Dr. Atul Gawande — the prominent physician, prolific writer, and all-around health care celebrity — will become the chief executive of the new health care company launched by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, the three companies announced Wednesday.
Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who teaches at Harvard’s medical and public health schools, will take charge of the new organization July 9. In a note sent to friends and colleagues, Gawande said that he is not giving up his positions at Harvard or the Brigham and that he will keep writing, including for the New Yorker. But he said he will transition from being executive director to chairman of Ariadne Labs, which works on solving problems in health systems around the world.
SIOS Technology Corp., the industry pioneer in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to help enterprises lower costs and ensure resilience of their critical information technology infrastructures, today announced the opening of the SIOS R&D facility at the M. Bert Storey Engineering and Innovation Center at the University of South Carolina’s College of Engineering and Computing in Columbia. The new facility will serve as the SIOS R&D center for product development and is strategically located at the University for the purpose of advancing collaborative research in AI and machine learning through collaboration with students and faculty.
Battery-powered devices will get a new option for hardware-accelerated speech interfaces next year if Kurt Busch makes his targets this year. The chief executive of Syntiant aims in 2018 to sample a novel machine-learning chip and raise a Series B to make it in volume.
Election officials from states spanning New England and the Midwest visited Capitol Hill yesterday with a clear message: Send us more money to help secure the vote.
Yet lawmakers are acknowledging that states probably won’t get more federal funding for election security upgrades anytime soon — which does not bode well for states seeking to upgrade to their systems before an anticipated surge of cyberattacks surrounding the midterm elections. It also could hinder states trying to carefully plan longer-term improvements they hope to make for the next political cycle.
The Secure Elections Act is the main bill senators are pushing to help states respond to the mounting threats. But at this point, senators “will not use this bill to send additional funding to states,” said a Republican Senate aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to disrupt deliberations about the bill.
Florida’s busiest airport will be the first in the nation to require a face scan of passengers on all arriving and departing international flights, officials said Thursday, a move that pleases airport executives but worries privacy advocates.
Officials at Orlando International Airport said the expansion of face scans would speed up the time it takes for passengers to go through customs.
Ask finance ministers and central bankers around the world about their worst nightmare and the answer is almost always the same: Sometime soon the North Koreans or the Russians will improve on the two huge cyberattacks they pulled off last year. One temporarily crippled the British health care system and the other devastated Ukraine before rippling across the world, disrupting shipping and shutting factories — a billion-dollar cyberattack the White House called “the most destructive and costly in history.”
The fact that no intelligence agency saw either attack coming — and that countries were so fumbling in their responses — led a group of finance ministers to simulate a similar attack that shut down financial markets and froze global transactions. By several accounts, it quickly spun into farce: No one wanted to admit how much damage could be done or how helpless they would be to deter it.
USA for UNHCR plays a vital role helping and protecting the 65.6 million refugees and people displaced worldwide by violence, conflict and persecution. USA for UNHCR is a national partner of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the only U.S. organization dedicated to raising funds and awareness for refugees and UNHCR. USA for UNHCR provides lifesaving essentials including shelter, water, food, safety and protection, and supports programs and initiatives to help refugees prepare for the future. With donor support, USA for UNHCR helps refugees survive, recover and rebuild their lives.
Using satellite imagery from refugee camps in South Sudan, the team helped USA for UNHCR create prototypes of two new tools to increase awareness of the refugee crisis and potentially help inform relief efforts on the ground.
In addition to this research, both organizations will also share their knowledge and guidance with the startups of the AI Factory program, developed by Microsoft France, Inria, and Station F.
Both partners will intensify the support received by these startups, enabling them to benefit from the expertise, learnings and applications resulting from the work carried out by researchers from Microsoft Research and Inria.
The digital transformation projects deployed by Microsoft on behalf of major French companies will also accelerate their implementation and enable the French economy’s flagship organizations to stimulate the development of new products and applications.
