A new report from the California Department of Technology identifies six “high-risk automated decision systems” currently in use by state agencies. The systems are used for purposes that include estimating whether incarcerated people may reoffend, screening unemployment claims for possible fraud, administering remote exams for California State University students and detecting whether students used generative artificial intelligence to complete assignments.

The findings were released Friday as part of an annual disclosure required under a 2023 state law. The law requires state agencies to report automated systems that assist or replace human judgment in decisions with legal or similarly significant consequences. That includes decisions affecting housing, education, employment, credit, health care and criminal justice.

The disclosure marks a significant shift from the state’s first report last year, when officials said they had no such systems in use. That answer drew scrutiny because some state agencies were already known to be using automated tools in sensitive areas.

Among the systems identified in the new report is COMPAS, a tool used by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to assign recidivism risk scores to incarcerated people. The department has used the system for at least a decade, according to previous state records.

Another system involves the Employment Development Department’s use of automated fraud detection in unemployment claims. The department’s fraud screening came under criticism after benefits for about 600,000 Californians were paused between Christmas and New Year’s in 2020, according to a Legislative Analyst’s Office report.

Civil rights, privacy and civil liberties organizations pushed for the 2023 reporting law because of concerns that automated systems, including artificial intelligence tools, can reproduce or worsen bias. Similar technologies have faced criticism nationally for alleged problems in high-stakes testing, criminal justice risk assessments and tools that claim to detect AI-generated writing.

The Department of Technology said this year’s inventory found more systems because officials conducted a more detailed review of agency responses. The department said it followed up with agencies and asked additional questions about how their tools are used.

In addition to the six systems deemed high risk, the report lists six other automated tools that were initially flagged but later determined not to meet the law’s high-risk definition. One of those was an AI tool used by the California Department of Finance to analyze legislative bills.

The report also identifies two high-risk systems that are not currently active. The Department of Cannabis Control is developing artificial intelligence to review whether cannabis packaging violates rules meant to prevent marketing that appeals to children. California State University, meanwhile, discontinued use of a language model that had been used to review job applications.

The new disclosure comes as public agencies across California are beginning to catalog their use of AI. San Jose and San Francisco recently released their first AI inventories. At the same time, California-based AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are increasingly seeking government work as public debate intensifies over how the technology should be regulated.

Surveys have shown that many Californians remain wary of artificial intelligence. Polling by TechEquity and Carnegie California found that more Californians prioritize safety protections over rapid innovation. National polling has reflected similar concerns.

An effort in Sacramento to place more limits on automated decision-making stalled last month. Senate Bill 1248 would have barred state workers from using automated decision systems as the sole basis for making decisions, but the measure died during the Legislature’s appropriations process.

Despite the new report, major questions remain about how broadly AI is being used across state government.

The disclosure does not include several generative AI pilot programs supported by the governor’s office. Those projects include tools intended to help businesses file taxes, assist state employees working on homelessness and support a state AI assistant called Poppy. According to a state website, Poppy uses large language models, including Anthropic’s Claude, to help draft documents, research policy and build custom AI tools. The state says 67 departments provided input during the pilot phase, with a statewide rollout scheduled to begin next month.

Also absent from the report is a California State University contract with OpenAI to provide a version of ChatGPT. Research and surveys on AI use in schools have raised concerns that the technology can create problems as well as benefits in educational settings.

The reporting law also excludes some major public institutions, including the judicial branch and the University of California system. That leaves out areas where AI is already emerging. Recent reporting found that a majority of California’s roughly 60 courts have adopted policies on generative AI use. Courts in Los Angeles and Riverside counties have begun testing an AI tool designed to function like a clerk by drafting orders and preparing legal research memos.

For Inland Empire residents, the issue is not abstract. Automated systems are increasingly being tested or used in areas that can touch daily life, from public benefits and college coursework to courts and corrections. The state’s latest report offers a broader look at those tools than last year’s disclosure, but it also shows that California’s accounting of government AI use remains incomplete.

Original source: CalMatters

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The firm has discussed the feasibility of a tie-up between SpaceX and Tesla, an idea that some investors are pushing, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. Separately, they are also exploring a tie-up between SpaceX and xAI ahead of an IPO, some of the people said.

Any transaction could attract sizable interest from infrastructure funds and Middle Eastern sovereign investors, some of the people said. A deal could also potentially require a large financing component, one of them said.

No final decisions have been made, details could change and the companies could decide to remain separate, the people said. Musk and representatives for SpaceX, xAI and Tesla didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Different parts of Musk’s grand vision for SpaceX — of the company putting data centers into space to do complex computing for AI — would potentially be served by the various scenarios. xAI could benefit enormously from computing capacity provided by SpaceX’s data centers in orbit, if the company can make the engineering work.

