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Regulating AI: How to bell the cat? 

Regulating AI: How to bell the cat? 

by | Jan 21, 2024 | Science


With the forest-fire-like spread of AI—in our lives and possibly our jobs—there is a rising fear and scepticism about how AI will improve our lives. The fear is from two directions: fear of missing out (FOMO), and fear of new technology and loss of livelihood.

As more and more applications of AI are discovered, there’s a growing discomfort—even among the proponents of AI—around the amount of control we unknowingly cede to AI and those who own it. As always, with rapidly-spreading new technology, there’s a race between control and utilising its potential.

The European Union was one of the first to act in this area by publishing its “White Paper on Artificial Intelligence: A European Approach to Excellence and Trust” on February 2, 2020, long before all the melee around generative and general-purpose AI began. The same is the case with EU’s groundbreaking AI Act, the first draft of which was proposed in April 2021. The Act was adopted on June 14, 2023 and is set to come into effect in late 2025.

Meanwhile, the US’ approach to regulating AI has been somewhat different from that of the EU. While there is no specific Act or law for around AI regulation, the Biden administration has set new standards for AI safety with an ‘Executive Order on the Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence’ on October 30, 2023. The order aims to exercise a soft authority on AI and leverages the powers of federal agencies, particularly those around consumer protection. On October 4, 2022, the US President Joe Biden unveiled a ‘AI Bill of Rights’, which outlined five protections that Americans should have in the AI age—safe and effective systems; algorithmic discrimination protection; data privacy; notice and explanation; and human alternatives, consideration and fallback.

The AI Act: A breakdown

Given the EU’s path-breaking legislation and enforcement around the digital economy, including the famous General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and that the rest of the world uses the EU legislation for a model, it’s interesting to see how the EU’s AI Act regulates AI.

The AI Act focuses on the kind of risks arising from AI applications and classifies them into unacceptable, high, limited and minimal.

Unacceptable risk in AI systems are those that are considered a threat to people and will be banned. They include: cognitive behavioural manipulation of people or specific vulnerable groups; social scoring; biometric identification and categorisation of people; and real-time and remote biometric identification systems— such as facial recognition. There are certain exceptions available for the maintenance of law and order, with specific controls.

The AI systems that negatively affect safety or fundamental rights are considered high risk and will be divided into two categories: AI systems that are used in products falling under the EU’s product safety legislation (including toys, aviation, cars, medical devices and lifts); AI systems falling into specific areas that will have to be registered in an EU database (including management and operation of critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, worker management and access to self-employment, access to and enjoyment of essential private services and public services and benefits, law enforcement, migration, asylum and border control management, assistance in legal interpretation and application of the law). All high-risk AI systems will be assessed before being put on the market.

Limited risk AI systems will have to comply with minimal transparency requirements that would allow users to make informed decisions. Users should be made aware when they are interacting with AI. This includes AI systems that generate or manipulate image, audio or video content, for example deepfakes.

The EU also has recommendations for general purpose and generative AI—disclose that the content was generated by AI; design the model to prevent it from generating illegal content; and publish summaries of copyrighted data used for training.

In addition, high-impact models would have to undergo thorough evaluations and serious incidents would have to be reported to the European Commission.

What about India?

On the home turf, India passed the Digital Personal Data Protection Act in 2023 which has its hands on data protection, privacy and consumer protection as an outcome of AI. We can also expect the proposed Digital India Bill, 2023, to have more specific rules and regulations around AI and its applications. India is also collaborating on worldwide AI policymaking by being part of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI).

So, how do we expect policies on AI to evolve? A recent EY report highlights six regulatory trends:

1. Core principles such as respect for human rights, sustainability, transparency and strong risk management.

2. Following a risk-based approach where regulations are tailored to the perceived risks of AI to values like privacy, non-discrimination, transparency and security.

3. Sector-agnostic regulation and sector-specific rules.

4. AI-related rulemaking within the context of other digital policy priorities such as cybersecurity, data privacy and intellectual property protection.

5. Private-sector collaboration with the core objective of promoting safe and ethical AI, as well as to consider the implications of higher-risk innovation associated with AI where closer oversight may be appropriate.

6. International collaboration, driven by a shared concern the risks to safety and security posed by powerful new AI systems

A large part of the EU’s AI Act spreads across all six of the trends, making it the most comprehensive even if highly critiqued approach to regulation. Recent announcements, events and government releases indicate that India has a similar path in front of it.





