AB's Blog

Half a century has gone past since François Truffaut lamented the lack of originality in the works of the regular crop of French directors, in the sense that they failed to seize the projects with complete creative control, and accused them of churning out trite cinema borne out of transliterating novels and plays for the screen. Writing for the great French cinema magazine, Cahiers Du Cinema, Truffaut's seminal article A Certain Tendency of French Cinema is credited widely for formally introducing the Auteur Theory. The  auteur , which is French for "author", refers to a director who exercises an all-encompassing creative control over the production of a film, to the degree where she might be considered the author of the film. While Truffaut championed the cause and was a foremost auteur of the highest regard, he wasn't the first, and certainly not the last. The likes of  Eisentein, Ozu, Kurosawa and Hitchcock were auteurs before the term was even invented. The past ...

The blistering pace of societal development and advancement has set the tone for some key changes in two fundamental aspects of human society – electrification and mobility. With a growing consensus among the general public for moving to more climate-conscious alternatives, helped by government incentives and spearheaded by the scientific community, we are seeing transformative changes in power conversion technologies and a shift towards electric-vehicle-based mobility. While increasing efficiency lies at the heart of all invention, the motivation for achieving it has shifted from a purely scientific endeavor to a real-world requirement. Power converters are at the heart of the grid. Conventionally, owing to the macroscopic and robust nature of the system, a frantic Moore’s Law scale miniaturizing rush never plagued power devices, allowing instead a focus on materials research – without an irreplaceable CMOS-style architecture centred around Silicon, newer and better materials can be ...