Tesla’s ability to manufacture energy storage systems could help SpaceX use solar energy in space to run the data centers. Musk has also discussed using SpaceX’s Starship rockets to carry Tesla’s Optimus robots to the moon as well as to Mars.

Tesla shares jumped as much as 4.5% in after-hours trading on Thursday. The stock had fallen 3.5% during normal hours, giving the company a market value of about $1.56 trillion. SpaceX is targeting an IPO that would value the company at about $1.5 trillion, Bloomberg News has reported.

Two legal entities with the phrase “merger sub” in their names were set up in Nevada on Jan. 21 that count SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen as officers, Nevada’s business portal shows.

Reuters reported the potential merger between SpaceX and xAI earlier. Shares of xAI would be exchanged for shares in SpaceX, Reuters said, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Some xAI executives may have the option to receive cash instead ‍of SpaceX stock as part of the merger, Reuters said.

SpaceX is weighing a June listing, around Musk’s birthday, and could seek to raise as much as $50 billion, people familiar with the matter have said. That would make it the biggest IPO of all time. Bank of America Corp., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley are expected to have senior roles.

Robinhood Markets Inc., the upstart broker credited with getting young people hooked on trading, is vying for a key role in SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday.

SpaceX’s Johnsen told employees in December that a potential IPO would help fuel an “insane flight rate” for its developmental Starship rocket and a possible base on the moon.

Ludlow , Nair, Grush and Porter write for Bloomberg.

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Technical topics, of any sort at all, are generally subject to serious distortion when they hit the level of public discussion. There are many reasons for this – ideology, click-lust, and the sheer inability of the average journo school grad to adequately wrap his head around whatever concept is under consideration.

There’s no end of examples: Just think of the garbage written about global warming or COVID.

The latest of these topics is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Commentary on AI has exploded across the media sphere since the release of ChatGPT, an AI app purportedly capable of learning how to produce prose in any style at request. The consensus, to quote a style not yet mastered by ChatGPT, is almost uniformly “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The media uproar has been characterized by two approaches — the first (and most common) is complete lack of understanding of the technology. The second is an impression of the topic derived from movies, largely HAL 9000 and Skynet (an older generation would add Colossus). These AI entities are uniformly insane, malevolent, or both (though not to the level of the one envisioned in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream” which is so overcome by existential loathing that it destroys all humanity except for five individuals, whom it then sets out to torture for all eternity). For some reason, nobody ever suggests the AI Samantha in the superb film Her, who is cheerful, helpful, and even loving. That says more about human nature than it does Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Turing had first proposed computers in the 1930s and then played a role in building the earliest working models for the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park. In this paper he suggested something that came to be called the Turing Test, intended to answer the question as to whether an AI should be treated as a self-aware entity – as another person. Turing’s argument is that if you converse with an AI – ask it questions and receive answers – and cannot decide whether you are interacting with a human person or a machine, you must consider it to be an intelligent, self-aware entity. (The Turing Test has been philosophically challenged since them, while at the same time being subject to cheating by some AI researchers, who have pulled tricks such as personifying the AI as a twelve-year-old or a foreigner who speaks English as a second language.)

Turing’s speculations fell on fertile ground. While the original Bletchley Park “bombes” (so-called due to the ticking noise they made while calculating) had been shut down after the war, more advanced computers such as UNIVAC were being designed and built during the early 50s. They were greeted with wild speculation along with musing on what it all meant for the fate of humanity. Conclusions were largely unanimous: “thinking machines” would soon outdo mere humans, who would then be either destroyed or shoved aside to go quietly extinct.

Eighty years on, little has changed. The debate continues on the same shallow, uninformed level while we eagerly await for AM or HAL to appear and start torturing or murdering us.

So what is the problem here? First and above all, when we speak of AI in the 21st century, we’re discussing two distinct and separate types as if they were one and the same thing. These are what I call “App AI,” which includes ChatGPT and the numerous AI art apps making the rounds, and “General Intelligence AI,” the movie-style HALs and Skynets capable of taking over everything and doing what they damn well please.

Up until now, all that we’ve seen are App AIs. These are software, generally operating on neural nets, devoted to one particular task – text creation or artwork – that feature algorithms capable of modifying the responses of the program as it “learns” more about the task. AI learning is accomplished through “supervised learning,” in which mere humans set the parameters and goals, oversee the process, and examine and judge the results. Until now this human interaction has proven strictly necessary — “unsupervised learning,” when it has been attempted, usually goes off the rails pretty quickly. The App AI’s single task comprises their entire universe and they can’t simply take what they’ve learned and apply it to other fields. As Erik J. Larson puts it in The Myth of Artificial Intelligence (which should be read by anybody with an interest in the topic), “…chess-playing systems don’t play the more complex game of Go. Go systems don’t even play chess.” So no such AI is ever going to quit sampling internet imagery and try to take over the Pentagon. (This also applies to the guy who claimed, a couple weeks back, that ChatGPT is already “running the financial system.”)

