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84 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2018 IMPACT Award. This award is presented to one or more policymakers for their leadership roles on issues of importance to the electronics industry. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and check our website [1] for the announcement. If you are a senior-level executive at an IPC- member company, we invite you to join us and urge you not to miss this event. The more ex- ecutives who sign up early, the stronger po- sition we'll be in to make powerful presenta- tions. For a glimpse of what you can expect, look at our recap from IMPACT Washington, D.C. 2017 [2] . This magazine also published a special insert last July that you may find inter- esting [3] . IMPACT Washington, D.C. 2018 presents the chance to build lasting relationships with members of Congress, collaborate with fel- low industry executives, and present a unified voice for the electronics industry. Register to- day [4] using the referenced link. We look forward to seeing you in D.C.! PCB007 References 1. Current IPC News. 2. IMPACT 2017 Washington, D.C. 3. Special Coverage: IPC's IMPACT Washing- ton, D.C. 2017. 4. Registration for IMPACT 2018 Washington, D.C. John Mitchell is president and CEO of IPC—Association Connecting Electronics Industries. To read past columns or to contact Mitchell, click here. New technology allows U.S. soldiers to learn 13 times fast- er than conventional methods and Army researchers said this may help save lives. At the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, scientists are im- proving the rate of learning even with limited resources. It's possible to help soldiers decipher hints of information fast- er and more quickly deploy solutions, such as recognizing threats like a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or potential danger zones from aerial war-zone images. The researchers used low-cost, lightweight hardware and implemented collaborative filtering, a well-known technique on a state-of-the-art, low-power Field Programmable Gate Array platform to achieve a 13.3-times speedup of training compared to a state-of-the-art optimized multi-core system and 12.7-times speedup for optimized GPU systems. The new technique consumed far less power too— 13.8 watts, compared to 130 watts for the multi-core and 235 watts for GPU platforms, making this a potentially useful component of adaptive, lightweight tactical computing systems. AI Helps Soldiers Learn Many Times Faster in Combat