Monthly Archives: February 2017

Various companies may be working on self-driving cars, but NASA is about to launch technology to the International Space Station that could bring the agency closer to enabling rendezvous with a spacecraft without human intervention.

A test module, dubbed Raven, will help NASA autonomously rendezvous with and dock with satellites traveling through space at more than 16,000 mph.

Two spacecraft autonomously rendezvousing is crucial for many future NASA missions and Raven is maturing this never-before-attempted technology, said Ben Reed, a deputy division director with NASA, in a statement.

The module, which is about the size of a microwave oven, will be attached to the outside of the space station where it will use sensors and algorithms to test technologies needed to handle a space rendezvous without the help of humans. The module is expected to work for about two years,

NASA needs to have refueling and maintenance spaceships able to rendezvous and dock with satellites in order to service them.Thats a problem since 99% of all satellites working in space were not designed with this capability, according to NASA.

Because of time delays, its difficult to send rendezvous commands from Earth to satellites when they are running out of fuel.

The Raven test module is the first step in NASA's effort to develop ways for spacecraft to rendezvous in space without human involvement.

It would be easier and more efficient to send robotic-servicing satellites to refuel other satellites, which can weigh several tons, and perform any needed repairs.

It also means satellites would be able to work far longer rather than becoming space junk, while companies and the government carry the expense of sending up new satellites.

However, NASA notes that this is a tricky job.

Since the satellites largely are not built for rendezvous, robotic-servicing satellites would need to use machine learning and sensors to find, approach, match speed with and grab onto targets.

The Raven module is set to be launched on the 10th SpaceX commercial resupply mission, which is scheduled for Saturday.

The equipment will be aboard SpaceXs Dragon spacecraft, which will ride a Falcon 9 rocket as it lifts off from NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Raven is scheduled to be unpacked from the Dragon spacecraft by the space stations Dextre robotic arm five days after it reaches the orbiter.

Dextre, a two-armed, Canadian-built robot that works on the outside of the station, will attach the module to a payload platform on the outside of the orbiter.

From its perch outside the space station, Raven will capture and analyze data about approaching and departing spacecraft. It will use sensors and machine-vision algorithms, which would enable a machine to "see," to gauge the distance and speed of the spacecraft it's tracking.

Its processor also will send commands to the Ravens navigation system so it remains trained on the object it is tracking.

Engineers on the ground will keep track of Ravens progress and adjust the device to increase its efficiency and accuracy.

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NASA at work on autonomous space rendezvous technology - Computerworld

Can Technology Really Solve China's Healthcare Crisis? Forbes Technology isn't the solution to every problem; in fact, in many situations it can actually make things worse. Nowhere is this tension between technology's promise and its unfulfilled potential more obvious than in China's healthcare economy. This is ...

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Can Technology Really Solve China's Healthcare Crisis? - Forbes

As flying metal birds performing acrobatics in the sky wowed spectators at Aero India 2017, which opened today at the Yelahanka Air Force Station in Bengaluru, audiences in another part of the city were enthralled as they listened spellbound to Bibop G. Gresta talk about his Hyperloop concept at the Make in India-Karnataka conference.

Gresta, whileexplaining the work his Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc., the company inspired by Elon Musk, was doing, created quite a buzz among the audiences when he told them with the Hyperloop technology, people from Bengaluru would be able to get to Mysuru, a distance of 140 km, in 20 minutes flat.

Gresta is the founder and chairman of HTT, a company centred on and taking forward the Hyperloop concept that Musk inspired. He was speaking at a panel discussion on automobile and auto components at the conference.

Hyperloop is a technology where people are transported at 760 miles per hour (1,216 km per hour), or almost the speed of sound, in a pod that travels through a vacuum tube. This technology costs one-fourth that of a high-speed rail link and a fraction of the cost of a magnetic levitation transport system or maglev, which is a showpiece German technology now available in China too.

With every hour of work, the company is closer to building the technology, Gresta announced.

Surprisingly, given the sheer scope of the idea HTT is working on, the company works without a distinct structure. It crowdsources work, and the contributors get to own one stock of the company for every hour of work put in. Said Gresta,

:There are 800 scientists working on the project from across 42 countries, and when each of them puts in 10 hours of work a week, they are given ten stocks in the company that is a stock for per hours work. Its the biggest crowdsourced project in the world."

Gresta said that he was trying to entice governments across the globe to build the Hyperloop, and hinted that in a couple of weeks, there could be an important announcement concerning India.