There’s been a lot of speculation recently as to whether these systems will supplant humans working in particular fields. The answer is no — not yet, and probably not ever. A few weeks ago, Monica Showalter, esteemed by all AT readers, ran a Turing Test of sorts on ChatGPT. She entered the prompt “Write a piece on the future of the airline industry in the style of Thomas Lifson.” What she got was a bland, gassy, ill-written piece filled with clichés, non-sequiturs, and outright errors, none of which, I can state with authority, has ever been characteristic of Thomas’s writing.

But couldn’t an App AI conceivably learn enough, experience enough, and develop enough to stretch its electronic tentacles into fields that it was never intended for?

That brings us to General Intelligence AI, the realm of HAL and Samantha, the Holy Grail of AI research, and what Stephan Hawking and Elon Musk have both warned us against.

Turing had originally dismissed notions of machine intelligence due to the fact that machines lacked intuition – the human facility that enables us to skip step-by-step procedures and go immediately to the heart of a problem. There exists no way to quantify intuition – along with other related human capabilities such as imagination. Though Turing ignored this factor in his 1950 paper, it remains true today. There is no means of breaking down intuition, imagination, or simple common sense to make them programmable.

One of the shocking developments in AI research late in the last century was the revelation that machines can’t deal with the everyday. A program could play chess, model the interior of an M-class star, or plot a rocket trajectory with ease, but ask it to pilot a robot down a hall and it will immediately run into a wall and suffer a complete breakdown. This is something that Elon himself has encountered with his “self-driving” cars.

The statistical techniques that AI programs utilize – rifling through thousands, millions, or conceivably billions of possible solutions before they select the most probable – simply cannot replace the human attributes we all take for granted.

We don’t actually know what “intuition” or “common sense” are, which means that we don’t know what thinking is. And if that’s the case, how can we hope to duplicate it? It took something on the order of three-and-a-half million years for intelligence to develop in human beings. Nobody, however adept, will replicate that in a handful of years.

We are likely to find that conscious intelligence is an emergent property arising from elements we can now scarcely conceptualize, much less understand. And if we can’t understand it, it’s unlikely that we will be able to transfer it to silicon chips.

So Skynet is not going to be stomping on our skulls just yet. Which doesn’t mean that people will stop working on General Intelligence AI. That’s no bad thing – such research will teach us a lot about ourselves, possibly including things we’d rather not know. And if by some wild chance such an effort was successful, we’d still have little reason to worry. As Elon has pointed out, such an entity would be isolated in a research facility and dependent on extraordinarily complex and sensitive hardware. Any change in the system, such as a malfunction or brownout, would be likely to shut the whole thing down. (Which raises other questions: are we morally justified in creating an intelligent entity that will inevitably succumb to malfunctions? I would say “no.”)

As for App AI, it is simply a new kind of tool, and Sapiens does well with tools. It will continue to improve, providing us with more capabilities and potential. At the moment, App AI is at about at the same level as home computing was in the early 80s, when it was limited to trivia such as primitive games. The prospects are enormous.

But ChatGPT will not take over and force everyone to read its stuff eighteen hours a day. Nor will AIs put everybody out of work, something that has been predicted since Kurt Vonnegut published Player Piano in 1952. Since the 1970s, it has been clear that infotech actually creates jobs by expanding existing industries and establishing new ones. We have no reason to think that AI will be any different.

AI will also provide us with a new armory of digital defenses against the current efforts by the WEF, the tech giants, and the elites to force technofeudalism on us. And that, playmates, will be something worth having.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author’s articles on this Opinion piece or elsewhere online or in the newspaper where we have articles with the header “COLUMN/EDITORIAL & OPINION” do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints or official policies of the Publisher, Editor, Reporters or anybody else in the Staff of the Hemet and San Jacinto Chronicle Newspaper.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was set to announce a “major scientific breakthrough” Tuesday in the decades-long quest to harness fusion, the energy that powers the sun and stars.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it, something called net energy gain, according to one government official and one scientist familiar with the research. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the breakthrough ahead of the announcement.

Granholm was scheduled to appear alongside Livermore researchers at a morning event in Washington. The Department of Energy declined to give details ahead of time. The news was first reported by the Financial Times.