The Federal Trade Commission today announced that the agency will hold a series of public hearings on whether broad-based changes in the economy, evolving business practices, new technologies, or international developments might require adjustments to competition and consumer protection enforcement law, enforcement priorities, and policy. The multi-day, multi-part hearings, which will take place this fall and winter, will be similar in form and structure to the FTC’s 1995 “Global Competition and Innovation Hearings” under the leadership of then-Chairman Robert Pitofsky.
“The FTC has always been committed to self-examination and critical thinking, to ensure that our enforcement and policy efforts keep pace with changes in the economy,” FTC Chairman Joe Simons commented today. “When the FTC periodically engages in serious reflection and evaluation, we are better able to promote competition and innovation, protect consumers, and shape the law, so that free markets continue to thrive.”
The hearings and public comment process will provide opportunities for FTC staff and leadership to listen to interested persons and outside experts representing a broad and diverse range of viewpoints. Additionally, the hearings will stimulate thoughtful internal and external evaluation of the FTC’s near- and long-term law enforcement and policy agenda. The hearings may identify areas for enforcement and policy guidance, including improvements to the agency’s investigation and law enforcement processes, as well as areas that warrant additional study.
In the wake of the FCC’s ham-fisted net neutrality repeal, more than half the states in the country are now exploring their own, state-level net neutrality protections. California’s proposal, Senator Scott Weiner’s SB 822, was seen as particularly promising in that it went even farther on some important issues than the 2015 FCC rules it was intended to replace. The EFF went so far as to call California’s proposal the “gold standard” for state-level net neutrality laws, noting it did a better job policing many of the problem areas where modern anti-competitive behavior occurs, such as zero rating or interconnection.
Laurent Carnis recently guest edited an article collection for the journal European Transport Research Review on the topic “Smart cities and transport infrastructures”. Here he presents the highlights of these articles and how they advance the discussion of what the cities of the future should be.
Analog Devices, the 53-year-old semiconductor company, threw a party Tuesday afternoon to celebrate its new technology incubator in Boston, dubbed the Analog Garage—an homage to the innovations that have originated in garages, basements, and other “nondescript quarters” of the world, as the company puts it.
But this ain’t no garage or basement. The 25,000-square-foot office is located on the 20th and 21st floors of a 22-story tower near the heart of downtown Boston.
University of California Office of Scholarly Communication
from
Over the past year, the University of California’s Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee (SLASIAC), in partnership with our university libraries and the systemwide academic senate’s Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC), has been considering the twin challenges of journal affordability and the moral imperative of achieving a truly open scholarly communication system. Making the research produced at the University of California open to the world has long been an important goal at UC, as evidenced by the strong Open Access policies enacted at the campus and systemwide level, our many initiatives to create open access publishing options for UC authors (including CDL’s eScholarship publishing service and our early open access pilots with third party publishers), and most recently, a Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication promulgated by UCOLASC.
We believe it is time to take a further step along this road.
The industry has a great deal to gain from a new law. The United States does not have a single, overarching national privacy law to protect consumer information online. Instead, we are starting to see proposals in different states that would create a patchwork of 50 different sets of regulations. For consumers, this leads to an unappealing future where one’s level of privacy would depend on a ZIP code. For companies, this framework would create complications and confusion in navigating their obligations to consumers living in different states.
It isn’t easy for me to call for greater regulation of the sector to which I’ve devoted my life. When I said earlier this year that social media platforms like Facebook can be addictive, especially for children, and that they should be regulated—like cigarettes—I was criticized by some of my peers for supposedly betraying my industry. And I realize that fashioning new regulations is exceedingly difficult.
But, as an industry, we must recognize that the failure to protect personal data is not only a danger to consumers, it also poses one of the greatest threats to the long-term health of the high-tech industry itself, and, by extension, our innovation-based economy.
Philadelphia, PA June 27-29. “Neuroergonomics has witnessed extensive growth since its development a decade ago with the understanding of the brain at work and in everyday life.” [$$$]