EESTEC Magazine 41st Issue 2019 by EESTEC Publications

THE FUTURE OF SOLAR ENERGY Power up!

Embedded Systems and Autonomous Cars Who drives the future?

GAME THEORY Can math be all fun and games?

7 Partner NGOs Connecting the theory and industrial practices characterises the study at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. The Förderverein Elektrotechnik und Informatik has been involved in the realisation of this goal for many years. It is supported by numerous people and companies from the Hamburg area, whose membership expresses their special interest in the training of qualified young talent in engineering and computer science in the region.

8 Meet the team

10 The best EESTEC workshops

Whether you’re a student, a young professional, or you’re taking your first steps on the career ladder after a degree or apprenticeship at univativ, you’ll find the perfect job to suit your circumstances and lifestyle. Do you need to fund your studies? Or are you looking to kick-start your career with an industry heavyweight? If you’re not yet ready to commit, univativ gives you the chance to familiarise yourself with different sectors and companies before finding the job that suits you best. Whether you’re looking to work in aviation, automotive, finance, pharmaceuticals, logistics or IT – univativ offers you a wide range of jobs and exciting project environments.

What is EESTEC?

World’s Smallest Transistor

Editor’s word

Topological Insulators

EESTEC Infographics

ASIMO

41stissue

Smart Grid

Embedded Systems and Autonomous Cars

51% Blockchain Attacks

Inspirational Scientist Facts & Stories

Bitcoin Mining Hardware ASICs

The status of holograms

Uber Forecasting System

Nobel Prizes in 2018

Origami Robot

Mixed Reality

Artificial Intelligence

Entrepreneurship

The future of solar energy

Game Theory

Machine Learning how to start

EESTech Challenge

A Brief History of Electrical Engineering

Cloud Storage

What Facebook knows about us

Soft Skills Academy

Internet of Things

Google Analytics

Natural language processing

Alumna story

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WHAT IS EESTEC?

MAY 2019 NO: 2019/1 VOLUME: 41 EESTEC INTERNATIONAL ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING STUDENTS’ EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION MEKELWEG 4, 2628 CD DELFT, THE NETHERLANDS, WEB: EESTEC.NET EMAIL: BOARD@EESTEC.NET

Electrical Engineering STudents’ European assoCiation is an apolitical, non-governmental and non-profit organization for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) students at universities, institutes and schools of technology. EESTEC aims to develop international contacts and to encourage the exchange of ideas among EECS students through professional workshops, cultural student exchanges and publications. With various activities that EESTEC provides, it creates opportunities for students to develop in their academic, professional and social lives. The Association was founded in The Netherlands, in 1986. Nowadays, EESTEC is present in 27 countries and 56 universities across Europe with over 5000 members. Indirectly, EESTEC influences the students at all the faculties where it is present.

introduction

EDITOR’S WORD Maciej Zawilski

Dear Readers, It’s hard to imagine that one year has passed since Spring Congress 2018. And yet - here we are. This year brought an abundance of challenges for the whole association, starting from the first Annual International Meeting in July, with two other firsts of CRedit and Brand.Comm in April, interwoven by other events, meetings, efforts, all with a common goal - to help EESTEC grow. The Magazine changed as well, as it was the very first year of it being a project with an independent team. I am happy to say that we managed to work it out, and the result is being held in your hands right now. Last year, the Magazine became a platform to share our common passions, which are Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and in this year we continue to discover even more of those fields. Are you eager to learn about Smart Grid? Natural Language Processing? Autonomous cars? Do you want to start teaching your programs via Machine Learning? Get to know 2018 Nobel Prize winners? Or maybe you want to know what Google and Facebook really know about us? EESTEC Magazine has you covered! If you are interested in more EESTEC-related topics, you can revisit workshops that happened the last year, learn more about EESTech Challenge and Soft Skills’ Academy and check out the current statistics. Are there more active EESTEC-ers now then there was last year? Dive in and find out! Last, but not least, Alumnus story is going to introduce you to a new point of view, held by one of our most experienced ex-member. Finally, I want to send a big thank you to people who made it possible - my lovely Coordinators and Team Members. Without you, your hard work and determination, this issue would have never seen the daylight. It was a great pleasure to work with you this year, and I hope you share this feeling. Enjoy your read and power your future!

Observers

internationally active members

Other

240

Mechatronics Engineering

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Telecommunication Engineering

Computing and Control Engineering

Power Engineering

Automatic Control and Electronics

Microelectronics

IMWs

Teleinformatics

Electronics and Telecommunication

Biomedical Engineering

Computer Engineering

Software Engineering

cture stru

LCs

Information Technology

Applied Computer Science

JLCs

Computer Science

Electronic Engineering

12 ev e n ts

Electrical Engineering

EESTEC infographics OO O OO

5015

bers m e m

153

Training Team members

ofďŹ cial events

1397

active members

OO O OO

Partner NGOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s BEST (Board of European Students of Technology) is an organisation which provides communication, cooperation and exchange possibilities for students all over Europe. It strives to help European students of technology to become more internationally minded, by reaching a better understanding of European cultures and developing capacities to work on an international basis. BEST and EESTEC have been actively collaborating for a second year now by sharing knowledge and best practices, working together on training opportunities and participating in each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s events.

ESTIEM (European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management) is an organisation connecting students from all around Europe, fostering relations and mutual understanding between them. It provides students with the opportunity to develop their soft skills as well as learn the management basis and boost their professional career by connecting the partners with its members. For many years EESTEC is actively collaborating with ESTIEM providing each other with bidirectional knowledge transfer and cooperating on join events.

IFISO (Informal Forum of International Student Organisations) is a biannual meeting connecting different associations, creating the opportunity for the knowledge exchange, experience sharing and having a broader perspective on the possible approaches regarding a wide variety of organisational matters. EESTEC is participating in IFISO for over 10 years, learning about other member organisations, their way of work and potential areas for future collaboration.

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Meet the team ZoranKabakcı PRTeamCoordinator

Hello! I am Zoran from LC Istanbul, and the Magazine Public Relations Coordinator. I have been an EESTECer for three years, I experienced many events and I improved myself on both personal and technical levels; but conducting PR works of Magazine was the most precious duty for me. From the beginning, we tried to present the most unique technical contents with amazing members of Magazine Team. It was a great honour to be a part of creation of 41st EESTEC Magazine. I am sure, you will enjoy each article.

EmelÇolakoğglu

contentTeamCoordinator

Hello lovely readers! My name is Emel, from LC Istanbul. I’ve been a part of EESTEC for around 2 years. I’ve been amazed with EESTEC since day one and this year was my turn to help improve our association. We spent many hours with my team working on our Magazine and we had so much fun writing our articles and learning much more about current technologies. We created this issue for you to have a pleasant reading while getting to know more about Computer Science and Electronical Engineering. Great thanks to my team - the most hardworking and amazing people to work with. Enjoy reading!

JasonVelentzas

PRTeamMember

Aloha! I am Jason from LC Thessaloniki, I am 21 and I am in EESTEC for a couple of years. I am currently the chairman of LC Thessaloniki and also member of the PR Team of EESTEC Magazine. I am very happy about my contribution to this really interesting and amazing project and I also want to thank these wonderful people of my team that made my EESTEC journey a byte funnier.

BerkÜnlüsoy

PRTeamMember

Hello! My name is Berk from LC Istanbul and I have been in EESTEC for 1.5 years. During that time, I’ve met amazing people from various EESTECers from various international teams but the most favourite one is definitely Magazine Team, this is a unique experience to work on lots of topics and present to everyone. For more interesting topics and details, follow us... Enjoy it!

AbdulkadirKoçak

PRTeamMember

Hi. I’m Abdulkadir. I’ve met EESTEC this year. I’m a member of LC Eskişehir. Magazine PR Team is my first international team. I’m proud to be with this team. I hope you have a good time reading us :)

HelenaFiliććčc

PR&ContentTeamMember

AlenaDelkićc designCoordinator

Hi dear! I’m Alena and I’ve been a part of LC Novi Sad for the past 2.5 years. This is also my 2nd time designing the Magazine and I’m really proud of what this bunch accomplished in the first time of it being an official project. I hope you’ll have as much fun reading it as we had creating it for you!

Hello everyone! My name is Helena and I am a member of LC Belgrade. One more Magazine issue is coming! There are no words to describe how honoured I am to work with this team. Being a part of it gave me an opportunity to express my creativity and interests. I enjoy every moment of it because I had the opportunity to meet and work with amazing people. I really hope that you will feel our energy reading this issue.

introduction

ChiaraMarzano ContentTeamMember

(18 March 1998) is an Italian writer and Computer Science and Engineering student. Her most notable works include some angsty incomplete teenage novels, three short love poems and six articles about various topics in the Computer Science field. In her free time, she likes to ski, read everything from essays to shampoo labels and come up with witty bios for EESTEC Magazine.

JózsefMák

ContentTeamMember

Hi! I’m József Mák, I’m from Hungary, and I’ve been active in LC Budapest mostly in 2017-2018, but now I moved to London to get a PhD in physics (although my MSc is in info-bionics engineering), and became the member of the newly founded observer here. I like looking up advances on the frontiers of fundamental science, because you never know, when something will make it into engineering application. In the little free time I have, I like doing something sports/movement related or just having a meaningful chat.

MarkoRajkovic ContentTeamMember

My name is Marko Rajkovic, the VC-HR from LC Novi Sad and a full time EESTECer! Writing is my passion, as well as EESTEC and Electrical Engineering, so the EESTEC Magazine is the place I love the most and the people I work with are awesome!

Miraç Mert Pelister

ContentTeamMember

Chemical engineer with weird laughter. Also tries to mimic Walter White from time to time.

ElaaJamazi ContentTeamMember

Hello there! My name is Elaa Jamazi and I am a member of LC Istanbul. I am currently studying computer engineering at Istanbul Technical University. As someone who has a passion for writing and EESTEC and as a future engineer, EESTEC Magazine turned out to be the perfect fit for me. It was a great experience and I am looking forward to future issues ;)

IuliaIamandei ContentTeamMember

My name is Iulia Iamandei, a girl with a lot of passion and love for EESTEC! I love expressing myself through literature and photography.

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THE BEST EESTEC WORKSHOPS de<code> IT 2 - LC Bucharest de<code> IT 2 was a technical workshop that aimed to accustom participants with the way of development of software solutions in a company. We tried to reproduce the workflow that most of the big companies use to develop their products. This event lasted for 5 days and the participants, which were grouped in teams of 4 (a mix between local participants and foreign participants), developed their own web application under our trainers’ guidance provided by different partner companies. In the end, they held a presentation about their work. It was an amazing experience for everyone, especially for the organizing team.

МедMedRock week - LC Ljubljana MedRock week truly was an exciting and challenging event, where students from different fields of expertise worked together to create a new and innovative software product that could help bring fresh solutions to the world of medicine. The event was organised with the collaboration of professionals and had three main stages. First, was the planning stage, where the company provided the teams with actual problems and let them choose what they would focus on based on their strengths and weaknesses and plan out how and what their project would achieve. The participants used whatever tools they were most comfortable with, including Azure, Android Studio and OpenEP. The second was the working stage, where participants put their skills to the test and created a product that surpasses the skills of any individual. And lastly, the final stage, where the creators of their product would have to present the idea to the representatives of major companies, who finally evaluated the products and provided the participants with useful feedback.

introduction

H.E.R.O. - LC Patras EESTEC LC Patras during 13-20th of May 2018 had its international workshop event called H.E.R.O. which stands for Hardware Embedded secuRity Operations. During that week, apart from the EESTEC Spirit and the great memories of fun and city touring in the beautiful urban landscape of Patras, participants had the chance to get closer to Hardware Security topic. The academic part was presented by four different professors, one from the Electrical Engineering Department, one from the Computer and Informatics department of University of Patras and the other two from Western Technical Faculty of Computer Engineering. They are a team of hard-working professors to the field of hardware security and they held sessions for various levels of knowledge. In general, it all started with an Introduction of how important is the Security and why it is better assured via Hardware rather than only Software. Moreover, participants enjoyed lectures about Block Ciphers, Symmetric Encryption, Public Key Cryptography and RSA. The lecturers tried to share some puzzle solving and discussion over the topics accordingly to the participantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; level of experience and knowledge, which should be declared as various, taking into consideration that our youngest participant was 20 and our oldest 28 and from having none prior experience up to working at a company on the Hardware Security topic. Last but not least, in order to educate and entertain our participants, there was a trip to a Technical Museum of Patras in Rio, where they had the chance to play around on algorithms and puzzles both from ancient Greece and the modern times, and challenge themselves to problem-solving games in teams and individually as well.

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Lovin’ Spring - LC Craiova “Lovin’ Spring” was an academical workshop that took place between the 11th and the 16th of February that focused on the basics of the Spring MVC framework, hence the name. The goal of the workshop was to build a Web application that would serve as a platform for students to share their knowledge during the exams period. For the backend, we used Java as the programming language in conjunction with the Spring Framework, for the frontend we used the Thymeleaf template engine, and as the database, we kept it simple with a MYSQL server. One of the more difficult and time-consuming tasks was setting up the environment, so installing the JDK, MYSQL server, the STS IDE and so on, but after that, everything went relatively smoothly. We managed to generate our databases and entities using the Hibernate library and we created a basic API for our app. As the last step, we managed to retrieve the data, mapped our controllers to their respective views created with the Thymeleaf template engine and displayed the data in a much more readable form than a JSON. Unfortunately, since the time was limited, we didn’t get to fully develop our application, but we managed to cover the core basics.

