Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits

Identifying what technology is going to change the world next is a superpower everyone wishes they had. If you could see where advancements were being made and where funds were being invested—and if you had the vision to act on what you saw—what could you accomplish? This is basically a job description for the CTO of Microsoft US, who is our guest this week on Moore's Lobby. Gina Loften is an electrical engineer, leader, author, and executive whose purpose is to identify the next big technologies, lead one of the most advanced teams of engineers on the planet to create solutions for them, and then help the largest corporations adopt them into their processes seamlessly.  Loften has been on the front lines of AI for years, from the public introduction of IBM's Watson to the new battlefield of bringing AI to the edge, which stands to affect everything from healthcare to retail. She has a unique perspective on what it means for engineers to specialize in a particular field and why they should care about what the next technological revolution brings. In this episode, Loften discusses the rapidly evolving technology industry and how engineers should see themselves within it. As Loften puts it, "The world does not work without engineers."

About five years ago, we reached the tipping point where it became cheaper to build a new wind farm than to build a conventional thermal power plant. Now we’re staring down the barrel of a second tipping point, where it will be cheaper to build a new wind farm than it will be to operate an existing conventional power plant. In this episode, Dave speaks with the VP and CTO of GE Renewable Energy, Dr. Danielle Merfeld, about the current state of renewables.  You’ll hear valuable advice about following your passions from an executive at one of the largest technology corporations on the planet who is both young and an electrical engineer. From her decision to pursue her Ph.D. to the role of company culture in finding the right people to work with, Dr. Merfeld humanizes the engineering processes that are driving the future of renewables. Learn about where we stand on the key concepts of energy diversity, storage, and transmission. Hear the challenges of educating people on a subject that’s often misunderstood and also evolving rapidly. And listen in as an executive truly nerds out about “imminently manageable” power electronics in renewables.

Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino, discusses the origins and impact of Arduino, including its transformation of the maker movement. They explore the influence of design thinking, early engineering interests, and the success and popularity of Arduino despite initial skepticism. They also touch on Arduino's future directions, its applications in various industries, and the importance of setting up a company properly.

To say that autonomous vehicles represent a huge number of engineering challenges is an understatement. To some engineers, they seem insurmountable. To others, like Mo ElShenawy, they're part of another day at the office. This week, Dave speaks with Mo ElShenawy, Senior VP of Engineering for Cruise. Cruise began as a startup out of Y Combinator and rose to prominence as a powerhouse of machine vision and data processing for autonomous vehicle development. Acquired by GM in 2016, Cruise today works with companies like Honda and Microsoft to bring fully autonomous (and zero emissions) vehicles to scale.  Mo runs Cruise's largest department, leading 1,000+ engineers in what is arguably one of the most significant engineering challenges of our generation. In this episode, you’ll hear Dave and Mo discuss the hardware and software challenges of designing AVs, why AVs should be safer than human drivers, and why Mo doesn’t believe in “tech for tech’s sake.”  Meet Mo ElShenawy Mohamed “Mo” ElShenawy’s career has spanned several unique industries that share a unifying need for scalable automation technologies. He joined Cruise in 2018, where he now leads over 1,000 engineers as Senior Vice President of Engineering as the team tackles safe, scalable AV deployment, starting with San Francisco.    

"Smart city" isn't exactly an engineering term. And yet engineers are responsible for developing the technologies that take a city from being advanced to being "smart," including wireless communications, sensor fusion, and machine-learning algorithms implemented to serve public life.  But it turns out the real hurdles in the way of smart city technologies are much more human and complex than we may realize. In this episode, Dave speaks with Karen Lightman, the Executive Director of Carnegie Mellon's Metro21 Smart Cities Institute about how engineering and public policy work hand-in-hand in smart cities. Hear about the tragedies of falling in love with a chip design that doesn't have a market, the dangers of avoiding standards in the tech industry, and the importance of testing smart city technologies in real-world "living laboratories"—or "living sandboxes," as Karen prefers to call them.

