Research News
*The information and links in the topics is current on the date of announcement, but is subject to change without prior notice.
Year
Month
15 Dec, 2021
TOKYO─Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) has developed “Electricity markets trading strategy AI” for renewable energy aggregation that supports strategic trading by electricity market operators. The AI bundles renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power and simultaneously makes strategic trading decisions that support profitable trading while avoiding supply imbalances. By realizing stable supply of highly variable renewable energy and promoting its use as a primary power source, the AI will help to advance carbon neutrality.
Next Kraftwerke Toshiba Corporation and Toshiba Energy Systems & Solutions Corporation are participating in a demonstration experiment using the AI that began on December 1, 2021, as part of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s Renewable Energy Aggregation Demonstration Project.
07 Dec, 2021
TOKYO—Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) has developed a new anomaly detection AI that enables large-scale industrial plants to overcome a widespread and growing challenge: using a small workforce to achieve constant and effective monitoring of thousands of sensors, and the accurate detection of anomalous signals hidden among small variations in sensor values. The AI can currently be applied to power and industrial plants that use pumps to move fluids, and is the first of its kind to realize high-level accuracy in detecting anomalies in the complex interactions between plant operating conditions and massive sensor values. Toshiba will present the technology at the 21st IEEE International Conference ICDM2021 LITSA Workshop on Data Mining on December 7.
22 Nov, 2021
TOKYO— Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) has developed a world-first AI technology that can determine actual-scale 3D measurements from only monocular camera images taken under various conditions, such as those taken from a distance with a zoom lens or with autofocus. Using several photos taken from a distance by a monocular camera during infrastructure inspections, this AI facilitates easy measurements of the size of areas for repair without the need to approach dangerous and difficult-to-inspect areas such as high places and inclinations.
The conventional use of only a monocular camera provides only relative values, requiring gyroscope to obtain absolute values or basic information about sizes. However, the developed AI can provide absolute values by combining relative depth information obtained from multiple viewpoints of a monocular camera with blur information contained in the captured images. Considering that the average age of infrastructure facilities in Japan now exceeds 35 years, this AI can be used to develop efficient maintenance plans that prioritize and realize appropriate repairs without excess or deficiency. Toshiba has been developing robot-integrated management and inspection image analysis technologies like those shown in Figure 1 to save labor and automate infrastructure inspections, and the newly developed technology improves performance in size measurements.
Toshiba will present the details of this technology on November 22 at the British Machine Vision Conference 2021 (BMVC 2021).
05 Nov, 2021
TOKYO─Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) has developed the AI technology that automatically generates physical models for detecting equipment abnormalities and determining the causes of those abnormalities in social infrastructure equipment. The AI automatically generates a physical model that describes the states and motion of a target device from measured time-series data. In addition, the AI shows not only abnormalities in equipment but also the cause of the occurrence of abnormalities based on physical phenomena, which has been difficult in the past. For example, the model made by the AI might indicate that an increase in equipment temperature is due to clogging dust, making improvement measures easier to formulate. The AI responds to complicated phenomena such as sudden changes in temperature and airflow, and can be applied to the maintenance of infrastructure equipment with complicated mechanism of abnormalities offurencethat is abnormalities with complicated occurrence mechanisms. It will improve reliability of facilities and contribute to resilience in social infrastructure. Toshiba will present the details of this technology on November 5 at IMECE 2021, which will be held online.
29 Oct, 2021
TOKYO─Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) has demonstrated the world’s first successful fabrication of high-performance circuits with analog–digital integration on a single chip driver integrated circuit (IC) for controlling next-generation power semiconductors. The developed IC detects the voltage and current status of power semiconductors at ultra-high speeds of 2 µs or less, and fine control reduces noise generated by power semiconductors by up to 51%. Theoretical calculations also confirm that power loss when driving the motor can be reduced by 25% compared with equivalent noise reduction by conventional methods. In the event of a short circuit or other malfunction, the power semiconductor can be immediately protected to prevent damage to it.
28 Oct, 2021
Toshiba Europe has been awarded a prestigious Institute of Physics Award for Business Innovation. This recognises Toshiba’s pioneering Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) technology developed over two decades of research, protecting communication infrastructure from present and future cyber-threats, and commercialising UK-manufactured products which pave the road to the quantum internet. The Institute of Physics (IOP) is the professional body and learned society for physics, and the leading body for practising physicists, in the UK and Ireland. With a rich history of supporting business innovation and growth, it is committed to working with ‘physics-based’ businesses, and companies that apply and employ physics and physicists.