Driving into the Future - LC Cosenza During “Driving into the future” workshop, participants were introduced to the Electric Propulsion Systems, showing the pros and cons of the electric cars. On one of the first days, we had an electric car prototype showcase: we talked about the challenges of replacing an internal combustion engine with an electric engine. In the afternoon, we talked about Internet of Vehicles and how a connected car can improve our lifestyle. The day after was the time of the University of Calabria race team, showing participants the Formula SAE car and a prototype of a self-driving race car. After lunch, participants had a lesson about ethical concerns of self-driving cars. In the last day of our academic part, participants attended another lesson about legal concerns of self-driving cars and the afternoon was the time for a session about artificial intelligence.

introduction

Printerstellar - LC Thessaloniki The main axis around which our workshopâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, Printerstellarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, revolved was 3D Printing and 3D Design in general. Specifically, the arranged lectures covered the subjects of 3D Scanning, Printing and laser-cutting and included a brief introduction to programs, such as Ultimaker Cura, that is used to prepare a model for 3D Printing, and Rhinoceros, along with its plug-in - Grasshopper - both used for 3D Modeling. Apart from the academic part, the workshop offered some hands-on experience as well. During the sessions, the participants had the opportunity to scan and to be scanned with a professional 3D Scanner, as well as to print a small object of their choice or carve a piece of wood through laser-cutting that they could take as a souvenir as soon as the workshop ended. Last, but not least, they did an introduction in Grasshopper and created something of their own as a project. We hope they kept all those souvenirs along with the knowledge they received about programming and using 3D design technology.

3D Blinders - LC Xanthi In our last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s workshop 3D Blinders, the main topic was 3D printing. More specifically, we got three topics covered. Firstly, we covered 3D printings basics, the main techniques on how 3D Printer principals work, the materials that can be printed and the potential of a printer based on its price. Then we made one DIY 3D printer with the participants and showed them how to make it more functional with 3D printed components, more electronics and more informal tricks. Finally, we made an online system based on Raspberry Pi, which made the printer able to be controlled from an online DB. The main point of the workshop was on how to make a cheap printer function really well on a budget and how to harness its full potential.

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ЊОРЛЊWORLD’S SMALLEST TRANSISTOR author: Marko Rajković

Transistor size is an important part of improving computer technology. The smaller the transistors, the more you can fit in a chip, and the faster and more efficient your processor can be. 14

That’s why it is such big news that a team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has successfully built a functional 1-nanometer long transistor gate, which the lab claims is the smallest working transistor ever made! For years, the computing industry has been governed by Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore made a prediction that would set the pace for modern digital revolution. From careful observation of an emerging trend, Moore extrapolated that computing would dramatically increase in power, and decrease in relative cost, at an exponential pace. As well as that, a part of Moore’s law states that the number of transistors in a semiconductor circuit doubles every two years. Current generation technology uses 14-nanometer scale technology, with 10-nanometer semiconduc-

PowerYourFuture tors anticipated for release in 2018 or 2019 with The single atom transistor represents a quantum products from big companies such as Intel. electronic device at room temperature, allowing the But, there is a problem with Moore’s law. Nowa- switching of the electric current by the controlled days it runs into trouble, and the trouble is laws of and reversible relocation of one single atom within physics. While the 7-nanoa metallic quantum point meter node is technically contact. So far, the device possible to produce with operates by applying a silicon, after that point, small voltage to a control you reach problems, where electrode within the aquesilicon transistors smallous electrolyte. The gel er than 7 nanometers beconnects two small metalcome so physically close lic strips containing silver together that electrons exand when a small electric perience quantum tunnelfield is applied it kickstarts ling. So instead of staying the flow of electrons into in the intended logic gate, the electrolyte gel. the electrons can continu“By tan electric control ously flow from one gate pulse, we position a single to the next, essentially silver atom into this gap making it impossible for and close the circuit” - said the transistors to have an Thomas Schimmel, co-auoff state. thor of the paper and a While companies like professor at KIT. “When Intel had originally announced that they would be the silver atom is removed again, the circuit is inexploring other materials for producing 7-nanome- terrupted”. In this state the transistor is turned off. ter semiconductors and beyond, the Berkeley Lab This transistor can drive a tiny current of approx. research team has beaten them in that race, us- 1-8 microAmps. It can conduct electricity more efing carbon nanotubes and molybdenum disulfide ficiently than semiconductors and consumes less (MoS2) to create a sub-7-nanometer transistor. The power since it is made from metal. MoS2 functions as the semiconductor, with the hollow carbon nanotube functioning as the gate to control the flow of electrons. Research is still in very early stages. At 14 nano“This quantum meter, a single die has over electronics a billion transistors on it, element enables and the Berkley Lab team switching has yet to develop a viaenergies smaller ble method to mass prothat those of duce the new 1-nanometer conventional transistor or even develop silicon a chip using them. But technologies by a as a proof of the concept factor of 10.000” alone, the results are very - said Schimmel. important. In Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, a team of scientists had said that the world’s smallThe advantage may est 1-nanometer transistor seem promising, but it’s can be controlled by a single atom. Unlike more still a prototype. It requires billions of these trantraditional transistors it isn’t made from a semicon- sistors to build anything useful. The real challenge ductor. Instead, it’s crafted from metal and the gate to making them applicable in the everyday life elec– the part that acts as a switch turning the transistor tronics lies in the scaling up the manufacturing on and off. The switch is a blob of electrolyte gel. process.

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TOWARDS TOPOLOGICAL TRANSISTORS author: JÓzsef Mák

ncreasing computational power so far mainly relies on stacking more and more transistors on a unit chip area, but fundamental physics will sooner or later put and end to these efforts. Two of the most important effects that come into play are quantum tunneling and heat dissipation. As microchips’ feature sizes shrink such that they become comparable to the electrons wavelength, electrons are able to penetrate insulator layers leading to leakage currents that render the device unusable.1 Along with small sizes however, comes also increased resistance and thus heat production that is ever harder to deal with.2 Trying to circumvent the above problems, researchers have come up with an impossibly large range of experimental materials and devices, such as transistors made of graphene, carbon nanotubes3, semiconducting plastic4, single molecules5, photonic elements6, even biological material7. This article’s focus, building transistors of electric-fieldtunable topological insulators for ultra-low dissipation logic circuits, became promising after a recent successful experiment, which was published in Nature in December, 2018.8 In this work, a team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Monash University, Australia showed that there is a certain material, sodium bismuthide (Na3Bi) which can be switched between an insulating and nearly

PowerYourFuture lossless conducting state, all by the application of an electric field. So, what are topological transistors, what is sodium bismuthide, and how does this help in building new computers that consume considerably less energy, than their present day counterparts?9 To proceed, we need to look at how solids conduct current, and for that you need to put up with some weird facts of microscopic physics. Namely that electrons behave much like waves, and if they are confined by positively charged atomic nuclei in a crystal lattice, they can only exist in wave modes in the spreading directions, wavelengths and associated energies which cannot be of any value, but are limited to be in certain bands. When an external electric field is applied (somebody connected a battery to our solid), some electrons gain energy and switch from being in one available wave mode to be in the other, the net effect being that there will more electron waves propagating opposite to the applied field than in the other direction, and this leads to measurable current flow. However, how large the field that must be applied to be able to excite a sufficient amount of electrons from one wave mode to the other, such that a useful amount of current can flow, differs largely from material to material: conducting, semiconducting or insulating solids require higher and higher fields (or corresponding voltages)

for decent current flow.10 So how does topology come into the picture? Topology is a branch of mathematics that studies how certain geometrical properties, called topological invariants remain unchanged under continuous deformations. A simple example is that the number of holes (an example of a topological invariant) in a body made of rubber cannot change if you are only allowed to stretch, but not tear or weld the rubber.11 As it turns out, on the interface of two materials (which might be just the surface of one material, that is in contact with vacuum), if the shapes of electron waves in them are topologically different, new possibilities of wave propagation become available for the electrons, that are localized in the interface.12 These new wave modes have two important features: first, the energies of the electrons in them will be in between the available energy bands allowed by the bulk of the solids. Because of this, even if the solid itself is an insulator (meaning it requires high electric fields in order to excite a considerable number of its electrons to a state in which they move opposite the field) it will become conducting on the edge, owing to the intermediate energy levels now formed. The second important feature is that these new states only allow electron propagation in one direction. Why this matters is, that a considerable part of electric resistance in a material comes from the electron waves

eestecmagazine reflecting back from impurity ions. If electrons are not allowed to propagate backwards however, the only other option they have is to flow around the disordered parts, which eliminates most of the resistance. Insulating materials having different topological properties from vacuum are called topological insulators, and will therefore be insulating only in their bulk, but be very highly conducting along their surfaces.13 Now you start to see why topological insulators are important: these are materials that are almost per fectly conducting along their surfaces. The only missing piece of the puzzle is to show how somebody can build a transistor out of them. A transistor is basically an electronic switch: a device that can be brought from a conducting state to an insulating state by the application of an electric field. In our case this means that we want to be able to switch

a material between a normal (also called topologically trivial) insulating and a topological insulating state: this way it would be possible to switch between an insulating and a nearly lossless conducting state. That this is possible, is exactly what a team of scientists from Berkley Lab and Monash University showed. They prepared a few-layer-thick crystal of sodium bismuthide (Na3Bi) on the surface of silicon, that behaves as a 2D topological insulator: such a material is very thin in one direction and nearly lossless current conduction happens around its edges, not its surface. 14 They applied an electric field over it, which made the highly conducting edge states disappear, turning the crystal into a normal insulator. Where does this all lead to? It is hard to tell yet, exactly when (or if ever) we will have ultra-low dissipation topological transistors in our everyday electronic devices. This is

because the competition is huge in the materials science, and there are also other promising candidates for low-consumption electronics, each having their upand downsides. Furthermore, the above experiments so far only proved that it is possible to switch a material from a topological to a trivially insulating state, in a material that can possibly be used at room temperatures. Most of the experiments however have been carried out so far in a cold environment, and the actual current conducting capabilities of the material are less known. It is not clear either, if the difference between the on and off currents in the future transistor can be made large enough for practical applications. 15 Nevertheless, the reasonably large band gap, possible modulation with practically achievable electric fields and its integrability with silicon technology make Na3Bi a promising material for building low consumption electronic devices.

PowerYourFuture

References: For a nice explanation of quantum tunneling and a visually pleasing animation, see E. Khutoryanski. [Feb. 29, 2016]. Quantum tunneling, [Online]. Available: https://youtu.be/RF7dDt3tVmI (visited on 03/03/2019) 2 M. Bohr, “A 30 year retrospective on dennard’s mosfet scaling paper,” IEEE SolidState Circuits Society Newsletter, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 11–13, 2007. 3 J. Carter. (Jul. 28, 2018). Silicon chips are reaching their limit. here’s the future, [Online]. Available: ttps://www. techradar.com/news/silicon-chips-are-reaching-their-limit-heres-the-future (visited on 03/03/2019). 4 T. I. of Technology. (Mar. 1, 2019). Organic electronics: Scientists develop a high-performance unipolar n-type thin-film transistor, [Online]. Available: https://phys.org/news/2019-03-electronics-scientists-high-performance-unipolar-n-type.html (visited on 03/03/2019). 5 D. Johnson. (Aug. 14, 2017). Single-molecule transistors get reproducibility and room-temperature operation, [Online]. Available: https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/devices/single-moleculetransistors-get-reproducibility-and-roomtemperature-operation (visited on 03/03/2019). 6 A. Hazari. (Jan. 5, 2017). Electronics are about to reach their limit in processing power—but there’s a solution, [Online]. Available: https:// qz.com/852770/theres-a-limit-to-how-small-we-can-make-transistors-but-the-solution-is-photonic-chips/ (visited on 03/03/2019). 7 E. Waltz. (Jul. 26, 2017). Complex biological computer commands living cells, [Online]. Available: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ the-human-os/biomedical/devices/biological-computer-commands-living-cells-to-light-up (visited on 03/03/2019). 8 For the original publication see J. L. Collins, A. Tadich, W. Wu, et al., “Electric-field-tuned topological phase transition in ultrathin na 3 bi,” Nature, vol. 564, no. 7736, p. 390, 2018. For an accessible popular science version from the same authors, see L. B. N. Laboratory. (Dec. 10, 2018). Topological matters: Toward a new kind of transistor, [Online]. Available: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-topological-kind-transistor.html (visited on 03/03/2019). 9 A well-understandable public lecture from one of the members of the above mentioned research group: Monash Education. (Oct. 8, 2017). Topological insulators and how they might change the world — Professor Michael Fuhrer, [Online]. Available: https://youtu.be/jQ_ihxXcqpg (visited on 03/04/2019) 10 For a reasonably detailed introduction see S. Ramsay. (Oct. 23, 2015). The band theory of solids, [Online]. Available: https://youtu.be/cPMe8T5Sjv0 (visited on 03/04/2019). 11 This is why for a topologist a coffee mug and a doughnut are the same, but are different from a sphere: both the mug and the doughnut have a hole in them, whereas the sphere does not. A sphere would however be equivalent to a cube. 12 This is called the bulk-edge correspondence. See the introduction of T. Ozawa, H. M. Price, A. Amo, et al., “Topological photonics,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.04173, 2018 13 Again, what needs to be special is the topological properties of the electronic waves in the material, not the geometrical shape of the material 1

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ASIMO author: Chiara Marzano

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is but the world as it will be” The mind behind this passage is Isaac Asimov, a Russian writer and biochemist from the 20th century who used science fiction as a medium to spread scientific knowledge. Almost ten years after his death, Honda honoured his principles and work by naming their groundbreaking prototype ASIMO, where the name also stands for Advanced Step in Innovative MObility. ASIMO was the first humanoid ever to be able to walk independently and to climb stairs, making him the most advanced robot to step on our Earth so far. The first prototype was released in 2000 and, since

then, it has been refined on up until this summer, when Honda announced its retirement in order to concentrate on the development of more beneficial and promising projects. Nevertheless, the heredity left behind is unmeasurable: its locomotor system is already being used on some exoskeletons in order to facilitate rehabilitation and its balancing system is now used in the field of smart transportation in some self-balancing motorbikes. This robot was designed in order to give help, in fact, it has grasping hands, it can understand some gestures and phrases that are present in its vocabulary or recognize faces and voices. Thanks to these features and considering its friendly appearance and small size, it easily serves its original purpose: ASIMO could be of assistance for any house chore, it could support the elderly, and even help people with handicaps that are confined to wheelchairs or beds. The design for ASIMO’s body was inspired by nature, where the human body was the main source

of inspiration for researchers. The first idea on how to design the joints came from studying legs of insects and the movements of people using prosthetic legs to walk or climb and, therefore, this robot has hip, knee and foot joints with a soft material playing the role of our soft tissues. Its gyroscope is used to maintain balance just like our inner ears do, some joint-angle sensors and a six-axis force sensor work like muscles and skin in order to sense muscular power. One of the greatest milestones set thanks to this advanced locomotor system is ASIMO’s peculiar ability to turn around: its movement is smooth and continuous, an ability to emulate human actions that had never been reached before. It is undeniable that, ever since we were kids, our dream was to live to see humanoids that could emulate human gestures and behaviours almost flawlessly like C3PO from Star Wars did.. Until that moment comes, we can wait and enjoy the benefits that robotic research is providing to our kind and wait for signs of lifelike looks behind those plastic eyes.

