Britain’s flagship home insulation program has received a damning verdict from the National Audit Office. Under the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme, tens of thousands of households have been left with faulty or even dangerous installations. It’s a result, the auditors say, of weak oversight, poor skills and confused accountability.

This report is troubling not only because of the human cost but because it exposes a deeper failure of governance in how the UK tries to decarbonize home heating. It’s a complex task that demands long-term stewardship, but is instead being left to the market.

The ECO was designed to make energy suppliers help households cut emissions and bills. Suppliers are the companies that buy electricity or gas from generators and sell it to you—the company named on your bills is your supplier. In theory, the ECO means these suppliers meet government-set carbon or energy saving targets by funding insulation and heating upgrades for households, with regulators checking that installations qualify.

The ECO was preceded by two other schemes that operated on the same principle. For years, they worked reasonably well for simple and low cost measures like loft or cavity wall insulation. But in 2013, the ECO was launched and expanded to cover more complex and expensive retrofits like solid wall insulation—an unprecedented shift.

So what went wrong?

The National Audit Office’s latest findings confirm fears that this was an approach set up to fail. Many installations require major remediation, some pose immediate health risks. The problems are familiar: an under-skilled workforce, uncertified installers, weak regulation and oversight.

Individually, these problems could be fixed. The government could improve installer training, tighten audits and crack down on fraud. But together, they reveal a deeper problem: a misplaced belief that market-based tools can deliver foundational change.

Energy efficiency obligations such as ECO work well for standardized, low-risk actions, like swapping bulbs or improving boilers. But, as we warned back in 2012, they are less suited to complex, capital-intensive retrofits of millions of households that require lots of coordination and long-term financing.

The UK’s energy efficiency governance still sits at arm’s length from the realities in people’s homes. Responsibilities are split confusingly between suppliers, Whitehall departments, auditors and local authorities, and it can often seem like no one is really in charge.

That’s why the failings highlighted in the National Audit Office report are not just implementation glitches or down to some “bad apple” installers. They’re failings of a governance model designed for incremental change, not the transformation required for net zero.

German lessons

If the UK really wants to retrofit millions of homes, it should look to what’s worked in other countries. Germany’s long-running KfW loan program is one example. For more than three decades it has supported high-performance refurbishments through low-interest loans and grants. Successive German governments have recognized that the returns—in jobs, tax revenues, economic stimulus—have consistently outweighed the upfront cost.

By contrast, ECO has been repeatedly restructured, with shifting targets and funding levels that make it hard to plan ahead. Treating home retrofit as a short-term obligation rather than a long-term national project has left the UK far behind its peers.

Retrofitting homes is inherently local (you can’t pick up your house and move it to a different area). Local authorities should therefore play a much stronger role in coordinating delivery, enforcing quality, and linking retrofit to other social goals such as tackling fuel poverty.

Getting councils involved would align retrofit with local priorities rather than distant central government targets. It could also rebuild trust among people who may understandably be wary of such schemes.

The UK’s forthcoming warm homes plan is a chance to reset. The government should take a hard look at the tools at our disposal and think about what is needed to foster the creative and courageous policy needed to decarbonize our homes.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Inspired by the human eye, our biomedical engineering lab at Georgia Tech has designed an adaptive lens made of soft, light-responsive, tissuelike materials. Our study is published in the journal Science Robotics.

Adjustable camera systems usually require a set of bulky, moving, solid lenses and a pupil in front of a camera chip to adjust focus and intensity. In contrast, human eyes perform these same functions using soft, flexible tissues in a highly compact form.

Our lens, called the photo-responsive hydrogel soft lens, or PHySL, replaces rigid components with soft polymers acting as artificial muscles. The polymers are composed of a hydrogel—a water-based polymer material. This hydrogel muscle changes the shape of a soft lens to alter the lens’s focal length, a mechanism analogous to the ciliary muscles in the human eye.

The hydrogel material contracts in response to light, allowing us to control the lens without touching it by projecting light onto its surface. This property also allows us to finely control the shape of the lens by selectively illuminating different parts of the hydrogel. By eliminating rigid optics and structures, our system is flexible and compliant, making it more durable and safer in contact with the body.

