A new technology designed to help weather forecasters better understand and predict hurricanes —sail drones— are being used in the Atlantic and Caribbean to help the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to better understand how storms develop and rapidly intensify.
They almost look like a cross between a sailboat and a surfboard, but sail drones aren't used for leisure. Their purpose is to hunt hurricanes to give forecasters more data from the surface of the ocean.
"It's a very economical solution to scientific data gathering," Brain Connon, vice president of ocean mapping with Saildrone said.
Connon said the drones collect data in real-time, including air & sea surface temperatures, relative humidity and wave height — important information all gathered without risking human life.
Continue reading: https://www.wwltv.com/article/weather/hurricane/drones-sail-to-better-understand-hurricanes/289-b0336b09-38c0-466e-8424-7537e665628d

Taking another step towards realizing our collective vision of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat, the Central Government under the leadership of Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, has released India’s airspace map for drone operations on 15 September 2021.
The map is available on DGCA’s digital sky platform at https://digitalsky.dgca.gov.in/home.
The drone airspace map comes as a follow-through of the liberalized Drone Rules, 2021 released by the Central Government on 25 August 2021, the PLI scheme for drones released on 15 September 2021 and the Geospatial Data Guidelines issued on 15 Feb 2021. All these policy reforms will catalyze super-normal growth in the upcoming drone sector.
WHY ARE DRONES IMPORTANT?
Drones offer tremendous benefits to almost all sectors of the economy. These include – agriculture, mining, infrastructure, surveillance, emergency response, transportation, geo-spatial mapping, defense, and law enforcement to name a few. Drones can be significant creators of employment and economic growth due to their reach, versatility, and ease of use, especially in India’s remote and inaccessible areas.
Continue reading: https://www.punjabnewsexpress.com/news/news/ministry-of-civil-aviation-releases-airspace-map-for-drones-149966

Blockchain technology isn’t merely the public ledger that keeps track of your Bitcoin balance. It’s a versatile framework for handling data, encryption, and security that can be applied to many different industries. Organizations around the world are starting to see this and have their top people working on new applications every day.
Banking
The banking industry is one that is being thoroughly revolutionized by the advent of blockchain technology. As cryptocurrencies are beginning to become evermore legitimate competition for fiat currencies, the industry is starting to adapt to rather than resist this new way of handling finances.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies already provide attractive options for transferring money, with lower costs per transaction in many cases. The other key advantage is that there’s no risk of failed payments, like in the case of bounced checks or insufficient funds returns. There’s still room for improvement here, though, with transaction speeds being the main concern.
Continue reading: https://dodofinance.com/which-industries-is-the-blockchain-revolutionizing-today/

Governments are tasked with bringing fair and efficient services to the public. Unfortunately, providing transparency and accountability often results in a reduction in efficiency and effectiveness or vice versa. Governments are usually forced to choose to improve one at the cost of the other. On rare occasions, technology comes along that enables governments to improve fairness and efficiency.
The move from paper-based record keeping to computer databases was one such technology. The internet was another. Blockchain is the next. Like the internet before it, blockchain will not only improve how the public interacts with government services, it will have broad economic and social implications.
How government can use blockchain
Blockchain will have a wide and varied impact on government services. Here we explore some promising examples.
Continue reading: https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockchain-will-transform-government-services-and-that-s-just-the-beginning

Paolo Ardoino was on the front lines of one of the largest cryptocurrency heists of all time.
He was flooded with calls and messages in August, alerting him to a breach at Poly Network, a platform where users swap tokens between popular cryptocurrencies, such as ethereum, binance, and dogecoin. Hackers had made off with $610 million in crypto, belonging to tens of thousands of people. Roughly $33 million of the funds were swiftly converted into tether, a “stable coin” with a value that mirrors the U.S. dollar.
Ardoino, Tether’s chief technology officer, took note. Typically, when savvy cyber criminals make off with cryptocurrency, they transfer the assets between online wallets through difficult-to-trace transactions. And poof — the money is lost.
Ardoino sprang into action and minutes later froze the assets.
“We were really lucky,” he said. “Minutes after we issued the freezing transaction, we saw the hacker attempt to move out his tether. If we had waited five minutes more, all the tether would be gone.”
Continue reading: https://www.inquirer.com/wires/wp/tracking-stolen-crypto-is-booming-business-how-blockchain-sleuths-recover-digital-loot-20210926.html

