LOS ANGELES (PRWEB)
October 28, 2020

Students at The Archer School for Girls have been awarded a grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program to develop an automatic sprinkler system that will protect homes from wildfires by using infrared technology to detect and extinguish approaching embers and any resulting hot spots.

Only 13 schools from across the country received this year’s InvenTeams grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program, which inspires youth to create technological inventions that solve problems stemming from their local communities. The winners will receive up to $10,000 in grant funding to build their invention. The panel of judges included MIT educators, researchers, staff, and alumni, as well as representatives from industry and former Lemelson-MIT Award winners, who assembled virtually this fall to select this year’s InvenTeam recipients.

More than 4 million acres, the most in recorded history, have burned in California alone this year. Other western states such as Colorado are also experiencing destructive and fatal wildfires. Archer was located in the mandatory evacuation zone for the Getty Fire in 2019, which inspired the school’s InvenTeam to target embers with their invention because research has shown that more than 90% of structures lost to wildfire are ignited by embers flying ahead of the main fire lines.

The Archer School for Girls InvenTeam includes over 50 Middle and Upper School students who are responsible for all aspects of the invention process, from the initial ideation phase to the development of functional prototypes. Students are mentored by Engineering & Design Coordinator Mike Carter and Math Teacher Eileen Finney.

The students have been developing their project since last spring and meet virtually several times a week to collaborate. Even with pandemic-related precautions, the team is able to remotely design parts to manufacture in Archer’s Saban IDEAlab using a laser cutter, 3D printers, and CNC milling machines.

The Archer School for Girls InvenTeam will develop its invention in the next nine months. Students have already met with local fire officials and are continuing to reach out to community stakeholders to improve the invention. Their working prototype will be showcased at a technical review within the local community in February. They will present their final prototype at EurekaFest, the Lemelson-MIT Program’s invention celebration, in June 2021.

“Technology is the future and knowing I can have a hand in helping others in my community motivates me in every meeting and in every piece of work,” said Maia A. ’24, an InvenTeam member who is helping develop a phone app that will manage their new device. “There are fires left and right here in California and our invention can stop them from getting worse. We can stop a problem before it even happens and who knows, that might even save a life.”

For the last five years, Archer’s Integrated Design and Engineering Arts program has encouraged students to apply their research and invention skills to real-world problems through dedicated classes, such as Better Living through Engineering, Product Development and Honors Research, and through extracurricular clubs like the InvenTeam.

In 2015, Archer students received an InvenTeam grant to develop a compact faucet mounted water meter that would alleviate Southern California’s long-term drought problem by influencing conservation behavior and encouraging people to use water more responsibly.

“One of the key tenets of Archer’s philosophy is to learn by doing, and as such we encourage our students to take creative risks,” Head of School Elizabeth English said. “The Lemelson-MIT Program’s InvenTeam initiative has been a great way for our community to come together to work toward a shared goal, and it is the perfect challenge for our students. We are very grateful for the opportunity to participate in it again.”

About The Archer School for Girls

Celebrating its 25th year, The Archer School for Girls is a 6th-12th grade independent school that provides a collaborative, student-centered learning environment based on research into how girls learn and thrive. Archer focuses on an education that is both ambitious and joyful, cultivating individuality, personal identity, independence, leadership, and a strong sense of global engagement. The school awarded $4.2 million in financial aid in 2020-2021 to ensure access for students from across Los Angeles. For more information about the school, please visit http://www.archer.org.

About the Lemelson-MIT Program

The Lemelson-MIT Program celebrates outstanding inventors and inspires young people to pursue creative lives and careers through invention.

Jerome H. Lemelson, one of U.S. history’s most prolific inventors, and his wife Dorothy founded the Lemelson-MIT Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. It is funded by The Lemelson Foundation and administered by the School of Engineering at MIT, an institution with a strong ongoing commitment to creating meaningful opportunities for K-12 STEM education. For more information, visit lemelson.mit.edu.

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HAYWARD, Calif. (PRWEB)
October 28, 2020

In response to demands created by the COVID-19 pandemic, Chowbotics has unveiled new technological developments for its fresh food robot, Sally. Spurred by a need for safer self-serve experiences in vertical markets like grocery, healthcare, and higher education, Chowbotics has developed a mobile app for fast, contactless ordering. The company has also expanded the robot’s menu capabilities, elevating the culinary experience for ranging tastes. Chowbotics has also introduced a large format video interface for responsive marketing that creates an engaging customer experience, even when socially distanced. Through these new capabilities, Chowbotics continues to propel its mission of fresh food accessibility anytime, anywhere, bringing capabilities to foodservice and prepared food teams that were otherwise limited by new food safety challenges.

Chowbotics has developed a proprietary app to allow contactless ordering, creating a safer self-serve experience for patrons and faster throughput for operators. Users can now browse the menu and place an order with their nearest Sally from anywhere, through their own personal smart devices. Upon arrival at the robot, a QR code is scanned to complete the order. “We realized that with the pandemic there was growing demand for a contactless ordering experience,” explains CEO Rick Wilmer. “Customers greatly appreciate the custom nature of Sally’s made-to-order meals and easy-to-use interface, but they also want to reduce surface-contacts, which our contactless ordering experience provides.”

Allowing customers to view the menu and place an order before arriving also greatly increases the throughput of the robot by reducing ordering time. The average time to order and dispense a meal with the app is reduced by as much as 50% resulting in higher meals served per day capabilities for operators.

“The new contactless app for Sally is a great innovation for university dining and adds convenience and another level of safety for our customers,” says Scott Rossen, Director of Dining Services at Ferris State University.

