Moore's law – the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years while the costs are halved. 
          Gordon Moore, Fairchild Semiconductor (1965)
 
"Moore's Law is over," says Mike Muller, chief technology officer at chip designer Arm, the Japanese-owned company whose processor cores are found inside most mobile phones.

Given Moore's Law has been the engine driving the breakneck pace at which computers have advanced over the past 50 years this statement might seem worrying.

"On one level it's true, but I'd say, certainly from my perspective and Arm's perspective, we don't care," he says.

Muller and his colleagues have good reasons for their indifference to the end of Moore's Law.

For one, the bulk of Arm-based processors are sold into the embedded computing market, where there is still plenty of scope for transistors to get smaller and chips to get faster.

But more importantly, Arm believes the regular boosts to computing performance that used to come from Moore's Law will continue and will instead stem from changes to how chips are designed.

Here are three ways that Arm expects processor design will evolve and advance.
 
1. 3D chips will continue to improve processor performance. Muller believes chip designers will continue to squeeze more power from processors by stacking more transistors and processor dies on top of each other.

"There's a whole bunch of stuff happening in 3D, whether that's within the silicon and 3D transistors stacking within a die, [or] stacking dies together," he said.

2. Computers will rely on increasingly specialized chips. Today's systems offload workloads to processors tailored to accelerate tasks. For example, offloading 3D rendering to GPUs or running trained machine-learning models on Google's TPUs, Muller predicts future systems will have an even more full range of specialized chips.

Greg Yeric, director of Future Silicon Technology for Arm Research, says there's plenty of runway to continue improving accelerators.

"For the next three to five years there's a lot to be gained just by making better CMOS-based machine learning," he says.

3. Computers will move beyond silicon chips. Soon, it's possible we will reach the limits of conventional materials and technologies used to build processors, such as the CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) chips used today, says Yeric.

At this point, the chips inside systems will become more diverse, with traditional CMOS chips sitting alongside more exotic forms of information processors.

"We're going to start to see accelerators that are hardware differentiated," says Yeric.

"So, you can have a special kind of transistor that does one thing really well, [which] doesn't necessarily do all [computing] well, and you can have a chip that bolts onto a regular CMOS chip.

"We have widgets that vastly outperform CMOS on certain things. It could be photonics; it could be spintronics; it could be new memory.

"Architecting those systems is going to be a bit more of a challenge. However, I really don't see that we're going to have a slowdown at the system level, it's just that the systems won't look like a big monolithic piece of CMOS."

Muller says to expect the likes of neuromorphic, spintronics, and even quantum photonic chips to find their way inside systems.

"There is going to be in the 10-15-year timeframe new technology to take us beyond CMOS," he says.
"Products, as bought by people like you and me, are just going to keep getting better and better.
​
"Our jobs [chip designers] might be getting harder and harder, but from a consumer's perspective there isn't going to be a slowing down," he says.

Thirty years ago, it was a big deal when schools got their first computers. Today, it's a big deal when students get their own laptops.

According to Thomas Frey, the senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute think tank, “In 14 years it'll be a big deal when students learn from robot teachers over the Internet.”

It's not just because the technology will be that sophisticated, Frey says, but because the company responsible for it will be the largest of its kind.

"I've been predicting that by 2030 the largest company on the Internet is going to be an education-based company that we haven't heard of yet," Frey said.

Frey's prediction comes amid a boom in artificial intelligence research. Google is developing DeepMind; a complex piece of machine-learning software and IBM is developing Watson-powered robots.

"Nobody has quite cracked the code for the future of education," Frey contends.

His vision for 2030 includes a massively enhanced version of today's open online courses – the kind of instruction you may find with Khan Academy, Coursera, or MIT OpenCourseWare. Only, the instructors won't be humans beamed through videos. They'll be bots, and they'll be smart enough to personalize each lesson plan to the student sitting in front of the screen.

Frey suspects that a new kind of efficiency will allow students to learn at much faster rates than if they had to compete with 19 other students for the teacher's attention. Students will breeze through their material at four or 10 times the speed, completing an undergraduate education in less than half a year.

"It learns what your proclivities are, it learns what your idiosyncrasies are," Frey explains. "It learns what your interests are, your reference points. And it figures out how to teach you in a faster way over time."

He uses the example of Google's DeepMindlearning to play the Atari video game "Breakout." Not only did it quickly pick up on the rules, but within a half hour it figured out a way to achieve incredibly high scores – all with little human input.