Proponents of fusion hope that it could one day produce nearly limitless, carbon-free energy, displacing fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. Producing energy that powers homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away. But researchers said it was a significant step nonetheless.

“It’s almost like it’s a starting gun going off,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leader in fusion research. “We should be pushing towards making fusion energy systems available to tackle climate change and energy security.”

Net energy gain has been an elusive goal because fusion happens at such high temperatures and pressures that it is incredibly difficult to control.

Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. Unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste.

Billions of dollars and decades of work have gone into fusion research that has produced exhilarating results — for fractions of a second. Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility, the division of Lawrence Livermore where the success took place, used 192 lasers and temperatures multiple times hotter than the center of the sun to create an extremely brief fusion reaction.

The lasers focus an enormous amount of heat on a small metal can. The result is a superheated plasma environment where fusion may occur.

Riccardo Betti, a professor at the University of Rochester and expert in laser fusion, said an announcement that net energy had been gained in a fusion reaction would be significant. But he said there’s a long road ahead before the result generates sustainable electricity.

He likened the breakthrough to when humans first learned that refining oil into gasoline and igniting it could produce an explosion.

“You still don’t have the engine and you still don’t have the tires,” Betti said. “You can’t say that you have a car.”

The net energy gain achievement applied to the fusion reaction itself, not the total amount of power it took to operate the lasers and run the project. For fusion to be viable, it will need to produce significantly more power and for longer.

It is incredibly difficult to control the physics of stars. Whyte said it has been challenging to reach this point because the fuel has to be hotter than the center of the sun. The fuel does not want to stay hot — it wants to leak out and get cold. Containing it is an incredible challenge, he said.

Net energy gain isn’t a huge surprise from the California lab because of progress it had already made, according to Jeremy Chittenden, a professor at Imperial College in London specializing in plasma physics.

“That doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a significant milestone,” he said.

It takes enormous resources and effort to advance fusion research. One approach turns hydrogen into plasma, an electrically charged gas, which is then controlled by humongous magnets. This method is being explored in France in a collaboration among 35 countries called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor as well as by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a private company.

Last year the teams working on those projects in two continents announced significant advancements in the vital magnets needed for their work

___

Mathew Daly reported from Washington. Maddie Burakoff reported from New York, Michael Phillis from St. Louis and Jennifer McDermott from Providence, R.I.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Years late and billions over budget, NASA’s new moon rocket makes its debut next week in a high-stakes test flight before astronauts get on top.

The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket will attempt to send an empty crew capsule into a far-flung lunar orbit, 50 years after NASA’s famed Apollo moonshots.

If all goes well, astronauts could strap in as soon as 2024 for a lap around the moon, with NASA aiming to land two people on the lunar surface by the end of 2025.

Liftoff is set for Monday morning from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

The six-week test flight is risky and could be cut short if something fails, NASA officials warn.

“We’re going to stress it and test it. We’re going make it do things that we would never do with a crew on it in order to try to make it as safe as possible,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The retired founder of George Washington University’s space policy institute said a lot is riding on this trial run. Spiraling costs and long gaps between missions will make for a tough comeback if things go south, he noted.

“It is supposed to be the first step in a sustained program of human exploration of the moon, Mars, and beyond,” said John Logsdon. “Will the United States have the will to push forward in the face of a major malfunction?”

The price tag for this single mission: more than $4 billion. Add everything up since the program’s inception a decade ago until a 2025 lunar landing, and there’s even more sticker shock: $93 billion.

Here’s a rundown of the first flight of the Artemis program, named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister.

ROCKET POWER

The new rocket is shorter and slimmer than the Saturn V rockets that hurled 24 Apollo astronauts to the moon a half-century ago. But it’s mightier, packing 8.8 million pounds (4 million kilograms) of thrust. It’s called the Space Launch System rocket, SLS for short, but a less clunky name is under discussion, according to Nelson. Unlike the streamlined Saturn V, the new rocket has a pair of strap-on boosters refashioned from NASA’s space shuttles. The boosters will peel away after two minutes, just like the shuttle boosters did, but won’t be fished from the Atlantic for reuse. The core stage will keep firing before separating and crashing into the Pacific in pieces. Two hours after liftoff, an upper stage will send the capsule, Orion, racing toward the moon.

MOONSHIP

NASA’s high-tech, automated Orion capsule is named after the constellation, among the night sky’s brightest. At 11 feet (3 meters) tall, it’s roomier than Apollo’s capsule, seating four astronauts instead of three. For this test flight, a full-size dummy in an orange flight suit will occupy the commander’s seat, rigged with vibration and acceleration sensors. Two other mannequins made of material simulating human tissue — heads and female torsos, but no limbs — will measure cosmic radiation, one of the biggest risks of spaceflight. One torso is testing a protective vest from Israel. Unlike the rocket, Orion has launched before, making two laps around Earth in 2014. This time, the European Space Agency’s service module will be attached for propulsion and solar power via four wings.

