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AI specialists being lured away from UK's top universities
 It was the case of the missing PhD student.

As another academic year got under way at Imperial College London, a senior professor was bemused at the absence of one of her students. He had worked in her lab for three years and had one more left to complete his studies. But he had stopped coming in.

Eventually, the professor called him. He had left for a six-figure salary at Apple.

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“He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left,” said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. “It’s five times the salary I can offer. It’s unbelievable. We cannot compete.”

It is not an isolated event. Across the country, talented computer scientists are being lured from academia by private sector offers that are hard to turn down. According to a Guardian survey of Britain’s top ranking research universities, tech firms are hiring AI experts at a prodigious rate, fuelling a brain drain that has already hit research and teaching. One university executive warned of a “missing generation” of academics who would normally teach students and be the creative force behind research projects.

The impact of the brain drain may reach far beyond academia. Pantic said the majority of top AI researchers moved to a handful of companies, meaning their skills and experience were not shared through society. “That’s a problem because only a diffusion of innovation, rather than its concentration into just a few companies, can mitigate the dramatic disruptions and negative effects that AI may bring about.”

Q&A What is AI? Show Artificial Intelligence has various definitions, but in general it means a program that uses data to build a model of some aspect of the world. This model is then used to make informed decisions and predictions about future events. The technology is used widely, to provide speech and face recognition, language translation, and personal recommendations on music, film and shopping sites. In the future, it could deliver driverless cars, smart personal assistants, and intelligent energy grids. AI has the potential to make organisations more effective and efficient, but the technology raises serious issues of ethics, governance, privacy and law. Was this helpful? Thank you for your feedback.

She is concerned that major tech firms are creating a huge pay gap between AI professionals and the rest of the workforce. Beyond getting the companies to pay their taxes, Pantic said the government might have to consider pay caps, a strategy that has reined in corporate salaries in Nordic countries.

Many of the best researchers move to Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. “The creme de la creme of academia has been bought and that is worrying,” Pantic said. “If the companies don’t pay tax it’s a problem for the government. The government doesn’t get enough money to educate people, or to invest in academia. It’s a vicious circle.”

When Murray Shanahan, another Imperial researcher, received a job offer from DeepMind, Google’s London-based artificial intelligence group, he thought hard about the decision. He saw plenty of positives to joining the company. It was a chance to pursue his work without the burden of other academic duties. He would have access to fabulous computing resources. And he would work alongside some of the best in the field. But despite the long list of pros, Shanahan paused.

Professor Murray Shanahan, who is a senior scientist at DeepMind, but has retained his academic position at Imperial. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

“The potential impact on academia of the current tech hiring frenzy was one of the issues that bothered me,” he said. Shanahan decided to negotiate a joint position. It allowed him to have a foot in both camps, keeping his chair at Imperial while becoming a senior scientist at DeepMind.

For those with the right skills, the hiring boom has obvious positives. Heavy investment from tech firms means there are many more jobs in artificial intelligence than there are qualified candidates. To recruit the best talent, companies offer high salaries, impressive computing facilities and technical challenges that have the potential to affect the lives of billions.

In the past, brilliant mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists headed to the City for serious money. Now they are as likely to train in AI and move to tech firms. “There are fantastic opportunities in industry, the sorts of opportunities that make working in the City seem really dull and not particularly well paid,” said Zoubin Ghahramani, professor of information engineering at Cambridge University and chief scientist at Uber, the ride-hailing firm. “It’s both intellectually interesting and, from a lifestyle point of view, very difficult to turn down.”

Ghahramani announced his move to Uber in March. For now, he commutes to the company’s San Francisco office one week every month. Next summer, he will move to the city full time. Beyond the difference in salaries, he lists a host of other reasons that academics are lured into industry. University roles come with administrative duties that some find onerous: teaching, marking, being on committees, and the endless chasing of grants. In industry, star recruits can focus purely on their research.

But there is more to it than that. The explosion of interest in artificial intelligence is driven by the success of machine learning, a field that uses algorithms to find meaningful patterns in data. To work well, many of today’s algorithms must be trained on huge amounts of data, a task that takes a lot of computer power. Without collaborative projects, universities can rarely compete with the big tech firms on data or computing. Instead, they focus on new ideas: building algorithms that learn from less information, for instance.

Zoubin Ghahramani, professor of information engineering at Cambridge University and chief scientist at Uber. Photograph: The Royal Society

Ghahramani began working at Uber part time when the company bought Geometric Intelligence, his AI startup, last year. As chief scientist, he will oversee the use of machine learning algorithms to understand how cities work and how people move around them. The end goal is to match the supply of rides to demand. “The interesting thing about this is we’re doing machine learning in the real, physical world of cities. We’re trying to optimise the movement of people and things around the world,” he said.

Ghahramani sees no sign that industry’s demand for talented AI researchers has peaked. “It’s very fierce right now and it’s yet to show signs of tapering off,” he said. “Universities will have to train enough people to meet the demand, and that’s a challenge if lecturers and postdocs are being lured into industry. It’s like killing the geese that lay the golden eggs. Companies are starting to realise that and some of the major tech companies are starting to give back to universities by sponsoring lectureships and donating funds.”

Steven Turner joined Amazon Web Services in Cambridge last year. He helps companies to build their own Amazon-style “recommendation engines”, and use image recognition, computer speech and chatbots in customer service. One financial institution he has worked with now uses technology to answer simple questions, such as on customer mortgage rates, freeing up humans for more complex queries.

In academia, he saw departments fighting for funds to continue their work and keep people from leaving. The main reason he left was to work on real problems rather than more theoretical concepts. But the culture at Amazon turned out to be more vibrant than in academia. At university, Turner found being a PhD student isolating at times, even though his supervisor was a brilliant mentor. “I personally think that having a greater focus on culture and social interaction to ensure researchers don’t feel as isolated as they can do would have a significant impact on retention,” Turner told the Guardian. He said universities should also focus on researchers’ career development, giving free access to external training and teaming up with business schools to broaden researchers’ knowledge.

Ghahramani believes UK universities will have to become more flexible about researchers holding joint positions. “They need to be flexible about intellectual property arrangements. They need to be flexible about PhD students who might want to spend time in a world-leading industry AI lab. That’s what we need to get around the problems. The universities that have been flexible have benefited,” he said.

Output: The UK's universities are facing a "brain drain" of artificial intelligence (AI) specialists, who are being lured away by major technology companies. Research by the Guardian has found the trend is harming research and teaching in higher education, and leading to a concentration of expertise in a small number of companies. Top AI researchers at institutions including Imperial College and Cambridge University have been recruited by Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Universities are struggling to compete with the very high salaries on offer, and the demand shows no sign of tapering off.


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The end of fiat currency mooted by Deutsche Bank paper
 Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid contends that the fiat currency system "is inherently unstable and prone to high inflation."

China's rapid economic emergence in the 1970s, and an explosion in the global working-age population, has allowed inflation to be controlled externally, but that period is coming to an end.

What could replace fiat currency is yet to be determined.

LONDON — Deutsche Bank isn't known for its gold bugs, but that hasn't stopped its strategist Jim Reid from writing a paper that discusses "the start of the end of fiat money."

Reid's basic contention is this: The dominance of the fiat currency system since Richard Nixon decoupled gold from the dollar in 1971 "is inherently unstable and prone to high inflation," and an offsetting disinflationary shock that kept it afloat since 1980 is now slowly reversing.

If that's the case, Reid says the fiat currency system — a term which describes any currency whose value is backed by the government that issued it, rather than by a commodity like gold or silver — could be "seriously tested" over the next decade.