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New light weight anode material for Li-ion battery

New light weight anode material for Li-ion battery

by | Jan 7, 2024 | Science


The discovery of new, functional materials is all about manipulating the elements to form compounds as needed. This, in turn, often involves breaking the bonds.

Sonochemistry, or using high-frequency sound waves, way above human hearing range, is one of the techniques for breaking the bonds. When high-intensity sound waves slither through a watery medium, they create extremely tiny bubbles that form and collapse rapidly. This process produces extremely high temperatures and pressures.

Sonochemistry is not something new. It has been long known to scientists but seems to be making a come back for newer applications today.

Prof Kothandaraman Ramanujam of the Department of Chemistry, IIT Madras, has synthesised a new material called ‘hydride-stabilised boron nanosheets’ (H-BNS) through this technique. There are many applications of this material, but the notable three include its use as — anode material for Li-ion batteries, reducing agent for organic reactions and a medium for storing hydrogen.

Their experiments have been published in a paper in the journal ChemComm.

Making of H-BNS

Kothandaraman and his students, Swati and Dr Anand, fired sonic waves into the water that had boron, after which they allowed time for unreacted boron particles to settle down—which were removed by a centrifuge. Then the supernatant solution was centrifuged at much higher speeds and longer to collect the ‘hydride-stabilised boron nanosheets’.

What happens is, the sonic waves break the bonds between hydrogen and oxygen in water molecules simultaneously boron-boron bonds freeing boron atoms to form 2D materials. Some of the nascent hydrogen atoms pick up an extra electron from 2D boron sheets and become ‘hydrides’. These hydrides go and ‘sit’ on the boron slabs (or ‘borophites’, which are multiple layers of borophene sheets). “Sonication helps in breaking boron-boron bonds and production of hydrides,” explains Kothandaraman. The hydride settles down on the boron nanosheets, forming H-BNS.

The team measured the thickness of H-BNS using ‘atomic force microscopy’ and found it to be ~ 20 nm thick. This indicates the formation of borophites (a one-atom thick, 2-dimensional sheet of boron).

Now, if you ‘intercalate’ (or insert) lithium into H-BNS, you have yourself a potential anode material for a lithium-ion battery. Boron is lighter than carbon (graphite) and hence these batteries could have higher energy densities if optimised. And, boron is plentifully available in nature. “The potential use of H-BNS for lithium-ion battery applications was successfully demonstrated in half-cell mode,” says Kothandaraman.

Furthermore, the use of H-BNS as a reducing agent has also been studied and confirmed. Since H-BNS has hydride, it is a potential hydrogen storage material, useful for fuel cells.





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Bringing back the dead

Bringing back the dead

by | Jan 7, 2024 | Science


In Roald Dahl’s William and Mary, the dead William’s brain, optic nerve and the eye are kept ‘alive’ in solution — the eye can ‘see’ and the brain can know what the eye is seeing. When he lived, William was a wife-abuser and now Mary took revenge by smoking a cigarette in the eye. The short story opens a scientific question: when is one really dead?

Until the 1960s, a person died when the heart stopped beating, but then came ‘Cardiopulmonary resuscitation’— CPR, which means that a still heart was not cessation of life. Now, scientists are taking it much further. Work is on to show that hours after ‘death’, brain functions can be revived. “Under appropriate conditions, certain molecular and cellular functions in the large mammalian brain may retain at least partial capacity for restoration after a prolonged post-mortem interval,” says a scientific paper on ‘Restoration of brain circulation’.

The brain stops functioning minutes after it stops receiving oxygen through blood pumped from the heart. But who is to say that if it starts receiving oxygen again after, say, a few hours, the cells will not come alive? In other words, it is possible to “treat” death. Yale University professor, Stephen Latham, who was part of a research that was able to revive brain functions of dead pigs, using a blood-infusing device that they call OrganEx, has told MIT Technology Review, that the line between life and death isn’t as clear as we once thought, and “death takes longer than we thought and at least some of the processes can be reversed.”

The brain surviving long periods of oxygen deprivation is a big breakthrough, which opens possibilities of reviving dead people with all organs intact — such as those who drowned.





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Can transparent wood replace plastic and glass?