FLIGHT PLAN

Orion’s flight is supposed to last six weeks from its Florida liftoff to Pacific splashdown, twice as long as astronaut trips in order to tax the systems. It will take nearly a week to reach the moon, 240,000 miles (386,000 kilometers) away. After whipping closely around the moon, the capsule will enter a distant orbit with a far point of 38,000 miles (61,000 kilometers). That will put Orion 280,000 miles (450,000 kilometers) from Earth, farther than Apollo. The big test comes at mission’s end, as Orion hits the atmosphere at 25,000 mph (40,000 kph) on its way to a splashdown in the Pacific. The heat shield uses the same material as the Apollo capsules to withstand reentry temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,750 degrees Celsius). But the advanced design anticipates the faster, hotter returns by future Mars crews.

HITCHHIKERS

Besides three test dummies, the flight has a slew of stowaways for deep space research. Ten shoebox-size satellites will pop off once Orion is hurtling toward the moon. The problem is these so-called CubeSats were installed in the rocket a year ago, and the batteries for half of them couldn’t be recharged as the launch kept getting delayed. NASA expects some to fail, given the low-cost, high-risk nature of these mini satellites. The radiation-measuring CubeSats should be OK. Also in the clear: a solar sail demo targeting an asteroid. In a back-to-the-future salute, Orion will carry a few slivers of moon rocks collected by Apollo 11′s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969, and a bolt from one of their rocket engines, salvaged from the sea a decade ago. Aldrin isn’t attending the launch, according to NASA, but three of his former colleagues will be there: Apollo 7′s Walter Cunningham, Apollo 10′s Tom Stafford and Apollo 17′s Harrison Schmitt, the next-to-last man to walk on the moon.

APOLLO VS. ARTEMIS

More than 50 years later, Apollo still stands as NASA’s greatest achievement. Using 1960s technology, NASA took just eight years to go from launching its first astronaut, Alan Shepard, and landing Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon. By contrast, Artemis already has dragged on for more than a decade, despite building on the short-lived moon exploration program Constellation. Twelve Apollo astronauts walked on the moon from 1969 through 1972, staying no longer than three days at a time. For Artemis, NASA will be drawing from a diverse astronaut pool currently numbering 42 and is extending the time crews will spend on the moon to at least a week. The goal is to create a long-term lunar presence that will grease the skids for sending people to Mars. NASA’s Nelson, promises to announce the first Artemis moon crews once Orion is back on Earth.

WHAT’S NEXT

There’s a lot more to be done before astronauts step on the moon again. A second test flight will send four astronauts around the moon and back, perhaps as early as 2024. A year or so later, NASA aims to send another four up, with two of them touching down at the lunar south pole. Orion doesn’t come with its own lunar lander like the Apollo spacecraft did, so NASA has hired Elon Musk’s SpaceX to provide its Starship spacecraft for the first Artemis moon landing. Two other private companies are developing moonwalking suits. The sci-fi-looking Starship would link up with Orion at the moon and take a pair of astronauts to the surface and back to the capsule for the ride home. So far, Starship has only soared six miles (10 kilometers). Musk wants to launch Starship around Earth on SpaceX’s Super Heavy Booster before attempting a moon landing without a crew. One hitch: Starship will need a fill-up at an Earth-orbiting fuel depot, before heading to the moon.

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GENEVA (AP) — The physics lab that’s home to the world’s largest atom smasher announced on Tuesday the observation of three new “exotic particles” that could provide clues about the force that binds subatomic particles together.

The observation of a new type of pentaquark and the first duo of tetraquarks at CERN, the Geneva-area home to the Large Hadron Collider, offers a new angle to assess the “strong force” that holds together the nuclei of atoms.

Most exotic hadrons, which are subatomic particles, are made up of two or three elemental particles known as quarks. The strong force is one of four forces known in the universe, along with the “weak force” — which applies to the decay of particles — as well as the electromagnetic force and gravity.

The announcement comes amid a flurry of activity this week at CERN: Also Tuesday, the LHC’s underground ring of superconducting magnets that propel infinitesimal particles along a 27-kilometer (about 17-mile) circuit and at near light speed, began smashing them together again. Data from the collisions is snapped up by high-tech detectors along the circular path.

The so-called “Run 3” of collisions, ending a three-year pause for maintenance and other checks, is operating at an unprecedented energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, which will offer the prospect of new discoveries in particle physics.

