Monthly Archives: March 2020

SiLC was founded in 2018 by silicon photonics Industry veterans. Founder and CEO Mehdi Asghari was part of the executive team that led Bookham to its IPO in 2000 and later joined the leadership team at Kotura, which was acquired by Mellanox in 2013. SiLC has developed a significant body of intellectual property, as well as a proprietary process for manufacturing high-performance optical components at large scale.

"Integrating all essential functions necessary to build an FMCW chip on a cost-effective silicon platform represents the holy grail of LiDAR," said Daniel Docter, Managing Director, Dell Technologies Capital. "SiLC's team has over twenty years of experience and a proven track record commercializing silicon photonics solutions. After looking at more than 30 different LiDAR companies, we found SiLC to be the only company that has a viable approach for large-scale adoption of LiDAR in automotive and industrial robotics."

The announcement follows a successful showing at CES 2020, where SiLC demonstrated the industry's first fully-integrated FMCW chip and an unprecedented long-range LiDAR resolution. Utilizing its second-generation FMCW silicon photonics 4D+ Vision Chip to generate scans, SiLC was able to detect objects smaller than one and a half inches at a range of nearly 200 meters, translating to an effective resolution of around 0.01 degrees vertically and horizontally.This level of performance capability can enable a vehicle traveling at highway speed to stop or avoid objects at more than 200 meters range, a critical aspect of autonomous vehicle navigation and safety.

"This is my third startup and by far the most exciting, both at a technology level and the size of the markets it addresses. We believe we have an opportunity to transform several industries," said Mehdi Asghari, founder and CEO, SiLC. "Our 4D+ Vision Chip technology will not only make LiDAR a commercial reality but will also enable applications ranging from robotics to AR/VR to biometric scanning."

SiLC's advanced production-ready 4D+ Vision Chip exceeds the performance metrics, such as range, resolution, accuracy offered by most LiDARs in a much smaller footprint, while adding critical vector measurements such as velocity, light polarization, and reflectivity.

"SiLC enables a dramatic advancement to 4D imaging and associated LiDAR technology while enabling a much needed cost volume scaling that follows the dynamics of the semiconductor industry," said Liqing Zeng chairman of Decent Capital and co-founder of Tencent Holdings Ltd., one of China's most valuable corporations. "We see incredible growth potential for SiLC, especially considering the experience and track record of the team."

For more information about SiLC visit http://www.silc.com.

About SiLC TechnologiesSiLC Technologies, Inc. is a leading provider of highly integrated FMCW LiDAR solutions, located in Monrovia, Southern California. The company's initial focus is on its integrated 4D+ Vision Chip, which has demonstrated a range of beyond 300 meters and applicable to a wide range of applications. Founded by a group of highly experienced industry veterans with over 20 years of commercial product development and manufacturing heritage, SiLC utilizes a proprietary silicon-based semiconductor fabrication process to manufacture its chips and standard, automated IC style assembly processes, enabling robust, cost-effective and compact solutions. Please visit us at SiLC.com.

About Dell Technologies CapitalDell Technologies Capital is the global venture capital investment arm of Dell Technologies. The investment team backs passionate early stage founders who push the envelope on technology innovation for enterprises. Since inception in 2012, the team has sustained an investment pace of $150 million a year and has invested in more than 100 startups, 40 of which have been acquired and 5 have gone public. Portfolio companies also gain unique access to the go-to-market capabilities of Dell Technologies (Dell, Dell EMC, VMWare, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks). Notable investments include Adallom, Arista Networks, Cylance, Docusign, Graphcore, JFrog, MongoDB, Netskope, Nutanix, RedLock, RiskRecon, TwistLock, Wavefront and Zscaler. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Dell Technologies Capital has offices in Boston, Austin, and Israel. For more information visit http://www.delltechcapital.com.

Media Contacts:Mission Control Communications (mc) for SiLC Technologies, Inc.[emailprotected]

SOURCE SiLC Technologies, Inc.

See the original post here:

SiLC Technologies Raises $12M in Seed Funding to Deliver Long-Range, Single-Chip LiDAR for Autonomous Vehicles, Machine Vision, and Augmented Reality...

A piece of Hilton Head Island history will soon be getting a major upgrade, with a goal of continuing to help save lives. The town is tearing down its last of six original fire stations and will be building a new one in its place.Hilton Head Fire Station 2 has been an icon on the island for 45 years. It is located in Sea Pines off Lighthouse Road. The fire chief for Hilton Head Island Fire Rescue, Brad Tadlock, said the building has undergone several expansions and renovations over the years, and it's time for a new one. The town is committed to upgrading and making the fire stations resilient. When we come back from a storm, we have to be able to operate and get the town back open and operating," said Tadlock.While the new building is under construction, the department's personnel will operate out of a temporary location next to the Sea Pines Resort Fitness Center. It is located in the Shoppes at Sea Pines Center. Tadlock said,"This location will ensure that response times and service delivery standards are maintained to that area of the Island until the project is completed."The town said the old station will be replaced with a new 8,500 square foot fire station that will have sleeping facilities for six firefighters, a weight room, and three bays for fire apparatus and ambulances. Town officials said construction is expected to take one year, depending on weather and other factors. The nearly $3.8 million project is part of the town's capital improvement program. Tadlock said construction will stop during the RBC Heritage Golf Tournament and start back up following the event.Construction is expected to start on the new station next week.