Can transparent wood replace plastic and glass?

by | Jan 7, 2024 | Science


Conventionally, wood is used in making furniture, construction and as a source of fire. But now, researchers are exploring the possibility of making wood transparent as an eco-friendly alternative to glass.

Researchers are looking to tune wood’s optical, thermal, mechanical and ionic transport properties by chemically and physically modifying its naturally porous structure and chemical composition. “Such modifications can be used to produce sustainable, functional materials for various emerging applications such as automobiles, construction, energy storage and environmental remediation,” says a paper titled ‘Engineered Wood’, published in Annual Reviews.

Transparent wood is created when wood from the fast-growing, low-density balsa tree is treated to a room temperature, oxidising bath that bleaches it of nearly all visibility. It is then penetrated with a synthetic polymer called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), creating a product that is virtually transparent, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

In 1992, German scientist Siegfried Fink developed the initial transparent wood, a creation that researchers have refined further. In simple words, it is made by removing the lignin (a polymer that’s found in the cell walls of plants) from wood and replacing it with clear plastic materials.

The advantages of using wood over plastic are numerous. Apart from being abundant and renewable, wood is also an eco-friendly alternative to high-carbon footprint materials.

Despite advancements, the widespread use of natural wood is constrained by its opaque appearance, modest mechanical strength compared with metals like aluminium and steel, and elevated thermal conductivity when compared to foams and wools, according to researchers.

Adopting transparent wood could also be cost-effective. It offers about five times better thermal efficiency than glass, reducing energy expenses.

For a green future

In recent research, scientists created transparent wood using acrylic derived from natural basswood and examined its resistance to various elements. The research paper “Comprehensive assessment of transparent wood degradation” was published in 2023 by Igor Wachter et al of University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia. The transparent wood showed strong resistance to fungi. In fire tests, it ignited later and produced less harmful carbon monoxide than regular wood. The material also experienced changes in colour and transmittance when exposed to UV radiation, with significant changes occurring in the first few hours.

The challenges identified by the researchers include ensuring durability against fire, microorganisms and weathering, along with the need to scale up production and reduce environmental impact. To overcome these challenges, efforts are directed towards exploring stability improvement methods, optimising production processes, and adopting environmentally friendly chemical approaches.

Now, is transparent wood market-ready?

Researchers say not yet. “Government incentives for engineered wood to displace petroleum-based polymers will accelerate market penetration.”

However, ‘transparent wood’ is not problem-free. A study at the University of Maryland highlighted three important challenges.

It says, the first challenge is creating high-performance materials with good product durability and service life. Currently, most modification methods have focused on enhancing the performance of wood. Little research has been conducted on the durability of wood-based materials when exposed to fire, microorganisms, water, or weathering. “This is a crucial factor to consider due to the hydrophilicity and biodegradability of the wood components.”

The second challenge is scaling up fabrication and reducing manufacturing and installation costs. One approach to tackle this is the use of high temperature and pressure to facilitate the diffusion of chemicals in the wood microchannels, resulting in a more homogeneous modification. The third challenge the paper mentions is that of reducing environmental pollution. Toward this goal, researchers are investigating the use of green solvents for wood de-lignification such as deep eutectic solvents or organic acid, which lead to much lower environmental impacts.





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This new nuclear fuel can guarantee India’s green energy transition

This new nuclear fuel can guarantee India’s green energy transition

by | Jan 7, 2024 | Science


An invention by an American company, set up by a person of Indian origin, is making waves in the nuclear establishment of North America. If adopted in India, it can guarantee green energy security for the subcontinent by fast-tracking the use of Thorium in nuclear reactors.

India has the world’s largest reserves of Thorium, estimated at 1.07 million tonnes, enough to last over a century. If India uses this Thorium, it can then produce enough green energy and easily turn net-zero by its target date of 2070.

However, Thorium is a fertile material and not a fissile material. This means, it must be paired with Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 to be used as fuel in a reactor. As neutrons from these fissile materials bombard Thorium, it mutates into Uranium-233, which is also a fissile material. So, to use the Thorium in India, you need sufficient stocks of Uranium-235 (which India has very little of), or Plutonium-239 (which is produced using Uranium-235). So, the question has been, how to use Thorium with minimal use of (precious) Uranium.