CERN scientists hailed a smooth start to what is expected to be nearly four years of operation in “Run 3” — the third time the LHC has carried out collisions since its debut in 2008.

A day earlier, CERN celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the confirmation of the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that has a central place in the so-called Standard Model that explains the basics of particle physics.

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CBU | Contributed

Students, families and faculty gathered in the Dennis and Carol Troesh Engineering Building at California Baptist University on April 22 to celebrate another year of innovation.

Students in the Gordon and Jill Bourns College of Engineering presented their projects from the year as part of the Engineering Design Showcase. The event featured senior capstone projects, junior design projects and a robotics competition consisting of teams comprised of first-year engineering students.

Dr. Mark Gordon, associate professor of mechanical engineering, said this event is important because it allows students to share their work with others.

“We feel it is important for students to be able to show what they have done,” Gordon said. “It is one thing to get to the end of a course and hand something in but to be able to show it to other people is a valuable thing for them. It gives them extra motivation and also provides a more satisfying experience.”

Gordon also emphasized that the design showcase presents first-year students with the opportunity to interact with juniors and seniors to gain a better understanding of what field of engineering they might want to pursue.

“We find it to be valuable for our first-year students because we have a lot of types of engineering, so one of the things we want them to do is find which type of engineering is right for them,” Gordon said. “This is an opportunity to go around and see what the juniors and seniors are doing and see which type of engineering they might want to go into.”

Celise Vaughan, a mechanical engineering junior, shared about her team’s junior design project, which was a solar windmill design. The goal of the design was to create a product that could produce both solar and wind energy since neither form of energy is consistent. She enjoyed sharing her work at the showcase, especially after facing several obstacles with parts failing during the design process.

“It’s nice having a finished product,” Vaughan said. “It really is a struggle, especially near the end rushing to get everything done, especially when you hit bumps in the road. It’s nice to be proud of something.”

Jonathan Samonte, a mechanical engineering senior, and his team showcased their capstone project—a miniature, wearable heating and cooling device, which uses ceramic tiles to either heat or cool the user. He said he appreciated the opportunity to share the project he and his teammates had worked on all year.

“There is a sense of finality about it,” Samonte said. “You get to the end of the project and think ‘Wow, that’s a whole year’s worth of effort put into a project.’ Now, we actually get to show people what we were doing for an entire year.”

First-year engineering teams participated in a competition in which robots they designed collected data remotely via sensors. The robots used the information to collect orbs based on amount and color. The robots were judged based on accuracy, the energy spent, the cost and the time taken to complete the task.

Members of the winning team, 8-Bit Butler, said they spent weeks perfecting the design and drawings and building their robots for the competition.

“A lot of it was testing and trying to see if our designs were reliable and if they could withstand running for repetitive times and putting stress on them,” said Joshua Miller, an electrical and computer engineering freshman.

The team encountered some major obstacles, including the challenge of having to redesign and rebuild one of their robots five hours before the competition began. However, the team enjoyed the collaboration throughout the process.

“My personal favorite thing is the team collaboration,” said Bryan Mayen, a mechanical engineering freshman. “Since the beginning, we were all so determined to get that main master plan going. We just let our hearts go toward building these things. That’s what matters—being a team and having good team collaboration.”

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California’s economy is diverse, but its greatest asset is technology, with much of the world viewing the state – and the Bay Area in particular – as the global center of innovation. However, there are growing concerns with a range of issues that could erode California’s technology leadership.

Tech accounts for nearly one-fifth of the economic value produced in the state. The $520 billion that it contributes represents more than a quarter of all U.S. tech output – more than the next four states combined.

California leads the nation in tech businesses and dominates the IPO pipeline with 56% of the nation’s private companies valued at more than $1 billion. Silicon Valley ranks as the world’s No. 1 startup ecosystem , followed by Los Angeles at No. 6 and San Diego at No. 21.

This remarkable level of activity is built on a foundation of talent, scientific research, investment and a business culture that reaches high, embraces risk and encourages collaboration. Universities play a key role. The University of California is the top research institution in the world for U.S. patent generation . The state attracts nearly $3 of every $10 in federal research investment nationwide. Nearly half of all venture capital in the United States is invested in California, and more than a third in the Bay Area.

As it emerges from the pandemic, California’s strength in science and technology is undiminished. That’s good news, but it’s not the whole story. Science and technology leaders are raising several issues that over time could pose problems for California’s technology leadership and the jobs, tax and other benefits it delivers. Most stem from quality-of-life concerns that those who live here, and talented people who want to come here, increasingly face.

In one of a series of studies commissioned by the California 100 Initiative, the “ Future of Advanced Technology and Basic Research ” outlines competing scenarios for the state’s technology future and offers policy prescriptions for how California can address key issues.