He has been canvassing with the Karnataka government and will next go to Jharkhand, where the Momentum of Jharkhand, an investors meet, is being held on February 16-17.

Hyperloop is being touted as the next big advancement in transportation, where people can be transported in pods at the speed of sound the speed matches that of a passenger plane, but the pod will move safely inside a vacuum tube built on the ground.

Gresta also said that the Hyperloop technology produces 30 percent more energy than it consumes, which means that it produces a usable surplus that can be transferred to other users.

But why do we need Hyperloop? You guys think there is a traffic jam in Bengaluru? This is nothing compared to Indonesia and China, where there are ninja traffic jams, he said, coining his own word for it. Plus, there is also pollution due to the high number of private vehicles, making it difficult to breathe in large cities such as Beijing.

With every hour we spend in a traffic jam, we live that much less, he said rather dramatically, pushing for his yet-to-be-demonstrated technology.

He informed that Hyperloop was not new. According to him, in the early 1900s, a tunnel had been built under the New York subway, but the engineers were stopped from going ahead with the experiment as, back then, nothing was allowed to move faster than 100 miles an hour, that too only over ground or on rails. Then came the very expensive magnetic levitation technology, whose cost still hasnt come down.

When Musk first wrote about this technology years ago, it captured the spotlight immediately, inspiring him and his co-founder Dirk Alhborn to work on it.

Karnataka's Industries Commissioner Gaurav Gupta said that such ideas were of great interest to Bengaluru, as this is where the brightest minds and industry come together.

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Is Hyperloop transportation technology coming to India? - YourStory.com

India is one of the best and worst places to launch a tech startup these days, a contradiction epitomized in a recent survey (pdf) of 170 entrepreneurs across 15 industries. Sixty-five percent of those surveyed said India is in the midst of a tech bubble, even as 63% said they were struggling to find funding.

For the past few years, India has been a hotbed of startup activity, even if a good portion of those ventures ultimately dont make it. Between June 2014 and July 2016, more than 2,280 Indian startups began operations; nearly 1,000 of them shuttered. While fail is less of a dirty word in tech than elsewhere, Indian entrepreneurs cite a range of factors in their struggle to find footing, including a lack of funding, lack of innovation, and an oversaturated marketplace. Most of the entrepreneurs surveyed by InnoVen Capital, an Asian venture-lending firm, said that finding cash was their biggest barrier to growth.

[Sixty-three percent] of respondents who attempted to fundraise in 2016 did not have a favorable experience, reads the companys February 2017 Startup Outlook report. The average startup had to pitch to more than six investors before securing funding.

(Only 18% of the companies whose leaders participated in the survey were backed by venture capital; a quarter were funded by angel investors and nearly half were self-funded.)

Among other obstacles, e-commerce and healthcare startups rated revenue growth as a top business challenge, while enterprise startups cited customer acquisition and customer churn. Artificial-intelligence startups cited trouble discovering and hiring talent. Many of those surveyed also called for India itself to foster a more entrepreneurial environment by, for example, increasing investment in digital infrastructure, allowing for more foreign investments, creating stronger intellectual property laws and making updates to public education.

The Indian government has made some strides on this front, including Startup India a plan to reduce taxes and bureaucracy, create incubators and sources of funding, and introduce patent reformsand Digital India, a campaign to improve online infrastructure and internet connectivity.

In the InnoVen Capital survey, fintech CEOs noted their appreciation for policies promoting Digital Payment [and] the Unified Payments Interface, and entrepreneurs in the e-commerce, consumer, and logistics sectors rated the Goods and Services Taxit proposes to offers relief from Indias cascading tax system by subbing in a simplified tax structureas the most helpful government initiative of 2016. One in five entrepreneurs called for more tax-policy improvements this year.

Crowding is a different beast. Although entrepreneurs listed having a robust business model as the most important facet of improving investor sentiment this year, more than 20% of them also said that more exits would help. Seventy percent said they were open to an exit, and nearly two-thirds rated an initial public offering as the most preferred route.

While Indias entrepreneurs are finding inspiration from withindemonetization has done wonders for digital payments startup Paytmforeign tech majors like Google, Airbnb, Amazon, and Uber are still among [at least some] Indian entrepreneurs favorites. Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also has lots of fans in the country.

Challenges or no, 94% of survey respondents said they would be looking to fundraise in 2017some $800 million between them. But theyll have to hurry: Nearly 20% believe that tech bubble is about to burst.