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SMART GRID HOW DOES IT WORK? author: Helena Filić In order to reduce daily consumption of electricity, people designed the electrical power system called “Smart Grid””. Probably, every one of you has heard something about the electricity grid, but do you know how does it work? What are the advantages of the modern smart grid? If you continue reading this article, you will find answers. Every electricity grid includes three main parts: 1: Generation a place where electricity is produced which can be centralized or decentralized, so it is far or close to the place of consumption;

All the data and events that take place in the smart grid are collected via smart meters, so they can be used for a better understanding of consumers’ needs. Power generation plants are able to predict and react in specific situations. This allows them to control the production of electricity whenever less power is needed and quickly raise up generation when peak periods approach. Smart grid needs to work effectively, so it relies on an entire system of smart technologies. Each of the three main parts of the electrical grid is adapted for interaction between them.

There are many advantages of smart grid, compared to the traditional one. The electric utility is able to remotely monitor and coordinate its distribution assets. The smart grid also has the ability to detect bugs and damages, so it can respond reasonably, sometimes even enabling the grid to “self-heal”. It ensures a consistent power supply 3: Consumption avoiding power leakages. The smart grid allows the various types of consumers. consumer to be an active participant for all actions and events within the smart grid. The difference between the traditional electrical grid and smart grid is that the smart grid allows The electrical grid is one of the most complex two-way communication of electricity data from and outdated breakthroughs in the world and makthe stages of generation to consumption. That ing it smart is one big step forward for technology is possible by using smart meters in homes and development. businesses. The traditional analogue meters are replaced with these digital devices so information about supply and demand between producers and consumers is available. 2: Distribution which usually includes transformers, substations and power lines that transport electricity from where it is generated to points of consumption;

BITCOIN MINING HARDWARE ASICS author: Marko Rajković Mining Bitcoin can still be a hobby, and even profitable if you have cheap electricity and get the most efficient Bitcoin mining hardware. It’s important to remember that Bitcoin mining is competitive. It’s not ideal for the average person to mine since the cheap price of electricity in China allows it to dominate the mining market.

What is ASIC?

ASIC is short for Application Specific Integrated Circuits. The integrated circuit (IC) is customized for particular use, rather than intended for general purposes. For example, a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency Bitcoin miner is an ASIC.

What is an ASIC Bitcoin Miner?

It is practically impossible to profitably mine Bitcoin with a regular PC, you’ll need specialized hardware called ASICs. Originally, Bitcoin was created with an intent to be mined on CPUs (laptop or desktop computer). However, Bitcoin miners discovered they could get hashing power from graphics cards. Graphics cards were then surpassed by ASICs. Think of a Bitcoin ASIC as specialized Bitcoin mining computers, Bitcoin mining machines, or “bitcoin generators”. Nowadays all serious Bitcoin

PowerYourFuture Miner

Hash Power

Price

Dragonmint 16T

16.0 TH/s

$2729

Antminer S7

4.73 TH/s

$490

Antminer S9

14.0 TH/s

$3000

Avalon 6

3.50 TH/s

$560

Antminer R4

8.60 TH/s

$1000

Bitcoin miner hardware ASICs comparison

mining is performed on dedicated Bitcoin mining hardware ASICs, usually in thermally-regulated data-centers with access to low-cost electricity.

Dragonmint T16 vs Antminer S9

How to find the best Bitcoin Miner?

There are some important factors to look at when determining which Bitcoin mining ASIC to buy:

Hash rate

How many hashes per second can the Bitcoin miner make? More hashes cost more, which is why efficiency is crucial.

Efficiency

You’ll want to buy the most efficient mining hardware possible. Since miners use a large amount of electricity, you want to buy one that converts the most amount of electricity into bitcoins.

Price

Cheap mining hardware will mine less bitcoins, which is why efficiency and electricity usage are important. The fastest and more efficient mining hardware is going to cost more. The best ASIC miner is the most efficient for bitcoins. Aim for value.

The Dragonmint T16 was Halong Mining’s first ASIC to hit the market. Boasting 16 TH/s, it is the most powerful ASIC miner there is. Additionally, the T16 is remarkably power efficient, consuming around 0.075 J/GH. Moreover, the Dragonmint T16 ulitizes ASICBOOST, an exploit of Bitcoin’s algorithm which improves efficiency by 20%. Compared to Bitmain’s Antminer S9,, which consumes 0.098 J/GH, the Dragonmint T16 is not only more powerful, but more efficient as well. The difference in power consumption seems small, but however, when mining on a large scale, every bit of saved electricity counts. What do you get when you combine power and efficiency? An incredibly profitable ASIC! The T16 is 30% more efficient than its competition.

Mined in BTC

Mined in $

Electricity cost

Profit

0.0005 BTC per day

$4.86 per day

$4.26

+$0.41 per day

0.0160 BTC per month

$142.20 per month

$127.87 per month

+$14.33 per month

0.1916 BTC per year

$1706.43 per year

$1534.64 per year

+$171.97 per year

~Note: electricity cost is high ($0.12 kWh). If it would be lower, it’s even more profitable.

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ООORIGAMI ROBOT author: Chiara Marzano

After years of research, a team of scientists at MIT and Harvard Universities made their own contribution to shaping our future further, giving birth to a newfangled lab creature to live a full life cycle: a small robot that folds when heated, moves accordingly to the magnetic field around it and dissolves almost completely when in contact with some liquids. Going into detail, this miniature robot, often referred to as an origami robot, has a flat squarelike shape as its starting form and, when heated to a certain temperature, it starts folding assuming the predicted shape. When this first transformation is completed, it is ready to walk, swim and complete certain types of tasks thanks to a magnetic field suitably manipulated to control its movements. Finally, when it cannot serve any other purpose, a great part of this tiny robot, excluding the magnet used to control it, can be dissolved in acetone. Let’s give a look at how this creation is built and how it works. The robot has five layers in three different materials, all of which are lasercut following specific digital instructions. The middle layer is made up of copper and here is where most of the circuits making the robot work are engraved on, two additional layers of paper are present both below and above it to ensure its stability - researchers are working in order to make these latter layers dissolve in water as to ease the process of degradation. The two external layers allow folding: as a matter of fact, they are made out of a shape-memory polymer, a so-called smart material that can return to its original shape from a deformed state whenever triggered; the folding process happens in less than a minute and is eased by cuts realized on the structural and external layers, which allow the pieces to create angles as wide

as 150°. A microprocessor and one or more motors are attached on the top polymer level and, while the robot weights approximately 0.31 grams and measures 1.7 centimetres on both its sides in its starting state, when in its final shape, its speed can reach up to 3 or 4 centimetres per second. The mentioned motors do not take any part in the life-cycle of the robot and are not to be intended as proper engines. As a matter of fact, they are made up of two parts: a cubic neodymium magnet which does not dissolve with the rest of the structure and around which the structure folds, and four electromagnetic coils that produce the magnetic field thanks to which the robot moves. The pioneering aspect of this research lies in the costs and production process this robot can potentially achieve. Indeed, its ability to reach an almost straight angle allows it to perform almost any movement and fold into many different shapes and therefore, as diversification in the production process is extremely low and as the functions of electrical devices used in other robots is mainly covered by controllable materials instead, the costs of manufacture can be reduced greatly. Because of its dimensions and due to how easy its activation and control are, researchers believe this robot could make its way among the latest nanorobots and non-invasive medical solutions in the upcoming years, such as the latest nanobots created by NCNT and Arizona State University that are designed to shrink tumours by reducing the bloodstream to the affected areas. Despite the promising position in relation to the state of the art, the path towards a ground-breaking scientific discovery is still long and its next step is making the robots autonomous through enhancing its structure with self-folding sensors.

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THE FUTURE OF SOLAR ENERGY author: Iulia Iamandei

Energy! Energy! Energy! It’s all around us - powering technology like our computers, our phones, lights and cars. Our entire homes are built in a way so we can get the electricity we need. We’re so dependent on it, that if we have it cut off for even five minutes, we cannot function the same way and sometimes we’re forced to stop what we were doing because of this absence. So, electricity and producing energy are very important to us, but how do we make electricity?

eestecmagazine First, we should know that there are many sources from which we gain energy to power our homes: solar, gas, wind, nuclear, coal. One of the most praised ways of producing electricity nowadays is from solar panels. Solar power might be the key to a clean energy future. Every day, the sun gives off far more energy than we need to power everything on Earth. How do solar panels work? Simply put, a solar panel works by allowing photons, or particles of light, to knock electrons free from atoms, generating a flow of electricity. Solar panels actually consist of many smaller units called photovoltaic cells. (Photovoltaic simply means they convert sunlight into electricity.) Many cells linked together make up a solar panel. Each photovoltaic cell is basically a sandwich made up of two slices of oppositely doped semimetal, usually silicon â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the same stuff used in microelectronics. Why are they so beneficial? Solar power potentially causes less electricity loss. Electricity needs to be transported from big power plants to end-consumers via extensive networks. Using solar power, your energy might become domestic and as a result, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in control of your own bills and energy usage. Furthermore, solar power systems are durable, thus chances of service interruption are reduced. When many of us are switching to solar power, we are less likely to experience blackouts or brownouts. For example, every household in the UK that have solar cells installed, works in the same way as a small power plant. This, in turn, provides us with a greater electricity grid security, especially in terms of natural or human-caused disasters. So, solar power only improves our

chances of surviving human caused-disasters. Our national economy can be helped by solar power. The more people opt for solar, the more companies that install solar panels will be needed. This creates additional jobs for skilled workers, and consequently keeps the economy growing. After solar panels have been installed, operational costs are quite low compared to other forms of power generation. Fuel isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t required, and this means that solar power can create large amounts of electricity without the uncertainty and expense of securing a fuel supply. No harmful emissions are released into the air when electricity is produced by solar panels.

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What is the future of solar energy? The majority of us have been accustomed to the beneficial consequences of having solar panels in our everyday lives, but how will our future look like? Numerous research goes into the making for a better lifestyle. Researchers from Israel and Germany partnered up to study if there was a better way to convert sunlight into electricity. Turns out that the most efficient way is also the most common â&#x20AC;&#x201C; photosynthesis. The study confirmed that using biomass as fuel could eventually allow us to create artificial photosynthesis machines. These could convert sunlight into energy and store it in a more natural way for later use. Some countries lack the space for solar farms. An elegant solution to this problem is floating solar farms. Ciel & Terre International, a French energy company, has been working on a large scale, floating solar solution since 2011. They have already installed a trial farm off the coast of the UK and are now looking at attempting similar projects in India, France, and Japan.

The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) believes that getting closer to the sun is the best way to increase efficiency and collect more power. The teamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Space Solar Power Systems (SSPS) project is trying to send solar panels to near-Earth orbit. The power collected will be wirelessly transmitted back to base station via miA. Team of researchers in Finland is trying create a tree that stores solar energy in its leaves. These leaves could then be used to power small appliances and mobile phones. The trees are likely to be 3D printed, using biomaterials that mimic organic wood. Each leaf generates power from sunlight, but can also use kinetic energy from the wind. The trees are designed to survive indoors as well as outdoors. The project is currently in the prototype phase at the VTT research center in Finland. In conclusion, solar is booming. Solar power is now cheaper than coal in some parts of the world, and generating power from the sun is likely to be the lowest-cost energy option globally in less than ten years. I could only see positive outcomes and the future of our energy is not as scary as we may think.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

author: Marko Rajković

If you take your ability to easily detect the presence of static electricity for granted, remember what lead to that. Before the advent of the 17th Century, finding static electricity wasn’t as easy as scuffing a balloon against your hair and feeling the electricity, and then putting it against the wall and magically sticking them together Fortunately for humankind, the father of modern electrical engineering was able to solve this problem. William Gilbert, possibly the world’s first electrical engineer. He invented the versorium, a metal needle mounted on a base, able to spin freely. The versorium could distinguish between charged and non charged objects, and it would spin toward charged ones, letting the user know that they were carrying some amount of static electricity. Despite a few important discoveries in the later years, electrical engineering didn’t grow as a discipline until late 19th Century. Those years are referred as the dawn of electrical engineering as a separate science aspect, thanks to scientist like George Ohm and Michael Faraday, who made new and groundbreaking observations and had developed new theories. But, as history has thought us many times, nothing comes without cost. At the end of the 19th Century, there was a big dispute now known as “The War of Currents” that pit an electrical engineer against an electrical engineer, a scientist against a scientist.