Business concerns include taxes and regulations that increase costs and make it hard to grow companies in-state. The biggest worry, though, is talent. Its talented workforce is California’s greatest asset in the global competition for technology leadership and is at the heart of its ability to innovate. As long as California can attract and retain that talent its leadership will continue. But can it?

There are issues at several levels. California draws deeply on its universities for talent, but since 2000 public investment in the University of California has fallen by nearly half. California’s other main source of technology talent, immigration, is also vulnerable.

High-skilled immigrants face systemic visa and green card barriers, limiting access to the world’s most creative minds. This matters because nearly half of tech companies in Silicon Valley are founded by immigrants. Companies such as Google, Tesla, Stripe and Uber, all with immigrant entrepreneur founders, support tens of thousands of jobs.

Housing is the biggest challenge. The median sales price of a single-family home in California tops $800,000. In the Bay Area it’s $1.4 million. For decades cities have failed to allow housing to be built, creating a deficit that has worsened as the technology economy has grown.

Rental rates in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland are among the highest in the country. The issue is this: with remote work, more technology workers have a choice of where to live and many are choosing states such as Texas, Colorado, Arizona or Idaho, where paychecks go farther and families can afford homes. Housing costs also impact young scientists as they’re choosing where to start their careers. Add in the bad air from endemic wildfires and California’s vaunted quality of life, long an asset, becomes a negative.

Or at least it might if we do nothing. California needs to address its business climate issues, support its public universities, include more women and minorities in its innovation economy, keep the door open to global talent, address climate change and its impacts, and ensure that affordable housing is available for current and future Californians. California’s science and technology assets are unique, but it would be a mistake to take today’s technology-based prosperity for granted.

Sean Randolph | Contributed

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By his Executive Order and an associated Action Plan, Biden’s administration calls for 50% of all new vehicles sold in America by 2030 to be EVs. That means an additional 50 million new EVs on the road in the next nine years, all in an effort to lower Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, namely CO2.

On December 13, 2021, the administration announced its plan to spend $7.5 billion to construct 500,000 EV charging stations throughout the US. The plan’s funding comes from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure & Jobs Act Biden signed on November 15, 2021.

Then, on January 20, President Biden signed Executive Order 13990—Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis. This EO includes a wide range of environmental policies including vehicle fuel economy standards. The scariest of those policies is a set of new regulations from the EPA called SAFE, which stands for The Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Final Rule for Model Years 2021-2026:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalize updated Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and greenhouse gas emissions standards for passenger cars and light trucks and establish new standards, covering model years 2021 through 2026.

Fun Fact: These standards, imposed on car manufacturers, set the minimum average fuel economy limit (i.e., 40 miles per gallon) for their entire fleet of vehicles. A gas-powered fleet alone cannot meet these standards. Instead, car companies must sell more EVs to increase their fleet-wide average fuel economy. One way is to hawk EVs as more fuel-efficient.

On the EPA-mandated sticker on new EVs, you’ll see a fuel economy designation called MPGe (Miles Per Gallon equivalent). It’s usually greater than 100, making unwary consumers believe the vehicle is several times more fuel-efficient than a comparable gas guzzler. However, EVs are not really several times more fuel-efficient (but that’s a topic for another day).

Americans bought or leased about 15 million new cars and light trucks in 2021 and that number is forecasted to grow to 17 million by 2030. Assuming a ramp-up in EV sales from 2.3 million in 2021 to 8.5 million in 2030 (50% of 17 million), there would be 50 million more new EVs plugged into our electrical grid. The big question, then, is where vast amounts of so-called “clean energy” come from to charge all those EVs and what will it cost consumers.

Fun Fact: The current average price of electricity that residential consumers pay is $.14 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), although it varies from $.09 to $.23 per kWh based upon local supply and demand. Imagine if the price of electricity in your area increased by 50%. Or worse, imagine there is no electricity to heat and cool your home or…charge your brand-new EV.

Most major auto manufacturers (and a few trendy new ones) are rushing to market with all-electric vehicles. However, they are not spending billions on EV development because of consumer demand. Instead, onerous CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) and EPA imposed GHG emission standards force them into the EV market. The NHTSA (National Highway Transportation Safety Administration) latest proposed CAFE standards directly respond to Biden’s Executive Order 13990 and call for a whopping 8% per year increase (up from the current 1.5% per year) in average fleet fuel economy from 2024 to 2026. That’s an average increase of 12 miles per gallon above the 2021 standard. Eventually, gas-powered vehicles alone won’t be able to meet these standards, making EV’s the only real alternative.