In recent months, bills to regulate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the country have been advanced in the legislature. The most advanced proposal from the chamber, written by Representative Eduardo Bismarck (PDT-CE), is ready for a vote in the House plenary. Experts considered the projects to have positive points, but said that regulation may be premature, given the speed with which AI technology is developing.
In fiction, AI is often portrayed in menacing stories, sometimes involving machines rebelling against humans. She is, for example, in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), or The Matrix (1999). In real life, artificial intelligence is a type of computer program that is able to interpret data, learn from it and make decisions independently to accomplish a particular task set by its creator.
Today, artificial intelligence exists in a series of everyday actions. Algorithms are also found in online stores, in company inventory monitoring, in facial recognition tools, fraud prevention systems, and in analyzing consumer behavior patterns.
Continue reading: https://www.mediarunsearch.co.uk/artificial-intelligence-is-on-the-agenda-of-the-house-and-senate/

The growing appreciation that human stockpickers struggle to outperform their benchmark indices has helped fuel a massive surge in assets held by passively managed exchange traded funds. Now some companies are hoping to show that artificial intelligence can finally give them an edge.
The technology is fast-evolving but at least two fund managers, EquBot and Qraft Technologies, running dedicated AI-powered ETFs are claiming early success, even though some of their AI models’ decisions might have required strong nerves to implement.
For example, the team at Qraft, which offers four AI-powered ETFs, listed on NYSE Arca, witnessed its technology build a weighting of 14.7 per cent in Tesla in its Qraft AI-Enhanced US Large Cap Momentum ETF (AMOM) in August last year, but when it rebalanced a month later on September 1 it sold it all.
Continue reading: https://www.ft.com/content/775c9361-4921-4e72-973e-d672d8a60084

The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) has become an important topic in the application of AI and machine learning in the past several years. This first part of a two-part series explains the evolution and importance of the ethics of AI. The second part will present its relevance and use in engineering applications.
We know that predictive models developed by artificial-intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) algorithms are based on data. And, because we know how this data is used to build AI-based models, the main target of AI ethics is addressing how AI models become biased based on the quality and the quantity of the data that is used.
This first part of this two-part series discusses the nonengineering applications of AI and ML and how human biases such as racism and sexism can be included in AI models through the inclusion of biased data during the training of the algorithms. Because engineering applications of AI and ML are used to model physical phenomena, Part 2 of the series will discuss how AI ethics can determine and clarify how human biases of traditional engineers—assumptions, interpretations, simplifications, and preconceived notions—can be revealed in the engineering applications of AI and ML.
Continue reading: https://jpt.spe.org/the-ethics-of-ai-evolves-with-the-technology

A recent New York Times article concludes that new AI-powered automation tools such as Codex for software developers will not eliminate jobs but simply be a welcome aid to augment programmer productivity. This is consistent with the argument we’re increasingly hearing that people and AI have different strengths and there will be appropriate roles for each.
As discussed in a Harvard Business Review story: “AI-based machines are fast, more accurate, and consistently rational, but they aren’t intuitive, emotional, or culturally sensitive.” The belief is that “AI plus humans” is something of a centaur, greater than either one operating alone.
This idea of humans plus AI producing better outcomes has become a tenant of faith in technology. Everyone talks about humans being freed up to perform higher-level functions, but no one seems to know just what those high-level functions are, how they translate into real work and jobs, or the number of people needed to perform them.
A corollary of this augmented-workforce narrative is that not only will AI-augmented work enable people to pursue a higher level of abstract thinking, it will — according to some — also lift all of society to a higher standard of living. This is certainly an optimistic vision, and we can hope for that. However, this could also be a story imbued with magical thinking, with the true end-game being fully automated work.
Continue reading: https://venturebeat.com/2021/09/25/we-are-sleepwalking-into-ai-augmented-work/