Disinflationary forces

The basis of Reid's argument is that China's rapid economic emergence in the 1970s, and an explosion in the global working-age population, has allowed inflation to be controlled externally, because a boost in labour supply during a period of globalisation naturally supressed wages.

Externally-controlled inflation means policy-makers and central banks can respond with familiar tools: More leverage, loose policy, and extensive money-printing.

"It's not usually this easy as inflation would have normally increased with such stimulus and credit creation," says Reid. In fact, "it could be argued that this external disinflation shock has perhaps 'saved' fiat currencies."

An end to the demographic super-cycle

If this theory is correct, Reid says, then "any reversals in this demographic super cycle could spell problems for the fiat currency system."

Under that scenario, inflation would pick up externally as the working-age population stopped rising and labour pricing power returned, as demand rose and supply shortened.

Reid continues:

"Central banks and governments which have ‘dined out’ on the 35 year secular, structural decline in inflation are not able to prevent it rising as raising interest rates to suitable levels would risk serious economic contraction given the huge debt burden economies face.

As such they are forced to prioritise low interest rates and nominal growth over inflation control which could herald in the beginning of the end of the global fiat currency system that begun with the abandonment of Bretton Woods back in 1971."

After fiat currency

Eventually, Reid says, "it’s possible that inflation becomes more and more uncontrollable and the era of fiat currencies looks vulnerable as people lose faith in paper money."

One such alternative is cryptocurrency, which uses blockchain, a much-hyped online ledger system whose primary benefit lies in the difficulty of tampering with data recorded within it.

"Although the current speculative interest in cryptocurrencies is more to do with blockchain technology than a loss of faith in paper money, at some point there will likely be some median of exchange that becomes more universal and a competitor of paper money," Reid says.

Output: The fiat currency system is "inherently unstable and prone to high inflation", Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid has said. In a paper on the end of fiat money, Reid said the system could be seriously tested over the next 10 years as the disinflationary tendencies that have kept it afloat for the past three decades slowly start reversing. He added that if inflation becomes more uncontrollable, people could lose faith in paper currencies, making cryptocurrencies more appealing and competitive.


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P2P lending blockchain Lendoit adds two to advisory board
 Israeli Blockchain firm Lendoit welcomes two new experts on to its advisory board.

High profile advisors Eddy Travia & Richard Titus have joined the advisory board of Lendoit, an Israeli-based financial firm that is using blockchain technology to revolutionise the peer-to-peer lending industry.

Travia, a key figure in the blockchain space since 2013, co-founder of SeedCoin and blockchain Space, and current CEO of investment firm Coinsilium brings a wealth of experience to the project.

With an impressive portfolio that already includes RSK, Factom, CoinDash and SatoshiPay. Travia was also nominated among the top 3 ‘Most Influential Investors of the Year’ at Blockchain Awards 2014 and has been a major influence in the space ever since.

Titus is currently the managing partner at ARK ICO Advisors, a Singapore based firm advising ICO projects all over the world including AdEx, Pillar & Hive. he brings over 20 years of technology, scaling and development experience to the project.

Having nurtured over 15 successful initial coin offerings the two new additions to the Lendoit advisory board will help pave the the firm’s success in the lucrative P2P industry.

Utilizing the Ethereum blockchain, Lendoit is a decentralised peer-to-peer lending platform that brings lenders and borrowers together globally using Smart Contracts on the blockchain to ensure transparency, trust, reduced risk and circumvent intermediaries.

Borrowers are able to download the Lendoit app and request a loan which is then auctioned to verified lenders on the platform, this provides borrowers with the ability to browse bids and accept the best loan rates to suit their circumstances.

Despite it not launching until next year Lendoit has already created strong ties with governments and corporations one of Israel’s biggest investment firms Migdal Investment Banking. Established in 1965 and part of Migdal Capital Markets Group, it currently manages assets valued at $9 billion for thousands of clients in the Israeli private, business and public sectors.

Compared to other P2P lending platforms on the market such as ETHlend and Salt, Lendoit offers a competitive advantage in various areas such as decentralised intermediate, interest auctions, and compensation funds.

Lendoit so far have also partnered with YETAX, Smartech, WHISP R&D, The Hive Project and Wings.

Whitepaper: https://lendoit.com/Lendoit-whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/Lendoit

Output: Israeli peer-to-peer (P2P) blockchain lender Lendoit has welcomed two high-profile advisers to its board. Eddy Travia, the CEO of Coinsilium in London and a SeedCoin co-founder, and Richard Titus, the managing partner at ARK ICO Advisors in Singapore, are joining the advisory board of the financial firm. Lendoit is a decentralised lending platform that uses smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain to improve transparency and reduce risk.


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Canadian public pension giant invests $120m in rooftop solar
 Canada’s second-largest public pension fund, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), which is also known in English-language media as La Caisse, announced it will invest $40 million in U.S. rooftop specialist Sunrun.

CDPQ specified that the operation is part of the $234.5 million senior secured credit facility closed by Sunrun on October 20th, 2017.

“CDPQ is already active in the commercial solar industry in North America and India, so this transaction represents a good opportunity for us to enter the residential sector, which is one of the fastest growing market segments in the U.S. energy industry today,” said CDPQ executive vice-president Marc Cormier. “While generating stable returns in the long term, this financing is also aligned with our strategy to increase our low carbon investments 50% by 2020.”

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CDPQ had agreed to provide Ontario-based rooftop solar power producer Potentia Renewables with 107 million CA$ ($78.0 million) in debt-funding in May.

Prior to these two transactions, CDPQ had invested in wind power projects across North America and in Western Europe, and in renewable energy and solar projects in India. In March 2016, the company announced a $150 million commitment to target hydro, solar, wind and geothermal power assets. Later in January 2017, La Caisse announced it acquired a 20% stake in Indian solar company Azure Power for $75 million.

Output: Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), the second biggest public pension fund, plans to invest $40m into Sunrun, a US-based rooftop solar provider, following an $83.4m investment in Canada-based Potentia Renewables in May. The investment, part of Sunrun's $234.5m senior credit facility, will give CDPQ exposure to North American residential solar. CDPQ plans to increase low carbon investments by 50% by 2020.


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Virtual cocktail app alters drink's flavour through electronics
 A matter of taste ACM Multimedia 2017

Drinks are so last century – but they’re getting an upgrade. A device called the Vocktail is shaking up the traditional cocktail by mixing in a dash of electronics designed to fool your senses.

Made by Nimesha Ranasinghe and his team at the National University of Singapore, the Vocktail – short for virtual cocktail – is a glass that can be made to alter and augment flavours via a phone app. Once a liquid is poured into the glass, a drinker can change three aspects affecting its taste.

First, they can change their perception of the drink by altering its colour via an LED in the glass. Next, they can make the drink seem more sweet, salty or bitter using tongue-stimulating electrodes placed around the rim. In previous experiments, the team showed that different electrical patterns can give the impression of various tastes. Finally, a tube in the side of the glass releases gases with different smells, such as lime, that change the perceived flavour even more.

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Ranasinghe previously created a digital lemonade using colours and electrodes to trick people’s taste buds. By adding smell to the mix, the Vocktail opens up many more flavour combinations. Virtual drinks can make you think you are drinking something sugary when you are in fact just swigging water, letting people satisfy their taste buds without any of the calories. The app also lets you share your favourite virtual cocktail recipes with others.

One day, devices like the Vocktail may become part of an ultimate virtual reality experience in which all sensations are simulated digitally. “A Vocktail could become a welcome addition to social experiences in virtual pubs or bars,” says Adalberto Simeone at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium.

The Vocktail was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Multimedia Conference last month.