21 Oct, 2021
Cambridge, UK, 21 Oct 2021: Toshiba Europe Ltd today announced it has developed the world’s first chip-based quantum key distribution (QKD) system. This advance will enable the mass manufacture of quantum security technology, bringing its application to a much wider range of scenarios including to Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.
22 Sep, 2021
TOKYO─Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) has successfully developed draw solutes , an osmotic pressure material for the forward osmosis membrane method to concentrate and extract components or substances (valuable materials) from aqueous solutions. This material both reduces energy consumption to one-fourth and increases the concentration rate by 2.4-fold compared with conventional concentration methods. Conventional concentration technologies rely on evaporation or application of high pressure, and thus require a huge amount of energy. On the other hand, this newly developed technology uses the principle of osmotic pressure causing spontaneous removal of water from aqueous solutions, thereby achieving energy-saving concentration. After being used for concentration treatment, the newly developed osmotic material can be separated from water and then reused.
This technology can be used in the manufacturing of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, effluent treatment, and recovery of rare metals. It will also enable the reuse of water and the sustainable use of natural resources and reduce the burden on the environment, thus contributing to a recycling society.
Toshiba will present details of this technology online at the 52nd Autumn Meeting of the Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan (September 22-24, 2021, Tsushima Campus, Okayama University).
15 Sep, 2021
TOKYO─Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) has developed the world’s most versatile and accurate Visual Question Answering (VQA) AI, able to recognize not only people and objects, but also colors, shapes, appearances and background details in images. The AI overcomes the long-standing difficulty of answering questions on the positioning and appearance of people and objects, and has the ability to learn information required to handle a wide range of questions and answers. It can be applied to a wide range of purposes without any need for customization.
10 Sep, 2021
TOKYO—Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502), the world-leader in development of perovskite photovoltaic for next-generation solar power generation, has developed a new coating method for the perovskite layer that boosts power conversion efficiency (PCE) to 15.1% for its 703cm2 module, the highest for any large, polymer film-based perovskite photovoltaic module. The innovative coating method for perovskite layer also greatly reduces production time and costs, contributing to a lower cost for solar power generation.
26 Aug, 2021
Toshiba Corporation, Tohoku University Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization (ToMMo), Tohoku University Hospital, and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) have developed a distributed storage technology that combines quantum cryptography communication and secret sharing technologies, successfully demonstrating the world’s first experimental large-scale genome analysis data backup to multiple sites. These technologies will allow data backup that prevents data leaks and tampering over long periods and are expected to contribute to safe data management in the fields of genomic research and medicine.
20 Aug, 2021
Toshiba Corporation (President and CEO: Satoshi Tsunakawa, hereinafter: Toshiba) and the Riken National Research and Development Institute (President: Hiroshi Matsumoto, hereinafter: Riken) have developed a scalable AI, namely, a learning method that allows deployment of a trained AI to various systems with varying computational requirements with as little degradation of performance as possible. When applying this technology to image classification task, even when reducing calculations to one-third the standard amount, the decrease in detection accuracy was only 2.1% (compared with 3.9% for a conventional scalable AI), thereby achieving world-class performance.
03 Aug, 2021
TOKYO—Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) and Peraton Labs today announced a new jointly-developed vulnerability assessment tool that emulates cyberattacks on industrial control systems. Dubbed Automated Attack Path Planning and Validation (A2P2V), this powerful new tool automatically generates cyberattack scenarios and simulates attacks that combine advanced offensive techniques to test and determine control system security status. It verifies results to identify security threats that need to be prioritized among the increasing number and range of cyberattacks.
11 Jun, 2021
TOKYO—Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) today announced an updated solid-state LiDAR that achieves the world’s smallest volume, robust vibration and wind resistance while maintaining a maximum detection range of 200m, plus the highest resolution of any sensor of similar size. The upgraded performance of the new LiDAR will advance progress to autonomous driving, and also expand its application into monitoring transportation infrastructure, in such areas as early detection of road subsidence or landslides, snow cover, or falls of objects onto roads.
09 Jun, 2021
8th June 2021, Cambridge: The Cambridge Research Laboratory of Toshiba Europe today announced the first demonstration of quantum communications over optical fibres exceeding 600 km in length. The breakthrough will enable long distance quantum-secured information transfer between metropolitan areas and is a major advance towards building the future Quantum Internet.