A piece of Hilton Head Island history will soon be getting a major upgrade, with a goal of continuing to help save lives.

The town is tearing down its last of six original fire stations and will be building a new one in its place.

Hilton Head Fire Station 2 has been an icon on the island for 45 years. It is located in Sea Pines off Lighthouse Road. The fire chief for Hilton Head Island Fire Rescue, Brad Tadlock, said the building has undergone several expansions and renovations over the years, and it's time for a new one.

The town is committed to upgrading and making the fire stations resilient. When we come back from a storm, we have to be able to operate and get the town back open and operating," said Tadlock.

While the new building is under construction, the department's personnel will operate out of a temporary location next to the Sea Pines Resort Fitness Center. It is located in the Shoppes at Sea Pines Center.

Tadlock said,"This location will ensure that response times and service delivery standards are maintained to that area of the Island until the project is completed."

The town said the old station will be replaced with a new 8,500 square foot fire station that will have sleeping facilities for six firefighters, a weight room, and three bays for fire apparatus and ambulances.

Town officials said construction is expected to take one year, depending on weather and other factors.

The nearly $3.8 million project is part of the town's capital improvement program.

Tadlock said construction will stop during the RBC Heritage Golf Tournament and start back up following the event.

Construction is expected to start on the new station next week.

See the article here:

Last Hilton Head 'original' fire station being replaced with new facility, technology - WJCL News

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS)

What: Keysight continues to garner industry recognition for the companys advanced solutions. In February 2020, Keysight was honored with the following:

Details of each award are as follows:

Keysight will be honored during the Lightwave event at OFC for the Keysight Technologies N4891A 400GBASE FEC-Aware Receiver Test Solution in the field test equipment category

More information about the Lightwave Innovation Review

Keysight N4891A 400GBASE FEC-aware receiver test solution provides the industrys first forward error correction (FEC) aware compliance testing system for measurement of frame loss ratio in 400G Ethernet links using FEC. It supplies one stressed lane and maintains the proper FEC striped test pattern data, without placing stress on the other lanes.

According to one of the judges: "This is a groundbreaking test platform. Historically, systems which have been able to provide stressed analog characteristics have not contained significant digital content to allow for flexible traffic. This test system arrives at a good time in the industry as more FEC and complex digital markers are being deployed in high-bit-rate optical communications."

About Lightwave

Lightwave delivers content focused on fiber optics and optoelectronics, the technologies that enable the growth, integration and improved performance of voice, data and video communications networks and services. Our experienced editorial team provides trusted technology, application and market insights to corporate executives, department heads, project managers, network engineers and technical managers at equipment suppliers, service providers and major end-user organizations. Our unique ability to inform our audiences business-critical decisions is based in our 35+ year relationship with the entire optical communitytechnology vendors, communications carriers and major enterprisesand our recognition of the interplay among its members.

Story continues

Keysight named a winner of the 2019 infoTECH Spotlight Data Center Excellence Award for Vision X Network Packet Broker

More information about the InfoTECH Spotlight Data Center Awards

Keysights Vision X network packet broker is designed with a modular approach that enables customers to select different functions, capabilities and speeds as their data center evolves. Network operations teams can upgrade speeds and bandwidth of their visibility solution along with their monitoring and security tool capabilities.

The infoTECH Spotlight Data Center Excellence Award recognizes the most innovative and enterprising data center vendors who offer infrastructure or software, servers or cooling systems, cabling or management applications.

"Once again, the winners of the infoTECH Spotlight 2019 Data Center Excellence Award represent the most innovative and forward-looking companies in this crowded space," said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC (News - Alert). "Data centers are critical to the success of any businesses today. Small or large, every company relies on data centers to host their critical applications and data. The award recipients are leaders within this space, and we look forward to seeing their excellence and innovation in 2020 and beyond."

About infoTECH Spotlight

infoTECH Spotlight delivers daily content focused on information technology. Visitors find free industry news, communities, channels, blogs, feature articles, videos, whitepapers and other resources. The site keeps readers informed about developments across topics including software, hardware, security and networking. infoTECH Spotlight is powered by TMCnet, one of the leading communications and technology site in the world.

