Easy-to-use and low-cost wireless microcontroller comes to IoT and STEM curriculum developers — On June 30th, 2022, the Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) finally plugged a massive hole in its product line. The RPF announced the new Raspberry Pi Pico W — the "W" is for wireless. In the spirit of the original $4 Pico, RPF announced a retail list price of only $6…

Our new generation of STEM teaching robots with big displays are easier to connect and more powerful. — In January 2019, our local CoderDojo club published our first low-cost ($40) robots that drew faces on bright OLED displays. However, those robots were hard to set up and program. …

A new generation of note-taking tools helps us quickly organize thoughts as knowledge graphs — Last year, my longtime friend Arun Batchu introduced me to the new generation of software for creating Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). Although the concept of a PKG goes back to 2019, the term has recently become popular because of a new generation of note-taking software that uses knowledge graph representations.

How a company known for GPUs could help build better EKG hardware — On March 22, NVIDIA announced that it is entering the CPU market with a new 144-core chip with high-speed interfaces. This blog post will discuss the implications for the Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) industry. In the past, I have written extensively about the next-generation Hardware Optimized Graph (HOG) processors and…

How we can easily show occupation-gender bias using the Hugging Face website — Here is a lab you can use to teach your STEM and coding students about how a type of AI called natural language processing machine learning can show gender-biased in online language. This lab can be done in just a few minutes with the awesome user interface provided by the…

How shape detection drives classification — In April of 2021, the renowned technologist, entrepreneur, and brain theorist Jeff Hawkins published his new book A Thousand Brains. This book described Jeff’s A Thousand Brains Theory of the architecture of the human neocortex. In this blog, I will review this architecture and discuss its implications on the long-term…

Why enterprise ontology management matters to the EKG industry — Yesterday we saw an announcement that NoSQL database and search vendor MarkLogic will acquire the industry-leading ontology and metadata management company Smartlogic for an undisclosed amount. This announcement could significantly impact organizations building enterprise knowledge graphs (EKGs) because EKGs depend on the management and reuse of ontologies. …

Getting the right vertical angle is easy with this simple design I am working with several other engineers to design a new class of low-cost robots for teaching computational thinking to STEM students. As we started to roll out our design to our students, we focused on giving our students…

A Powerful MicroPython Kit for Under $10 — Last April, Cytron Technologies announced a new $9.90 US board build on the powerful Raspberry Pi 2040 chip called the Maker Pi RP2040. This board packed an incredible number of LEDs, buttons, a speaker, and easy-to-use Grove connectors. But most importantly, it was the first RP2040 based board to include…