Mehul Shah

This is where the invention of Mehul Shah, Founder and CEO of Clean Core Thorium Energy, comes in. The Chicago-based company has developed (and patented) a fuel, which is a mix of Thorium and Uranium of a certain level of enrichment, called HALEU (High Assay Low Enriched Uranium). Clean Core calls this concoction ANEEL (Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life) — named so to honour one of India’s foremost nuclear scientists, Dr Anil Kakodkar.

Gamechanger

ANEEL can be used in the existing Pressurized Heavy-Water Reactors (PHWRs), an indigenous reactor system that is the workhorse of India’s nuclear fleet. India has 18 PHWR reactors of a total capacity of 4,460 MW and is building ten more of 700 MW each.

If pursued, Clean Core’s ANEEL fuel can prove to be a game-changer for India. According to the World Nuclear Association, most of the current reactors run on uranium fuel enriched up to 5 per cent Uranium-235. HALEU is Uranium enriched to more than 5 per cent but less than 20 per cent. It is needed for many of the advanced nuclear reactor designs under development. “HALEU is not yet widely available commercially. At present only Russia and China have the infrastructure to produce HALEU at scale. Centrus Energy, in the US, began producing HALEU from a demonstration-scale cascade in October 2023,” says the Association. With uncertain commercialisation timelines, HALEU suppliers have remained cautious on scaling capacity due to demand-side risk.

Perfect pair: Clean Core’s nuclear fuel bundle made from Thorium and HALEU

Perfect pair: Clean Core’s nuclear fuel bundle made from Thorium and HALEU

However, with Clean Core’s near-term timeline to commercialisation, the company can help strengthen the demand-side confidence for HALEU suppliers.

India’s approach to Thorium utilisation has been to make a Thorium blanket around uranium or plutonium reactors, so that as the reactor produces energy, it also converts thorium into uranium-233. However, ANEEL provides an easier and quicker alternative for the deployment of thorium leveraging imported HALEU.

Nuclear waste reduction

Furthermore, in utilising this fuel, reactor operators can enjoy a dramatic reduction in nuclear waste volume and operating costs.

Another significant advantage is the inherent operating characteristics of the ANEEL fuel bundle — it lasts much longer and burns more efficiently. Its burn-up is 60,000 MW-days per tonne, compared with the 7,000 MW-days per tonne of the conventional natural uranium fuel in PHWRs. This higher burn-up significantly impacts the waste volumes and economics of reactor operations compared with the currently used natural uranium.

For example, in an existing Indian 220 MW PHWR, while using natural uranium fuel, an average of eight bundles would need to be replaced daily for the rest of the reactor’s operating life of 60 years. That is about 1,75,000 bundles used over the life of a reactor. With the ANEEL fuel, an average of only one such bundle would need to be replaced daily resulting in about 22,000 bundles used over the lifetime of the reactor. This leads to significant reduction in waste generation and cost savings.

Due to the inherent benefits of using thorium, the spent ANEEL fuel cannot be used for weapons — a source of comfort for foreign uranium suppliers and reactor operators, says Mehul Shah.

With all these benefits, Shah believes that ANEEL-powered 220 MW Indian PHWR can fill a growing need for clean, baseload energy production, as highlighted by the pledge to triple nuclear capacity by more than 20 countries at the recently held COP28.

Other countries are also showing interest in using ANEEL. “This is the first-of-its-kind nuclear fuel, in that it combines HALEU and thorium in proprietary unique compositions that can drive a global clean energy future,” says Dr Sean McDeavitt, Director of the Nuclear Engineering and Science Center and professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Texas A&M University.

In April 2023, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories signed a MoU with Clean Core “to further the development and deployment of Clean Core’s ANEEL fuel,” according to a press release. Under the MoU, CNL would support Clean Core’s activities, including R&D and licensing.





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Atmanirbhar Carbon Credits Standards: India’s Milestone Move towards a Sustainable Future

Atmanirbhar Carbon Credits Standards: India’s Milestone Move towards a Sustainable Future

by | Jan 6, 2024 | Science


n a groundbreaking move, the Ministry of Power in India introduces Atmanirbhar Carbon Credits Standards through amendments to the Carbon Credits Trading Scheme. This initiative not only benefits Indian companies by saving processing costs but also opens doors for overseas entities to earn carbon credits based on Indian standards. Explore the significant steps taken towards establishing a robust Indian carbon market and contributing to the global decarbonization effort.





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