Tag: video

Solar Panel Windows

Classified as a Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) system, ClearVue’s solar PV windows are integrated within a building’s envelope, as opposed to conventional PV systems where modules had to be mounted on the top of existing roofs. This has a dual benefit: clear solar glass serves as an energy-efficient window product for any building, but also generates electricity for on-site use or export to the grid. This can provide savings in materials and electricity costs, reduce pollution, and add to the architectural appeal of a building.

2022-11-12: ultrathin organic solar cells hit new efficiency records

Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are 10x lighter than silicon panels and cost 50% as much to produce. Some are even transparent, which has architects envisioning solar panels not just on rooftops, but incorporated into building facades, windows, and even indoor spaces. “We want to change every building into an electricity-generating building”. OPVs reach 9% efficiency. Prototypes have reached efficiencies of 20%, approaching silicon and alternative inorganic thin-film solar cells, such as those made from a mix of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS). Unlike silicon crystals and CIGS, where researchers are mostly limited to the few chemical options nature gives them, OPVs allow them to tweak bonds, rearrange atoms, and mix in elements from across the periodic table. Yet, stability and high efficiency still won’t be enough. To make it in the market, solar cells also need to prove reliable for decades. Under intense exposure to the ultraviolet (UV) in sunlight, the organics in solar cells can degrade, much as our skin burns during a day at the beach.

Tetris revolution

The improvements have added up. To qualify for the 2020 C.T.W.C., players had to achieve a near max-out within 2 hours. This standard of play left behind veterans who had qualified in each of the previous 10 years. Jonas, with his 1 max-out in qualification, entered the tournament ranked 31th among 64. Joseph, having scored a world-record 12 max-outs, came in as the No. 1 seed. By the quarter-final, the entire old guard had vanished. The remaining players were all of the YouTube generation, with many explicitly crediting its algorithm for introducing them to classic Tetris.

Non-neural bioelectricity

a group of cells stores memory in their electrical impulses, which affects cell division.

We found a pretty amazing phenomenon, which is that if you make so-called “Picasso frogs” — these are tadpoles where the jaws might be off to the side, the eyes are up here, the nostrils are moved, so everything is shifted — these tadpoles make largely normal frog faces. Now, this is amazing, because all of the organs start off in abnormal positions, and yet they still end up making a pretty good frog face. And so what it turns out is that this system, like many living systems, is not a hardwired set of movements, but actually works to reduce the error between what’s going on now and what it knows is a correct frog face configuration. This kind of decision-making that involves flexible responses to new circumstances, in other contexts, we would call this intelligence. And so what we need to understand now is not only the mechanisms by which these cells execute their movements and gene expression and so on, but we really have to understand the information flow: How do these cells cooperate with each other to build something large and to stop building when that specific structure is created?

10x H.264

We propose a neural talking-head video synthesis model and demonstrate its application to video conferencing. Our model learns to synthesize a talking-head video using a source image containing the target person’s appearance and a driving video that dictates the motion in the output. Our motion is encoded based on a novel keypoint representation, where the identity-specific and motion-related information is decomposed unsupervisedly. Extensive experimental validation shows that our model outperforms competing methods on benchmark datasets. Moreover, our compact keypoint representation enables a video conferencing system that achieves the same visual quality as the commercial H.264 standard while only using one-tenth of the bandwidth. Besides, we show our keypoint representation allows the user to rotate the head during synthesis, which is useful for simulating a face-to-face video conferencing experience. Our adaptive and 20 keypoint scheme obtains 10.37 and 6.5 reduction in bandwidth compared to the H.264 codec, respectively.