The electric vehicle (EV) market's demand for ultra-fast charging has never been higher, as automotive batteries aim to replicate the convenience of filling up a tank at a gas station in minutes.

According to the US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), more than 80% of EV charging takes place at the driver's residence via basic wall outlets (100V/120V) or dryer outlets (220/240V). This makes sense as residential charging is convenient and inexpensive.

Problems arise when the EV is driven far enough away from the residence to warrant a recharge to get back home or continue the journey. This scenario is why fast-charging stations are growing in demand. Fast charging aims to recharge EV batteries within a short period of time, similar to refueling conventional gasoline vehicles. Today's fast charging typically takes about 20 minutes to charge up to 80% capacity.

The growth of fast-charging stations will help address the common driver concern of the limited range of their EV. The increase of fast-charging stations will mean drivers can easily refuel and significantly extend their vehicles' driving range.

But fast charging comes at a price. Until recently, many EV battery systems were not compatible with the fastest charging system. Fortunately, the major EV car manufacturers are investing in high-speed chargers with capacities of 150kW or higher and even faster, ultra-fast recharging technology.

Companies are working to address the issues between fast charging systems and battery capacity and safety. For example, Peter Kelly-Detwiler, Principal at NorthBridge Energy Partners, LLC, has been tracking the developments from SK Innovations.

"Why carry a huge canteen (or battery) on your hike if you know you can fill quickly at a stream every two or three hours on your journey," asked Kelly-Detwiler?  "Of course, the charging infrastructure will need to be there, with liquid-cooled cables, etc., but I do think a portion of the industry will end up at 350-400 kW capability to support the Hummers or SK Innovations supported EVs."

The need for liquid-cooled energy cables hints at another challenge for fast-charging EV stations, namely, their adverse impact on the electrical power system. Common effects include harmonic contamination in the transmission lines and high current, adding to peak-hour consumption concerns. The high power and current ratings of the recharging facilities require supervised operation at specially designed stations.

Types of Rechargers. There are two types of recharging "fuels," namely, alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC). A standard cord set is provided with each new vehicle that typically enables 3.6kW of charging via a conventional wall socket. Using this approach, the impact on the electricity grid is limited as the charging rate is so low.

There are three major categories of chargers, based on the maximum amount of power the charger provides to the battery from the grid, according to the EERE):

• Level 1: Provides charging through a 120 V AC plug and does not require additional charging equipment.  This level can deliver 2 to 5 miles of range per hour of charging. Most often used in homes, but sometimes used at workplaces.
• Level 2: Provides charging through a 240 V DC (for residential) or 208 V (for commercial) plug and requires the installation of additional charging equipment. It can deliver 10 to 20 miles of range per hour of charging. Used in homes, workplaces, and public charging.
• DC Fast Charge: Provides charging through 480 V AC input and requires highly specialized, high-powered equipment and special equipment in the vehicle itself.  (Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles typically do not have fast charging capabilities.) It can deliver 60 to 80 miles of range in 20 minutes of charging. This service is used most often in public charging stations, especially along heavy traffic corridors.

Depending upon the type of EV battery, how depleted it is, and its capacity, the charging rate amongst these three categories can be anywhere from less than 30 minutes to 20 hours.

Another type of charging, currently being researched by the Department of Energy (DoE) and provided to specific vehicle models Qualcomm and others, is cord-free wireless battery charging. For example, Qualcomm's Halo tech is currently fitted to the Formula E Safety Car and Medical car. The main advantage of wireless charging is convenience and not necessarily a faster charging rate.

A common concern with EV owners is the effect of faster-charging systems on the vehicle's battery life. The issue is that the chemical processes involved in rapidly charging a battery can lead to greater thermal loads that may degrade the battery faster than regular charges. The result could be reduced battery life and a decrease in driving range.

According to Jim Francfort, project manager in INL's Advanced Transportation Group and quoted from an INL article, "The value of building infrastructure is a difficult thing to measure. To put DC fast-charging stations along interstate corridors could encourage people to take longer trips even if they don't stop to charge."
The fact that fast charging is available gives EV drivers the confidence they might otherwise lack. This new breed of drivers will know that fast charging is available, like gas stations for traditional vehicles, if they need it.

Microsoft is urging users to abandon telephone-based multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions like one-time codes sent via Short Message Service (SMS) and voice calls and instead replace them with newer MFA technologies, like app-based authenticators and security keys.

The warning comes from Alex Weinert, Director of Identity Security at Microsoft. For the past year, Weinert has been advocating on Microsoft's behalf, urging users to embrace and enable MFA for their online accounts.

In a blog post last year, citing internal Microsoft statistics, Weinert said that users who enabled multi-factor authentication (MFA) ended up blocking around 99.9% of automated attacks against their Microsoft accounts.

But in a follow-up blog post, Weinert says that if users have to choose between multiple MFA solutions, they should stay away from telephone-based MFA.

The Microsoft exec cites several known security issues, not with MFA, but with today's state of the telephone networks.