Machine learning will accelerate similarly in the education space, Frey says. Online bots will pick up on a student's strengths and weaknesses and use a series of algorithms to tailor the lessons accordingly. Research suggeststhis personalized method is among the most effective at raising kids' overall achievement.
Frey doesn't go so far as to argue education bots will replace traditional schooling outright. He sees them more as a supplement or a kind of tutor. If a child struggles with algebra, a bot may be able to offer some help during homework time or over the weekend.

It's up for debate whether AI can master the subtleties of language, thought, and reason all within the next 14 years. One of the most significant hurdles for machine learning is grasping social interactions. Many AI systems today are still less capable cognitively than a 6-year-old.

Frey trusts 14 years isn't too generous a timeline for the technology to ramp up, given how quickly technology innovation builds on itself. The Internet was beginning to enter a lot of people's homes 14 years ago. But by 2007 people were already surfing the Web on their iPhones, and today the Internet is almost omnipresent in daily life.
​
Frey predicts that artificial intelligence will have the same trajectory in the education space. By 2030, DeepMind's ability to master "Breakout" could seem as quaint as dial-up modems do today, and what seemed like a massive library of online content in 2016 could look to future students like a skimpy collection that hardly does anything.

Last Monday was the first day that French schoolchildren under 15 could not use their cellphones at any point during the school day, thanks to a new nationwide law.

The ban, passed in July following a campaign pledge made by French President Emmanuel Macron, will affect elementary and junior high schools across the country as they return from the summer break.

The new law, which went into effect on August 5, bans all types of cellphones, as well as tablets and smartwatches.

While a ban on cellphones during class hours was already in place since 2010, the new law extends to breaks and mealtimes.

Schools are free to choose themselves if they implement the ban for students over 15. There are also some exceptions to the prohibition, such as for students with disabilities.

Under the new law, students have to turn their phones off during the day or put them in lockers. Schools will independently deal with the logistics of how students will be kept away from their phones.

The law was introduced amid fears that students were becoming too dependent on and distracted by their smartphones.
​
Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer in June hailed the legislation as "a law for the 21st century," and said it would improve discipline among France's 12 million schoolchildren.

You may have recently gotten a message from your bank that, yes, you should read and act upon.
The message being sent by many banks involves a small, but crucial change affecting check deposits made using bank mobile apps on smartphones and other devices.

Depositors must now include the phrase “For Mobile Deposit Only” underneath their signature on all checks deposited using mobile apps. Some banks are also suggesting you add "For Mobile Deposit Only at (Bank Name)" or "For (BANK NAME) Mobile Deposit Only."

This new endorsement requirement, instituted by the Federal Reserve, officially went into effect July 1. It applies to all mobile deposits at all financial institutions, such as PNC Bank, Capital Oneand Legend Bankin Texas.

Without the inclusion of the new phrase, banks say the check may be returned with the notification that your “deposit was rejected due to restrictive endorsement."

The change is meant to protect banks from fraud, which can occur when a check is accidentally, or intentionally, presented at a bank after it already has been deposited via mobile. 

"It’s not like there was rampant fraud, but it was just an area they wanted to tighten up," said Michael Diamond, senior vice president of payments at Mitek Systems, which has digital transaction technology used by more than 6,100 banks.

"This is the banks taking care of themselves," Diamond said. "The channel is very, very, very safe, and the growth is great. More and more people are using it." 
​
Case in point: Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said last month that during the April to June period, more customers deposited checks using the bank’s mobile app than in person at bank branches. Overall, 76% of all deposits come through ATMs and mobile deposits, he said.

Google might have just made itself the most significant example of how security keyscan work better than other forms of multi-factor authentication. According to Krebs on Security,ever since Google required over 85,000 of its employees to use physical security keys instead of one-time codes in 2017, it hasn't had a single case of account takeover from phishing. "We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security keys at Google," a company spokesperson said. "Users might be asked to authenticate using their security key for many different apps/reasons. It all depends on the sensitivity of the app and the risk of the user at that point in time."

Security keys like the one made by Yubikey give you a way to log into a website by merely plugging it in and pressing a button. You don't even need to type in your password anymore, much less generate a one-time code. While the method has its weakness, considering it relies on a physical item you can lose, it's considered safer than two-factor authentication, especially the type that sends you codes via SMS. Hackers could intercept messages sent to your device, after all, and gain entry to your account that way.
​
Unfortunately, Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) – that's what you call the type of multi-factor authentication that uses physical keys – support is pretty limited at the moment. You can already depend on it for protection on Chrome, but you'd have to manually activate it on Firefox by going to "about:config" first. Microsoft won't be rolling out U2F compatibility for Edgeuntil later this year, and Apple has yet to reveal whether Safari will ever support the standard. Further, only a few websites and services can use it, including Facebook and password managers such as Keepass and LastPass. It remains to be seen if Google's positive experience with the standard can help it become more widespread, but it's the kind of meaningful testimonial that could give it a massive boost.