Output: Scientists at the National University of Singapore have developed an app-connected glass that enhances the flavours and smells of drinks. The virtual cocktail, or Vocktail, combines an LED and other gadgetry to alter change the colour, taste and odour of a drink and alter the impressions and perceptions of drinkers. The Vocktail was unveiled at last month's Association for Computing Machinery Multimedia Conference.


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Google releases internal tool that lets users co-operate on AI
 As if giving the world its AI framework wasn’t enough, Google is now letting others work with a once-internal development tool, Colaboratory.

The software works a lot like Google Docs, its document collaboration tool, but with the ability to run code and show that code’s output within the document. Colaboratory is free and built on top of the open-source Jupyter project, software often used in data science.

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It’s easy to take a skeptical view of anything free—Google stands to benefit if its software becomes a standard for teaching students to work in machine learning and data science. A similar strategy can be seen with TensorFlow, the AI framework Google open-sourced, which made it so easy to get started running AI software that a cucumber farmer built his own sorting system with it. Of course, that also means another customer for its Google Cloud APIs, per-use AI software sold by the company.

Google is also working to teach other companies to use its AI services; Colaboratory is pitched as an education tool as well as collaboration for research.

With Colaboratory, users create notebooks, or documents, that can be simultaneously edited like Google Docs. It supports Python 2.7 and has to be used on Google Chrome. The software is also integrated with Google Drive, so users can easily share projects or copy others’ shared projects onto their own accounts.

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You can tinker with Colaboratory now, but Google is initially limiting the number of notebooks that can be created, and users must apply to be connected to Google’s backend to run code within a notebook.

Output: Google is open sourcing its Colaboratory development tool, offering it both as a research and an educational solution. It allows developers to run code and show its output in documents, while users who apply for connection to Google's backend can create editable notebooks that can be shared on Google Drive. However, Colaboratory must be used on Google Chrome and the number of notebooks will, initially, be limited. Google previously open sourced its TensorFlow artificial intelligence software.


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Singer Bjork will accept bitcoin for her new album
 Fans will be able to buy Björk’s new album ‘Utopia’ using cryptocurrencies, while pre-ordering it directly from the star or her label will earn them crypto rewards too.

The musician has teamed up with British blockchain startup Blockpool, which is working with label One Little Indian on a ‘crypto-checkout plugin’ for the online store. It will process ‘Utopia’ pre-orders using credit/debit cards and PayPal, but also the Bitcoin, AudioCoin, Litecoin and Dashcoin cryptocurrencies.

However they choose to pay, each fan will receive 100 AudioCoins – together worth just under $0.19 at the time of writing – as a reward for pre-ordering the album, deposited into an e-wallet created for them by Blockpool.

Fans will be able to exchange the coins for other cryptocurrencies, keep them as an investment, or convert them back into ‘fiat’ currency like pounds or dollars. Over the next two years, they will also be able to earn more AudioCoins by interacting with Björk’s music, live events and digital activities.

It’s one of the most ambitious steps by a musician into the world of cryptocurrency since Imogen Heap’s ‘Tiny Human’ single in 2015, which fans could pay for using the Ether cryptocurrency. The blockchain startup that worked with Heap on that project, Ujo Music, also helped dance artist RAC take payments for his ‘EGO’ album in Ether earlier this year.

Blockpool CEO Kevin Bacon – a well-known musician and producer in his own right, as well as the founder of music-tech companies AWAL and BuzzDeck – has explained the bigger picture behind Björk’s entrance into the crypto/blockchain world, which joins her previous exploration of technologies including apps and virtual reality.

“People have done things with crypto and artists before, but this is the first time a global artist has done anything like this. While it will be interesting to see how the crypto community responds to this, Utopia is also a gateway for people to go into crypto for the first time. Björk is the best artist in the world we could imagine doing this,” said Bacon.

“This isn’t about jumping on a bandwagon or trying to get rich quick. It’s about doing things where you use blockchain and the crypto benefits in ways that people haven’t thought of yet. And in this case, very much led by Björk and her team’s creative vision for what this technology can do.”

Bacon said that Blockpool has worked hard to make the signup and wallet-claiming process as accessible as possible for Björk’s fans, particularly those who don’t already own cryptocurrency.

“We’ll be providing information for people who don’t know anything about crypto or who want to find out more. But they can keep those coins in that wallet, they can also take them out and put them into any third-party wallet or exchange that they want to,” he said.

“They could take them out and trade them back into Bitcoin or any other currency, or take them back into cash if they want. To cash it back out would be a wasted opportunity, I think. Some people will just keep it as Audiocoin for a while, and some people will add it to their portfolio of currencies.”

Bacon added that Björk and her team will be deciding how to reward fans with more Audiocoin over the course of the next two years, rather than Blockpool deciding how the campaign should be run.

“We’re not going to give her a list of 20 things she should do. We’ll show her the kind of thing that could be done, and then she’ll take that and run with it,” he said.

Examples of the kind of thing that can be done include rewarding fans for sharing links to Utopia’s music, its tour, to merchandise and other content on social networks. Blockpool also has the technology to deliver rewards to fans in a specific location at a certain time – gig venues for example.

“You could create blockchain-enabled digital treasure hunts, although what we don’t want to do is turn this into Pokémon Go! But why not reward your fans for engaging with what you do, and reward them in a meaningful way?” said Bacon.

“For an artist like Björk who’s embraced VR more than any other artist, I can see fantastic opportunities: you could embed this in the VR world as well, with rewards for people who interact with her virtual world.”

2017 has been a year of excitable talk about blockchain technology – not just in music but in other industries too – and the emergence of the initial coin offering (ICO) as a way to raise often-huge sums of money for often-unproven business plans.

Bacon is famously a sceptic about some of the blockchain hype as it relates to music, but his overall feelings about the future of this technology are optimistic.

“There’s a lot of talk about whether crypto and blockchain is a bubble. I don’t see it as a bubble: I see it as a burst of energy. I think you’ll see a lot of activity, a lot of things will disappear or get left to rot, but the important things will stay and grow,” he said.

“I think blockchain and crypto will be like the dotcom boom and bust in the late 1990s. We’ll see enormous adoption over the next couple of years, then some kind of bubble burst, but then a long-term change.”

“In the short term, we may see people overcooking it: there’s a danger we’ll see a lot of artists doing coins, a lot of bad marketing ideas and a lot of people using it as a mechanism to make money,” admitted Bacon.

“But some people will do good stuff, and it’s those people, who use the technology to its best, who’ll come out the other side. I think Björk’s a leader, and I think she’ll be the person that defines how other people go.”

You can read the full Q&A with Kevin Bacon here, or bone up on blockchain music with our recent themed issue on the topic.

Output: Musician Björk is teaming up with blockchain start-up Blockpool to allow customers to buy her new album using cryptocurrency. Fans of the Icelandic singer will be able to pay with bitcoin, Litecoin and Dashcoin as well as a new token, AudioCoin, along with traditional card payments and PayPal. Those who pre-order the album will also receive 100 AudioCoins, a cryptocurrency created by Blockpool. The company's CEO said Björk and her team will devise further ways to reward her fans with the tokens over the next two years, and predicted "enormous adoption" of cryptocurrencies.


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GuestReady acquires Easy Rental Service
 GuestReady has closed €2.6 million in seed funding in order to expand its business to new markets. Currently operating in London, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur, the startup says it plans to utilize the funds to reach 5 more cities by Summer 2018. They also announced the acquisition…

[…]

Output: UK-based property management start-up GuestReady has acquired Easy Rental Services, a competitor that operates in London and Paris. GuestReady began last year as an online platform to give Airbnb users access to guest services such as cleaning, check-in and laundry. It now focuses on fully-managed properties and operates a portfolio of 600 properties. It has recently raised around $3m in seed funding and aims to expand into five more cities by next summer.