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Thomas Edison, famed for inventing the light bulb and the phonograph, embraced the standard method of direct current (DC) power distribution. Produced by batteries and dynamos, DC describes the unidirectional flow of an electrical charge. But George Westinghouse, the electrical engineer who built a fortune by making improvements on the Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s railroad system, threw his money behind the development of a power network based on the alternating current (AC), a more efficient transmission method which magnitude changes cyclically. In the end, AC won the battle, and Edison even recanted near the end of his life. Also, on the AC side, there was a great scientist, Nikola Tesla. He was one of the most eccentric and prolific electrical engineers in history. His work formed around the basis of AC power, and he is one of the most admired pioneers in electrical engineering. Because of his showmanship, his probable obsessive compulsive disorder and unique inventions, Tesla became a fixture in modern films, comic books and science fiction work, including the 2006 movie The Prestige, possibly the most successful film to feature a world famous electrical engineer in a supporting role. In the 20th Century, electrical engineering, like many technologies, expanded by leaps and bounds. By 1900, the radio was already in common use, thanks to Tesla, and developments over the next few decades made radio even more useful. Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the telegraph, made radio useful worldwide, developing the first transatlantic radio transmissions. During and after World War II, radio became more prevalent in communication and guidance. The development of the integrated circuit in 1958 led to the advent of electronic engineering, after which came the personal computer, the microprocessor, and a variety of signal and control systems. And it all started with a simple needle that could detect static electricity.

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INTERNET OF THINGS author: Chiara Marzano

The expression “Internet of Things” can be used to refer to any device that is connected to the Internet and that, therefore, shares data and communicates with other objects. These can include any type of device starting from simple and research-oriented objects, such as sensors, passing through smart fridges and light bulbs, up to the growing trend of wearables. Depending on the task they were designed for, these devices collect data from their environment, analyze it and then take action accordingly. This technology is full of potential and offers great advantages to its users. In fact, it can help with the little tasks of everyday life, for instance, by warming up our living room when it senses us approaching the house or by buying water and other groceries when it senses we are running out of them; it can also have pivotal and life-saving applications. For instance, the company Concrete Sensors uses connectivity and places sensors in concrete to allow it to collect and share data regarding its state and conditions, in order to prevent disaster and offer a more reliable and effective maintenance. Formally, the first use of the phrase “Internet of Things” backs to the late 1990s, when a British engineer and researcher for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kevin Ashton, coined it while working on the RFID standard. Despite this, devices with such characteristics already existed before and many back the birth of IoT to that of the Internet and of the semantic web. During this process,

BetweenEEandCS two main phases can be identified, with the genesis of the Internet indicating the transition: Pre-internet: During this phase, sensors were heavily used and through the years technological development managed to obtain sharp precision in the process of data collection, but the devices were unable to communicate. Post-internet: When devices started to communicate. This phase can be divided further, based on the features the devices are equipped with. The very nature of IoT relies heavily on Big Data and on the efficiency of the DBMS of choice. Each physical device has embedded sensors and actuators that allow it to communicate remotely throughout the Internet. The data retrieved by the sensors is sent to designed receptors, analyzed thanks to big data analysis techniques and action is taken accordingly. This technology is based on a four-stages bottom-up architecture: Level 1 - Sensors: embedded chips responsible for the retrieval of data from the environment; Level 2 - IoT Gateways and Framework: responsible for the transmission of the data collected to the internet infrastructure; Level 3 - Cloud Server: Where the data collected is stored; Level 4 - Mobile App: Designed for end users in order to facilitate their interaction with the device. Despite this technology being widely spread and being present in over 2.5 billion pockets and purses around the world, it is still in its infancy. As a matter of fact, security and privacy are still open issues. Private networks’ and VPNs’ security aspects are fundamental to ensure higher security. These devices often hold a weak and unstable connection that could easily cause undesired gateways for hackers. As technology is running ahead of the game and some common means through which attacks can be dismissed (such as IPSec, DTLS or 6LoWPAN compression) are often impossible to implement on such devices for memory, energy or computational reasons. The examples of malicious access and manipulation are many: unauthorized access to tags, tag cloning, Sybil attack, sinkhole attack, DoS attack, malicious code injection or “man in middle” attack and so on. For what concerns privacy, EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) carried on a research on “What the Internet of Things means for consumer privacy” through which it was possible to realize that over 70% of users have some concerns regarding how their data is retrieved and processed while over 90% of the subjects wished on more control on the storage of their personal information. The impact of IoT on our daily life is unmeasurable. Phones, cars, dishwashers, switches, clocks, toasters and any object we can think of are connected to the Internet and communicate actively with others, collecting data that concurs in making every small action easier and more accessible.

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EMBEDDED SYSTEMS AND AUTONOMOUS CARS author: Helena Filić

About 150 years ago, the first car was designed by German engineer Karl Benz. He was an engine designer and automobile engineer who was granted a patent for his first engine. At that time Benz probably didn’t have one thing on his mind - that one day we will be able ‘to drive’ cars without driving them at all. We are all aware of one huge invention that is called self-driving cars. This discovery is the transportation of the future. Automakers see it as a huge challenge and they are working to develop fully automated cars. Enabling a driver to feel completely careless and safe while a car is driven by itself is possible by using multiple embedded systems. Today there is no car that absolutely depends on its driver. Almost every new vehicle has at least one automated feature, and most of them have many. Embedded systems are computer systems that represent a combination of CPUs and required sensors. This system includes a single chip microcontroller, such as cortex or ARM, and microprocessors - FPGAs, DSPs, and ASICs. They are programmed for a specific task and their action depends on the information which is received from sensors. An advanced embedded system in vehicles has increased rapidly in the past two decades. Self-driving cars need all the necessary technology to be completely aware of the environment that surrounds them. All the information that they collect in every moment helps them to understand the optimal way to react. There are lots of challenges that automakers have to face. For example, a self-driving car has to be ready to predict every movement in different situations like weather

changes. Doesn’t matter if it’s raining, snowing or sunny, the best and safest way to reach some point has to be found. This is possible only by using embedded systems. Every car contains hundreds of embedded systems, but you probably haven’t been aware of it. The system for temperature control, the smog monitor, Airbag systems, GPS, anti-locking brake system, fuel injection controller devices are all examples of embedded systems in your car. Every self-driving car has to include these embedded systems: 1. A global positioning system (GPS) - it relies on signals that come from GPS satellites and give car information of its location, speed and direction. 2. Radar systems - which give information about the objects around the vehicle. Radar has to be able to detect obstructions in a longer range. With these systems the car can be parked in the right place and collision can be avoided. 3. Forward-looking cameras and other sensors by using them, the car will have more information about its environment. Objects and passengers can be detected, but also traffic lights and other signs that make rules in driving. These systems work with image-processing and pattern recognition algorithms. 4. Digitally controlled, highly precise braking system - this is maybe the most important system for self-driving cars. It has to enable a car to stop at every moment when it is needed. If any other embedded system warns to break, this system will act precisely and quickly. The future that we were imaging is right here in front of us.

BetweenEEandCS

THE STATUS OF HOLOGRAMS author: Iulia Iamandei

Technology is so advanced nowadays that we can see our location in space and time (GPS), we can create our own virtual realities or we can have meetings in the comfort of our own homes. Besides, who would’ve thought that we can have self-driving cars, smart digital assistants, robots that clean your house, or even an entire house that can supply its own energy needs? These inventions may have seemed impossible before and even insane, so one may ask the question: what will we do next? Can we surpass ourselves? Well, we already did… by creating the duplicate of an individual. We’ve all been in this situation: you’re so sick that you cannot go to work, you’re so tired that you absolutely do not wish to go to school the next day, or you just hate the feeling of going out with your mother-in-law. If only you could clone yourself so you didn’t really have to do all these things. Thankfully, in the era we live, there is definitely a way of doing this! Let me introduce you to the concept of Holography. This term has been popularized in a lot of movies, books, documentaries

as just a figment of imagination. But what is a hologram? A hologram can be thought as a sound recording - as the sound field created by the vibrating of a musical instrument or vocal cords is encoded in a way that it can be replayed without the original vibrating matter. So, a visual recording? Not quite, but close. It is a photographic technique that records the shape a light wave takes after it bounces off an object, much like the impression you would see if a key were pressed into clay. It uses interfering waves of light to capture images that can be fully three-dimensional. When waves of light meet, they interfere in the same way waves of water interfere to make the kind of patterns you see when you throw rocks into a pond. It is the information in this type of wave pattern that is used to make holograms.

possible, called “Stimulated Emission” in 1917. The idea of the laser was first published in 1958 by Arthur Shawlow and Charles Townes who were working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. Theodore Maiman built the first working ruby laser in 1960 while working at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. Holography came into being long before the laser was invented. Back in 1886 in France, Gabriel Lippmann developed a theory of using light wave interference to capture color in photography. He coated mercury on the back side of glass photographic plates to act as a mirror and bounce the light waves back through the emulsion and create wave interference. In 1891 he presented this theory along with some primitive examples of his interference color photographs to the Academy of Sciences.

The History of Holography It wasn’t until the invention of the Laser that true three-dimensional holograms as you see today became a practical reality. Albert Einstein first theorized about the process which makes lasers

Present Day Holography Holography revolutionized the way we see entertainment in many ways.Yes, we can create our own cinema by buying a projector but the most fascinating way is bringing back our favorite idols to

eestecmagazine sing on a stage for us. Although it may sound like a scene that was taken out of a horror movie, it is less creepy than that. Tupac, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and many more appeared on stage long after their time. The replicas look unarguably real, as though you could touch them. Tupac’s appearance on the Coachella stage in 2012 shocked many fans, as the rapper died in 1996. The show was so amazing that many people wondered how it was done. Well, here it is. There are two parts to the illusion: first, the computer program created by the Oscar-winning Digital Domain Media Group took physical images and video movement from footage of the rapper when he was still alive, got input from Tupac’s friends and colleagues on the realism of the animation, and finally created an all-new video recording of a performance that never happened. In fact, when the ghost first appeared, he saluted the Coachella crowd by name, despite having died three years before this annual festival even started. The video then was projected from above the stage, straight down onto a reflective surface that bounced the image up onto a Mylar screen (mirror). Another example of technological advancement is this story of a French politician. Jean-Luc Melenchon appeared in seven places at once as a “holographic” projection. The presidential candidate made use of the Victorian Pepper’s Ghost illusion to deliver his campaign speech. Pepper’s ghost is an illusion technique used in theatre, amusement parks, etc. The basic trick involves a stage that is specially arranged into two rooms, one that people can see into (which can be the whole stage itself) , and a second that is hidden to the side, the “blue room”. A plate of glass (or Plexiglas or plastic film) is placed

BetweenEEandCS

somewhere in the main room at an angle that reflects the view of the blue room towards the audience. Generally this is arranged with the blue room to one side of the stage, and the plate on the stage rotated around its vertical axis at 45 degrees. Care must be taken to make the glass as invisible as possible, normally hiding the lower edge in patterning on the floor and ensuring lights do not reflect off it. Holograms are surprisingly useful outside the entertainment world, too. Military mapping has been invented to allow soldiers to view three-dimensional terrain, look “around” corners and develop inmission training. One American company does this by taking complex computerised image data, which they make into a holographic sheet. Not only can users “look into” the high quality 3D image of the terrain stored in the hologram sheet, but the technology is simple to use and can be rolled up for easy storage and transportation. Holography also helps in the medical domain. Students have the possibility to learn all the details of the body by just looking at a hologram. Many medical

systems generate complex data using advanced imaging technology, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and ultrasound scans. Normally, that electronic information is used to display a flat image on a computer screen, but it can also be used to produce full colour, computer-generated 3D holographic images. A company in Scotland has been successful in using this kind of data to produce 3D images for training and display. The advantage here, as with all “real” holograms, is that no special viewing devices, or glasses, are needed. Students and doctors can simply “look”, u n h i n d e re d , a t t h e t h re e dimensional images. However, there can be also some really bad disadvantages added to the development of using holography. Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and UC Berkeley in the USA, discovered that holography combined with CGI (special visual effects created using computer software) can steal one’s identity. It already happened. Famous people’s faces got “stolen” in such way that, by the power of editing, were easily put on

someone’s body in order to create something malicious and destroy one’s reputation. But this is not the most concerning matter. For further proof you could search Youtube for almost any celebrity; there’s also a wellknown video of Emma Watson’s face on Sofia Vergara’s body. The professor then continues with a hypothetical theory that because this technology is easy to use by anyone, someone with bad intention could post a video of e.g. the American president declaring War against North Korea. Because news travel so fast, the war could start in less than 10 minutes from that video going viral. So, having all this power can be also harmful to us. The Future of Holograms We cannot deny the power of holograms and the fact that they are a major business. It is suggested that by 2020 the market for genuine, display holograms will be worth $5.5 billion. What does this mean to our future? What will happen next? The uncertainty is something we are used to and we can only imagine.

eestecmagazine

MIXED REALITY author: Marko RajkoviÄ&#x2021;

ixed Reality (MR) is used either as an independent concept or to classify the spectrum of reality technologies. As an independent concept, mixed reality combines the best of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). When used to classify the larger scope of reality technologies, it refers to the coverage of all possible variations and compositions of real and virtual objects.

This spectrum is called Mixed Reality Continuum and varies from where nothing is computer generated to the point of an environment where everything is computer generated. Mixed reality attempts to combine the best of both virtual reality and augmented reality. When both real and virtual worlds are merged together, a new environment is born and it becomes possible for physical and digital objects to coexist and interact in real time.

What is Mixed Reality?

Real Environment

Mixed Reality is the predominantly virtual spaces w h e re re a l w o r l d o b j e c t s or people are dynamically integrated into virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. The continuous scale covers all possible variations and compositions of real and virtual objects. The continuum ranges from a completely real and natural environment, to a completely virtual environment. The concept was first introduced by Paul Milgram.