Potholes are a nuisance pretty much everywhere, and the methods traditionally used to keep track of them aren't efficient. Whether it be driving around to visually inspect roads or watching videos of streets to spot and prioritize the repair of pavement damage, strategies typically used by towns and cities require a fair amount of time and labor. But AI could make that process a bit easier and quite a bit faster. One group exploring the use of AI to support the municipal officials in charge of road maintenance has been developing a software system that could not only aid in road repairs but also bridge and building maintenance as well.

The group, led by John Zelek at the University of Waterloo, has been using road images sourced from Google Street View to develop its system, which automatically analyzes photos of roads to spot potholes, cracks, and other damage. In theory, municipal officials could use the software to analyze images taken via vehicle-mounted phone cameras when employees are driving as part of their day-to-day work. "If governments have that information, they can better plan when to repair a particular road and do it at a lower cost," Zelek said in a statement. "Essentially, it could mean lower taxes for residents."
​
The researchers are also looking to apply the system to drone images taken of bridges, buildings, and other infrastructure as well as images of construction projects. "If the parts of a new building aren't coming together properly, it would be very beneficial to flag problems before the next 30 stories have been put up," said Zelek.

Tokenization is the process of replacing sensitive data with unique identification symbols that retain all the essential information about the data without compromising its security. Tokenization, which seeks to minimize the amount of data a business needs to keep on hand, has become a popular way for small and mid-sized businesses to bolster the security of credit card and e-commerce transactions while minimizing the cost and complexity of compliance with industry standards and government regulations.

Payment card industry (PCI) standardsdo not allow credit card numbers to be stored on a retailer's point-of-sale terminal or in its databases after a transaction. To be PCI compliant, merchants must install expensive end-to-end encryption systems or outsource their payment processing to a service provider who provides a "tokenization option." The service provider handles the issuance of the token value and bears the responsibility for keeping the cardholder data locked down. 

In such a scenario, the service provider issues the merchant a driver for the POS system that converts credit card numbers into randomly-generated values or tokens. Since the token is not a primary account number, it can't be used outside the context of a specific unique transaction with that particular merchant. In a credit card transaction, for example, the token typically contains only the last four digits of the actual card number. The rest of the token consists of alphanumeric characters that represent cardholder information and data specific to the transaction underway. 
​
Tokenization makes it more difficult for hackers to gain access to cardholder data, as compared with older systems in which credit card numbers were stored directly in databases and exchanged freely over networks. Tokenization technology can, in theory, be used with sensitive data of all kinds including bank transactions, medical records, criminal records, vehicle driver information, loan applications, stock trading and voter registration.

It's not a secret that Microsoft hasn't been winning the hearts and minds of consumers lately.
Killing off products like the Groove Music service, Microsoft Band fitness tracker, and Windows Phone have left many questioning whether Microsoft's grand plan is to focus on business users and leave consumers to its competitors.

But at the company's recent Inspire conference, Microsoft execs told their partners that Redmond isn't giving up on consumers.

Yusuf Mehdi – whose new title as of June 2018 became corporate vice president of Modern Life and Devices – led a session at the partner show in Las Vegas, Nev., where he outlined the company's vision for what officials plan to christen "Modern Life Services."

"Modern Life” and "Gaming" are the two new additions to Microsoft's core digital solution areas that its sales force and its partners are meant to target in fiscal 2019 and beyond. The others, which Microsoft announced a year ago at Inspire, are “Modern Workplace,” “Business Applications,” “Applications and Infrastructure,” and “Data and AI.”

In teeing up his presentation, Mehdi acknowledged that "in the last couple of years, we've lost a little of that magic with consumers," according to attendees who asked not to be named.

Most consumer companies are laser-focused on one thing, Mehdi said. Amazon is focused on shopping; Spotify, on music; Netflix, on movies. Microsoft's core value proposition is productivity, he said. The company's job is to try to make productivity sexier.

Microsoft is targeting so-called "professional consumers" with these services, Mehdi said. These are people who already know how to use technology but need to figure out how to use it better to make them more productive. The goal of these services will be to give users back time and help them focus on what matters to them.

Microsoft officials believe because the company already "owns the work calendar with Outlook," that it has a foothold in working to blur the line between consumer and commercial activities.

What, exactly, will qualify as a Modern Life Service? Mostly they will be apps, services, and features that Microsoft already makes available or soon will in Windows, Outlook, and PowerPoint, but which officials will attempt to position as well suited to the needs of professional consumers on Windows PCs, iPhones, and Android phones.
​
One example is the Microsoft "Your Phone" app, which Microsoft execs first showed off at the Build 2018 developer conference earlier this year. Your Phone on Windows 10 will allow users to respond to text messages on their Windows desktops, as well as drag and drop photos from their desktops and send them via their phones without actually having to access the phones. Microsoft believes that by not having to interrupt their workflow, users will save time and be more productive.

