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Tech With Purpose News

This week’s selection of Tech With Purpose news includes video interviews with US government climate leaders, Bill Gates and a New Your Times best seller, Tech For Humanity prize winners, an AI For Good report, a smart building webinar, purposeful jobs, the balance between doing good and doing well, vertical farm trials and more.

I hope you find this summary useful, please do let me know if you have any feedback, and if you have Tech With Purpose news you would like to have included in a future release, please send it to me here.

Invest in Water, Land, People and Energy, Says UBS

UBS says an ‘environmental credit crunch’ is putting pressure on companies to make rapid, meaningful changes and suggest these trends are investmentworthy: People, Health and Community, Energy, Land, and Fresh Water Read more here.

Vertical Farm Trials

LettUs Grow partners with a Dutch university to begin trials of vertical farms and greenhouses. The trials aim to explore how the two different types of agriculture respond to different climates and seasons. Read more here.

Purposeful Job Demand

One of the things I discovered when getting more involved in Tech With Purpose was the sheer number of people beavering away, doing great things. Actually, that’s one of the things I want to try to help address – there’s so many people doing so many positive, good things that there is bound to be overlap and duplication. This website jumped out at me because it helps purpose-driven individuals find purposeful work. Also, it’s an interesting trend that I think will grow – job candidates will start demanding purpose-driven roles and companies will need to think about how they define roles to be more ‘for purpose’. Read more here.

Sustainability by Sustainable IOT

oneM2M launches an initiative to tackle the topic of sustainability in IOT. As a standardisation group, oneM2M seems to be promoting adoption of standards and economies of scale as a stepping stone to creating sustainable IoT deployments to help develop more sustainable businesses…yeh, it seems to get a big recursive 😉 Realising IoT is more than IoT, the group are open to involving other technology companies, including Cloud, AI and mobile operators. Read more here.

We also want to show them how to choose sustainable technologies and prepare for the new innovation possibilities that these technologies enable.Dale Seed, oneM2M

Doing Well, By Doing Good – McKinsey

Looking back to World War II and the decade following the 2008 financial crisis, McKinsey try to unravel the entangled concepts of social responsibility and sustainable profit, suggesting that in order to avoid the lacklustre economic conditions of previous global crises, companies need to focus on doing social good first. Read more here.

Nesta report looks at AI doing good in Scotland

Nesta report on their AI for Good programme in Scotland. The conclude that AI certainly can help with social issues, that it will require investment and crucially that AI solutions should be co-designed with those who will be impacted by them. There’s a whole raft of interesting AI research projects and companies in this report. Picking out just two:

• The research by Heriot-Watt university looks at how today’s mainstream smart speakers could be perpetuating negative stereotypes- this echos a topic I’ve discussed before, in particular, do we interact differently with our robotic home helpers than we would with a human equivalent? Why?
• Citizen Literacy aims to use AI to address the 15% of the UK working age population who have low levels of literacy

Check out the report for other initiates using AI to manage energy for the elderly, to interpret satellite imagery to plan forest plantations, to create new types of prosthetics, to help young people understand their mental health and quite a bit more. Read more here.

Social Economy and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The Social Economy and the Fourth Industrial Revolution from the Stanford Social Innovation Review “while many of the sector’s ethical proposals are sensible, they often lack nuance about the social and political implications of AI, let alone strategic options, and tend to produce hard-to-implement lists of principles. In addition, with a few exceptions, civil society has done very little work on public policy options”
Read more here.

Tech for Humanity Prize Winners

Computer History Museum Announces the inaugural Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Prize winners Read more here.

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Can Smart Buildings Help Save Our World?

IoT.nxt opened registration for their Smart Building webinar featuring Vodafone. The webinar looks to understand more about the opportunity of smart buildings to achieve headway in the race for sustainability. Read more here.

Bill Gates, India’s PM and several US Government Climate Change leaders speak

IHS Markit’s flagship annual event CERAWeek always features some heavyweight guest speakers. This year they have made the keynote speachers availble to all of us. Check out the interviews and videos with Bill Gates, John F. Kerry the United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, the United States White House National Climate Change Advisor, Gina McCarthy, Jennifer Graholm the US Secretary of Energy, the Prime Minister of India, Hon. Shri Narendra Modi and New Your Times number one best seller, author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race, and Professor of History, Tulane University, Walter Isaacson. Read more and watch the videos here.

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