R e a l e n v i ro n m e n t , a l s o called natural environment, refers to the natural world we consume everyday. This natural environment encompasses all living and nonliving things occurring naturally on Earth.

Augmented Reality Augmented reality brings aspect of the virtual world into the real world. It is the real environment, as opposed to virtual ones, in the spectrum of reality technologies. This is because augmented reality users remain in the real world while

experiencing enhanced virtual created visuals and feelings.

Augmented Virtuality Augmented Virtuality describes the environment in which real objects are inserted into computer-generated virtual environments. It is best described as the inverse of augmented reality. By utilizing augmented virtuality technology, a homeowner could visualize and interact with virtual appliances and easily manipulate different layouts.

Virtual Reality Virtual reality seeks to provide users with the greatest level of immersion. The total immersion experienced in virtual reality requires stimulation of all of the userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s senses in a fully immersive virtual experience, to the extent that the brain accepts the virtual environment as a real environment. In the virtual reality the userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience a completely synthetic world that may or may not mimic the properties of a real-world environment.

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GAME THEORY author: Chiara Marzano

ame Theory is a comprehensive mathematical discipline that aims to analyze the strategic behaviours of the participants of a game, often called players, who have a common objective: victory. The players pursue goals that can be in mutual conflict and their actions in the game can influence the strategies attainable by others. A player is declared the winner after they succeeded in obtaining the maximum possible gain through a sequence of moves and decisions. A player must be both rational and intelligent, two words which have a considerably specific meaning in a mathematical scenario. A participant is defined rational when, given some alternatives, they can clearly establish an order relation among those. For instance, when given the option to participate in EESTEC Exchanges for the whole summer (option a) or to earn 2000 euros (option b), our player must be able to decide which of the two options they prefer (a>b or a<b) or if they repute them to be equally valuable (in this case, a~b). Another necessary trait for the player to be considered legitimate is intelligence: as a matter of fact, they ought to know which actions will maximize their strategy and allow them to act rationally. The game has a pay-off for each participant: the players can earn a positive, negative or null score and, though it depends on the type of game played, the sum of all those scores is usually a fixed and constant number. For instance, a frequent choice for the constant is zero, which symbolizes that the players who lost have to repay the winner. The results of all the possible combinations of interactions among the players can be represented through various methodologies. The most common graphic representations are the pay-off matrix, in

which the scores or utility functions for all the players in each resulting scenario are represented, or a decision tree that depicts the different sequences of decisions each player can pursue from the beginning up until the division of the pay-off. Therefore, what marks the boundary between Game Theory and the Theory of Choice? While the latter analyzes statistical and probabilistic data to predict the optimal set of choices to meet the arranged objective, Game Theory analyzes the process of decision-making of a player related to their interactions with other subjects. Indeed, this discipline analyzes two different aspects of those interactions through its two main branches: normative analysis which investigates the reasons behind certain decisions, strategies and tactics adopted, and prescriptive analysis, which studies the interactions and tries to predict all the possible outcomes and establish which balances can or cannot be reached. A game that is classically analyzed through Game Theory is the Prisonerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dilemma. This game was formalized by Albert W. Tacker and it presents two prisoners who cooperated in a crime confined in separate cells. The two prisoners can confess their crimes or declare themselves innocent and, based on the choice of the other criminal, a penalty is applied. If both parties confess, they will be charged with ten years of imprisonment, if only one confesses, the betrayer will be offered to spend one year in prison while the other will have to atone for a twenty-five-years penalty as they did not collaborate with the authorities. Lastly, if they both declare themselves innocent, they will only have to atone for three years of prison as there is no evidence of the major crime but only of smaller offences.

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The objective each criminal has, is to spend as little years as possible in prison and, therefore, the best scenario for each of them is to confess while the other does not, as to spend just one year in prison. Considering this, this game shows how, when lacking communication, two parties can decide not to cooperate in face of a greater reward: in fact, both prisoners will likely betray each other and confess, resulting in having to face ten years in prison each. Does communication or lack of it play a great part in games? Imagine a scenario that is slightly different from the one previously considered in which the criminals are allowed to communicate. We could easily convince ourselves that they would agree on an option that could benefit both at the same time and therefore not confessing their crimes and facing three years each. Though this may sound plausible, this scenario rarely ever takes place as the two prisoners, being criminals, do not trust each other and, after agreeing on not confessing, will still both confess either with the objective to fool the other or not to get fooled. The theory of this simple game is a clear demonstration of the usefulness of this mathematical framework: assuming some basic human characteristics, e.g. valuing personal reward more than any cooperative solution, gives an estimate about the optimal playing strategy, but also predicts the most probable scenario. Application to more complicated events can prove valuable in the fields of economics entrepreneurship. prisoner 1 prisoner 2 confesses does not confess

confesses

does not confess

10 years

25 years

10 years

3 years

1 year

3 years

25 years

3 years

pay-off matrix of the Prisonerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dilemma

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CLOUD STORAGE

author: Elaa Jamazi

In 2006, Amazon Web Services played a major role in popularizing cloud storage by launching “Amazon S3” (simple storage service). It has gained recognition after becoming the storage supplier of widely popular services such as: Dropbox, Pinterest, etc. Ever since, according to Google data, the interest in “Cloud Storage” has become 40 times larger in the past decade, which is no surprise considering how practical and handy cloud storage proved to be. Now, the web is overflowing with dozens of cloud storage services that can be divided into three categories: public, private and hybrid services.

Starting with the most commonly used one, especially on the individual level: Public cloud storage. It is an easy way for businesses and individuals to get storage capacity from a provider that both owns and operates the service. But it doesn’t only cover storage capacities; providers may also offer other resources such as applications or virtual machines. Some of these resources may be offered for free but clients may need to pay for other resources, or more storage capacities through subscriptions or a pay-per-usage model. The biggest advantage of public storage is that the client doesn’t need to worry about

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the costs that come with building and maintaining the storage infrastructure. Also, it allows the users to easily and simply scale the storage space up or down and it enables resource sharing. public storage itself can also be categorized into two classes: file storage for sharing and collaboration, and storage for business applications. Some companies like Dropbox, Box, and Apple iCloud provide easy-to-use platforms for individuals as well as organizations of all sizes to store, share and collaborate on certain projects. While other companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Amazon offer services catered to businesses’ needs that can support some tasks like software development, data analytics and databases, which all require a higher and optimized storage space. As for private storage, also known as internal storage, it has scalability and flexibility as common points with public storage. However, it is only dedicated for businesses especially big enterprises. It is owned and can only be accessed by a single organization and its authorized partners. Internal storage is usually built on traditional data storage and IT infrastructure. That doesn’t mean that the features and tech-

nologies used for establishing the cloud storage will differ from those used with public storage, it only means that the relationship between user and provider will change. In the case of internal storage, the client is the corporate division or the business unit, while the provider is the company’s IT department. As for why some enterprises would choose this kind of storage over the public one, is because sometimes certain data may need to be kept on site for security or legal issues which can’t be accomplished through public cloud storage since it is managed and saved in the provider’s data centers. Those centers are geographically separate from the concerned enterprise and can’t be supervised by it, therefore it is avoided when higher security is required. As for the implementation of this type of storage, an orchestration framework would be needed. This framework can be supplied by specialized companies. Examples of such frameworks include: Microsoft Azure Stack and VMware vRealize Suite cloud management platform. Also, some open source platforms are available like Apache CloudStack and OpenStack. Now, for the third and final cloud storage type: Hybrid cloud

storage. Just as the name suggests, it’s a mix between public and private storage. It uses both local and off-site resources. It allows businesses to benefit from both types of storage as they can keep their highly-classified files under their watch, while having the not-so-top-secret ones on a public cloud. Opting for hybrid cloud storage will help the organization cut down on hardware spending that comes with creating their own cloud and also simplify, a bit, the orchestration process for themselves since it is handled by the provider (in the case of using a public cloud storage service). Some of the most popular hybrid cloud storage providers are Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, Rackspace, VMware, Dell EMC, and IBM. So, in conclusion, Public cloud storage is the only one that can be used on the individual level, while private and hybrid cloud storage services are more dedicated for businesses and enterprises since a hardware infrastructure is needed to implement them. Some organizations go for these kinds of cloud storage to ensure total control and security over certain types of data that may be required to be kept secret and unattainable by outsiders.

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS WHAT KIND OF DATA ARE THEY GATHERING? author: Helena Filić

robably you have asked yourself a thousand times why whenever you enter a website some warning about ‘collecting cookies’ appears. What does it mean? And why have I never received some of those cookies to my home address? Actually, there are a lot of things happening behind those cookies, for example - Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free web analytics service and, now, the most widely used tool for following and reporting website traffic. You want to use Google Analytics whether you own a website, you own an online shop or if you are a marketer, in order to increase the marketing and sales efforts of the platforms you are using. Google Analytics is a free web analytics service and, now, the most widely used tool for following and reporting website traffic. At its most basic level, Google Analytics consists of: JavaScript code on each page of a website A data collection service on Google’s servers A processing engine that creates report data Every time a new visitor enters a page with a tracking code, the code runs in the visitor’s browser, collects visitor data, and sends it to a Google data collection server.

It collects information about the visitor’s browser and computer settings, like screen resolution, operating system, type of web browser, JavaScript support, language. Also, the location (this is derived from the IP address), time of visit, visited pages and time spent on each page of the website. With some custom implementation, Google Analytics can be used to collect document downloads, clicks on links leading to external websites, errors when users fill out forms, clicks on videos, scroll depth, interactions with site-specific widgets. After the information is collected, it can be sent to Google Analytics servers to proceed further. If you were wondering who can access the analytics, the answer is: everyone who has login access to the Google Analytics account. If you are now interested in using Google Analytics, here are some of the most important facts that you should know about. First of all Google Analytics is free of charge so everyone can use it. There’s a Google Analytics Academy, where you can get more information about how to use it. You can create custom reports based on your needs. This way you can track specific information depending on your industry. If the Google Analytics cookies are deleted, the user is seen as a new visitor in the next visit, and all information from previous visits will be lost. This also means that multiple users on a computer are seen as the same visitor. Also, a visitor using two computers is seen as two different visitors.

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51% BLOCKCHAIN ATTACKS author: Moritz Knüppel Most cryptocurrencies, most notably the original Bitcoin (BTC), are based on a concept called the blockchain, in which transactions are stored in a distributed ledger. In Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains, this ledger is secured through a process called mining, in which computers or dedicated ASIC hardware (see the article on ASICs in this magazine) try to solve a complex mathematical puzzle to tie together a heap of transactions into a so-called block. The miner who finds the answer first is awarded a mining-reward of currently 12.5 BTC. The newly found block is mathematically linked to its previous block, creating a chain of blocks, thus the term blockchain. This blockchain is shared across the Bitcoin network and a miner will generally try to find the next block to add to the chain in order to receive a mining reward. This system is secure so long as the computational power (measured in the so-called hashrate) is decentralized, meaning that no one person or group of persons controls a significant amount of the hashrate. What happens otherwise, we will demonstrate with a practical example: The PoW based currency Emerald Crypto (EMD) uses the Scrypt algorithm for mining and has a fairly consistently low network-wide total hashrate of about 1Gh/s1. In order to realize an attack, we need more hashrate than the rest of the complete network combined, thus we need at least 1Gh/s. Here the Slovenian company NiceHash comes into play, which is a marketplace to sell and buy hashrate. There we can rent 10Gh/s for 16 hours for a price of roughly €24.

Like the BTC client program, the EMD one automatically attempts at launch to connect with other clients to form a P2P network in order to share the most current blockchain. We disable this behavior at point X in time. Now the EMD client holds the entire EMD blockchain up until the moment, but will not receive updates or update other clients. Since the rest of the network continues mining, eventually a new block will be found and added to the blockchain. This will be communicated to all other clients in the network. Our client is isolated and will not receive this update. Instead, we will point the mining power rented at NiceHash to our client and start mining ourselves and very soon, we will have found a block of our own. We hold greater mining power, so will find new blocks faster than all the others together, making out blockchain grow faster.

block 45

block 47

publically available blockchain

block 46

Gigahash per second, meaning 1,000,000,000 calculated hashes in one second

block 46

block 47

attacker’s available blockchain

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At this point, EMD is effectively split. There are two separate “networks“, each with their own blockchains. Both blockchains are valid according to the EMD rules. If we now connect our client back to the rest of the network, it receives the other blockchain and begins to publish its own. Every client now needs to make the decision which blockchain to accept as the “true“ one. The decision is based on which blockchain is the longest2. Since our blockchain is longer than that of the others, they have to accept our blockchain as the “true” one and will disregard their own. This rewriting of a blockchain allows for a socalled double spend, where the same EMD is spent twice. Assume that we are still mining our secret blockchain when we start another client which is connected to the network. With it, we send 1000 EMD to a cryptocurrency exchange that accepts EMD deposits. Once this transaction is mined into the (public) blockchain, the exchange will now credit us with 1000 EMD, which we exchange for BTC and withdraw right away. After that, we release our private blockchain, according to which the 1000 EMD transaction has never taken place. Therefore, despite having received value in exchange for our 1000 EMD, we still hold our 1000 EMD according to the longest, thus “true”, EMD blockchain, which we can now deposit again, exchange for BTC again and withdraw again. We thus spent the same money twice. The degree to which a currency is vulnerable depends on whether there is enough hashrate purchasable for the respective PoW algorithm. https://www.crypto51.app/ keeps track of this for a number of cryptocurrencies, many of which are potentially very vulnerable to attacks. I predict that in the long term, such attacks will occur repeatedly, until there are only two or three significant currencies per algorithm left, as is already the case with the SHA-256 algorithm used by Bitcoin and its recent forks.