Why it matters

Artificial vision using cameras is commonplace in a variety of technological systems, including robots and medical tools. The optics needed to form a visual system are still typically restricted to rigid materials using electric power. This limitation presents a challenge for emerging fields, including soft robotics and biomedical tools that integrate soft materials into flexible, low-power and autonomous systems. Our soft lens is particularly suitable for this task.

Soft robots are machines made with compliant materials and structures, taking inspiration from animals. This additional flexibility makes them more durable and adaptive. Researchers are using the technology to develop surgical endoscopes, grippers for handling delicate objects and robots for navigating environments that are difficult for rigid robots.

The same principles apply to biomedical tools. Tissuelike materials can soften the interface between body and machine, making biomedical tools safer by making them move with the body. These include skinlike wearable sensors and hydrogel-coated implants.

What other research is being done in this field

This work merges concepts from tunable optics and soft “smart” materials. While these materials are often used to create soft actuators—parts of machines that move—such as grippers or propulsors, their application in optical systems has faced challenges.

Many existing soft lens designs depend on liquid-filled pouches or actuators requiring electronics. These factors can increase complexity or limit their use in delicate or untethered systems. Our light-activated design offers a simpler, electronics-free alternative.

What’s next

We aim to improve the performance of the system using advances in hydrogel materials. New research has yielded several types of stimuli-responsive hydrogels with faster and more powerful contraction abilities. We aim to incorporate the latest material developments to improve the physical capabilities of the photo-responsive hydrogel soft lens.

We also aim to show its practical use in new types of camera systems. In our current work, we developed a proof-of-concept, electronics-free camera using our soft lens and a custom light-activated, microfluidic chip. We plan to incorporate this system into a soft robot to give it electronics-free vision. This system would be a significant demonstration for the potential of our design to enable new types of soft visual sensing.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A recent study shows that AI-powered social media bots can increase user engagement on posts, but they fall short of encouraging users to post more overall.

The study, “Does Social Bot Help Socialize? Evidence from a Microblogging Platform,” focused on user engagement with CommentRobot, a large language model–powered bot launched on Weibo, China’s leading microblogging platform.

The work is published in the journal Information Systems Research.

At the core of the research project, the social bot automatically generated comments on users’ posts in public threads on the platform. The researchers found that when human posts receive bot comments, their peers are more likely to engage with those posts, but human authors of focal posts (hereafter posters) were not any more likely to increase their social media activity.

The study was conducted by Yang Gao of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Maggie Mengqing Zhang of the University of Virginia, and Mikhail Lysyakov of the University of Rochester.

Key findings were that when people receive bot-generated comments, their posts receive 23% more comments, and 11% more likes.

“Our research studied the bots at several complex levels, from bot comment quality to which users were targeted and how human peers responded to the public interactions between the bot and the poster,” said Gao.

Gao said that the quality of the bot comments matters. Social bot comments that were considered relevant and included certain social cues were more likely to generate engagement. The researchers detected a pattern where social bots often prioritized less active users, but that it was active users who more significantly benefited from receiving bot comments.

“It’s often assumed that people are more likely to engage with other people and not bots, but what we found is that when the bots are able to integrate relevant social cues into their comments, this stimulates a response from people,” said Zhang. “This in turn increases engagement.”

“What may be most interesting about this dynamic,” said Lysyakov, “is that the subsequent engagement is often not directly with the bot’s comments, but rather with other human users who also decided to engage in discussion.”

While all of this heightens user activity and engagement around a single social media post, the study authors found that overall, this did not increase the likelihood that they would become more active on the platform as posters.

The researchers analyzed over 106,000 posts by 64,000 users on Weibo in January 2024, focusing on first-time interactions with CommentRobot. They used econometric models, instrumental variable analysis, robustness checks and an online randomized experiment with 348 active Weibo users to confirm their findings.

“All of this suggests that while AI-powered social bots can help increase visibility and engagement around posts, platforms should refine their deployment strategies,” said Gao. “Poorly targeted or low-quality comments may limit their effectiveness, and platforms cannot assume bots will increase overall user activity.”