Keysight has been named a winner, Next Gen, Network Security and Management in the Cyber Defense InfoSec Awards

More information about the Cyber Defense InfoSec Awards

For more than 20 years, TMC has been honoring technology companies with awards in various categories. These awards are regarded as some of the most prestigious and respected honors in the communications and technology sector worldwide. Winners represent prominent players in the market who consistently demonstrate the advancement of technologies. Each recipient is a verifiable leader in the marketplace.

"Keysight embodies three major features the judges look for to become winners: understanding tomorrows threats, today, providing a cost-effective solution and innovating in unexpected ways that can help stop the next breach," said Gary S. Miliefsky, publisher of Cyber Defense Magazine.

About Cyber Defense Magazine

With over 5 Million monthly readers and growing, and over 17,000 pages of searchable online infosec content, Cyber Defense Magazine is a premier source of IT Security information. It is managed and published by and for ethical, honest, passionate information security professionals. Its mission is to share cutting-edge knowledge, real-world stories and awards on the best ideas, products and services in the information technology industry.

About Keysight Technologies

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS) is a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world. Keysight's solutions optimize networks and bring electronic products to market faster and at a lower cost with offerings from design simulation, to prototype validation, to manufacturing test, to optimization in networks and cloud environments. Customers span the worldwide communications ecosystem, aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, semiconductor and general electronics end markets. Keysight generated revenues of $4.3B in fiscal year 2019. More information is available at http://www.keysight.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200305005584/en/

Contacts

Beth Hespe, Americas and Europe+1 609-994-7442beth.hespe@keysight.com

Read more from the original source:

Keysight Technologies Continues to Garner Industry Recognition for Advanced Solutions with Three New Awards - Yahoo Finance

From Brexit to Trump: technology, particularly social media, is in the firing line when it comes to the perceived departure from political norms. But there is much more to it than that, according to new research from think tank Chatham House.

Ten years ago, the media bubble was flush with the notion that the burgeoning popularity of social media and smartphones was good for democracy. "The role of social media in the Arab Spring... seemed to confirm this view of digital technology as a liberating force," the report, titled "The Future of Democracy in Europe" (PDF), said.

"It was hoped that social media would 'enable greater access to information, facilitate collective organizing, and empower civil society'. Social media has indeed enabled much greater participation in politics, particularly by young people."

A following decade overwhelmed by snark, trolling and cat gifs has dampened the feeling somewhat. "Optimism has given way to pessimism as utopian thinking about digital technology has been replaced by dystopian thinking," said the nonprofit, which dates back to 1919.

"In particular, since the decision by the British people to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016, technology has become widely seen as a threat to democracy.

"The way that social media undermines the ability of mainstream media organizations to control the flow of ideas and information which in the early 2010s was identified as a positive change is now widely seen as a problem."

The report cited the development of "post-truth" politics as a worrying influence of technology. Politicians seem free to repeat long-debunked ideas but are endlessly amplified online until some people at least believe them.

Along with post-truth, social media was also criticised for polarising political opinion. People only listen to information that supports their own opinions and only take the views of their own "tribe" seriously.

"However, though these arguments about social media polarization have become widely accepted, they are based on limited evidence... Recent research challenges the idea of echo chambers and argues that social media actually increases exposure to alternative views. Some even argue that 'the "echo chambers" narrative' has itself been 'amplified and distorted in a kind of echo chamber effect'."

The report went on to say that there is little evidence social media helped Trump win the presidential election in 2016 or that it necessarily promotes populist or illiberal ideas.

The US Black Lives Matter movement has also successfully exploited social media, the report argued. "It is far from clear that social media particularly benefits populists more than other actors."

Although the influence of AI on individual decision-making and knowledge may act to undermine democracy in the future, making predictions is difficult.

If technology is driving populism, the response should not be to limit democracy but to deepen it further as part of a "democratization of democracy".

The report advocates deliberative democracy. Citizen assemblies are an example of this in action. The idea is to deliberate on issues face-to-face in groups of around 100 in meetings chaired by academics or judges.

Whatever the future holds for democracy, political commentators are more likely to hype technology and then scapegoat it in endless cycles as least as far as The Register can see.

Sponsored: Quit your addiction to storage

View original post here:

Is technology undermining democracy? It's complicated, says heavyweight thinktank - The Register

Ozdemir will tell viewers about how Exros technology improves the speed, torque and energy efficiency of electric motors

Inc () (OTCMKTS:EXROF) CEO Sue Ozdemir will appear on national television to talk about the firms electric motor technology.

The segment, part of Business TV-News, will air over the weekend on Canadas BNN Bloomberg network and in the US on the Biz Television Network on March 15.

Ozdemir will tell viewers about how Exros technology improves the speed, torque and energy efficiency of electric motors. "Our objective is to tell investors, manufacturers and the public around the world about our remarkable technology, which is now being commercialized," shesaid in a release.