This is strongly simplified in order to limit the length of this article. The actual decision is made in favor of the blockchain with the highest accumulated difficulty, which depending on the difficulty adjustment mechanism and statistical chance may not be the longest.

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UBER NEURAL NETWORK BASED FORECASTING SYSTEM author: Chiara Marzano

ny decision-making process in companies is nowadays centred around Business Intelligence, a series of strategies and processes apt to gather data and analyze strategic information in order to obtain knowledge from them. A fundamental component of these strategies is efficient forecasting regarding products, marketplace or expenses, which could serve several causes such as avoiding under or overprovisioning, determining prices for the service and improving customer experiences. Uber, the American company offering, among others, a peerto-peer ridesharing service, leverages forecasting to offer higher efficiency and quality to its clients and to increase the rides while reducing costs. Being heavily reliant on the actions and reactions of its clients, Uber employs these characteristics to create fitting models. Those models can take into account human behaviours and other factors, such as seasonality, and conveys them in a fairly accurate forecast. Consequently, factors such as the uniqueness of human thought and fluctuations in their behaviour are not to be looked down on completely. They can easily be integrated into the model, and when in posses of a large database, can help deliver more accurate results thanks to statistical methods. Tracing

unexpected events, and the response of the clients to them, is also a mean of immense value. Merged with seasonality, it allows, for instance, a larger number of cars to be sent to the area of a shop giving discounts on the week before Christmas, or to pick up as many people as possible outside a theatre when a play is over, future-proofing any type of event and assuring complete coverage. The main quantitative methods used in forecasting by Uber can be grouped as follows: - Model-based: the strongest and most efficient choice when facing a problem defined by laws and theories, such as physical phenomena. This method does not prove to be efficient when the knowledge on the circumstances is not full. - Statistical models: simple and perfectly fitting for situations that are not fully knowable. Among all methods, the Theta Method stands out for its fair performances and computational costs despite not being of wide use and, for these reasons, it is the method of preference chosen by Uber in some fields. - Machine learning methods: A relatively recent addition among the classes. Quantile Regression Forests (QRF) currently is the most widely used method for forecasting purposes. The main difference between Statistics and Machine Learning is that

the latter is by nature laborious to work with for first users but, on the other hand, tends to be more flexible. Uber is currently using its own forecasting system, built based on both historical data collected by the company itself during the years and external factors. As the events that this model predicts can be extremely rare or without a specific periodicity, Uber retrieves data regarding rare events from different cities and uses them at once trained single neural network. The system is based on the Long Short-Term Memory architecture, a unit of a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) which can plot complex and non-linear interactions permitting multiple inputs. As a matter of fact, the system is designed as a multi-node neural network and therefore built to be accurate, scalable and fitting for different time series and it is successively trained with sliding windows, using libraries such as Tensorflow and Keras. The usage of the model can be effective after computing the weights of the network and exporting them and implementing them in native Go code. Despite the challenges set by the fluctuations and unpredictability of the physical world, forecasting could supply companies with a strong medium to improve their services further by providing a technology-backed glimpse into the future.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE author: Elaa Jamazi

Artificial Intelligence has been and psychological side of AI. The it caused a controversy mainly studied for decades, yet it is still biggest breakthroughs in the field because the bot avoided a lot one of the most ambiguous and have passed unnoticed by the of questions by claiming that puzzling topics of computer majority of people, because AI he’s a teenager whose second science. It all started in 1950, developed in subtle ways. Rather language is English and it also when a British mathematician than humanoid robots driving hid some of its non-human named Alan Turing opened the spaceships, AI is used as clinical aspects and lack of intelligence doors for a new field of study support systems or in examining with humor. And let’s not forget that would, later on, be called purchase histories. Nowadays, the humanoid robot that was “Artificial Intelligence” with his AI is present in every field where activated in 2015 and that caused paper “Computing Machinery computers are used. AI is heavily a big buzz ever since: Sophia. It’s and Intelligence”. However, only influential in aviation, finance, a robot that uses AI among other 6 years later - in Dartmouth education, medicine, even music, technologies to simulate human College, New Hampshire, USA - and many more. However, that behaviors. It was widely talked the term Artificial Intelligence doesn’t deny that there were about. It appeared on many was officially coined by John some AI moments that caught shows and popular YouTube McCarthy who held the first the attention of a large number channels. It even received the academic conference about of people, mostly due to the Saudi citizenship, making it the the subject. Attendees of the fact that these achievements first robot to receive a citizenship conference were very positive brought machines a step closer from any country. Such events about the future of AI, some to simulating humans and excite people since they bring were even quoted saying “Within even surpassing them in some up the science fiction part of AI a generation [...] the problem of fields. The first event was in and remind the public of some creating ‘artificial intelligence’ 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue of their favorite movies while will substantially be solved”. became the first computer to making the, scary yet appealing, Anyhow, it turned out that AI beat a chess champion once it robot-controlled future that’s in wasn’t so simple and achieving it defeated Russian grandmaster their imagination more plausible. was much harder than expected. Garry Kasparov. And in 2011, Speaking of Sci-Fi, AI is The term AI encompasses the computer giant’s question- one of the main topics this m a n y n u a n c e s , i n c l u d i n g answering system Watson genre was built upon. AI was machines truly capable of won the quiz show “Jeopardy!” heavily discussed in movies, thinking, but also search by beating the champions of series, novels and comic books. algorithms used for solving board the time: Brad Rutter and Ken There were two categories of games. No one can deny current Jennings. In 2014, a Chatbot AI representations in Science computers’ ability to use logic called Eugene Goostman has Fiction: Utopian and Dystopian. but the question is will they ever fooled 33% of the judges on the Utopian narratives focus on the be able to think. The definition Turing test to believe he was possible benefits of robots and of the word “think” is very vague human. Therefore, many have how they will end up helping itself, some even argue that considered that he passed the humans and making their lives such notion isn’t possible, which Turing test but the judgment easier. Iain Banks’s Culture series contributes to the philosophical wasn’t that black and white and of novels, illustrates a futuristic

eestecmagazine community in which humans, robots and aliens all co-exist. As for Dystopian cases, one of the most known films is the 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. It talks about an AI rebellion of an artificially intelligent computer, H.A.L 9000, that overrules an entire space crew while on mission. The only survivor was the spaceship’s commander that managed to deactivate it. Other popular AI movies are ExMachina, Blade Runner, RoboCop, I Robot, The Terminator, etc… But is a doomsday led by machines and AI as pictured in such movies only able to be a work of the imagination? Isn’t there even a tiny possibility it would turn out to be true? Well, some of the most prominent figures in the technology and science world affirm such possibility. Big names like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking believe that one day will come when AI will turn against the humankind. Musk has been quoted saying that “A.I. is far more dangerous than nukes”. As for Hawking, he believed that “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race” because AI will reach a point where it will become able to update and develop itself, while us, as humans, will be limited by the very slow natural evolution and will not be able to keep up with it. Whether our end will come by the hand of AI, or whether AI will turn out to be humanfriendly, the current researches and developments have proved that such an outcome is so farfetched and still out of reach. At the moment, AI is at a primitive state, far from becoming totally autonomous and surpassing human intelligence. However, it still has many benefits on our current lives. It made many tasks easier and much more efficient.

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MACHINE LEARNING HOW TO START? author: Helena FiliÄ&#x2021;

Have you ever wondered how people make decisions about who is the person that is walking towards them? Or how are we able to recognize all the words that someone is saying or signs and characters that we see? Or how does the system for fingerprints identification work? Machine learning represents a field of Artificial Intelligence based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention. It is not something new for the world, but algorithms have changed because of new computing technologies and requirements. The basic idea of ML (machine learning) is to teach a computer to perform specific tasks by only using data. The iterative aspect of machine learning is important, because, as models are exposed to new data, they are able to independently adapt. They learn from previous computations to produce reliable, repeatable decisions and results. Nowadays, researchers are trying to modify and apply complex algorithms to big data - repeating them over and over again, faster and faster. There are two really popular examples of machine learning applications: - Google self-driving car - the system that makes online detection of all the cars and walkers that are nearby, and traffic signs to later decide what to do; - Online recommendation offers, such as those from Amazon and Netflix. How does our music player make a playlist based on songs that we do or might like?

eestecmagazine If you are now interested in machine learning application enough and you want to improve your own ideas, here are the steps you should follow: Step 1: Learn multivariable calculus and linear algebra As some people like to say, mathematics is the basis of everything. In order to prepare yourself for this challenge you should improve your knowledge in this field. ML is all about applying statistics and computer science to data. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be scared! You really donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need to be a professional programmer or mathematician to learn ML. Step 2: Choose your programming language There are many programming languages which provide ML capabilities, but Python and R are the most commonly used. So before entering into this new world, try to make a smart choice and choose the language that might be familiar to you. Step 3: Find some machine learning courses There are many ways to make a progress with knowledge of ML. You can start by watching online tutorials for free. But if you want to build a

strong machine learning foundation, you should work harder. There are various courses available to learn about machine learning. They can be found online for free or maybe even at your university. Step 4: Put theory into practice Machine learning takes some time and you have to be patient and constant in what you do. For the advanced level you need to spend a lot of time working on various machine learning and deep learning problems. Also, you need datasetsto practice building and for tuning models. Step 5: Challenge yourself in more complex projects After some time of practicing easier examples, you should try to test yourself in more complicated problems. It will upgrade your confidence to face more interesting projects. In this Digital Age, everything is changing very fast and all the time. We can find out about a new discovery every day, especially in areas that are rapidly developing like machine learning. So try to sail into this world and achieve your goals.

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WHAT FACEBOOK KNOWS ABOUT US author: Chiara Marzano

Following a series of pieces published during the beginning of April 2018, the New York Times and the Guardian exposed Facebook, investigating the fallacies in the management of the data retrieved through their platform brought up by the scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica, a consulting company for online marketing. The case is complex and still lacks a clear explanation, but the main accusations that the company is facing are abetment towards the Republican party during the latest American elections and a subsequent attempt to sway the voting process through targeted campaigns. The red string connecting Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is a web application launched in 2014 by Alexander Kogan called “thisisyourdigitallife” that gathered personal information whenever one of its users accessed it through their Facebook profile. The practice itself does not go against any law but, as at the time Facebook also granted access to details about each profile’s friends network, this application was able to reach an estimated number of 50 million people, and so was Cambridge Analytica when Kogan later sold this data to the company, going against Facebook’s Terms of Service. The subsequent process opened the users’ eyes regarding the value of personal information and brought many to rethink their online privacy and secrecy choices: Which of the data we share is Facebook storing and do we have control over them? Besides the primary profile information provided at the moment of registration and interactions with public posts, the platform mainly gathers data using the following techniques:

3rd Party Data

Data bought from third-party companies, such as Acxiom, Epsilon, Oracle, Quantium, and Experian that help them profile users offline.

Facebook Pixels

Plug-ins for websites that help advertisers check on the effectiveness of their ads. In exchange for this service, Facebook tracks users’ interest in those ads and use them to target the following insertions better.

Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Modelling

These methods are the active core of the deducting process. In fact, the data currently stored cannot be examined effectively through any manual system and, where man fails, technology steps in. Artificial Intelligence is able to select the ad that could better interest the reader and to show it to them in the best moment, both helping advertisers to receive a better outcome from their campaigns and to learn further about its users. Considering the advertising activity undertaken by the networking platform in the past years, acting without any information backing their work up would consist in guesswork and, therefore, it would not be as effective. The fact that Facebook owns so much data about its profiles should not scare users though, as social networks are delicately and accurately engineered and handle sensitive information by nature to assure its users the best possible online experience.

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

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author: Elaa Jamazi

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Computers surpass humans on so many levels when it comes to processing numbers and storing data - as long as that information was presented to the computer in a set of instructions that it understands, using languages like C++, Java or Python. The input and output process that occurs between a computer and a user is under a certain format. Humans cannot just go and say or type words and then except the machine to respond correctly. Words are unstructured data and computers aren’t the best at dealing with it. Unstructured data doesn’t have a set of clear, exact rules. Humans can “feel” the difference between someone who is meaning what they’re saying word by word and, someone who is speaking figuratively. However, machines don’t have this ability, or at least not yet. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the subfield of computer science, information engineering, and artificial intelligence dedicated to deal with this issue and evolve computers’ ability of communication to reach the same level as humans. Natural Language Processing’s importance and influence in many fields has been increasing at an unperceived rate. Considering the ever growing amount of unstructured data produced every day, from medical records to social media and search engines, using AI to efficiently analyze this data in a short period of time, has become crucial. Let’s say, a company wants to find new ways to advertise its products. With the help of Google, they can find commonly used terms that clients usually associate with the company. NLP then allows for a quick compilation of the data into terms obviously related to their brand and those that they might not expect, which will turn out to be for their benefit they can utilize these themes to come up with new

advertisements that would still intrigue the listener. Also, NLP is used together with text analytics in social media analytics for tracking awareness and sentiment about specific topics and identifying key influencers. NLP’s uses and applications in our daily lives aren’t only limited to Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s assistant. For example, when doing a very normal task, such as typing into your phone or looking up a certain topic on some website, the word suggestions that appear are natural language processing in action. It is something that we don’t really think about and don’t even notice sometimes, yet it is part of one of the most complex current technology challenges. Furthermore, have you ever looked at the emails in your spam folder and noticed similarities in the subject lines? You’re seeing Bayesian spam filtering, a statistical NLP technique that compares the words in spam to valid emails to identify junk mail. But how does NLP work? For voice based systems like Alexa, translating the heard words into text should be done first. That can be accomplished using the Hidden Markov Models system (HMM). It listens to 10-20 milliseconds of the speech, divides it into phonemes (the smallest unit of speech) and then try to compare it with pre-recorded speech. Next, the NLP system tries to break each word down into its part of speech (noun, verb, etc.). This happens through a series of coded grammar rules that rely on algorithms that incorporate statistical machine learning to help determine the context of what the person said. For none Speech-To-Text NLP, the system directly skips to the part where it analyses the words using algorithms and grammar rules. Depending on the focus of the NLP software, the results get used in different ways.