In June 2020, Melinda French Gates and MacKenzie Scott launched the first-ever "Equality Can't Wait Challenge." This project initially intended to award $40 million in grants to organizations or coalitions with the most convincing proposals submitted. The four winning projects were announced in July, and each earned $10 million to launch their ideas into action. Two runner-ups were awarded $4 million apiece.
The Equality Can't Wait Challenge is the first of its kind in the United States. No other competition focused on gender equality has offered such a high reward for women. The project aims to expand the power and influence of females in the United States by 2030, and the goal is that the funds will promote progress toward gender equality.
The Goals of the Challenge
Pivotal Ventures, French Gates' company, partnered with MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies for the first time to provide funding for the Equality Can't Wait Challenge. The initiation of the Black Lives Matter movement spotlighted the injustices faced by Black Americans every day. The COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously struck the country, which has brought attention to the barriers that millions of Americans, including women and people of color, face to achieve success.
Continue reading: https://code.likeagirl.io/what-is-the-equality-cant-wait-challenge-and-how-does-it-empower-women-4a9ae9bd1641

Lisa Sweeney, CEO of Business in Heels, was recently recognized as a one of 2021’s Top 50 Small Business Leaders by Inside Small Business.  We asked Lisa what Business in Heels was doing differently to bring women into the future of technology.
“We are all about community and supporting women in business,” Lisa explained. “It was a team effort with many of our team and Mentors going out of their way to help others. A pivotal change has been the implementation of virtual events including coffee connections, mentor mornings and the Summits.”
Lisa said one week they were meeting in person, the next week they were doing virtual hugs and toasts. From the minute COVID hit they realized the confusion, isolation and fear would all be a problem.  Immediately the team acted and launched a series of virtual events. They took the time to ring people they knew who had been majorly impacted and invited them to join.
Continue reading: https://womenlovetech.com/lisa-sweeney-on-bringing-women-into-the-future-of-technology/

From a law degree to helping grow a wedding decoration business, Louise Gilbey is keen to encourage more women to get into tech as she spreads her wings in her latest role at a leading managed service provider with offices across the UK.
Having joined razorblue in May 2021, Louise is tasked with identifying new business opportunities and talking to businesses who would benefit from using razorblue’s services. Her role is mostly focused on being out and about, keeping in touch with local businesses and getting involved in networking events to help raise awareness of the company’s vast portfolio of award-winning managed IT services.
razorblue has recently announced its most successful financial year to date, its second acquisition in as many years, and has been shortlisted in not one but two categories in the North East Business Awards.
Louise said: “Every business needs a reliable IT partner, and our products and services provide end-to-end, unified solutions. Our fantastic reputation makes my job a lot easier!  I have been in business development roles for 10 years now and over this time I have developed a large and strong network, which is integral to helping the business to grow.”
Continue reading: https://www.businessdurham.co.uk/news/the-business-development-specialist-calling-for-more-women-in-tech/

Over the course of the past year and a half, as the business world was turned on its head, conditions for some working women worsened. Without schools and child care, many parents — and overwhelmingly women — were forced to let their careers take a backseat as they cared for their families, while others had to care for parents or other family members. The impossibility of doing both well — managing a career and family responsibilities — has pushed nearly 3 million women out of the workforce as of February of this year, according to CBS News.
But if anything good has come out of the challenges posed by the pandemic, I believe it is a reconfiguration of the workforce and a newfound willingness by many companies to be flexible in their efforts to prioritize employee well-being. For women, the months ahead could be a powerful turning point in their quest to balance a career they find worthwhile and where they are valued, all while managing personal goals. Here are three ways to make the most of the post-pandemic workforce reality.
Continue reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/09/24/three-ways-for-women-to-make-the-most-of-the-post-pandemic-workforce/?sh=4df9b6407e43