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Even Indian technology entrepreneurs think they are living in a bubble - Quartz

Counting people or tallyingtrees, when it comes to federal surveys, the biggest hurdles are managementand technology.

Speaking at the Feb. 13 Esri FedGIS Conference in Washington, D.C., officials with the Census Bureau and Forest Service said when it comes to fulfilling their missions, its about more than just getting good data.

Greg Reams, national program manager for the Forest Services Forest Inventory and Analysis, said what his office has learned is to pay regular visits to its CIO and contracting officers if it needs to get something done.

Hiring freeze: Some answers, some questions

Measuring soil and vegetation, counting privately owned forests, and watching for insects and disease, all fall under the Forest Services purview.

All the Cs and all the Os, the CIOs, the CFOs, all those kind of things, thats actually the hardest thing to do, Reams said, when asked about the biggest challenges for his line of work. It has to do with the administrative processes within agencies. So to get the permissions, its always a good idea to have a good idea of what youre trying to do the next two years, and work on those permissions with all the people that need to sign off on it.

For the Census Department, technology and congressional support are the challenges its facing today.

You only get one shot at a census, saidTom Fitzwater, who works in the Census Bureaus population division as a geographer, with a focus on international populations.

Theres a high risk of failure if youre adopting new technology, and especially going back to the lower-middle income national statistical office, this is going to be for the 2020 round of censuses the first time that many of these statistical offices have tried to conduct a completely digital census, or a census that has a very light paper trail. There are all of these risks that are associated with new technologies that introduce a lot of challenges for statistical offices.

At nearly $13 billion, the2010 Censuswas the most expensive countin U.S. history, and it cost the bureau $100 per household. The bureau requested $1.6 billion for fiscal 2017, and $778.3 million for the 2020 census.

To help cut costs on the upcoming census, the bureau is turning to the internet, rather than paper.

Unlike the 2010 census, which sent out enumerators the people whowill be out in the field actually conducting the survey with paper maps, the coming 2020 census, will use smartphones and tablets, saidDierdre Bishop, chief of the bureaus geography division.

Address listers and enumerators will be able to see case assignments on the screens, and have access not only to bureau maps, but imagery to help them get to where theyre going.

Bishop said Census expects about 143 million housing units in the U.S. by the time of the 2020 count.

Bishop said in 2010, the bureau hired more than 150,000 address listers to go around every block, validating the bureaus list of households.

It was one of the most laborious and expensive operations of the 2010 census, Bishop said.

Our goal is to count everyone once, only once, and in the right place, Bishop said. And in order to do that, we have to make sure that we have a very strong geographic foundation, we have to have a good address list.

The way the Census Bureau is balancing a good address list and its budget is by working with local and state agencies to get their address information, along with the Postal Service, and third parties for commercial data, Bishop said.

Census is also doing in-office canvassing using interactive review and a Block Assessment, Research and Classification Application, which was developed in-house.

This will allow us to focus field work, our most expensiveefforts, in only the areas where its absolutely necessary, where we cant find information through technology, Bishop said.

The application works by comparing satellite imagery from 2009, with very recent, current imagery, Bishop said. An analyst looks at a particular block and can label it stable, or unchanged. If they do see a change, they can drop a pin, which triggers a review by a more experienced analyst using additional resources to look at what has changed between the two images.

There is still 100 percent review of every census block, Bishop said. The interactive review phase for this address canvassing started in October 2015, Bishop said, with a goal ofcompleting half of all blocks in the nation by the end of fiscal 2016. Not only did Census meet that goal, it has already completed an additional 30 percent of block reviews for 2017.

Of the blocks reviewed, about 72 percent have no change from 2009, while about 17 percent are in review. Around 11 percent of blocks are on hold for better imagery, Bishop said. And the online reviews online take 62 seconds, Bishop said, compared to the 2.5 hours for in-person reviews of the previous census.

Bishop also pointed out that a decennial census is the largest peacetime federal mobilization.

As we look to the 2020 Census, because this is such a monumental task, I think right now one of our biggest challenges is getting congressional support and ensuring we have good funding to support the census, Bishop said. Then getting the right people in the door, to make sure that we get the job done on schedule.

Getting that support might notbe easy. In late 2016, members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform expressed their concern for the bureau meeting its deadlines, protecting citizens personally identifiable information, and delivering on new technology.

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Statistical agencies looking to C-suite, new digital tools to address biggest challenges - FederalNewsRadio.com