientist positions, mainly at Associate looking for in-depth tutorial, survey, and
and Full levels, related to Sustainable Energy.
review coverage of the technical
GIFT manages endowment funds from a variety of sources, developments that shape our world.
including a recent donation of more than 200 million US dollars.
GIFT’s new building will be completed within two years, adding
Offering practical, fully referenced articles,
50,000 square meters to the current 25,000 square meters. Proceedings of the IEEE serves as a bridge
With strong public and university support, we will rapidly expand to help readers understand important
our faculty, including high-level hiring (e.g. NAE/NAS members and
Fellows of multiple professional societies). Currently, five research technologies in the areas of electrical
centers have been established: Center for Large-scale Energy engineering and computer science.
Storage and Reliability, Future Battery Research Center, Center
for Advanced Sustainable Power Systems, Center for Green Energy
and Modern Agriculture, and Center for Perovskite Photovoltaics
Research.
Applicants must hold a doctorate degree in a relevant field. To learn more and start
Candidates are expected to establish a vigorous research program your subscription today, visit
and contribute to undergraduate and graduate education. For full ieee.org/proceedings-subscribe
consideration, please send a CV, teaching plan and research plan,
copies of three representative publications and contact information
of five referees as a single PDF file to the GIFT Search Committee
(email: [email protected]). More information is available at
http://gift.sjtu.edu.cn.

Constructor University (formerly Jacobs University) is a private, state-accredited,
English-language university in Bremen. We offer Bachelor, Master, and PhD
programs in three schools: School of Science, School of Computer Science
and Engineering, and School of Business, Social and Decision Sciences. Our
principles are first-class teaching and research, international diversity, and
transdisciplinary cooperation. According to the 2024 Times Higher Education
(THE) World University Rankings, Constructor University is among the top 25
percent out of more than 1.900 universities worldwide and is ranked as the second
most international university in the world. As an international university, we attract
highly talented and open-minded students from all over the world. Currently, over
1.800 students from 110 nations live and study on our residential campus.
The university is currently driving an ambitious expansion of research related

to Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Data Science. In this context,
a new Assistant Professorship with a focus on Data Science and Machine
Learning has been opened in the School of Computer Science and Engineering.
Accordingly, Constructor University invites applications from interested candidates
for the following position, to be filled ideally by August 2024:
Assistant Professor of Computer Science (Software Engineering)

(m/f/d) (full time; 38.5 hrs./week; tenure track)
You will support our research and teaching activities in the field of Computer
Science by establishing an independent research group focusing on research
topics related to software engineering. Possible areas of interest are:
• Agile and generative software development

• Software analytics and visualization
• Usability engineering and interaction design
• Software verification and software security
For further information regarding this position, please contact

[email protected]
The deadline for submission of applications is 11.01.2024.
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Gain access to the latest IEEE me as a well-
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And that’s only the beginning. Electrical Engineering
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Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering Graduate School of
Engineering and Management Air Force
Institute of Technology (AFIT)
Dayton, Ohio Constructor University (formerly Jacobs University) is a private, state-accredited,
English-language university in Bremen. We offer Bachelor, Master, and PhD
Multiple Faculty Positions programs in three schools: School of Science, School of Computer Science
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Air Force Institute of and Engineering, and School of Business, Social and Decision Sciences. Our
Technology is seeking applications for tenured or tenure-track faculty position. Must principles are first-class teaching and research, international diversity, and
have an earned doctorate in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a closely transdisciplinary cooperation. According to the 2024 Times Higher Education
affiliated discipline by the time of their appointment (anticipated 1 September 2024). (THE) World University Rankings, Constructor University is among the top
Applicants specializing in one or more of the following areas: artificial intelligence, 25 percent out of more than 1.900 universities worldwide and is ranked as the
machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and autonomy. Other areas second most international university in the world. As an international university, we
will also be considered. Position requires teaching at graduate level, establishing attract highly talented and open-minded students from all over the world. Currently,
and sustaining a strong Department of Defense relevant externally funded research over 1.800 students from 110 nations live and study on our residential campus.
program with sustainable record of related peer-reviewed publications.
The university is currently driving an ambitious expansion of research related
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering offers accredited M.S. to Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Data Science. Accordingly,
and Ph.D. degree programs in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Constructor University invites applications from interested candidates for the
Computer Science and an M.S. degree program in Cyber Operations. following position, to be filled ideally by August 2024:
For more information and to apply, visit: Assistant Professors of Computer Science (Data Science & Machine Learning)
Computer Science https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/763815000 (m/f/d) (full time; 38.5 hrs./week; tenure track)
Computer Engineering https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/763897700
You will support our research and teaching activities in the field of Computer
Include: Science by establishing an independent research group focusing on research
• A letter of application to include USA Jobs ad number. topics related to Data Science and Machine Learning, including but not limited to
• Your curriculum vitae (no photographs). deep learning algorithms, predictive analytics, and big data technologies. Possible
• Transcripts for all degrees listed on curriculum vitae (official copies must follow). areas of interest are:
• A statement of your research plans and a statement of your teaching philosophy
at graduate level (limited to one page each). • Neural networks and cognitive computing
• A list of three professional references including name, complete mailing address, • Data mining and predictive modeling
email address, and phone number. • Statistical learning and optimization
Applicants must be U.S. citizens and currently hold or be able to obtain a security For further information regarding this position, please contact
clearance. Review of applications will begin on 19 February 2024. The United States [email protected]
Air Force is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. The deadline for submission of applications is 11.01.2024.
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HISTORY IN AN OBJECT BY ALLISON MARSH
The Sound of Two Ove Glove, the Chia Pet. In 1985, he

was hired to sell the Great American
idea, and after the original investors
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THE HENRY FORD
Joe Pedott was a master of marketing problem? It did not work. Indeed, for it—was born.
whose advertisements made you when people used it to control their
want gizmos you never imagined you televisions, it tended to short- FOR MORE ON THE CLAPPER, SEE spectrum.
needed—the Garden Weasel, the circuit the TV. But Pedott liked the ieee.org/pastforward-jan2024

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6 Privacy-Protecting The Humanoids Are A Better Blue Big FOR THE

*For information on features, costs, eligibility, renewability, limitations and exclusions.

This Election Year,

AI Will Surveil the

44 could make data unhackable.

Year of the Humanoid

Bipedal robots seek to prove their

JANUARY 2024 SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG 1

Kelp Farms Make

technologies emerging from years

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Multiphysics® before prototyping.

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 RINA DIANE CABALLAR

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The evaporation process

Lithium Extraction Gets tina, Bolivia, and Chile inter-

For decades, producers have

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The Direct-Extraction Difference game-changing technology for

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company participating in the competition.

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Just as with NASA’s Apollo simulators, an analog computer handles the

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tion run by the Norwegian global power engineering

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