Today’s Woman in Tech: Kate Sills, Lead Software Engineer at Agoric
Kate Sills is a Lead Software Engineer at Agoric, a JavaScript-native smart contract platform and PoS blockchain. Kate leads the development of Agoric’s smart contract framework, which is called Zoe. With an interest in economics and law, she has been a columnist for the Cato Institute and was previously a board member of the Tezos Commons Foundation. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science.
When did you become interested in technology?
My dad is a farmer, but he also wrote computer programs for the family farm, mostly land-leveling programs in MS-DOS, that would figure out where to take dirt and move it most efficiently to level a field for the right slope. When I was about eight, I saw him working and asked if I could do it too. I wrote a few programs: one that played Mary Had A Little Lamb using computer tones and another that was a choose-your-own-adventure text-based game. But after that, I pretty much stopped programming, because I couldn’t see a direct application in my life. I did a little bit of blogging with a modified WordPress install, but I didn’t do any intensive programming outside of my own website until college.
Continue reading: https://jaxenter.com/women-in-tech-sills-175532.html

Like many companies in 2020, Bouchaine Vineyards was digitizing customer experience — fast. With stay-at-home orders in place, it shifted to virtual wine tastings via videoconference to accommodate remote life.
Virtual tastings took creative license with their digital medium: Customers could listen to jazz music from one screen while tasting a pinot noir–all while Bouchaine Vineyards managers conveyed details about the year’s vintage — on a Cisco Webex call.
That was the first step toward making the practice of wine growing and customer connection with the vineyard more concrete, said Brian Allard, Bouchaine’s direct-to-consumer director.
“We can connect customers who are computer savvy and environmentally savvy,” Allard said. “It’s changing the conversation. We’re no longer just talking about hints of cherry. Now the connection between the vineyard story and the glass is more tangible.”
From Videoconference to IoT for Microclimate Management
What began with some video calls as a way to reach customers morphed into a new mode of operations for the winery, through Internet of Things (IoT) sensors.
One of the most important challenges for the winery is how to manage its various soil “blocks,” to yield quality grapes and, thus, quality wine. These blocks, said Chris Kajani, general manager, operate as microclimates, with their own wind, temperature, humidity and other environmental characteristics.
Continue reading: https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2021/09/24/iot-helps-grape-growers-harvest-better-data-and-grapes/

Going forward, organizations that devise a well-thought-out strategy for data management and adopt technologies that tie together well are the most likely to succeed in unlocking their data’s value.
Data is only as good as its governance strategy. With organizations generating more & more data, there is an increasing need to improve data accessibility and derive more value from it. As a result, data governance issues – around how organizations manage, use, and share data across the value chain has gained increasing prominence, probably more so than ever.
According to a recent Gartner report, it’s expected that by 2022 as many as 90% of corporate strategies will recognize their data as a critical business asset, making governance in the digital age a necessary event for all governance professionals.  
The Growing Significance of Data Governance
Data is and has always been the lifeline of whatever we do. It has become even more critical now in the age of digitization. “Organizations need the right tools to unlock the purpose of collecting the data and making a good use of it to take the customer from product A to product B.” Jai Pawani, COO, HSBC India.
Continue reading: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/embracing-flexible-data-governance/articleshow/86483733.cms

Digital transformation is driving new innovations in government. It relies on comprehensive, accurate data, yet agencies often hit speed bumps when they try adopting data-driven decision models.
That's because integrating data sources and feeding information into analytics systems at scale isn't enough to become a data-driven agency. Agencies and their data scientists must ensure they do not drown in a flood of data they cannot use, Forrest Hare, cyber operations solutions developer at SAIC, said.
"It's easy to get data overload and decision paralysis when you are too successful at integrating your data," he added. Agencies must find an easy, repeatable, and scalable way to distil the numbers into meaningful knowledge.
"Rapid data-driven decisions require automated sense-making," Hare said. "Without that, you need lengthy, customized analytics for each decision."
Continue reading: https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-government-agencies-can-use-data-better-to-make-decisions-2021-9

