Science for the Energy Challenge

If we are going to successfully tackle the problem of energy, broadly defined as providing enough energy to support higher standards of living for a growing fraction of the world’s growing population without creating intractable conflict over resources or causing irreparable harm to our environment, then substantial advances in the state of the art in energy generation, distribution, and end use are required.

An international expert on energy, international politics and economics, Daniel Yergin is the co-founder and chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy research consultancy. He is an author and Pulitzer Prize-winner for his book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, which was turned into a PBS mini-series documentary about the economic history of the 20th century. Yergin will dynamically address the conflicting choices and visions for the world economy and the great battle over globalization.

Intermolecular charge transfer (CT) states at the interface between electron-donating and electron-accepting (A) materials in organic thin films are characterized by absorption and emission bands within the optical gap of the interfacing materials. Depending on the used donor and acceptor materials, CT states can be very emissive, or generate free carriers at high yield. The former can result in rather efficient organic light emitting diodes, via thermally activated delayed fluorescence, while the latter property is exploited in organic photovoltaic devices and photodetectors.

All propulsion systems that leave the Earth are based on chemical reactions. Chemical reactions, at best, have an efficiency compared to rest mass of 10^-9 (or about 1eV per bond). All the mass in the universe converted to chemical reactions would not propel even a single proton to relativistic speeds. While chemistry will get us to Mars it will not allow interstellar capability in any reasonable mission time. Barring new physics we are left with few realistic solutions.

The evolution of organic electronics has now reached the commercial phase, with the recent market introduction of the first prototypes based on organic transistors and organic solar cell modules fabricated from solution.  Understanding the impact of both the organic semiconductor design and processing conditions, on both molecular conformation and thin film microstructure has been demonstrated to be essential in achieving the required optical and electrical properties to enable these devices.  Polymeric semiconductors offer an attractive combination in terms of appropriate solutio

There is no evidence that significant reductions in the carbon dioxide emissions associated with power generation will be achieved using current commercial alternatives to abundant and low-cost fossil fuels. The massive infrastructure and equipment changes required for such a transition would require multiple decades if and when a serious commitment is made and an economical transition pathway identified.

Although Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications and services have their roots in ideas that are decades old, their increasingly widespread deployments have made them a hot topic these days. Frequent topics of discussion and hype, they are causing both excitement and concern.

Today, the IT industry accounts for about 2 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, comparable to the footprint of air travel. This footprint includes everything from datacenters and servers to networks and client equipment like laptops and printers. More and more information is being generated every day, and more and more consumers and enterprises are processing this information every day. Will IT emissions eclipse air travel one day soon?

In a low-carbon world, there is a need for energy storage to match nuclear, wind, and solar output with energy demand. These are high-capital-cost low-operating cost technologies where operating at a part load implies much higher costs for energy. Because energy is 8% of the world gross national product, significant increases in energy costs imply significant reductions in global standards of living. Heat storage costs are an order of magnitude less expensive than work (electricity) storage and thus may be the affordable pathway to an economic low-carbon world. 

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are rapidly becoming the dominant approach to computer vision and a major component of many other pervasive machine learning tasks, such as speech recognition, natural language processing, and fraud detection.  As a result, accelerators for efficiently evaluating DNNs are rapidly growing in popularity.  Our work in this area focuses on two key challenges: minimizing the off-chip data transfer and maximizing the utilization of the computation units.  In this talk, I will present an overview of my research work on understanding and impr