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INSPIRATIONAL SCIENTIST FACTS & STORIES author: Miraรง Mert Pelister

Get Inspired, Carry the Light We, engineers, are usually not considered as scientists, even though a significant portion of us actually become ones. That does not stop the lives of some scientists to inspire us nevertheless. Many scientists had such interesting lives, that are full of surprises, downs, and problems, that the dedication they had is truly motivating. Not only we learn science from them, but also there are so many life lessons to take from what they have gone through.

Dedication & Confidence C. V. Raman, who we know from Raman Effect and Raman Spectroscopy in physics, was a perfect example of dedication and confidence. At the age of 19, he wanted to publish a paper regarding his experiment and sent the paper to his professor for consideration. However, his professor did not even read the paper and did not give it a chance. Raman, full of ambition, did not give up and sent the paper directly to a scientific magazine. The paper immediately got published and was followed by another paper in a short time. After his outstanding work at such young age, a physicist from the other side of the world was impressed enough to write a letter to Raman, calling him professor mistakenly when he was still an undergrad student! Raman was so confident of his work, he bought tickets for himself and his wife for the 1930 Nobel Prize ceremony, anticipating that he would be awarded. Well, he was definitely not wrong as he got the prize the same year.

GetInspired

Passion & Imagination When it comes to the passion for science, Carl Sagan is one of the best teachers on the subject. He had so many inspirational quotes, speeches, articles or books that one can not simply put science aside after reading or listening to them. Dr Sagan does not only teach us about science, but also helps us imagine the future of humankind. He is a great example for us all in an academic way, as he held two Bachelor’s and one Master’s degree at the age of only 22. Astronomy and physics were definitely his passions and he followed them to the top – he even convinced NASA to turn the cameras of Voyager I spacecraft to Earth! Later the image became famous as “Pale Blue Dot”, and Dr Sagan even has a thought-provoking book on it. Sagan once pointed out that when he visited kindergartens and high schools, there was a huge difference on the quality of questions that were asked by the students – kids in the kindergarten had much deeper and sceptical questions about everything while high schoolers asked much simpler questions. That makes one think - what happens between the start and the end of the educational system that everyone loses their imagining and questioning abilities and becomes less curious about everything? It must become a valid objective for us, engineers, to overcome this problem and become curious again. Expanding the edges of our imaginative minds through gatherings, activities and studies should become a priority. EESTECers surely do these well via plenty of different workshops but maybe we can do better and follow these lines of Dr Sagan: “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.”

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NOBEL PRIZES IN 2018 author: JÓzsef Mák

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize award ceremony takes place every year on the 10th of December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, who was the founder of the prize. The prizes for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Economics (existing since 1968 and founded by Sveriges Riksbank in the memory of Alfred Nobel) are given out in Stockholm, Sweden, whereas the Prize for Peace is awarded in Norway. Advancements for which the Nobel prizes are awarded are not just scientific curiosities. In many cases, even if they are awarded for fundamental discoveries, by the time the prizes are given out, they have reached engineering application. In many other cases they are given out directly for engineering inventions. Inventors awarded with a Nobel prize were the developers of wireless telegraphy (1909), spectroscopic methods (1924, 1944, 1981, 1994, 2005), particle detection and acceleration methods (1939, 1947, 1960, 1992), microscopic methods (1953, 1986), the transistor (1956), the laser (1964), holography (1971), radio astronomy (1974), experimental methods that allow the manipulation of single quantum systems composed of photons and ions and other experimental methods that led here (1989, 1997, 2012), the integrated circuit (2000), optical fibers and the CCD sensor (2009), the blue light-emitting diode (2014) and 2017’s measurement instrument, the LIGO detector, used in the detection of gravitational waves.

In light of the above, let’s see what scientific contributions were found by the Nobel Committee to be ”for the greatest benefit to mankind” 1 in 2018. All information in this article and the quotes that describe the reasons for receiving the Prizes are accessible on the webpage of the Nobel Prize2, if not otherwise indicated.

objects in the middle of a laser beam in 1970, but the actual optical tweezer setup using a focused beam was only born in 1986. The new technology quickly became popular both in atomic physics (see fig. (1)) and biology: Ashkin and several more in his footsteps started capturing bacteria and viruses to study them. As technology advanced, not only cells could be captured but also organelles and THE NOBEL PRIZE IN 3 single molecules, which allowed PHYSICS such measurements as tracing This year’s Nobel prize in the stepwise motion of motor Physics is awarded to Arthur proteins as they move along Ashkin ”for the optical tweezers a filament. 6 Optical tweezers and their application to biological continue to find applications systems” and to Gérard Mourou in scientific and engineering and Donna Strickland ”for their research, such as in volumetric method of generating high- displays with the aim of once intensity, ultra-short optical realizing the capabilities of R2-D2 pulses”. Optical tweezers use displaying Princess Leia in real focused laser light to pick up 3D space. 7 and hold tiny objects in place. Before Gérard Mourou and (See [4] for a cool experimental Donna Strickland have invented demonstration.) The basic Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) working principle relies on light technology, high-power lasers carrying momentum, and the were huge and costly, were limited light rays being bent by the to a few gigawatts, and could not object that is held in place. Total give off more than a few pulses momentum is conserved in a per day in order not to damage closed system, and the small the amplifier material. However, object acted on by the laser they have cleverly circumvented beam reacts with a momentum the problem of amplifying a change compensating the high-intensity beam by first momentum change of the light’s stretching it in time-domain, such photons, which eventually moves that its peak-power is reduced, it towards the focal point of then amplifying it, and finally the laser. For a more detailed compressing it together again. explanation and an interesting (See [10] for a bit more detail experiment, see [5]. on CPA.) Since its invention in The inventor, Arthur Ashkin, 1985, CPA and its improvements first constructed a device that allowed for affordable lasers with was able to hold dielectric peak-powers well in the terawatt

GetInspired range, and the ultra-short pulses and ultra-high powers enabled a range of new experiments and inventions. Electronic movement in molecules and atoms happen on an attosecond (10-18 s) timescale, and CPA combined with a technology called HighHarmonic Generation (HHG) enables laser pulses of this temporal length, and as a consequence, direct observation of the electron dynamics. 11 Perhaps more well-known and less obscure applications of femtosecond laser pulses are material etching, such as drilling holes or laser eye surgery, that has become widespread over the last decade. Ultra-high power laser technology continues to improve, finding more and more applications, such as for making new types of particle accelerators for medical applications. What can be of special importance for European students, is that the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI), a co-operative project between the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, in which Gérard Mourou is also involved, is soon expected to be finished, and will further extend the limits of laser science.

THE NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY12 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 was awarded to Frances H. Arnold ”for the directed evolution of enzymes”, and to George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter ”for the phage display of peptides and antibodies.” The mutual motif in the works of the above scientists is that they managed to get evolution under control and put it to use. Frances H. Arnold, who first graduated in mechanical engineering, and than got a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, was the first to experimentally demonstrate

a successful evolution of an enzyme: by introducing random mutations in the DNA sequence coding the molecule, and then carefully selecting the best variants, she achieved a 256-fold boost in the activity of a protein called subtilisin E, in conditions where the molecule naturally does not function.14 Later other tricks were introduced, such as creating mutants by combining the genes of different organisms, the idea of which was presented by Dutch scientist Willem P. C. Stemmer. The directed evolution of proteins became a successful technique, and a series of new enzymatic catalysts, previously unseen in nature, were born: they drove chemical reactions, but without the need for expensive and hazardous catalysts normally used by the chemical industry, or enzymes that could function at higher temperatures than the naturally occurring variants. A pressing need for mankind is finding a replacement for fossil fuels and for this reason Arnold and others used directed evolution to make E. Coli bacteria able to produce a candidate biofuel, isobutanol. Other industrial applications of either evolved enzymes themselves or their products include taste enhancers, certain drugs and detergents, and the scale continues to widen. The other half of the Nobel was shared between George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter, for phage display. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, and force them to produce copies of the phage, thus destroying the host. In the first half of the 1980’s, libraries of DNA fragments were available, but it was unknown which protein they encode. Smith’s idea was to insert random genes into the phages own genetic material, in such a way that the protein they code for would be present on the

surface of the phage. Antibodies are molecules produced by the immune system, that bind other molecules, so called antigens, with high specificity. By immobilizing antibodies with a certain target protein on the side of a laboratory dish, and then pouring a mixture of phages having random proteins on their surface, the ones that carry the target will be bound to the dish, whereas the rest will be washed away. One can now multiply the phages by infecting bacteria, and apply the selection again, until a high number of viruses remain, that carry the gene of the target protein. By determining the sequence of this gene, the DNA fragment structure and the protein produced can be linked. Winter’s group turned the idea of phage display around: they created huge libraries of phages expressing different, random antibodies on their surfaces, and selected the ones that bound to a specific immobilized antigen. It was hoped that, by this method, antibodies for therapeutic purposes can be produced. If the new molecules are evolved from the ones that are present in the human body, they will not be rejected by the immune system, but upon the recognition of an antigen, will be able to trigger the immune response, otherwise absent due to disease or other reasons. The first such derived and approved antibody was Adalimubab, used in the therapy of autoinflammatory diseases. Another derived antibody for medical purposes is one that inhibits anthrax toxin, but more are on their way, which are expected to bring a change into the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease or cancer therapy, just to mention a few. For more information on how directed evolution and phage display work, see the Nobel

eestecmagazine information pages [12] or [16] for a short video and an article.

THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE17 James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018” for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.” Cancer is a name for a group of diseases that share a common trait: uncontrolled cell proliferation. The reasons for its development may be severalfold ranging from inheritance to mutations coming from external and internal factors accumulating in the genetic material as age progresses. It has been the subject of medical research for a long time how to activate the immune system against cancerous cells, that in many cases seem to evade the sophisticated ability of the immune system to recognize pathological behavior. Although the immune system is quite complicated (see [18] for a very understandable summary on how it works), it suffices to know for now, that cytotoxic T cells (kind of white blood cells, that are able to destroy other cells on activation) are up-regulated by their T cell receptors (TCR), whereas they are down-regulated among others by two other types of receptors, CTLA-4 (Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte Antigen 4) and PD-1 (Programmed cell Death 1). TCL, CTLA-4 and PD-1 are part of a subtle regulatory machinery, that activates the T cells only if a pathologically functioning cell is detected, but keeps them from attacking healthy cells of the body. Allison’s idea was to release the blockade provided by the CTLA-4 receptor, not very well known in his time, which was

suspected to hold the T cells back from killing cancerous cells. He used antibodies to block the CTLA-4 receptor, which released the brakes holding the T cells back, and the results were amazing: tumor-bearing mice could be healed and this demonstrated the potential of the technology, and that CTLA-4 is indeed involved in regulating T cell response for cancerous cells. When a human CTLA-4 blocking antibody was developed, later named ipilimumab, it was shown that it potentially substantially increased the survival rate of patients with melanoma, although severe autoimmune responses were also observed: patients’ immune system lost of its brake started destroying also the healthy cells of the body. Tasuku Honjo’s research was originally not motivated by cancer research. At the time he started his experiments, the function of PD-1 was mostly unknown and he launched a program to find out about its function. He and many others have found out that it also inhibits immune response, and it was hypothesized that it might also be involved in immune response against tumor cells. Honjo’s group published a paper in 2005, in which they have confirmed that blocking the PD-1 receptor with antibodies leads to an increased immune response against tumor cells, which is at least as effective as in the case of a blocked CTLA-4 receptor, but the autoimmune side effects were less intense. Two human PD-1 blocking antibody drugs that got commercialized run under the name of pembrolizumab and nivolumab. Today, depending on the type of cancer, PD-1 or CTLA-4 blocking antibodies are used, or a combination of both. Although in either case the autoimmune response can hardly be evaded, which is sometimes fatal, in

cases of several types of cancer a good long-term recurrence-free survival was observed. The field of immune checkpoint therapy (as later the method of releasing the blockade of the immune system was called) is ever growing, and research continues for searching more ways to utilize the immune system for therapeutic purposes. Arising phenomena are far from being well-understood, and it is in many cases hard to make predictions about the clinical outcomes of applying a certain method. This is an entry-point for engineers and pursuers of quantitative sciences, because it is expected that through mathematical modeling and data-driven analysis it will be possible in the future to make predictions about the outcomes of a therapeutic method or to direct experimental research. 19-21

OUTLOOK TO OTHER PRIZES Although not strictly in the field of natural science, it is worthwhile to take a quick look at the receivers of the rest of the Prizes. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2018 has been postponed, as it stands on the official website of the prize.22 Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad jointly share the Nobel Peace Prize 2018 ”for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” Finally, William D. Nordhaus ”for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis” and Paul M. Romer ”for integrating t e c h n o l o g i c a l i n n ova t i o n s into long-run macroeconomic analysis.” equally share the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2018.

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Cesium

Fig. 1: Creating a molecule by trapping a single sodium and a single cesium atom in optical tweezers. Image taken from [8]. For the original publication see [9].