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Fetchr joins partnership for drone home delivery service in UAE
 Fetchr, a US-based on-demand delivery startup has announced a partnership with California’s Skycart and the UAE’s Eniverse to develop the first autonomous drone delivery service in the region.

Skycart already offers a similar service to its users in the US. The startup delivers packages at customers’ doorstep within 30 minutes or less using their UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) network.

Skycart and Eniverse had announced their partnership earlier this year to create Space Autonomous Drones, a company formed to offer drone-based delivery services in UAE through different collaborations. It was said at the time that they will start with a soft launch to operate in some specific areas of Dubai including Emirates Hills, The Meadows, The Springs, The Greens, and Jumeirah.

The addition of Fetchr will help take the project “the last mile”, acording to the company’s founder and CEO Idriss Al Rifai.

“At its core Fetchr is a technology company, and this partnership represents a significant milestone for us as we work towards achieving Fetchr’s vision of enabling all deliveries through technology and disrupting the last mile delivery industry,” said Al Rifai.

“We are committed to collaborating with the concerned authorities in the UAE and become part of the country’s endeavours to be at the forefront of global innovation and implementation of such advanced technologies,” he added.

Mohammed Johmani, Founder and CEO of Eniverse Technologies, said, “Today we mark the launch of a long-term relationship with Fetchr. We are delighted to be the first company to implement this new modern technology in the UAE, especially with a like-minded firm such as Fetchr in which we see great future growth potentials.”

Output: US-based delivery company Fetchr has joined a partnership that is developing the first aerial drone home delivery service in the United Arab Emirates. The partnership between UAE-based technology firm Eniverse and US company Skycart had earlier announced that was planning to bring Space Autonomous Drones to specific areas of Dubai. California-based Skycart already offers a similar service to its users, which delivers packages to their doorstep. Fetchr's founder, Idriss Al Rifai, said his company's involvement in the drone project will help take it "the last mile".


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Montessorium wins $2m to develop Primary app for parents
 A Sioux Falls education technology startup nearly doubled its funding.

Montessorium, which creates educational apps for parents and children, raised $1 million in investments after a Series A financing round, the company announced Friday.

The investment, led by Bluestem Investment Fund 2016 LLC, brings Montessorium's total funding to $2.045 million.

"We're overjoyed by this show of support from investors in our home state," CEO Bobby George said.

The additional $1 million will help Montessorium take its apps to the "next level," said George, who co-founded the company and the Sioux Falls Baan Dek Montessori school with his wife, June George.

Last year, the company launched Primary, an app for parents. Primary has a wide range of activities, including tips for family activities such as camping ideas or ways to involve children in back-to-school shopping.

"In Primary ... we provide positive, timely resources that will improve the lives of the entire family," June George said. "We're helping parents help children."

Since launching last fall, Primary has been downloaded more than 30,000 times and featured on the App Store homepage.

The new round of funding also comes from South Dakota investors, including Falls Angel Fund, Two Bridges Capital, Kampeska Capital and SDSU/Brookings Angel Fund II.

"We're very excited about Montessorium's efforts," said Matthew Paulson of Falls Angel Fund. "For the first time, children, parents and classrooms have access to high-quality educational apps and also benefit from the Montessori teaching style approach at the same time."

Bobby George said one of the remarkable things about the latest financing round is having the ability to be a tech startup in Sioux Falls.

"You don't have to go to Silicon Valley to make something special," he said.

Output: A US education technology company has raised $1m of funding in a new investment round. Montessorium, which is based in South Dakota, creates apps for parents of primary-school children based on the Montessori style of teaching. The company's Primary app was launched last year and offers tips for undertaking activities with children. It has been downloaded 30,000 times and Montessorium wants to use the new money to develop it further. The latest round of funding comes from investors in the company's home state and brings the total raised to over $2m.


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Oil spills double risk of infant deaths in Nigeria
 Oil spills can lead to irreversible environmental degradation and pose hazards to human health. We are the first to study the causal effects of onshore oil spills on neonatal and infant mortality rates. We use spatial data from the Nigerian Oil Spill Monitor and the Demographic and Health Surveys, and rely on the comparison of siblings conceived before and after nearby oil spills. We find that nearby oil spills double the neonatal mortality rate. These effects are fairly uniform across locations and socio-economic backgrounds. We also provide some evidence for negative health effects of nearby oil spills on surviving children.

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Output: Babies in Nigeria born to mothers who lived within 10km of an oil spill up to five years before becoming pregnant are twice as likely to die in their first month, according to new research. The study also revealed that such spills damage the health of surviving children. The research was unable to explain why spills that occurred during pregnancy had no effect on child or neonatal mortality rates. It is estimated that the Niger Delta sees spills equivalent to 240,000 barrels of crude oil each year, resulting in polluted water, crops and air.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Oil spills double risk of infant deaths in Nigeria
 Babies in Nigeria are twice as likely to die in the first month of life if their mothers were living near an oil spill before falling pregnant, researchers have found.

A new study, the first to link environmental pollution with newborn and child mortality rates in the Niger Delta, shows that oil spills occurring within 10km of a mother’s place of residence doubled neonatal mortality rates and impaired the health of her surviving children.

Crucially, oil spills that occurred while the mother was still pregnant had no effect on child or neonatal mortality. But even spills that happened five years before conception doubled the neonatal mortality rate from 38 deaths to 76 deaths for every 1,000 births, the data found.

“The results from the study are absolutely shocking,” said Roland Hodler, an economics professor from the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, who led the study. “I didn’t expect to see this effect on pre-conception. Why we don’t find a stronger effect [on the foetus] during the pregnancy is not entirely clear – maybe it is due to the cumulative contamination of crude oil in the water and soil, which increases over time. But that doesn’t explain the entire effect.

“This is a tragedy. Even four to five years prior to conception, an oil spill still matters. I think this should be seen as a first-world problem for something to be done.”

Regular, uncontrolled spills have been a prominent feature of Nigeria’s oil industry – the nation’s primary source of GDP – since crude was discovered there more than 60 years ago. An estimated 240,000 barrels of crude oil are spilled in the Niger Delta every year, polluting waterways, contaminating crops, and releasing toxic chemicals into the air.

A 2011 report by the UN Environment Programme estimated that, after decades of repeated oil spills in Ogoniland, it would take 30 years to reverse damage to public health and the regional ecosystem.

Unborn and newborn infants are most vulnerable to oil-related pollution because they have not yet developed basic defences such as the blood-brain barrier, which helps protect against toxic chemicals, the study found. Even small doses of pollution are likely to be large in comparison to an infant’s body weight, while mothers who ingest poisoned food or contaminated water are also at greater risk of maternal malnutrition and sickness, potentially increasing infant mortality risks, said the researchers.

By pairing georeferenced data from the Nigerian Oil Spill Monitor – which recorded the location of more than 6,600 spills between 2005 and 2015 – with the 2013 national demographic and health survey, Hodler and his colleague Anna Bruederle were able to map oil spill locations in relation to neonatal and child mortality rates among the surrounding populations. The result was an analysis of roughly 5,040 children born to 2,700 mothers in 130 clusters, all within 10km of the closest oil spill.

The researchers then compared siblings’ health histories, contrasting the mortality rates of infants conceived or born before the first nearby oil spill with those conceived or born subsequently.

The data proved that neonatal mortality was higher the closer the oil spill was to the mother’s location, and that any oil spills prior to conception increased the incidence of low weight-for-height, notably in the first year of life.