Installing solar panels in your home can lower your environmental footprint and your monthly bills, but there are also some disadvantages you should know. Here are seven issues to consider.

1 Solar Panels Don’t Require Maintenance.Despite what solar panel makers may tell you, maintenance of the panels is not a problem once you have them installed. Solar panel manufacturers try to get people to lease solar panels, insisting that then the homeowner won’t have to worry about maintenance. Don’t let this get to you! The only thing you have to do is keep the panels clear of debris, by using a garden hose, out of direct sunlight, a few times a year.

2 SRECs and Tax Credits Aren’t Forever.Solar panel manufacturers will push you to invest in their product for many reasons, including the promise of SRECs (Solar Renewable Energy Credit) and tax credits. Every Megawatt-hour of electricity produced by your solar panels results in an SREC. In some states, SRECs are sold to utility companies, who then pay homeowners for each SREC they purchase. While such credits are a great incentive, they’re not a forever promise. For example, the Federal Solar Tax Credit will end for home solar in 2021.

3 The Effectiveness of Your Solar Panels Drops Each Year.It’s not a significant drop, but solar panel manufacturers aren’t going to be quick to disclose that efficiency of panels drops each year slightly. For panels manufactured after 2000, a 20-year-old panel will produce around 92% of its original power. 

4 You Should Be Careful of Your Warranty.It’s essential you do research on the solar panel manufacturers out there and hone in on which one has the best warranty. Most warranties last for 20 to 25 years, but for them to follow through, the manufacturer must still be in business. As always, choose a manufacturer with a solid reputation.

5 The Production of Solar Panels Creates Pollution.Solar is held up as an energy-saving, environmentally-friendly powerhouse. And while that’s undoubtedly true in many cases, the transportation and installation of solar energy systems are linked with the emission of greenhouse gases. Toxic materials and hazardous products have also been associated with the manufacturing process.

6 You Might Not Want Solar If You Have Low Electricity Costs.Solar is enticing for many reasons, most notably for financial and environmental sustainability. But if you don’t have substantial electricity costs, to begin with, you might want to reconsider investing in solar, since, if your electricity costs are low, your solar savings will be as well. Along with the size of your home and your usage, where you live also has an impact on your energy costs. For instance, in Louisiana, the cost of electricity is 27% lower than the national average.
​
7 You May Not Be a Good Candidate for Solar Energy. Along with living in a state with low electricity costs, there are other things to consider regarding solar energy. For instance, you might need to cut down trees that shade and beautify your home, and that can be very expensive. You may not even have the right roof to support solar panels structurally. These aren’t topics that solar panel companies are going to put right out there, but you should think of all of these things as you consider your options. Are you a good candidate for solar? Here’s what you need to know.

Sometime in early 2019, the self-driving e.GO Mover bus will hit the streets in Germany. The electrically powered vehicle can transport up to ten people, with a battery that lasts for ten hours or so.

And, it's powered by the cloud – the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, to be exact.

While autonomous vehicles powered by the cloud are not new, e.GO Mover highlights how artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing projects are increasingly coming together to power smart cities. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, boasts customers including DriveAI, nuTonomy, TuSimple, and Mapillary—all of which work on autonomous vehicle systems.

Google Cloud Platform also lists best practicesfor building a connected vehicle solution for autonomous driving and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication on its platform as well.

The growth of such a trend is enabled by the availability of powerful AI tools on these cloud platforms. Machine learning tools are crucial to the development of such autonomous systems, and public cloud giants make them much more accessible. This helps the growth of IoT projects in smart cities as well.

Of course, the cloud on its own will not be able to drive the digital transformation of smart cities fully. Improved latency through next-generation 5G connectivity will also play a role, as autonomous vehicles and IoT devices will be able to send and receive critical data while operating more readily.

But, what happens when connectivity is spotty? That's when edge computing comes into play. Edge computing occurs when data is processed at the same location where it is collected. This means that autonomous vehicles or IoT devices will need some compute power on-board to be able to analyze the data they're receiving, without having to send it over a network to be processed and sent back.

Edge computing is especially crucial in autonomous vehicles, as the potential danger posed by poor operations is immense.
​
As more and more cities begin to embrace digital transformation, these three technologies will play an integral role in their future. And, as city officials start to rely more and more on these tools, we may see network operators, public cloud vendors, and IoT providers operating similarly to the way our utility providers operate today.