References: A. Nobel. (2018). Alfred Nobel’s will. Nobel Media AB 2018, Ed., [Online]. Available: https:// www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobels-will-2/ (visited on 10/29/2018). 2 Nobel Media AB 2018. (2018). The nobel prize, [Online]. Available: https://www.nobelprize.org/ (visited on 11/01/2018). 3 Two still understandable, but more detailed descriptions about the works of the Nobel laureates are available on the popular and advanced information page of the prize: Nobel Media AB 2018., (2018). Advanced information, [Online]. Available: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2018/advanced-information. and Nobel Media AB 2018., (2018). Advanced information, [Online]. Available: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2018/popular-information/ 4 F. C. Team. (Apr. 10, 2010). Optical trapping with red laser, [Online]. Available: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPN90U4yzBc. (visited on 10/29/2018) 5 A. Drake. (Oct. 22, 2017). Levitating diamonds with a laser beam!! [Online]. Available: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq7GaO8iqu8. (visited on 10/29/2018) 6 T. U. München. (Apr. 26, 2012). Mini cargo transporters on a rat run: New insight on molecular motor movement. (Two video captures showing a kinesin molecule as it transports a small bead through a microtubule, and the easy-to-understand description of the experiment), [Online]. Available: https://phys.org/news/2012-04-mini-cargo-rat-insight-molecular.html (visited on 10/29/2018). 7 Brigham Young University. (Jan. 25, 2018). “Star Wars” inspired volumetric display produces 3d images that float in mid-air, [Online]. Available: https://www.theengineer.co.uk/volumetric-display-3d-images/ (visited on 10/29/2018). [8] (Apr. 24, 2018). Optical tweezers create a single molecule from two atoms, [Online]. Available: https:// physicsworld.com/a/optical-tweezers-create-a-single-molecule-from-two-atoms/ (visited on 10/29/2018). 9 L. Liu, J. Hood, Y. Yu, J. Zhang, N. Hutzler, T. Rosenband, and K.-K. Ni, “Building one molecule from a reservoir of two atoms,” Science, vol. 360, no. 6391, pp. 900–903, 2018. 10 H. Johnston. (Oct. 2, 2018). Arthur ashkin, g ́erard mourou and donna strickland win the nobel prize for physics, [Online]. Available: https://physicsworld.com/a/arthur-ashkin-gerard-mourou-and-donna-strickland-the-nobel-prize-for-physics/ (visited on 10/29/2018). 11 C. Cofield. (Feb. 21, 2008). Focus: Electron stroboscope. (Link to video and original article), [Online]. Available: https://physics.aps.org/story/v21/st7 (visited on 10/30/2018). 12 For the popular and advanced information pages, see Nobel Media AB 2018. (2018). Popular information, [Online]. Available: https:// www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2018/popular-information/ (visited on 10/30/2018). and Nobel Media AB 2018. (2018). Advanced information, [Online]. Available: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2018/popular-information/ (visited on 10/30/2018). 13 Yourgenome Project. (Mar. 15, 2018). From dna to protein. H. Wilgar, Ed., [Online]. Available: https://www.yourgenome.org/video/from-dna-to-protein (visited on 10/30/2018). 14 K. Chen and F. H. Arnold, “Tuning the activity of an enzyme for unusual environments: Sequential random mutagenesis of subtilisin e for catalysis in dimethylformamide,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 90, no. 12, pp. 5618–5622, 1993. 15 C. A. Smith, M. Venning, and J. Verran, “Use of novel culture media to indicate alkaligenic properties of dental plaque,” Microbial ecology in health and disease, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 44–50, 2004. 16 For an entertaining and simple explanation of the works of the Nobel laureates, see this article and video: C. H. Arnaud. (Oct. 3, 2018). Frances H. Arnold, George P. Smith, and Gregory P. Winter share 2018 nobel prize in chemistry, [Online]. Available: https://cen.acs.org/ biological-chemistry/Frances-H-Arnold-George-P-Smith-and-Gregory-P-Winter-share-2018-Nobel-Prize-in-Chemistry/96/web/2018/10. 17 Popular and advanced information pages: Nobel Media AB 2018. (2018). Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018, [Online]. Available: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2018/pressrelease/ (visited on 10/30/2018). and Nobel Media AB 2018. (2018). Advanced information, [Online]. Available: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2018/advanced-information/ (visited on 10/30/2018). 18 L. Boyev, K. Philip, T. Philip, B. Henderson, K. Yale, N. Jenkins, B. de Pastino, N. Sweeney, D. B. Jackson, M. Aranda, S. Bailis, J. Kennedy, C. Brown, J. Leung, S. Bruskiewicz, C. MacDonald, J. Corberie, J. Nadeau, N. Counter, V. Rosas, A. Edwards, T. Sammy, M. Fan, N. Stinchcombe, K. Heinrichs, J. Tuer, and A. Winnik. (Oct. 8, 2015). Immune system, part 1: Crash course a&p #45. For a 3-part video series providing a simple and entertaining explanation about the immune system, see this., [Online]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIJK3dwCWCw (visited on 10/31/2018). 19 R. E. Callard and A. J. Yates, “Immunology and mathematics: Crossing the divide,” Immunology, vol. 115, no. 1, pp. 21–33, 2005. [Online]. Available: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1782120/ (visited on 11/01/2018). 20 M. Castro, G. Lythe, C. Molina-Paris, and R. M. Ribeiro, “Mathematics in modern immunology,” Interface Focus, vol. 6, no. 2, p. 20 150 093, 2016. 21 Y. Vodovotz, A. Xia, E. L. Read, J. Bassaganya-Riera, D. A. Hafler, E. Sontag, J. Wang, J. S. Tsang, J. D. Day, S. H. Kleinstein, et al., “Solving immunology?” Trends in immunology, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 116–127, 2017. 22 Nobel Media AB 2018. (Nov. 1, 2018). All nobel prizes in literature, [Online]. Available: https:// www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-literature/ (visited on 11/01/2018). 1

eestecmagazine

author: Miraç Mert Pelister

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk... Those are the names of people who are known almost by everyone – not surprising when you think about the impact they have made. These people changed the way we live and set an example on making humanity’s decades long dreams come true. It’s not about “imagining a world without smartphones, affordable personal computers or self-driving electric sport cars” – it is not difficult to understand those discoveries would eventually be made sooner or later by different people. The key point to understand here is who opened those doors among the hall of advancement, and how they did it. We are pointing out these specific names for a valid reason! Humanity’s last century passed with unbelievable electrical and computational advancements. It took less than two decades to switch from cassettes to CDs, MP3 players and finally smartphones. Everybody got used to voice-dialing friends and family in less than a decade of a time. It is obvious that the speed of advancement will not cease in this century as well – which means there are many other unpredictable breakthroughs to be made. It is not certain that you are going to be the one that will make the discovery, however, you might be the one commercializing it! Are you asking “how”?

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1 - Imagine! The most important step is to imagine! Think about the problems you encounter during your daily life, studies, job. Think about what you’d wish for, so that the task would be different and the problem would be gone. Imagine further: What would be needed to provide that change? What could be done to create that solution? Could you do it? How? For example, let’s say the problem is falling asleep while driving. The situation is dangerous for both the driver and other people. But what if we could create a device that could detect if the driver has fallen asleep and wake him or her up? Maybe a system with a camera and a face recognition system could track the eyes of the driver and set off an alarm when he or she is asleep!

2 - Plan Plan the steps needed to turn your idea into a real product that could be sold. Never set big goals though - just like it is difficult to climb a stair where the steps are too far away from each other, it is difficult to achieve goals that require too many necessities to be met. Set a final objective and set a chain of small goals that end up in accomplishing that objective. It is also important to create plans B, C, Z. Unlike our imaginations, so many opportunities do not align in real life and leave our plans invalid. The key part of the matter is to never give up and plan different paths that will still end in the same objective. For example, Elon Musk’s objective was to send a capsule to Mars that could automatedly grow plants inside. When he discussed the idea with professionals, he was not taken seriously and he got rejected from rocket-building companies at the time. Instead of giving up the dream, he made money from his other investments (which were all done by the same process this article is offering) and started building his own rockets! Not only he took a different path than the one he first planned, but he also set up the biggest private aerospace company in the world.

3 - Put in effort Nothing is easy and nothing is free! One unchanging rule of the universe is that you must put more effort into work to be done, because some of the energy will be lost due to friction. No system works fully efficiently! So, no matter how energyconsuming the plan you created is, you must put in more into that to make it real and make it work. If you, solely, are not enough, employ people and distribute the work efficiently. Organized work could help you achieve your micro-goals way faster towards your big objective and it will help the process become more professional as it progresses.

4 - Profit! The last step is to enjoy the fruits of your labour! If you completed all previous steps successfully, there is a huge chance you are going to be an entrepreneur – even if your idea won’t become as popular as a PC or a smartphone, it will definitely change the way we do certain things and who knows, maybe it will be the first ring of a greater chain of breakthroughs over time. Do not forget that everything you use now was a design of a person that came up with a solution to a problem once. In conclusion, if you are an EECS student, you have an endless sea of possible advancements because our lives are mostly dependent on electronics and software now. So if you hesitate whether something in your field could be enough to change the way we live, do not – because everything in EECS can change anything in our lives. Nothing hinders you from becoming the next world-famous entrepreneur. Be dedicated, be creative, work hard and have confidence. The size of the impact you could make is not important - when you become an entrepreneur, you will make history nonetheless.

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EESTech Challenge is 3 years old Three years ago EESTech Challenge (EESTEC Technology Challenge), the technological competition organized by EESTEC, was born. Its premise was to create opportunities for European students to gain knowledge in the field of EECS and develop a professional network. Every year since then, EC has evolved and adapted to the fast developing rhythms of the EECS field by changing the topic of the competition annually. From Machine Learning to Big Data Analysis and now Internet of Things, EESTech Challenge is raising the bar with every year that passes. The competition consists of two stages, Local Rounds and the Final Round. This year 19 European cities in total have taken on the challenge and will organise a Local Round. Those are Athens, Aveiro, Belgrade, Delft, Duisburg, East Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Milan, Munich, Niš, Novi Sad, Patras, Sarajevo, Thessaloniki, Tirana, Tuzla, Valencia, Xanthi, Zurich. The participating teams will consist of three people who, in their pursuit of victory, should demonstrate not only their knowledge about Internet of Things, but also motivation, dedication, and team spirit. The winning team of every Local Round will qualify to the second and last stage of the competition, most commonly known as The Final Round. This year the Final Round will take place in Munich in May 2019. So why is this years’ topic Internet of Things? After thorough research of companies, students’ and universities’ interests, we concluded that this topic had the most potential. Its application spans through every conceivable scientific and non-scientific field, which is enough to make any participant fascinated by this topic, and every company interested in EESTech Challenge.

Pictures are of Local Rounds from Milan, Sarajevo and Tuzla respectively.

From protocols and sensors to platforms and programming, all the way to Cloud Computing and combination of Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, find your team, consider the potential of Internet of Things and get #ReadyForTheChallenge in the world of things!

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SOCIAL ENGINEERING IN EESTEC Relations between people is one of the requirements of life. Those relations can be traced to connect the fields like Physics and Psychology. For example, the psychology of herd can be likened to fluid mechanics. This means that the movement of society is depicted as a movement of fluid, where community-engineering can be used as one of the definitions of ‘Soft Skills’. These are character attributes and skills between people, which characterizes a person’s relationship with society. One of the purposes of Soft Skills is making engineers more social, as engineering is fed by demands of societies. If an engineer has no soft skills, how will he/she be successful for his/her duties? Only technical information - which can be called ‘Hard Skills’ - cannot be enough to solve problems of humanity. How can they find solutions to each problem, while they cannot understand the people? If the equation to reach the success can be defined, Hard Skills x Soft Skills = Success, would be the golden one. If one of them is zero, the result would be zero. The bigger the two parts of the multiplication, the more increased the success. If one does not exist, the other’s presence would not be a benefit. Soft Skills and Hard Skills have a mutual relation.

In EESTEC Soft Skills Academy, the topics of soft skills are integrated into the technical aspect of the life of humanity. Hence, each topic is prepared in order to create evoking relations between topics of soft skills and hard skills in people’s minds. Project management - which is the most popular Soft Skills topic in EESTEC - is used by many Commitments. The purpose of this topic is to make a person more organized and apply this method to solve any problem that requires engineering solutions. Multitasking is an apparent human ability to perform more than one task or activity at the same time. In maths, when trying to solve a multiparameter optimization query according to a few parameters the result is called “local solution”, but according to all parameters the result is called “global solution”. The purpose of multitasking is to teach the engineers how to work with multi-parameters to get “global solutions” for the problems. Those are a few examples of ‘Soft Skills’ topics that integrate with ‘Hard Skills’ in life. All ‘Soft Skills’ topics can be integrated into engineering solutions, due to the fact that engineering always needs to take the heed of requests of society to define the problems. After defining the problems, solutions can be produced according to mutual relations between ‘Soft Skills’ and ‘Hard Skills’. During this period, communication is the key to success.

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ALUMNA STORY author: Gosia Wesołowska

This month I was visited by a friend from Serbia. A country situated 700 km away from mine. If you told me in high school that one day I’ll be traveling abroad a few times a year and hanging out with people from different cultures, I’d thought you were lying. I joined EESTEC because of people and that’s what stays with you after graduation and becoming a fully licensed adult. People. Also, I like to think I did my part in those 7 years. Some people join, come to some parties and quit after a year or two. In my case, it started with a task to put up some posters. Then I was a coordinator, board member, oversight committee... I did some quality job on the international level too. The bottom line is - I wasn’t afraid of new assignments. Besides having fun and meeting dozens of great people, I learned a thing or two that actually come in really handy in the adults’ world. I have magnificent luck to work in the industry I actually studied for. I work as an ERP Integrations Consultant for a global company and I’m loving it. Working remotely with people from different countries and time zones? Done it. Using English on a daily basis? Duh, easy. Knowing my way around people on the top or clients? Obviously, and they adore me! The thing is, you never realize how much ahead of your peers you actually are until you start the first job. With experience in EESTEC, so many things come naturally! I hope that every EESTECer finds a fun/ learn balance and will have as warm memories of those years as I do.

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