Data administrators must adopt effective management practices like edge caching to ensure the availability of digital resources such as files, systems, and applications.
Caching and edge computing play a critical role in enabling modern content delivery networks (CDN) and telecommunications providers that offer web services to billions of users. Edge caching refers to the practice of using intermediate storage between traditional or hyperscale data centers and end users accessing the resource.
Advancing connectivity is partly thanks to the development of edge computing infrastructure, where edge servers (or nodes) sit at the edge of networks or systems. Edge caches store frequently utilized resources closer to the end user within device or server memory for quick retrieval.
This article looks at what edge computing and caching are, the role of edge servers, and how edge caching works.
Continue reading: https://www.serverwatch.com/guides/edge-cache/

By 2025, 100 million connected vehicles will be transmitting 10 billion gigabytes of data per month. A new report by the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium offers insight into a cross-industry solution to meeting this demand.
As the number of connected vehicles in operation rises, the networks that deliver and process data will have to deal with “unprecedented and ever-increasing volumes of data from a rapidly moving vehicle,” a new white paper reports.
The Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC) projects that by 2025 the number of connected vehicles will grow to about 100 million globally and the data volume transmitted between vehicles and the cloud will be about 10 exabytes — 10 billion gigabytes — of data per month.
The white paper published Wednesday (Sept. 22) by AECC, Distributed Computing in an AECC System, addresses distributed computing best practices for managing connected vehicles’ high data volumes. Among the companies represented on the AECC board of directors are Toyota, Intel, Ericsson, DENSO, Samsung, Dell-EMC, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) and KDDI Research.
Continue reading: https://www.pymnts.com/commerce-connected/2021/connected-vehicles-will-require-new-infrastructure-to-deliver-data/

“Exascale only becomes valuable when it’s creating and using data that we care about,” said Pete Beckman, co-director of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering (NAISE), at the most recent HPC User Forum. Beckman, head of an Argonne National Laboratory edge computing project called Waggle, was insistent on one thing: edge computing is a crucial part of delivering that value for exascale.
Beckman had opened with a quote from computer architect Ken Batcher: “A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems.” “In many ways, that is still true today,” Beckman said. “What we expect from supercomputers is that they’re so blindingly fast that really it’s bottlenecked on either reading or writing from input or output.”
“If we take that concept, though, and flip it over,” he added, “then we end up with this idea that edge computing, therefore, is a device for turning an I/O-bound problem into a compute-bound problem.”
Beckman outlined what he viewed as the new paradigm of high-performance computing: one defined by extreme data production – more than could ever be efficiently moved to supercomputers – by massive detectors and instruments like the Large Hadron Collider and radio telescopes. This paradigm, he said, resulted in a series of research problems where it would be more efficient to examine data at the edge and filter only the important or interesting data to supercomputers for heavy-duty analysis.
Continue reading: https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/09/24/the-case-for-an-edge-driven-future-for-supercomputing/

What is a smart city? A smart city is an urban area that uses technologies and networking to help improve local services and infrastructure management. For example, a smart city can harness the power of the Internet of Things (IoT), MEC and faster networking, such as 4G LTE and 5G, to reduce operational costs and provide better, faster services and information-sharing. Typically, a smart city collects data using a web of IoT-connected sensors to gather insights about how residents use the environment and access services. This data helps inform decision-makers so resources can be more appropriately allocated. As urbanization accelerates, smart cities will likely take on even more relevance. In fact, according to a report by Technavio, the market for smart cities is predicted to grow by about $2.1 trillion by 2024—and with it, smart cities' security concerns.
Continue reading: https://www.govtech.com/sponsored/smart-cities-security-concerns-and-safety-issues-5g-mec-and-security-risks