Dr. Aaron Edsinger spent years at MIT CSAIL's Humanoid Robotics Group, building robots in the shape of human torsos under the tutelage of world-renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks. It may seem strange, then, that the flagship product at his latest startup, Hello Robot, doesn't look human at all.  Listen in to hear about how Edsinger views the difference between startups and corporate life when it comes to innovation that truly serves people and communities well, from the iterative design process down to the pragmatism of simple design. Edsinger has run the gamut from founding robotics startups to Head of Robotics at Google to founding robotics startups acquired by Google. Throughout, he's gained unique perspective on what it means to design robotics that are designed for the market and how that differs from designs that are market-ready.   

This week in the Lobby, we have one of the original leaders of the single-board computer (SBC) industry, Jason Kridner of BeagleBoard.org, whose BeagleBone line of open-source SBCs is manufactured by Texas Instruments in partnership with Digi-Key and Newark element14.  In this episode, Jason and Dave get into the importance of rapid prototyping for embedded systems in an era where time-to-market trumps all. Core to this episode is the democratization of working with neural networks through SBCs like BeagleBoard AI. How will the industry change as access to developing machine learning algorithms becomes more common? And how responsible are developers for bias in AI, anyway? Tune in for a great conversation about hardware, ethics, and embedded prototyping!

Did you know that changing the size of a quantum dot changes the color it emits without altering any other properties? This deceptively simple fact goes down to the quantum level, where the color of a quantum dot can be controlled by changing how many nanometers across it is. In this episode of Moore's Lobby, we're diving into what Dr. Seth Coe-Sullivan calls "the quantum weirdness" as we explore the concepts of nanotechnology and quantum dots.  Coe-Sullivan is the CEO, President, and co-founder of NS Nanotech, a company that is blazing trails towards the next paradigm shift in display technologies while at the same time releasing practical far-UVC products used to battle viruses in healthcare applications. You'll hear Seth demystify many of the most complex and cutting-edge concepts that will govern how sharp and bright displays will be in the future, from AR/VR to mobile device screens to digital signage. And you'll get a crash course in nanotechnology straight from one of the leading experts in the field. 

As CTO and co-founder of Virgin Hyperloop, Giegel is a mechanical engineer, former aerospace researcher, and a transportation revolutionary. Hyperloop transportation has always been a bombastic proposal. Virgin Hyperloop aims to provide ground transportation up to 670 miles per hour. At those speeds, you could step into a hyperloop pod in New York City at noon and step out of it in Los Angeles in time for dinner five hours later, requiring 10x less energy than an airplane. A robust hyperloop transportation infrastructure would change the way we travel forever. As Giegel puts it, being one of two of the very first "hypernauts" was something akin to a Roman architect standing underneath an arch he designed. He put his very life into the hands of the engineers he leads, trusting them to hurl him 500 meters in 15 seconds—the initial test of Virgin Hyperloop's test track.  Hear Giegel talk about the vision behind his company's goals of creating a fully-electric, high-power, autonomous maglev system. (Spoilers: As it turns out, a hyperloop is just one of the ways their technology stands to change the transportation world.) You'll hear a fellow engineer discuss the technical elements of hyperloop creation that have long made experts think hyperloops are science fiction.  Would you know history if you were standing in the middle of it? Learn how much closer we are to the age of the hyperloop than you probably realize.

What does it take for a motorsport team to win five Formula E championships? And how do automotive companies translate that success into the electric vehicles we drive every day? We’re kicking off Season 2 of Moore’s Lobby with a guest who will be familiar to motorsports fans across Formula 1 and its electric vehicle counterpart, Formula E.  Motorsports are the ultimate proving ground for automotive technologies. When it comes to electric vehicles, no prototyping in the world can match the rigor—and the excitement—of a Formula E race.  Learn about crucial power design aspects in Formula E, including why the engineers have evolved towards using direct drive motors and one battery rather than two. And did you know that the cars must regenerate around 30% of the energy used during a race through regenerative braking, etc.? And that the drivers must trigger it manually at key moments? Hear the details from an expert who has made a career out of blazing trails.