The Nigerian government did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Activists have called the findings “disturbing and disheartening”.

“It is shocking to consider how many children may have died in the past 50 years – since oil exploration started in Nigeria’s Niger Delta – as a direct result of regular and uncontrolled oil spills,” said Debbie Ariyo of Africans Unite Against Child Abuse, a charity that supports the rights and welfare of African children.

“The ongoing environmental damage means that more children are exposed to harmful chemicals in polluted drinking water, air and food produce. Simply put, as long as the oil spills continue unabated and clean up of the region is delayed, then unfortunately more children will be harmfully impacted.”

Additional reporting by Emmanuel Akinwotu

Output: Babies in Nigeria born to mothers who lived within 10km of an oil spill up to five years before becoming pregnant are twice as likely to die in their first month, according to new research. The study also revealed that such spills damage the health of surviving children. The research was unable to explain why spills that occurred during pregnancy had no effect on child or neonatal mortality rates. It is estimated that the Niger Delta sees spills equivalent to 240,000 barrels of crude oil each year, resulting in polluted water, crops and air.


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US health agency to expand payments for telehealth services
 On Thursday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a final rule for the 2018 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule.

The lengthy (as in 1,653-page) document outlines numerous changes. For one, it increases physician payment rates by 0.41 percent for 2018 compared to this year.

But a less frequently highlighted part of the rule is what it does for telemedicine.

CMS will be paying for more telehealth services. The agency created multiple new codes, which cover instances around lung cancer, health risk assessments, psychotherapy, chronic care management and interactive complexity.

As a press release notes:

To strengthen access to care, especially for those living in rural areas, CMS is transforming access to Medicare telehealth services by paying for more services and making it easier for providers to bill for these services. Improving access to telehealth services reflects CMS’ work to modernize Medicare payments to promote patient-centered innovations.

Additionally, CMS said it is finalizing separate 2018 payment for CPT code 99091, which details certain remote patient monitoring.

Some, including Connected Health Initiative Executive Director Morgan Reed, were pleased with the changes. He praised CMS’ efforts regarding enabling doctors to utilize remote patient monitoring tools. In a statement, Reed noted:

These new rules are an important step forward for America’s connected health innovators, doctors, and most importantly patients. Until now, connected health technologies have been effectively locked out of the most important part of America’s healthcare system, Medicare and Medicaid. Previous CMS rules created serious disincentives for doctors to consider new technologies. Together with our advisory board, CHI pushed for newly enacted rules that finally level the playing field for innovators, giving doctors and patients the chance to take advantage of the best technologies available.

Others, such as American Hospital Association Executive Vice President Tom Nickels, weren’t quite as excited. He stated:

We are also supportive of the agency’s policies to make payment for new telehealth services, although we urge a more expansive approach toward telehealth coverage.

Photo: IAN HOOTON, Getty Images

Output: The US federal health agency is increasing the amount of telehealth services it pays for. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which provides access to healthcare for elderly and low-income Americans, has included the expanded services in its updated schedule of fees payable to medical staff. The change will provide better access to care for people in rural areas, according to the CMS. The news has been welcomed by representatives of the connected health technology industry, who said previous rules provided disincentives for doctors to use such new technologies.


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Chinese gene-sequencing start-up Annoroad raises $105m
 The Chinese next-generation sequencing company Annoroad this week announced it had netted $105 million in a Series C funding round. Ping An Ventures and the Shenzhen GTJA Investment Group led the round, with additional money coming from SoftBank China Venture Capital.

The company, known widely for its fertility and tumor tests, is among the largest genomics firms in China. In 2015, Annoroad announced plans to co-develop a prenatal DNA diagnostic with Illumina, combining the American company’s sequencing technology with its own nucleic acid extraction and data analysis. That resulted in NextSeq550AR, a sequencing platform

In a statement, the company said the windfall will partly go toward developing its overseas business efforts, though it didn’t elaborate.

It will also use the investment to improve research and development, hire talent, and increase efficiency and sustainability. Some of the money will be diverted to SolarGenomics, a cloud-based platform the company launched 3 months ago for bioinformatics and research storage.

Annoroad CEO Chongjian Chen called the funding “fresh impetus” for the company to implement more sustainable practices.

“With the mission of enhancing life value, based on gene technology, Annoroad is aiming at bringing more further social benefits, serving human health and accelerating the discoveries in life science,” Chen said.

The Chinese consumer genomics giant is not the first in its field to receive a 9-figure investment this year. 23andMe famously received $250 million earlier this year, reflecting global confidence in a genomics market that is expected to grow to $340 million worldwide in the next 5 years.

Output: Annoroad, a Chinese gene-sequencing firm, has raised $105m in a series C funding round led by Ping An Ventures and Shenzhen GTJA Investment Group. SoftBank China Venture Capital also invested in the round. Beijing-based Annoroad is recognised for its fertility and tumour test products, and is one of the largest genomics companies in China. The funds will be used to develop the company's overseas business connections, improve its R&D efforts and hire further staff. Some funding will be used for its SolarGenomics subsidiary, which offers a cloud-based platform for the storage of bioinformatics and research.


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Medici expands telehealth messaging service to South Africa
 Serial healthcare entrepreneur Clinton Phillips is expanding his telehealth business Medici to South Africa at the start of 2018 in a move intended to improve access to healthcare. It also follows a $24.2 million fundraise by the company last year. Phillips, who lived in Johannesburg before settling in Austin, Texas, talked about his plans for the company in a phone interview.

Unlike Phillips’ previous healthcare business 2ndMD, a second opinion service for complex medical conditions, Medici is modeled after WhatsApp but for healthcare. Although patients can initiate contact with doctors by text, physicians can choose to connect with patients through a video conference component or phone call.

“A billion people a day use WhatsApp and many of them are doctors. It is not built for healthcare, it is not compliant for healthcare but it is the best way they know to manage their patients.”

Medici plans to onboard 3,000 to 5,000 doctors to support the expansion to South Africa. Phillips said the company is collaborating with medical associations and insurance companies in the African nation, including the insurer MMI. Surprisingly, Phillips observed that the market is very similar to the U.S. in terms of public and private insurance. He noted that most South Africans with insurance have high deductible plans.

South Africa will also anchor Medici’s expansion plans on the continent — it already has partnerships in Kenya and Nigeria. It also has designs for Europe and currently has an office in Paris staffed by five people.

“We’d love to get to 20 countries in the next 12-18 month. US, Africa & Latin America are showing a lot of potential.”

The company’s business model allows physicians to use its app for free in exchange for a portion of their revenues or they can pay $149 per month. In what seems like an unusual but practical move, Medici also provides free malpractice insurance covering up to $1 million.

Asked how physicians use Medici, Phillips offered a few different examples for its “power users.” A Miami doctor uses it to care for children on Medicaid who have limited mobility because she said it provides useful insight into what is going on in a patient’s home. It also has specialists among its users such as an orthopedic surgeon so he can touch base with patients before their procedure and as they recover.

Also on Medici’s to do list are updates to its platform, such as using AI to help triage consults for the doctors using Medici and transcription to minimize doctors having to take notes.

Photo: ronniechua, Getty Images

Output: Telehealth messaging service Medici is expanding to South Africa early next year after raising new funding of $24m in an investment round last year. The Texas-based company offers a messaging platform inspired by WhatsApp, on which patients can access doctors, who can then phone back or use video conferencing to give advice. Medici is seeking to sign up 3,000 to 5,000 doctors in South Africa, and the move is the first stage of a planned expansion into other African countries. Founder Clinton Phillips has also expressed interest in Latin America and Europe.