In the next few years, Biden’s administration will allocate $5.0 billion to individual states and award another $2.5 billion to selected contractors to facilitate installing 500,000 new charging stations. Simultaneously, the administration will use various regulatory means—e.g., CAFE standards, GHG standards, and EV tax credits—to put 50 million new EVs onto the road by 2030. Unfortunately, America won’t have the electricity needed to charge those EVs unless new and expanded fossil fuel-based power plants are built now.

The average EV consumes over 25 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electrical power to go 100 miles or 3,000 kWh to go 12,000 miles per year. That means an additional 150 billion kWh of electricity to charge 50 million new EVs. In 2020, total U.S. retail electricity sales to end-use customers were about 3.7 trillion kWh (3,700 billion kWh). An additional 150 billion kWh would be a 4% increase in total demand over the next nine years—just to charge new EVs!

America Electric Power Grid is already strained in many parts of the country. In 2020, our electric power generation makeup was 40% natural gas, 19% coal, 20% nuclear, 8% wind, 7% hydro, 2% solar, and 4% other fuel sources, meaning roughly 60% of our electricity comes from fossil fuels and another 27% comes from nuclear and hydroelectric power plants. The administration doesn’t plan to build new nuclear or hydroelectric plants. Fun Fact: America imports 47 billion kWh each year from Canada to meet peak demand. America’s largest natural gas-powered plants, like those in Gila Bend, Arizona, can generate 2.2 GW, and the largest coal-powered plants, like the Robert Sherer power plant in Georgia, can generate 3.5 GW of continuous electric power, at full capacity. But because electricity can’t be stored and, because the demand fluctuates dramatically with the weather and the time of day, power plants operate at only about 40% of their maximum output capacity, on average. Thus, a 2.2 GW plant operating at 40% capacity generates about 7.7 billion kWh of useable electricity in one year (2.2 GW x 40% x 8760 hours/year).

Wind and solar power will continue to grow but such power plants are not nearly large enough to provide the continuous power needed to meet the demand of 50 million additional EVs. For perspective, the capacity of America’s largest wind farm, Alta Wind Energy of California, is 1.5 gigawatts (GW) and the capacity of America’s largest solar farm, Solar Star of California, is .6 GW. Worse, they only generate electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines. Therefore, wind farms typically operate at less than 50% capacity and solar farms typically operate at only 25% of capacity A huge 1.5 GW wind farm (32,000 acres) operating at 50% capacity will generate about 6.6 billion kWh of useable electricity per year (1.5 GW x 50% x 8760 hrs./yr) and a huge .6 GW solar farm will only generate about 1.3 billion kWh per year (.6 GW x 25% x 8760).

Here’s the bottom line: There isn’t nearly enough electrical power available or in the pipeline to fuel 50 million new EVs by 2030. That would require an additional 150 billion kWh’s per year of deliverable electricity. Even the largest power plants only deliver about 8 billion kWh’s per year.

To achieve the administration’s climate change policy goals for EVs, America must build and commission about 20 large new fossil fuel-powered plants or several dozen large new wind and solar farms. That’s impossible by 2030 because large power plants take years to plan, build and bring online. Which means 2030 will either collapse the energy grid or result in a lot of cars that won’t go.

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Jerry Korth is a seasoned entrepreneur and inventor having founded several small high-tech businesses. He is currently working on a green energy project to convert waste motor oil into low sulphur marine diesel fuel.

Jerry Korth | Contributed

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VA encourages researchers, organizations and individual technology developers to apply for SAHAT grant funding via Grants.gov. by 11:59 p.m., ET, March. 11, to develop specially adapted housing assistive technologies that will improve the livability of Veterans’ adapted residences.

VA issues the Notice of Funding Opportunity in the Federal Register to foster competition among technology developers, funding innovation that will best serve the needs of certain seriously disabled service members and Veterans.  

Since 2016, when VA awarded its first SAHAT grant, VA has awarded 22 grants. To date, these grants have resulted in the introduction of new products to the accessibility industry used to improve the lives of Veterans, including:

• AI-powered mobile scanner and reader enabling blind and visually impaired users to read text independently.
• Smart guidance: a customized disability-adapted bathroom module designed to bring users closer to independent living by providing a safer bathroom environment and permitting home care.
• Robotic overbed table for beds, recliners and wheelchairs allowing users to independently deploy, position and store mobile devices using accessible switches or a remote from a bed or chair.

“Awarding up to $200,000 per grant to develop technology will ultimately help make homes more livable for seriously disabled service members and Veterans,” said Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Benefits Mike Frueh. “In addition to the SAHAT program, VA also administers Specially Adapted Housing grants to eligible service members and Veterans with certain serious service-connected disabilities to purchase or adapt a home that suits their individual needs.”

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