Chuck Goldstein, head coach of the Gallaudet University Bison football team, will never forget the day in October when he watched quarterback Brandon Washington complete a 70-yard touchdown run during a home game in Washington, DC. It wasn’t just an impressive athletic feat: It also proved that a prototype of a connected helmet actually works.

“Talk about pressure to win a game,” Goldstein said onstage Monday at the CTIA 5G Summit. “We couldn’t use this technology and equipment and lose. And everything was just the way it was supposed to be.”

The NCAA Division III athletic program partnered with AT&T over the last two years to test a connected helmet that allows players to receive play calls through an eyepiece instead of relying on spoken commands or maintaining a line of sight with a coach.

That’s particularly important for the Bison because deaf and hard-of-hearing students make up 95% of Gallaudet’s population, Sam Atkinson, Gallaudet’s associate athletic director for communications, told Tech Brew.

For Washington, who is hard of hearing, receiving the visual cues gave him additional confidence that he was passing along the right directions to his teammates on the field—at least once he got used to using the tech.

“The first game, I was a little nervous, because it was raining and we never use it in practice. But after the third play, I scored a 70-yard touchdown. I was obviously good. I shook everything off, and I was ready to go,” he told Tech Brew.

Keep reading here.—KG

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Digital twins have proven to be a popular tool for everything from city planning to focus group research. Now, the US government wants to use these virtual replicas of physical objects to supercharge chip manufacturing.

The Biden administration announced this week that it’s seeking proposals for projects that develop digital twins of semiconductors, in hopes of a more collaborative and efficient design process. These projects will be part of a new institute under the Department of Commerce, with up to $285 million in funding through the CHIPS and Science Act, Biden’s multibillion-dollar legislative boost to the domestic semiconductor industry.

The call comes as the generative AI craze has led to soaring demand for AI-specific chips, while the design process has grown increasingly complex and difficult. Some companies are exploring how AI itself can be deployed toward improving this stage. The Biden administration said digital twins will help make this technology more viable, among other benefits such as increased remote collaboration and better testing.

“Digital twin technology can accelerate the costly and time-consuming work to develop the next generation of robust manufacturing for this extraordinarily complicated product,” Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a statement.

Keep reading here.—PK

As the EV transition emerges as a contentious issue in the 2024 presidential election, the Biden administration aims to sweeten the deal for small- and medium-sized auto suppliers in the Midwest.

Vice President Kamala Harris, as part of a national tour to tout the White House’s economic agenda that brought her to Detroit on Monday, announced $100 million in federal funding to help those businesses and their workforces navigate the EV transition.

The money is designated for two separate programs: The first is the Department of Energy’s Automotive Conversion Grants Program, which will get $50 million to aid its mission of partnering with states to assist small- and medium-sized automotive suppliers transition from making parts for internal combustion engine vehicles to supplying EVs.

The other $50 million, per the White House, is slated for DOE’s Industrial Assessments Center Implementation Grants program, which gives grants of up to $300,000 to companies to upgrade their facilities.

Keep reading here.—JG

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