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Bahrain looks to boost fintech development with dedicated hub
 The Bahraini Government and the region's Central Bank are backing the creation of a new fintech hub in a 10,000 square metre space overlooking the waters of Bahrain Bay and the Arabian Gulf.

Scheduled to open in February 2018, the hub will comprise co-working spaces, communal areas, workstations, hot desks, and a variety of other shared infrastructure designed to attract international corporate innovation labs and fintech start-ups.

FinTech Consortium, which runs similar facilities in New York and Singapore, has been appointed as the operator and ecosystem builder for the new location.

The Central Bank of Bahrain in June opened a regulatory sandbox for fintech firms worldwide to test their technology ahead of live deployment in the Kingdom. The initiative followed the creation of a partnership between the Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB) and the Singapore Fintech Consortium and asset management and advisory firm Trucial Investment Partners to develop a startup-friendly regulatory framework for the Kingdom.

H.E. Khalid Al Rumaihi, EDB chief executive says: “We are very excited about the opportunities that fintech presents in the region and in Bahrain’s ability to serve as a hub for innovation in this sector. We know that in order to realise these opportunities, it is vital to get the right ecosystem, including ensuring a supportive regulatory environment and infrastructure is in place.”

Bahrain provided greater opportunities for fintech businesses in 2014, when the CBB initiated two new license types - payment services and card processing services - marking the entry of non-banking companies into banking services. To date Bahrain has issued 14 licenses for these two activities.

Output: Bahrain's government and central bank are backing a fintech-focused hub overseen in the Gulf state by Singapore's FinTech Consortium. The centre will sit in a 10,000 sq m area next to Bahrain Bay and offer shared office facilities to corporate innovation labs and fintech start-ups by February. It follows the launch in June of the central bank's regulatory sandbox for fintech innovation.


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Secdo launches behavioural analysis cybersecurity platform
 eSecurity Planet may receive a commission from vendor links. Our recommendations are independent of any commissions, and we only recommend solutions we have personally used or researched and meet our standards for inclusion.

With major cybersecurity incidents an almost daily occurrence, organizations need an incident response plan for the likelihood that they will someday be breached. And more than ever, they also need an incident response service that can step in to help clean up those messes.

Despite all the cybersecurity defenses in enterprises, the human element matters the most, as phishing attacks remain the top avenue of incursion, accounting for more than 85% of all breaches, according to the annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. With 13% of human-related breaches containing ransomware and 10% of ransomware attacks costing organizations an average of $1 million, IT security teams need to be prepared for the worst.

That’s where incident response software and services come in. Incident response is focused on how best to deal with an incident once it occurs. The whole idea is to have a systematic approach to incidents rather than acting haphazardly. Incident response tools can help implement incident response plans and elevate response plans from a manual to an automated basis, sandboxing threats and shutting down ports and access and the like. But even then, manual actions remain important, and that’s where incident response plans and services come in.

The functions contained within incident response tools and services vary widely from vendor to vendor. But these core functions are present in most products:

Ability to instantly deploy and gain visibility across the environment, including Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems

Remediation capabilities across environmental components to implement corrective actions as quickly as possible rather than waiting for time-consuming manual actions, perhaps over hundreds or thousands of devices and components

Log review is useful as well, but real-time visibility is key

Post-breach investigations

Ransomware, virus, and malware removal

Recovery of systems and reestablishment of services and websites

See our picks for best ransomware recovery services and removal tools

Top Incident Response Tools

Check Point Incident Response

Check Point’s Incident Response (IR) service can be broken down into several components. It offers incident response retainers for reactive incident engagements as well as proactive engagements via consulting. Those consulting services include: tabletop exercises; IR planning (including policy and playbook review and creation around threats); maturity & readiness assessments; and more advanced services such as internal compromise and threat assessments that look at the network, logs, endpoints, Active Directory, and email (on premises or in the cloud), threat hunting engagements, and external attack surface mapping analysis for a company’s digital assets.

Key Differentiators

The Check Point Incident Response Team (CPIRT) Service helps prepare for and respond to any security breach with 24/7 dedicated experts to help speed recovery and return to business as usual. This includes real-time remediation assistance, rule-based and protection activation recommendations, traffic and attack analysis, forensic analytics lab access, scheduled log analysis of identified critical systems, and configuration change recommendations for third-party systems and service providers.

Complete Incident Handling: Check Point can handle the entire incident lifecycle from triage containment and remediation, with detailed documentation and reports.

Check Point has intelligence sharing arrangements with many global intelligence and infrastructure providers, local and national law enforcement, and others.

The service is vendor agnostic, with global 24x7x365 incident response analysts around the world.

Direct access to Check Point Research & Development, aiding in Zero Day threat identification.

Handles upwards of 3,000 or more cases per year.

More than 250 professionals, including advanced security experts, reverse engineers, and malware analysts.

Utilizes standardized frameworks for incident response such as NIST and ISO.

Cynet

The Cynet Incident Response service includes deployment of the Cynet 360 agent to gain visibility across the environment, including hosts, files, networks, and users. It is managed by a team of incident responders to resolve the problem and get the business restored back to normal.

Key Differentiators

It combines deep security analysis experience together with Cynet 360 investigative and security technology.

A 24/7 security team acts as an extended team for the organization, leading any required analysis, ensuring that nothing is overlooked, and generating the results needed.

Cynet 360 can be used post-resolution to protect systems against future attacks.

The Cynet 360 agent can be deployed to over 5,000 endpoints within an hour.

Cynet 360 provides visibility beyond the endpoint to networks and users to gain the necessary visibility for automated incident response.

Executive summaries and reports that can be exported for consumption by other systems or to manually update systems across the environment.

The full Cynet Prevention & Detection platform leverages Cynet Sensor Fusion to provide integrated antivirus, endpoint detection and response, network analytics, deception and user behavioral analytics.

Mandiant

The Mandiant Automated Defense module – soon to become part of Google – combines data from the security stack with data science and machine learning capabilities to triage alerts, automatically eliminating events that don’t matter, and revealing the ones that do. Its extended detection and response (XDR) engine uses decision automation to recall events that occurred in the past, correlating with threat intelligence to enrich incidents for escalation and remediation.

Key Differentiators

Mandiant Automated Defense increases scalability, consistency, and accuracy to augment SOC teams, improving detection and reducing attacker dwell times.

Mandiant investigator expertise and threat intelligence are delivered through the Mandiant Intel Grid.

Deliver detection and response capabilities at scale with a software-as-a-service approach that does not require the writing of rules or playbooks.

Weave together alerts and data from a variety of security control categories, data repositories and threat intelligence vendors to determine the likelihood of malicious and actionable threats.

Helps security analysts reduce monotonous tasks by automating alert analysis, reducing the number of false positives, and highlighting alerts that matter.

SOC teams can weave together data silos and integrate with SIEM/SOAR tools.

The overall Mandiant platform – Mandiant Advantage – encompasses extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities with breach intelligence, threat intelligence, and security validation.

Works with existing security controls.

Secureworks

Secureworks Taegis XDR is available as software or as a managed service. It is built on the Taegis security analytics platform, using data science techniques to expose adversaries that would otherwise go undetected. A combination of machine and deep learning that are trained using threat intelligence and user data powers the behavioral threat analytics.

Key Differentiators

The software includes built-in detection.

Automated containment actions across endpoint, network, and cloud environments.

Fuses human and machine intelligence to improve security.

ManagedXDR enables the team to deal with an increasing workload and threat volume.

Collaborate on hunts, chat with analysts, and periodically assess the security posture.

Cloud-native solution that complements existing infrastructure by correlating events from multiple security tools.