Weinert says that both SMS and voice calls are transmitted in cleartext and can be easily intercepted by determined attackers, using techniques and tools like software-defined-radios, FEMTO cells, or SS7 intercept services.

SMS-based one-time codes are also phishable via open source and readily-available phishing tools like Modlishka, CredSniper, or Evilginx.

Further, phone network employees can be tricked into transferring phone numbers to a threat actor's SIM card – in attacks known as SIM swapping – allowing attackers to receive MFA one-time codes on behalf of their victims.

On top of these, phone networks are also exposed to changing regulations, downtimes, and performance issues, all of which impact the availability of the MFA mechanism overall, which, in turn, prevents users from authenticating on their account in moments of urgency.

SMS and voice calls are the least secure MFA method today.

All of these make SMS and call-based MFA "the least secure of the MFA methods available today," according to Weinert.

The Microsoft exec believes that this gap between SMS & voice-based MFA "will only widen" in the future.
As MFA adoption increases overall, with more users adopting MFA for their accounts, attackers will also become more interested in breaking MFA methods, with SMS and voice-based MFA naturally becoming their primary target due to its extensive adoption.

Weinert says that users should enable a more robust MFA mechanism for their accounts, if available, recommending Microsoft's Authenticator MFA app as a good starting point.

But if users want the best, they should go with hardware security keys, which Weinert ranked as the best MFA solution in a blog post he published last year.
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This preference for app or security key alternatives for MFA shouldn't mean that users should disable SMS or voice-based MFA for their accounts without substituting another MFA approach. SMS MFA is still way better than no MFA at all.

Zoom calls will now come with the option of live captions, in a move that’s likely to make life easier for remote workers whose attention spans suffer steep declines during online meetings.

In March 2018, we published in issue 4-39 an article “Transcribe Your Meetings in Real Time” introducing you to Otter.ai, a Los Altos, CA start-up. Now the company is expanding its technology to enable speakers on a Zoom call to see their words turned into accurate captions in real-time. This should put an end to the unfortunate miscommunications frequently caused by remote collaboration tools.

So, there should be no more excuses for misreporting the numbers presented by your sales team or missing the list of targets put forward by your manager.

Captions will appear directly within the call, with a couple of seconds of lag. Presumably, they will be accurate enough for crucial information to come out in plain text consistently. 

The new feature will be incredibly helpful to users with accessibility needs and non-native English speakers struggling to make out the meaning of a sentence. Otter.ai currently only supports the English language but can handle a variety of accents, including southern American, Indian, British, Scottish, Chinese, and various European accents.

Two years ago, Otter.ai launched its popular speech-to-text software. Available as a mobile app or as a web-based tool, the technology soon started supporting online conferences, offering users the option to turn Zoom cloud recordings into written conversations to keep a record of their virtual meetings. 

Earlier this year, Otter.ai launched Live Notes – a new feature that enables users to open a live transcript of the call during a video conference in a separate shared file, which transcribes what is being said in real-time.  
Based on a sophisticated algorithm, Live Notes can separate human voices to identify different speakers and includes their name in the transcript to indicate that a given participant has started intervening. Users can then go back to the file to check a detail if they have missed a sentence or jumped late into the call.

Therefore, the new announcement builds on top of Live Notes, integrating the transcribed quotes directly into Zoom’s platform during a virtual meeting. In a demo call showcasing the technology, Otter.ai’s founder Sam Liang said, “Now, you will have Live Notes still going on in the background, but then you will also have the captions put down in the call. And there’s a pretty broad range of people that this will be helpful too.”

“It’s definitely a great help for people with a hearing disability, but also for international, distributed workforces who don’t speak English as their native language. And education as well: online classes could benefit from captions, on top of the Live Notes that they can go back to, to facilitate learning.”

The transcription is not precisely pitch-perfect: some sentences don’t make sense, and words occasionally come up deformed. Overall, however, Otter.ai’s algorithm, especially given the tool’s ease of use and accessibility, appears to be pretty accurate – an assessment echoed by most online reviews and user experiences.

Liang is confident that the technology’s accuracy is only improving as more users get on board, providing more training data for the speech-to-text algorithm and helping the AI work its way through background noise and strong accents.

By considering the context of an entire sentence, rather than working on a word-by-word basis, the AI can make more accurate decisions. 

Similar methods have sparked the interest of the industry’s most prominent players, with IBM now offering a cloud-based, highly accurate speech-to-text platform as part of Watson’s services. In contrast, Amazon Transcribe provides an API for automatic speech recognition.

However, Otter.ai is arguably the most consumer-facing technology out there. Liang confirmed that the company is now working on a smoother integration with platforms like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or Cisco Webex to open up access to the transcription and live-captions features.
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In Zoom, live captions are available now for Otter customers paying for a Business plan, as well as for Zoom Pro customers.

Students will have to “learn how to learn” instead of focusing on skills and specific tools. Most content will become obsolete within two years, said Dr. Simon See, head of computing giant NVIDIA’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology center.