IoT has become a popular technology in every sector. From automobiles, industrial equipment, home appliances to security systems, everything is connected to the Internet. At the same time, we have seen some significant developments in IoT in web development.
IoT in Web Design & Development
If you are wondering how IoT and web development are related, read on to find out. Firstly, any network of connected devices relies on web servers as well as cloud storage for operating. Also, advanced messaging protocols are used for communication across devices. Most importantly, a user interface is needed for any user to interact with the connected devices.
Another important thing is that most IoT devices can display web content. For instance, smart appliances, TVs, laptops, wearable devices, industrial monitors, etc. Some of these devices can even be used to search the web using browsers. An example is Amazon’s Echo, which has a virtual assistant Alexa. 
So, web design and development are essential parts of any IoT project. Now, let’s see how the development of IoT is changing the web design and development sector. 
Continue reading: https://www.iotforall.com/how-is-iot-impacting-web-design-development-in-2021

So far in the Drone Disruptors series, we’ve taken a look at two distinctly different players in the drone delivery space. Israel-based Flytrex hopes to become the drone of the U.S. suburbs, flying over residential neighborhoods and airdropping cups of coffee to your backyard. Then there’s Volansi, headquartered in the Bay Area, a company seeking to fly in more remote areas – including over the ocean.
But for this week’s installment, we sat down with a company that wants to bring drones to the least remote places in the world: cities.
“We want to show how drone city networks work,” Andreas Raptopoulos, co-founder and CEO of Silicon Valley-based Matternet, told Modern Shipper. “Our vision is that a city like San Diego or San Francisco or Miami or Berlin or London should use drone delivery as one critical piece of infrastructure.”
Raptopoulos envisions a citywide drone nervous system, with drones flying above the streets between urban nodes from which they can send and receive packages. In this week’s edition of Drone Disruptors, Modern Shipper sat down with Raptopoulos to talk health care, traffic and integration.
Continue reading: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/drone-disruptors-matternet-is-taking-cities-into-the-skies

The European Union has made no secret of its ambitions to thrive on the global tech scene, particularly when it comes to blockchain.
The bloc wrapped up its blockchain week on Friday, which was hosted in Slovenia and showcased how blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) can bolster the EU’s ambitions in its European Green deal and Digital transition.
And just last week, the EU announced it would invest in blockchain, data infrastructure and high-performance computing, which comes as part of its multi-billion-euro plan to develop technology across its member states.
By Pascale Davies  •  Updated: 24/09/2021 - 18:46
The European Union has made no secret of its ambitions to thrive on the global tech scene, particularly when it comes to blockchain.
The bloc wrapped up its blockchain week on Friday, which was hosted in Slovenia and showcased how blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) can bolster the EU’s ambitions in its European Green deal and Digital transition.
And just last week, the EU announced it would invest in blockchain, data infrastructure and high-performance computing, which comes as part of its multi-billion-euro plan to develop technology across its member states.
What is blockchain?
When thinking about blockchain, the word Bitcoin normally doesn’t come far behind. But blockchain is not just for trading cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain is actually the shared ledger that allows the process of recording transactions and tracking assets.
Continue reading: https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/09/24/how-european-governments-can-benefit-from-blockchain-and-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-cryptos

If there’s a common thread over the past year-and-a-half, it’s dramatic change: a global pandemic amidst a politically charged and socially divisive environment, civil unrest, extreme temperatures and record-breaking weather disasters.
These disasters have all driven immense transformation. From the collaboration required between state and health care to manage COVID-19 outbreaks and vaccine appointments to remote working, adopting new ways to support customers and operating brick-and-mortar processes in a digital environment, technology has been interwoven into the response and management of crises.
While we have certainly learned a lot in the last 18 months, we must also look ahead to how these changes will shape our future. What role will technology play in helping us mitigate challenges in the new era of the pandemic? Without question, business and communities have made a dramatic shift toward investing in big data and artificial intelligence. What will be important is to understand how big data and AI will keep our infrastructure ahead of disasters and, ultimately, more resilient in dealing with future events.  
Continue reading: https://www.nextgov.com/ideas/2021/09/how-ai-and-data-can-increase-resilience-new-era-pandemic/185603/