"We want to share this made-in-Canada technology with sectors where electric motors are essential - automotive, wind energy, recreational and last-mile vehicles, agriculture, public transportation and many others.

"Exro unlocks the full potential of electric motors, to make them faster, stronger and greener."

The Vancouver-based company is now commercializing its electric motor technology for the automotive, energy, agricultural and recreational sectors.

Contact Angela at [emailprotected]

Follow her on Twitter @AHarmantas

See original here:

Exro Technologies CEO Sue Ozdemir to appear on Canadian and US television - Proactive Investors USA & Canada

It depends on the way sex is determined in the first place

Mar 7th 2020

WOMEN LIVE longer than men. And, more generally, female mammals live longer than male ones. This might be put down to the fact that males live more dangerous lives than femalescompetition for the affections of those females being an ingrained part of malehood. Such competition leads either to dangerous fights, or to the growing of showy-offy but physiologically expensive and thus life-limiting accoutrements, or both. All of which would make perfect sense were it not also true that male birds, which cede nothing to their mammalian counterparts in the fighting and showing-off departments, nevertheless manage, on average, to outlive their respective females. Male spruce grouse (pictured), for example, live for 13 years; females for five.

A long-standing hypothesis holds the sex chromosomes to blame. Male mammals are, in the jargon, heterogametic. They have X and Y chromosomes, whereas females have a pair of Xs. In birds, it is the females which are heterogametic. In both groups, the sex-determining chromosome is a stubby thing that is missing many of the genes on its counterpart. It therefore cannot cover for its partners genetic deficiencies by providing working copies of genes which are mutated in that partner. (In humans, haemophilia, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and colour-blindness are all caused this way.) As a result, the heterogametic sex is less resilient and dies earlier.

It is a plausible idea. But two sample points (mammals and birds) do not prove it. So Zoe Xirocostas and her colleagues at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia have looked further. As they describe in Biology Letters, they searched the literature for animals where both the relative longevity of the sexes and the nature of any heterogameticity are known.

Adding reptiles, amphibians, sharks, bony fish, arachnids and insects to the list, they confirmed that the relationship between longevity and heterogameticity does indeed hold up in other groups of animals. But there is a twist. When males are heterogametic the sex difference in lifespan averages 20.9%. Despite extreme examples like the spruce grouse, however, when females are heterogametic the average difference is only 7.1%. These numbers suggest that fighting and showing off are involved in determining longevity differences, too.

This article appeared in the Science and technology section of the print edition under the headline "Which is really the weaker sex?"

Link:

Which really is the weaker sex? - The Economist

By Arhaan Gupta-Rastogi

"Bad workers always blame their tools." I remember the first time I heard this proverb, because it immediately made me think of the debates currently raging around digital technology.

In a recent article published in the MIT Technology Review, for example, we're told that "Screen time might be physically changing kids' brains," and that these changes are not good. The point seems to be that exposure to tech is bad for our brains, and the blame for this damage lies squarely with the tech itself. But what is our responsibility? Are we right to blame our tools?

The question of whether technology is bad or good largely misses the point. As with all tools, context matters. If I use a bicycle to ride to school, this is good. If I use a bicycle to ride into a pedestrian, this is bad. Is any of this the bike's fault?

The same can be said about drugs. If a doctor prescribes a painkiller and it's taken according to the doctor's instructions, then there's no problem. However, if someone buys that same painkiller on the street or takes too much of it, then there can be serious problems. A life-saving medical device in the hands of someone not trained to use it is, by the same logic, a weapon.

It may seem that arguing for the moral neutrality of technology is a pointless exercise. I get this, but it also has important consequences for how we live in the world. By blaming tech, we essentially evade our own responsibility to act ethically and appropriately in the world. The morality of technology, whether by this we mean simple devices like pencils or complex ones like AI, resides with us. How we use technology is who we are. As we work and live in the world, pointing at the evils of technology allows us to feel blameless, even as we do serious (and often unstudied) damage to ourselves and the world around us. It's not us, it's our tools!

What's to be done? The clearest option is probably education. We can have sessions and even classes in school that deal with the moral and neurological impact of digital technology, but we can also invest in humanities courses that help us to think critically and make tough decisions when the correct answer isn't clear. Many kids use fake birth dates to get Apple IDs and Google accounts before they're 13. Is this OK? Probably not, but why is it not OK? There's no rulebook for this, and context matters.

In the end, technology is neither bad nor good. It is for us to decide how to use the tools we create and take responsibility for our use. It is worth remembering that in regulating technology, we're really regulating ourselves.

Menlo Park resident Arhaan Gupta-Rastogi is a seventh grader at a local school.

Link:

Guest opinion: Is there such a thing as bad technology? - The Almanac Online