Identify previously unknown threats, eliminate noise, and speed up investigations with analytics-based detectors that are enriched with curated threat intelligence by the Secureworks Counter Threat Unit.

Sygnia

Sygnia can investigate, contain, and defeat attacks within the network, while minimizing impact and enabling effective recovery. Its forensics and incident response capabilities are designed to counter the spectrum of attacks, resolve incidents, and support risk management and business recovery.

Key Differentiators

Support for forensic diagnostics, reverse engineering, and evidence preservation, including host, network, mobile, cloud or any other form of digital data.

Manage uncertainty by determining if security alerts constitute a critical risk.

Obtain recommendations to address vulnerabilities and mitigate threats.

Crisis management support.

Retainer contracts offer standby support, from forensic triage to handling a full-scale cyber event.

Assess and enhance the ability to respond to and sustain cyberattacks.

Close gaps and improve preparation to manage the complex undertaking and intense pressure of a cyber breach.

Proactively hunt attacks within the network, and identify and neutralize dormant and active threats at an early stage.

Sygnia’s Advanced Compromise Assessment process establishes a base of security.

Herjavec Group

Managed Detection & Response (MDR) services from Herjavec Group (HG) analyze packets and system processes in real time, augmenting an existing managed security service. The benefits include threat detection, threat hunting, and technology-specific experts’ hands-on involvement in the environment to expand beyond preventative security strategies.

Key Differentiators

The HG MDR practice combines behavioral and anomaly detection with added intelligence from endpoint detection and response platforms.

The HG SOC operations monitor network, systems, and data, 24/7/365.

High-fidelity alerting, improved threat detection, and expert-level response.

Around the clock security event monitoring, triage & escalation.

Threat disruption across platforms.

Network security monitoring coupled with management of best of breed EDR or XDR solutions, cloud environments, and containers.

Digital forensics and incident response emergency services.

Managed phishing service.

BAE Systems

BAE Systems is a supplier of cyber, intelligence, and security capabilities to government agencies, as well as cyber and network security capabilities to the enterprise. It protects air, maritime, land, and cyber domains.

Key Differentiators

Has a workforce of about 90,000 people in more than 40 countries.

Emergency Cyber Incident Response services combine technical skills with strategic guidance to ensure the organization makes the right decisions at the right times to limit the impact of the attack.

In-house developed tools are used to discover the critical facts.

Visibility into malicious behavior.

If a breach of security has already made the headlines or attracted regulator attention, the BAE team can help manage internal and external stakeholders, as well as the press.

Centers of excellence exist in the UK, U.S., and Australia.

Can rapidly deploy expert personnel onsite.

Founding and certified member of the NCSC Certified Incident Response Scheme and CREST certified to provide cyber incident response services to government, critical national infrastructure and, other operators of nationally significant networks.

Cybriant

CybriantXDR combines machine learning and artificial intelligence with experienced oversight to identify and terminate malicious software before it can execute. It also alerts the organization only when a credible threat is detected.

Key Differentiators

Output: New York start-up Sedco aims to help companies facing growing incident response challenges and skilled staffing shortages with the launch of version 5.0 of its incident response platform. Additions include Behavioral Based Indicators of Compromise, a capability enabling firms to block potentially damaging processes or behaviours, and the Sedco Response Center, offering containment as well as forensic and remediation solutions. A survey by Hexadite and the Enterprise Strategy Group revealed that 71% of US IT professionals said incident response had become more difficult in the past two years.


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EDF partners with Elsewedy Electric on solar projects in Egypt
 EDF Energies Nouevelles, the renewable energy subsidiary of France-based energy giant EDF, and the Egyptian manufacturing company Elsewedy Electric will construct a 100 MW solar park in Benban, southern Egypt.

Financial close for the project was reached on Oct. 25, EDF said in a press release. The installation was selected in Round 2 of Egypt’s FIT scheme and will sell power to local utility Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company (EETC) under a 25-year contract.

The solar park will be located at the 1.8 GW Benban solar complex, where they are also building another 50 MW solar plant. Both projects, according to EDF, are being financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Proparco.

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The project must still be approved by the Egyptian authorities. Construction of the plant is expected to begin in the first quarter of next year. “By expanding into Egypt, alongside the ELSEWEDY ELECTRIC Group, a high regional profile, EDF Energies Nouvelles strengthens its position in the North African renewable energy market. The Benban solar project ties in with the EDF Group’s goal of doubling its renewable capacity in France and worldwide, by 2030 under its CAP 2030 strategic plan”, said EDF Energies Nouvelles’ CEO Antoine Cahuzac.

The 1.8 GW Benban solar complex represents the larger portion of the 2 GW of PV capacity allocated by the Egyptian government through its FIT scheme for solar.

Output: EDF Energies Nouevelles will partner with Egyptian manufacturing company Elsewedy Electric to deliver a 100 MW solar park in Egypt. The project will be located at the 1.8 GW Benban solar complex and, pending approval from the Egyptian authorities, will sell power to the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company under a 25-year contract. Construction is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2018.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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AI 'seven-year-old' bot given residency in Tokyo
 AI ‘child’ granted residency in Tokyo

AFP, TOKYO

An artificial intelligence (AI) character was made an official resident of a busy central Tokyo district yesterday, with the virtual newcomer resembling a chatty seven-year-old.

The boy named “Shibuya Mirai” does not exist physically, but he can have text conversations with humans on the widely used Line messaging app.

Tokyo’s Shibuya ward, an area popular with fashion-conscious young people, has given the character his own special residence certificate.

A special residence certificate for “Shibuya Mirai” is pictured yesterday. Photo: AFP / Shibuya Ward

This makes him Japan’s first — and maybe the world’s first — AI bot to be granted a place on a real-life local registry.

Mirai, whose name means “future” in Japanese, is supposed to be a first grader at an elementary school.

He can reply to messages and make light-hearted alterations to selfies he is sent.

Shibuya said the project aims to make the district’s local government more familiar to residents and allow officials to hear their opinions.

“His hobbies are taking pictures and observing people, and he loves talking with people... Please talk to him about anything,” the ward said in a statement with Microsoft, the joint developer of the character.

Output: A "seven-year-old" artificial intelligence (AI) bot has been granted residency in Tokyo's central Shibuya district. The boy, named Shibuya Mirai, does not physically exist but has text conversations with users of the popular Line messaging app. The character has now been given a special residence certificate, making him Japan's – and possibly the world's – first AI bot to take a place on a real life local registry.


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Virtual language learning offered by PandaTree
 PandaTree, a Palo Alto, CA-based language learning company, secured $1.5m in seed funding.

The round was led by Michael Dearing of Harrison Metals with Randy Ching of UP2398.

The company has reached a total of $2m invested with the earlier funding coming from Precursor Ventures and Nanjing Sunflower.

Led by Rich Matsuura, co-founder and product lead, and Kristina Klausen, founder and CEO, PandaTree provides a foreign language learning platform which allows students to talk via live video with their tutor, while interacting with a proprietary, standards-based language curriculum.

The WebRTC-based platform supports an interactive and fully integrated curriculum. During lessons students can be doing a virtual 3D tour of a Mayan ruin or the Great Wall of China with their tutor, working on a project, or playing a game.

With PandaTree, parents can schedule 25 or 50-minute online lessons with the tutor they choose, at the times that are convenient for them. Tutors go through a rigorous hiring process that includes test sessions with real kids, and background checks.

They use PandaTree’s curriculum, but tailor the topics and pace to each child for optimized individual learning. Mandarin and Spanish are currently offered, with additional languages planned for the future.

