AI-enhanced glasses for the visually impaired
The World Health Organization estimates that there are more than 25 million Europeans living with a visual impairment, with more than 75 percent of them projected to be unemployed. To assist this population with increased mobility independence and enhanced text reading capabilities, the Yes!Delft start-up Envision is developing its own hands-free, AI-based solution for smart glasses.
When persistence pays off: why ASMI is doing so well
Grueling work with Intel cemented the company’s position in the atomic layer deposition market, but the emergence of more ALD semiconductor applications was required for that investment to really pay off. The story of why ASM International is doing so well these days.
Quantify yourself
Having spent quite a bit of this summer thinking about machine learning and artificial intelligence, it seems to me that there’s a very important transformation ongoing from a focus on the qualitative to a focus on the quantitative. The moment we start with A/B testing, deploying multi-armed bandits or training machine learning models, the very first action we need to take is to define, in precise, quantitative terms, what the factors are that we are optimizing for and what the relative priority of these factors is. And, of course, what factors aren’t allowed to change outside a certain set of boundaries.
Photonics, a specialty of the Dutch Noord-Brabant area
The Dutch province of Noord-Brabant houses leading global players in photonics: Smart Photonics and Morphotonics.
Content streaming as glare control ready for takeoff
After two years of prototype development and testing, Videowindow – a company from the high tech incubator Yes!Delft – has inked a deal to give Rotterdam The Hague Airport an artistic and high-tech upgrade in an unusual area: the windows. More specifically, the airport has agreed to test and validate the start-up’s system for glare control in its terminal.
Despite advances in technology, systems reliability is getting worse
With a steady increase in global product recalls, highly publicized fines for automotive companies and the recent Boeing tragedies, it’s clear that reliability is a major issue. According to world-renowned expert Michael Pecht, things are getting worse. In fact, he says many of these problems are completely self-created and entirely avoidable – that is, if companies are ready to get serious about reliability.
Combining disciplines for smart vehicles and machinery
Self-driving cars capture everyone’s imagination. Less common knowledge is that the development of the technology to make machinery and other vehicles autonomous is supported in Flanders. Flanders Make, the research center for the manufacturing industry, maintains close partnerships with the industry to study a wide range of applications: from logistic robots, tractors and weaving machines to assembly cells within production areas. The key to success is a simultaneous design combining mechanics, electricity, electronics, software and control. We give the floor to two researchers.
Billions from the gaming world give digital twin momentum
With a game engine under the hood of its digital twin toolbox, Unit040 is leveraging the developments in the gaming industry. The impact of gaming technology on simulation and visualization in high tech has taken the traditional CAD industry by surprise. “We’ve been tapping into the knowledge from the game engine development race for years,” says Guido van Gageldonk, the CTO of Unit040.
Polishing raw software talent into industry-ready gems
The company where he did his internship and graduation project was very eager to take him onboard and he got offered not one but two prestigious PhD positions. Yet, Robin Mennens chose to enroll in the PDEng Software Technology program to further develop his technical, professional and personal skills and become a software designer and well-rounded engineer.
Ask the headhunter
For about five years now, I’ve been working as a senior chip engineer at the semiconductor division of a large Korean technology company. I really like it there, although I’ve reached my personal peak in the organization. To move ahead, I really need to speak Korean and that seems impossible with my limited language skills.
AI: the fabric of computing
During the summer, I spent a week at a summer school on deep learning (DL). There were several reasons to attend, but one was to simply learn more about this trending topic. In many ways, it was a wonderful, though humbling, experience as the field is progressing at a rate that’s simply phenomenal. There are constant breakthroughs in the area and the quality of models, in terms of accuracy and loss, is still improving rapidly with every year significant improvements being reported by various research groups (especially the industrial ones).