“Technology is moving so fast, and you have to keep adopting new skills. What you have to learn is the methodology of learning new things. You must learn how to learn new things,” he said.

Dr. See spoke in a panel discussion at the launch of Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) Deep Learning Week (DLW) recently.

Minister-in-Charge of the Smart Nation Initiative Vivian Balakrishnan was the guest of honor.

In a video call to students, staff, alumni, and members of the public, Dr. Balakrishnan emphasized the need for university students to develop “deep technical skills” in areas such as data analytics, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI).

“You are the dynamos that will drive our transformation and push the boundaries of how we can leverage technology to transform our economy and make a real difference,” he said.

This is the second edition of NTU’s DLW, organized by the Machine Learning and Data Analytics Lab at the NTU School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE).

During the DLW, there were AI-related workshops as well as a virtual AI career fair for students, ending with a machine learning hackathon themed “AI in business and economics,” said NTU in a statement.

Along with Dr. See, the other panelists included Mr. Sim Kai, deputy director of the national AI office, Dr. Laurence Liew, director for AI industry innovation at AI Singapore, Ms. Jane Shen, chief scientist and managing director at Pensees, Dr. Pan Yaozhang, head of data science at Shopee, and Dr. Yap Kim Hui, associate professor at NTU’s School of EEE.

Distinguished panel members included Ms. Jane Shen, Dr. Laurence Liew, Dr. Pan Yaozhang, NTU EEE chair Tan Yap Peng, Dr. Simon See, NTU EEE student committee president Duan Jiafei, Mr. Sim Kai, Dr. Yap Kim Hui, and moderator Dr. Wesley Tan.

Moderated by Dr. Wesley Tan, senior lecturer at NTU’s School of EEE, the panel discussed the Covid-19 pandemic’s impacts on the economy and digital transformation.

Panel members concurred that while Covid-19 had forced companies to speed up digital transformation, most trends were already in motion since last year.

The panel also believed that passion was more important than academic background when pursuing a career in AI.

Dr. Liew said that computer scientists were a minority among the applicants in his organization’s AI apprenticeship program, with social scientists and many from other disciplines who had also applied and were doing well.

“A lot of the most successful tech people in the world do not come from a computer science background,” he noted.
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“It doesn’t really matter what your first degree is in. As long as you are passionate, you can get into AI.”

If ever there was a decade that announced itself so defiantly in the first year, it’s the 2020s. With so much change and volatility already, 2020 has proven this decade will be dramatically different than the one before it. IT and business leaders must prepare for ten years, unlike any others. 

For IT and business leaders, success in the 2010s meant capitalizing on innovative commercial IT (think cloud and mobile). As the decade went on, many of those firms began leveraging the same commercial platforms, looking and feeling very similar to their customers. Forward-thinking organizations began examining how digital differentiation could give them a leg up and then – wham! – 2020 came in with a bang.

In only a few months, business models were flipped on their heads. The coronavirus pandemic, economic downturns, the rise of values-based consumers, and increasing climate issues forced most businesses to pivot to new, mostly digital, models quickly this year. 

In case it’s not clear by now: What worked in the 2010s will not work in the 2020s as we see business shift from global toward hyperlocal operations. So, what will work? 

For starters, every business role must incorporate systemic risk into long-term planning. For future-fit IT leaders, the risks aren’t limited to the data center or network outages. Today’s threats include rapidly changing consumer trends that require digital pivots, increasingly complex security concerns, the ethical use of AI, and the increasing impacts of climate change. 

Feeling overwhelmed? The good news is that several emerging technologies can help your organization identify and address these risks and create a competitive advantage through disruptive innovation. A few examples include: 

• Employee privacy software that leverages the downpour of employee data without infringing on employee trust 
• AI that is learning how to code enterprise software and changing firms’ organizational structures 
• Cloud-native technology that helps you innovate with software everywhere, especially at the edge 
• Software dedicated to analyzing climate risk to evaluate your individual organization’s risk 
• Robotic process automation that can scale back-office processes for increased resiliency 

Aligning your tech stack to address your organization’s highest risks and pursue the right innovations will be the differentiator for future-fit firms in the 2020s. One of my prime reference sources is Forrester Research. They practice what they preach. Here are some of the steps they are taking to move productively into the 2020’s:

• Leveraging new technology platforms and models to deliver our research and insights to clients more efficiently in formats that let you decide how you want to learn from us. For example, each of the links above will take you to a short-form story explaining an important technology trend in video and text. Each further provides direction on the most critical emerging technologies to invest in, along with a link to our research to learn more. 
• We are moving from an annual trends and technologies report cadence to twice a year in the spirit of more insight faster, with new trends and emerging tech updates published in between.    
• Lastly, to start planning your roadmap for the decade ahead, our upcoming event, Technology & Innovation Global, will dive deep into many of these trends in a keynote panel I will be hosting. We will also feature several breakout sessions from our top analysts. At that event, we’ll demonstrate our next generation of emerging technology and trends research tools, so please join us!