Image recognition keeps making progress. Face recognition is already a commodity we find on mass market point and shoot camera that recognise the faces and detect when a smile appear to take the picture. We have a number of automatic tagging application that looking at certain ratio among facial characteristics …

We usually have a pretty good idea on what we are thinking, just because we are thinking! However, what we perceive is just a fraction of the whole story that is going on in the hundred billion neurones in our brain. Most of what goes on is actually disregarded like …

The US Department of Energy has issued a directive to have systems able to store hydrogen in cars at a density of 5.5% in weight by 2017 and at 7.5% in 2020. As we know hydrogen is very light (55 times lighter than iron) and therefore creating a storage system that …

Happy Easter to all, to those who celebrate it and to those who don’t!  In the English speaking Countries the Easter Egg is sometime substituted, or flanked, by the Easter Bunny (and Easter has its English roots in the goddess Eostra, goddess of fertility and Spring). I am presently in Hong …

Long, long time ago I did my post doc in elementary particle physics and quantum properties where on the menu. Still, I remember I had problem in really understanding quantum properties and I used to console myself with the words of Niels Bohr: "If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, …

There have been over the last ten years several technological advances in electronics and part of these have been in finding ways to make transistors using different materials or different manufacturing processes resulting in circuits that can stand higher temperatures, or be manufactured at lower temperatures and hence use substrates …

Endoscopy has transformed medicine in the last fifty years and has progressed in getting smaller and in being able to act. Many surgeries that used to be "heavy" on the patient with lengthy hospitalisation have now become "light" on the patient and are performed as day hospital. It looks like …

The transistor is now 67 years old and the ones we have today have very little resemblance to that germanium based transistor invented in 1947 at Bell Labs. Progress have taken many routes, first changing the germanium with the silicon, then creating a process for mass production and for integration (wafer), …

Telecommunications networks started their evolution towards "packetization"  back in the middle of the last century (actually multiplexing goes back to the middle of the previous century being used in telegraphy) by the adoption of the PCM, Pulse Code Modulation. However, the packet network as we know it today is associated to …

6. Beyond Industry 4.0 Every time we identify a new wave of structural change we get the impression that it is going to be the last, and this in spite of the fact that we have seen several waves coming and fading away under the pressure of a new one. …