A new company founded by two former USC students wants to change the way rockets are made by using enormous 3-D printers. The company's initial project is called Terran-1, a 100-foot tall rocket that initially will carry satellites of up to 2,800 pounds into orbit around the earth. The current plan is to radically simplify manufacturing, using 100 times fewer parts to create a rocket that's so easy to manufacture, an AI can handle it. Relativity Space is based in Los Angeles, where its working on building a rocket that could launch as early as 2021. Relativity's founders see 3-D printing as the key to the company's success.

For a factory where robots toil around the clock to build a rocket with almost no human labor, the sound of grunts echoing across the parking lot make for a jarring contrast. "That's Keanu Reeves' stunt gym," says Tim Ellis, the chief executive and cofounder of Relativity Space, a startup that wants to combine 3D printing and artificial intelligence to do for the rocket what Henry Ford did for the automobile. As we walk among the robots occupying Relativity's factory, he points out the just-completed upper stage of the company's rocket, which will soon be shipped to Mississippi for its first tests. Across the way, he says, gesturing to the outside world, is a recording studio run by Snoop Dogg. Neither of those A-listers have paid a visit to Relativity's rocket factory, but the presence of these unlikely neighbors seems to underscore the company's main talking point: It can make rockets anywhere. In an ideal cosmos, though, its neighbors will be even more alien than Snoop Dogg.

In the age of blockchains, 3D printing, CRISPR-Cas9 -- and the inevitable new technologies that are yet to emerge -- today's workforce is struggling to keep up with the latest developments. For large companies and executives, finding resources for workers to learn from that are current, reputable, and unbiased can be challenging. To address this unmet need, MIT has assembled a team of writers, educators, and subject matter experts from both academia and industry to power the Institute's newest online learning offering -- a digital content library designed to help organizations keep their workforces apprised of the latest developments in technology and science. Known as MIT Horizon, the platform contains bite-sized articles, videos, and podcasts on emerging technologies, with early topics including additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and robotics. "Technologies are advancing very rapidly, and we feel a responsibility at MIT to provide learning opportunities that can help today's workforce keep up with this pace of innovation," says Sanjay Sarma, MIT vice president for open learning.

Just like a knife can be used to slice a fruit as well as to commit a murder, artificial intelligence can be used for improving healthcare, but also for discrimination based on facial features and complexion; 3D printing can make organs as well as guns. Technologies are creating new jobs but also leading to displacing workers. Companies complain of difficulty in finding people with requisite skills, even as millions of graduates (and, even more others) remain jobless. Narendra Jadhav, prolific author and Rajya Sabha MP, explores these conundrums in New Age Technology and Industrial Revolution 4.0 and argues for development of a rubric of conducive public policies alongside development and deployment of technology. The book starts with an overview of technologies like AI, augmented reality (AR), additive manufacturing (aka 3D printing) and blockchain. Jadhav puts these within the realm of education, healthcare, digital payments, national security and jobs to discern policy aspects pertaining to economic growth, social inequalities and yes, financial services and banking.

Commercial 3-D printing--or additive manufacturing (AM)--is a booming industry. But if printers were liberated from the typical setup involving an immobile box and a gantry, and set free to work in roving, collaborative teams, the AM business might be much bigger with many more applications, including as robotic masons at construction sites and repairing crumbling urban and rural civil infrastructure. A multidisciplinary robotics team at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, hosted by NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and supported by a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), is working to make the concept a reality by designing autonomous systems for 3-D printers on robotic arms attached to mobile, roving platforms. Functioning in teams--a concept called collective additive manufacturing (CAM)--these printers, with machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, could repair bridges, tunnels and other civic structures; work in ocean depths and disaster zones; or even head to space to work on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Feng explained that the goal is for accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability to the environment and to real-time conditions--rather the way a navigation app reroutes a vehicle that it senses has veered from a mapped course.

Angelo Yu is not afraid of Donald Trump. This year, Yu's auto startup in southwestern China is set to deliver its first vehicle to a U.S. buyer, but he has not even bothered to check how much President Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods might affect him. After all, he has a workaround -- even if it sounds like the stuff of science fiction. Pix Moving, Yu's company, is using artificial intelligence to design cars and convert the blueprints into instructions for 3D printers. His vision is to upload the data to the cloud and let his team in the U.S. print all the components there.

The Indian manufacturing sector is witnessing massive transformation due to explosion of smart technologies including artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D printing, Big Data, and 5G. Major manufacturing companies are shifting gears and investing heavily in modern technologies to meet evolving expectations of customers and partners, reduce costs, timely delivery, real-time monitoring, decision making, predictive maintenance and more. Furthering the perspective of adoption of next gen technology, Cisco in association with CNBC-TV18 has initiated a'Cisco Idea Lab' series to throw open insightful discussions with industry leaders on tech innovations' impact across businesses in India, starting with the manufacturing sector. In the first episode of the series, industry leaders Nishant Arya, ED, JBM Group; Sanjay Bhutani, MD-India & SAARC, Bausch Lomb; Mahesh Gupta, CMD, Kent RO Systems; Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero MotoCorp; and Daisy Chittilapilly, MD- Digital Transformation Officer, Cisco India & SAARC spoke about how tech that can unlock the true potential of the manufacturing sector. In a nutshell, robotics, IoT, Analytics, 5G, smart factories, and more will drive the manufacturing sector.

SINGAPORE: The Housing and Development Board (HDB) has rolled out the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance worker safety at its construction sites. This AI system will focus on two scenarios which are common causes of worksite accidents, based on data from the Ministry of Manpower, HDB said in a media briefing on Thursday (Sep 12). The system will monitor workers who come within one metre of a non-barricaded edge with a drop of more than two metres and those who are under the path of heavy loads lifted by tower cranes. Currently, construction work sites rely on manual supervision by site supervisors and Workplace, Safety and Health Officers (WSHO) to ensure compliance with safety standards. According to HDB, this is a "resource intensive endeavour", requiring multiple WSHOs and supervisors.

First invented in the 1980s by Chuck Hull, an engineer and physicist, 3D printing technology – also called additive manufacturing – is the process of making an object by depositing material, one layer at a time. Similarly to how an inkjet printer adds individual dots of ink to form an image, a 3D printer adds material where it is needed, based on a digital file. Many conventional manufacturing processes involved cutting away excess materials to make a part, and this can lead to wastage of up to 30 pounds (13.6 kilograms) for every one pound of useful material, according to the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. By contrast, with some 3D printing processes about 98 per cent of the raw material is used in the finished part, and the method can be used to make small components using plastics and metal powders, with some experimenting with chocolate and other food, as well as biomaterials similar to human cells.

As artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming mature, every industry wants to adopt it. Enterprises want to use it to unlock the hidden insight from data and use that to make strategic choices for companies. Many enterprises are continuously evaluating different use cases and experimenting with data using different AI frameworks. Having an infrastructure that can support different machine learning and deep learning (MLDL) frameworks is one of the challenges for enterprises in experimenting with AI. In many cases, it is helpful to be closer to data where you want to perform AI.