Since its inception, Sally the Robot was designed to work alongside culinary teams to provide a relatively easy and inexpensive way to expand their capabilities to new hours and places. Now, as self-serve stations become obsolete, Sally’s technology has become even more important for those teams, as it provides a means to not only continue, but elevate the self-serve experience with new cuisine choices.

In response, Chowbotics’ Michelin-pedigreed culinary team has created new menus that reflect customers’ changing tastes and needs, including quick, easy meals to bring back to their desk at home. Examples include dishes like Three Bean Salad, Thai Noodle Salad, Poke or even a Smoked Brisket Bowl.

“Sally also offers some very unique capabilities and opens a new, creative world for foodservice teams. We’re working directly with clients to develop menus that cater to their specific audiences and address their dietary preferences,” notes Kang Kuan, Vice President, Culinary.

Not only does Sally the Robot engage with operators through the Chowbotics’ robot cloud management platform, a new video interface included on all new robots (and available as an add-on to existing ones) will allow operators to proactively engage with patrons and market specific items based on the menus they are running. This could mean displaying breakfast bowls in the morning and a BBQ bowl in the early evening to boost incremental sales. It also allows operators to engage new users with the fresh food robot from a distance, and highlight ingredient sourcing or other partners. This new capability uses the powerful effects of video marketing paired with data to increase awareness, engagement, and ultimately sales.

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FRAMINGHAM, Mass. (PRWEB)
October 28, 2020

DUST Identity, creators of the Diamond Unclonable Security Tag (DUST), today announced it was awarded a contract from Nimbis Services Inc. under the Vulnerability-Risk Assessment and Mitigation (V-RAM) program. The contract is part of a larger effort by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to enhance the U.S. Government’s microelectronics supply chain through the Trusted Silicon Stratus (TSS).

The TSS cloud service supports the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s (OSD) microelectronics initiatives and is currently the only approved microelectronics cloud service for DoD work. Nimbis created the TSS to provide a trusted, multi-organizational, collaborative environment to advance the design, manufacture, and sustainment of microelectronics. DUST Identity will join other leading solution providers in the Trusted Silicon Stratus platform.

While initially focused on electronic design tools, the integration of the DUST solution into TSS points to a greater focus within the U.S. Government on supply chain security and product lifecycle traceability. DUST provides an unclonable identity layer to bind digital data to physical objects during the design, manufacturing and sustainment phases thereby securing the digital thread. Implementing the DUST solution enables stakeholders to greatly reduce cybersecurity risks by tracking microelectronic provenance from the earliest stages of product design.

“As Nimbis looked across the Microelectronics lifecycle at the tools and techniques emerging in the TSS marketplace, Nimbis recognized the need for secure post fabrication tracking and provenance technologies. DUST Identity offers an emerging capability for cloud-based supply chain security through a novel tagging methodology to enable real time authentication, location tracking, and provenance of microelectronics,” said Robert Graybill, President and CEO of Nimbis Services, Inc. “To ensure its use anywhere in the supply chain (e.g., point of manufacture, point of validation, etc.) this tagging solution is globally distributable, flexible, low cost and simple to apply.”

“We’re very excited to be selected by Nimbis and AFRL as one of the first supply chain solutions to be offered within TSS,” said Eric Sharret, Aerospace & Defense Lead, DUST Identity. “There are increasing risks and vulnerabilities associated with microelectronic supply chains. DUST was designed to address these changes in the threat environment and to allow organizations to meet upcoming supply chain compliance regulations. This new collaboration with Nimbis will add the critical ingredients of transparency and visibility throughout the electronics supply chain.”

More on DUST’s Technology

DUST Identity developed a solution that utilizes microscopic engineered diamond material that prevents non-genuine parts from entering the supply chain and provides full lifecycle visibility for genuine components. DUST leverages the inherent randomness in microscopic diamond crystals to provide a unique and unclonable physical-digital binding. An optical scanner and cloud-based infrastructure provide an interface to the object’s identity and provenance. DUST ensures that trusted data and verifiable products are used and traced across their full lifecycle.

About DUST Identity

DUST Identity is the creator of the Diamond Unclonable Security Tag (DUST), a technology utilizing engineered diamonds to create an unclonable identity layer on any object. DUST Identity is the supply chain solution that ensures that trusted data and verifiable products are used and traced across their full lifecycle. DUST Identity, established in 2018 and headquartered in Framingham, was created by a team of quantum physics, nanotechnology, and cyber experts. The company is an MIT spinoff, participated in several DARPA programs and is backed by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Airbus Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures, New Science Ventures, Angular Ventures, and Castle Island Ventures. Learn more via dustidentity.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Nimbis Services, Inc.

Nimbis Services (Nimbis), US-based, provides an e-commerce cloud product marketplace connecting communities for design, modeling, simulation, and analytics in the cloud. Nimbis develops and operates a secure Trusted Silicon Stratus (TSS), collaborative cloud platform and marketplace specifically supporting the trusted and assured microelectronics life-cycle for the DoD and Aerospace defense contractor community and is currently an approved microelectronics cloud platform. The TSS cloud software platform product addresses the cyber-security concerns of the DoD aerospace community by providing a secure environment for the development of electronic weapon systems tightly integrated with vulnerability, risk assessment and data provenance tracking tools such as block chain. TSS aerospace platform is targeting multiple security levels commercial, ITAR, ATO IL-2, FedRAMP IL-4, air gapped classified. . As a neutral cloud services broker, Nimbis’ capabilities provide secure cloud based communities of interest for libraries, APP workflows, IP and diverse data, uninhibited by existing IT silos or insufficient IT cloud expertise. Learn more about Nimbis Services via NimbisServices.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

DUST Identity Media Contact:

Nicole Canulla

Head of Marketing & Communications

617.982.3772

ncanulla@dustidentity.com

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