I can't run a starship with twenty crew. KIRK: And what am I supposed to do? WESLEY: You've got a great job, Jim. All you have to do is sit back and let the machine do the work. One clear message from the presidential election is that the dream of good factory jobs still resonates in America's rust belt. Despite the push for students to pursue STEM careers or move into the service sector, Americans still want to make stuff.

In the past the applications of metal additive manufacturing, otherwise known as 3-D printing, have primarily been confined to prototyping. Recently, the field has begun to undergo a major transition, as researchers push closer to developing metal 3-D printing as a reliable form of industrial manufacturing. However, there are still major obstacles to tackle before the field can fully make the leap, especially in high-risk applications such as aviation components. "One of the biggest hurdles between just making a part that looks good and actually putting it on an aircraft is making sure that the part you're producing doesn't have flaws in it," says mechanical engineering (MechE) alumnus Luke Scime. Scime worked with MechE's Jack Beuth, director of the NextManufacturing Center, to develop a machine learning algorithm that detects anomalies within a part as it's being printed--a practice known as process monitoring.

In the past the applications of metal additive manufacturing, otherwise known as 3-D printing, have primarily been confined to prototyping. Recently, the field has begun to undergo a major transition, as researchers push closer to developing metal 3-D printing as a reliable form of industrial manufacturing. However, there are still major obstacles to tackle before the field can fully make the leap, especially in high-risk applications such as aviation components. "One of the biggest hurdles between just making a part that looks good and actually putting it on an aircraft is making sure that the part you're producing doesn't have flaws in it," says mechanical engineering (MechE) alumnus Luke Scime. Scime worked with MechE's Jack Beuth, director of the NextManufacturing Center, to develop a machine learning algorithm that detects anomalies within a part as it's being printed--a practice known as process monitoring.

By Jennifer Chu MIT engineers have created soft, 3-D-printed structures whose movements can be controlled with a wave of a magnet, much like marionettes without the strings. The menagerie of structures that can be magnetically manipulated includes a smooth ring that wrinkles up, a long tube that squeezes shut, a sheet that folds itself, and a spider-like "grabber" that can crawl, roll, jump, and snap together fast enough to catch a passing ball. It can even be directed to wrap itself around a small pill and carry it across a table. The researchers fabricated each structure from a new type of 3-D-printable ink that they infused with tiny magnetic particles. They fitted an electromagnet around the nozzle of a 3-D printer, which caused the magnetic particles to swing into a single orientation as the ink was fed through the nozzle.

India's Mahindra & Mahindra, one of the biggest suppliers of smaller tractors to the U.S., and other manufacturers are racing to develop what they see as the future of farming: robo-tractors and other farming equipment to help produce more food, more sustainably at a lower cost. John Deere has tractors and combines on the market that free the driver in the cabin from the actual driving so he or she can monitor the crops and adjust pesticide, water and soil levels. Technology from Agco Corp.'s Fendt lets several driverless tractors follow a lead tractor driven by a human. Japanese firms Kubota and Yanmar are planning to launch driverless tractors that they expect to be popular with elderly farmers. The next generation is tractors that can drive entirely by themselves.

Today real-time database company ScyllaDB announced a new Scylla Enterprise release with optimizations for IBM Power System Servers with the IBM POWER9 multi-core architecture. By combining Scylla's highly performant, close-to-the-hardware design with next-generation IBM Power System Servers, organizations can reach new levels of performance while also reducing the footprint, cost and complexity of their systems. ScyllaDB has designed a powerful distributed database that extends the performance advantages we've introduced with our multi-core POWER9 processors," said Tim Vincent, IBM Fellow and Vice President of IBM Cognitive Systems. "The combination of the Scylla NoSQL database and our Power System Servers enables our shared customers to scale up their systems rather than continually scaling out, creating new opportunities for data center consolidation and price performance." This integration builds upon a multi-faceted relationship between ScyllaDB and IBM. In 2016, IBM Compose began providing Scylla as part of their database-as-a-service offering. The collaboration has since grown to include additional IBM divisions, including IBM Systems (both IBM Power Systems and Z Systems), IBM Cloud (including IBM Graph as a service) and IBM's internal use of Scylla to power the IBM Cloud Service Catalog. Scylla is an open source drop-in replacement for Apache Cassandra. It delivers scale-up performance of 1,000,000 IOPS per node, scales out to hundreds of nodes, and consistently achieves a 99% tail latency of less than 1 millisecond. Scylla's pioneering shard-per-core implementation, asynchronous architecture and auto-tuning capabilities enable organizations to immediately leverage the full advantages of the multi-core POWER9 chip. IBM Power Systems servers are designed for mission-critical applications and emerging Cognitive Era workloads including artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, advanced analytics and high-performance computing. Whether deployed in a private, public or hybrid cloud, Power System Servers are capable of performing millions of I/O operations per second. Because Scylla operates asynchronously, it is able to take full advantage of the speed of the POWER9 processor, driving both I/O and CPU processing in a way that scales linearly with the number of cores on the CPU. We are excited by the many advancements IBM has made with its Power System Servers," said Dor Laor, CEO of ScyllaDB.

Yes, AI will take your job. Computers and robots will eliminate a lot of jobs in the coming decades. If your job can be automated, it will be. If given a choice, many people would rather do something else than their current work. That's why people pay money for lottery tickets.

Identifying the location of a disturbance and its magnitude is an important component for stable operation of power systems. We study the problem of localizing and estimating a disturbance in the interconnected power system. We take a model-free approach to this problem by using frequency data from generators. Specifically, we develop a logistic regression based method for localization and a linear regression based method for estimation of the magnitude of disturbance. Our model-free approach does not require the knowledge of system parameters such as inertia constants and topology, and is shown to achieve highly accurate localization and estimation performance even in the presence of measurement noise and missing data.

The term "Industrie 4.0" was coined seven years ago. Since then, the "fourth industrial revolution" has already taken shape and developed its own consistent themes. In this article, we will review 9 paramount trends of this revolution. Imagine that your factory is not only automated but all of its machines are interconnected digitally within one system. Such a "smart factory" enables you to monitor all the physical processes in real time and make effective decentralized decisions.

When the last of 807 Woolworths stores across the UK closed in January 2009, budget shoppers and pick and mix fans mourned the end of an era. The closure of one of the country's iconic retail chains showed that high street shops were struggling to keep up with the pace of change, and that even industry giants were not immune from disruption. History repeated itself earlier this year when major toy store Toys R Us became yet another casualty. Heralding the death of the high street seems somewhat severe, but it's clear that incumbent retailers are facing a monumental challenge. In the face of ecommerce behemoths, (and not just Amazon), retailers are increasingly becoming technology companies in their own right.