Media Development Authority

Highly automated systems are becoming omnipresent. They range in function from self-driving vehicles to advanced medical diagnostics and afford many benefits. However, there are assurance challenges that have become increasingly visible in high-profile crashes and incidents. Governance of such systems is critical to garner widespread public trust. Governance principles have been previously proposed offering aspirational guidance to automated system developers; however, their implementation is often impractical given the excessive costs and processes required to enact and then enforce the principles. This Perspective, authored by an international and multidisciplinary team across government organizations, industry and academia, proposes a mechanism to drive widespread assurance of highly automated systems: independent audit. As proposed, independent audit of AI systems would embody three ‘AAA’ governance principles of prospective risk Assessments, operation Audit trails and system Adherence to jurisdictional requirements. Independent audit of AI systems serves as a pragmatic approach to an otherwise burdensome and unenforceable assurance challenge.

The air free-cooling has been long thought infeasible in tropics due to the unique challenges of year-round high ambient temperature and relative humidity. In recent years, the increasing availability of servers that can tolerate higher temperatures and relative humidity levels sheds light upon the feasibility of the air free-cooling to enhance the data center energy efficiency. However, building an air free-cooled data center in the tropics requires extensive experiments to understand the details of how the tropical environment conditions will affect data center power consumption, computing throughput, and server hardware reliability. Thus, together with multiple partners in data center industry and research, we conducted a project that designs, builds, and experiments with an air free-cooled data center testbed consisting of three server rooms hosting 12 server racks with 60 kW total power rating. This paper presents the key observations, experiences and learned lessons obtained from our project. The experiments show that (1) the air free-cooling design that uses fans only can reduce the power usage effectiveness (PUE) by 38%, compared to the global average PUE, (2) the tropics' year-round high temperatures up to 37°C do not impede the air free-cooling, and (3) the implementation of the air free-cooled data centers in tropics requires special cares to deal with airborne contaminants to avoid fast corrosion rate and dust-induced server faults.

Synthetic skins with humanlike characteristic would make it possible to address some of the psychosocial requirements of prosthetic hands as well as the safety and acceptance issues in social robotics. This paper describes the development of three-dimensional finite element models of synthetic finger phalanges. With the aim of duplicating the skin compliance of human finger phalanges, the model was used to investigate the effects of (i) introducing open pockets in the internal structure and (ii) combining different materials as external and internal layers. The results show that having pockets in the internal structure of the design can increase the skin compliance of the synthetic phalanges and make it comparable with the human counterpart. Moreover, having different layers can be used to satisfy skin compliance and other design requirements such as wear and tear.KeywordsSocial RoboticsProstheticsArtificial SkinsRehabilitation RoboticsFinite Element Analysis