FinSMEs

02/11/2017

Output: California-based edtech PandaTree has raised $1.5m in a seed funding round led by Michael Dearing of Harrison Metals. The company offers online personalised learning using virtual reality as part of a standardised curriculum, enabling children to learn Spanish and Mandarin in an interactive, engaging environment. Students can also receive live one-to-one sessions with a tutor. PandaTree aims to add more languages to its curriculum in the future.


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UK living wage increases to £8.75 per hour, £10.20 in London
 More than 150,000 workers will get an inflation-beating pay rise on Monday as the UK living wage, which is paid voluntarily by more than 3,600 employers, is increased against a backdrop of rising transport, food and housing costs.

The pay rate will rise 3.6% to £8.75 per hour around the UK and 4.6% to £10.20 in London, giving a wages boost to workers at companies which have adopted the measure, including Google and IKEA.

Katherine Chapman, the director of the Living Wage Foundation, said the increase in the living wage was driven by inflation, currently running at 3%, and the increased cost of household goods, rents and transport. The living wage is independently calculated and designed to reflect the “real cost of living in the UK and London”.

“The new living wage rates will bring relief for thousands of UK workers being squeezed by stagnant wages and rising inflation,” Chapman said. “It’s thanks to the leadership of over 3,600 employers across the UK who are committed to paying all their staff, including cleaners and security staff, a real living wage.”

Two-thirds of FTSE 100 companies, including BP, BT, Vodafone, Shell have failed to join the voluntary pledge.

Dr Wanda Wyporska, the executive director of The Equality Trust, said: “It’s incredible to see so many of the UK’s largest businesses refuse to pay their staff a living wage. It’s even more appalling when you consider the average pay for a FTSE 100 boss is now over 300 times that of a minimum wage worker.”

The increase takes the voluntary UK living wage to £3.15 more than the mandatory minimum wage for 18- to 20-year-olds. The national living wage, which is simply the name given to the statutory national minimum wage rate for over 25s, is set at £7.50 an hour.

Chapman said the national living wage was not enough to cover the true cost of living, particularly in London. “In-work poverty is today’s story,” she said. “New figures show that 5.5m people are still paid less than the real living wage.”

Heathrow Airport announced on Monday it had signed up to the living wage, meaning more than 3,200 of its lowest-paid workers, including cleaners and security staff, will have their weekly wages raised by up to £100 a week. More than 150 employers have become accredited to the living wage in recent weeks including the National Gallery, the Southbank Centre and Somerset House. They join around 3,600 employers already signed up, including Nationwide and Diageo.

Many high-profile employers including luxury hotel chains and most Premier League football clubs have failed to sign up to the pledge.

Two cleaners at a Ferrari showroom were sacked last week after walking out on strike in protest at not being paid the living wage. Fredy Lopez, 51, and Angelica Valencia Bolanos, 49, who cleaned the Ferrari and Maserati showrooms of car dealer HR Owen were told they could only go back to work if they accepted the £7.50-an-hour offered by an outsourcing company.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said he was delighted that the London living wage had risen above £10, but low pay and inequality remained problems in the capital. “London is one of the most dynamic and prosperous economies in the world, but unfortunately this prosperity isn’t shared by all Londoners. In the capital today, more than 2 million people are struggling to make ends meet and the ethnic pay gap is shockingly and unacceptably large.

“I want to make sure that no one who goes to work every day should have to endure the indignity of poverty. Paying the London living wage is not only the action of a responsible organisation, but a successful one too. Many of the accredited employers I speak to tell me of the increased productivity and reduced staff turnover that they’ve experienced since signing up.”

Output: The UK living wage, based on independently-calculated costs of living, will rise by 3.6% on Monday to £8.75 ($11.5) per hour across the UK, and by 4.6% to £10.20 in London. The wage is currently paid voluntarily by over 3,600 UK employers, including Google and IKEA, to around 150,000 workers. Heathrow Airport also announced on Monday that it would pay the living wage, raising the weekly wages of over 3,200 of the airport’s lowest-paid workers by up to £100 per week. Of FTSE 100 companies, two-thirds, including BP, BT, Shell and Vodafone, did not adopt the voluntary measure.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
P&G's reduced ad spend does not negatively impact growth
 by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, November 3, 2017

Procter & Gamble cut down the number of sites its ads ran on earlier this year about a month after brands discovered they were funding terrorist videos on YouTube. The maker of Tide, Bounty and other popular brands wanted to steer clear of questionable content and ads.

Research now suggests that overall, P&G cut the number of sites it ran ads on this year by 69% at the highest point, after Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard called out the industry for a lack of transparency and poisoning the supply chain.

MediaRadar, which tracks ad campaigns across online, TV, mobile, print and other channels, ran data to determine how calls for transparency impacted digital ad strategies for P&G, the biggest advertiser in the U.S. Using its ad-tracking software, the company compared year-over-year (YoY) 2017 numbers with January to August 2016.

During the months between January and August 2017, P&G has run its ads on 20% fewer sites overall — about 1,251 sites — compared with the year-ago timeframe.

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In January the YoY change fell to 64%, followed by February at 56% and then March at 55%. Following the greatest drop in the year in April 2017 at 69%, the number of sites running P&G ads fell 38% in May and then 7% in June. In July, the number began to increase at 14%, and went up in August to 21%.

P&G reported during its second-quarter earnings call that reducing its media spend by more than $100 million in ineffective ads had no negative impact on its growth rate. The company also said it reduced overhead and agency fees.

Todd Krizelman, CEO and co-founder of MediaRadar, believes P&G has gained more transparency over its campaigns, which has resulted in a bounce-back.

After freezing YouTube campaigns, P&G eventually returned to advertising on YouTube’s preferred channels.

Output: Consumer goods company Procter & Gamble has revealed its growth rate was not adversely affected by its $100m reduction in ad spend. In a Q2 earnings call, the company added it had also trimmed overheads and agency fees. Between March and April this year, P&G cut the number of sites running its ads by 69%, according to research by MediaRadar. Overall, between January and August, the company used 1,251 sites for ads, 20% fewer than the same period the previous year.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
EDF to develop 54 MW wind project in Scotland
 The Scottish government last week announced it has granted planning permission to a 54-MW wind project in the Scottish Highlands proposed by local firm Wind Prospect Developments.

The developer is a joint venture of renewables consultancy Wind Prospect Group and EDF Energy Renewables (EDF ER), a UK subsidiary of French utility EDF (EPA:EDF). Under the so-called Braemore project, it plans to install 18 turbines of 3 MW each at a site near the village of Lairg, Sutherland county.

The Section 36 scheme was given the green light after a rejection by Scotland’s Highland Council in 2015 that was followed by an appeal case. The developer's initial proposal was launched back in 2012 and has been in the permitting stages since then. Originally, Wind Prospect filed the project with a 27-turbine layout but amended it twice by removing three turbines in 2012 and an additional six machines a year later.

In their decision, Scottish Ministers have ruled out that the 54-MW plan will have no significant effects on the landscape and will contribute to the government's target for renewables to provide the equivalent of 50% of Scotland's heat, transport and electricity needs by 2030. According to the government's renewable electricity output calculator, the Braemore plant is expected to generate 126,089 MWh of electricity annually.

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Output: A 54 MW joint venture between EDF Energy Renewables, a UK unit of French utility EDF, and Wind Prospect Group, has been given the green light by the Scottish government. The Braemore wind project was originally launched in 2012 with 27 turbines, before Wind Prospect reduced the number to 16. The scheme was rejected in 2015, but given the go-ahead on appeal. Scottish ministers said the project, set to generate 126 MWh annually when completed, would contribute to the country's aim of providing the equivalent of half of its electricity needs using renewables by 2030.