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Tech With Purpose News
I have quite a bounty of Tech With Purpose news articles for you today, with quite a heavy bias towards AI. But let’s start with an autonomous greenhouse competition which Microsoft won with 50 cucumbers per square meter. Impressive. In addition, there’s a cool company helping emergency services save lives which just raised a nice amount of cash in their Series C, and are recruiting for twenty five positions. If that’s not enough, there’s AI combining with antibodies, AI and radio waves, AI and ocean waves, plus some VR and an emotional wellness tracking for employers.
Deep Learning Helps Tidy The Deep Blue
Researchers at the University of Barcelona create a deep learning algorithm that overcomes some of the challenges presented by the motion of the oceans in detecting and classifying waterbourne plastic polutants. Read more here.
Antibody and Gene-editing Tech to Tackle Childhood Diseases
Two interesting biotech companies here. One that uses antibodies to target and eliminate defective cells, rather than chemotherapy or radiation in young children. The other, a gene editing blood stem cell technology. Read more here.
AI and Radio Waves Interpret Human Emotion
This is a rather disturbing use of a potentially very powerful technology that I saw demonstrated at Mobile World Congress about four years ago. Certain types of radio signals can be used to penetrate matter (walls, floors, bodies) to detect subtle movements. In this example, the research uses AI to decipher emotions from radio-wave-measured hearbeats. Other use cases I have witnessed are to detect critical/dangerous events, such as stroke and heart attacks of vehicle drivers, passively monitoring the elderly to prevent falls, and remote monitoring of patients to make sure they have swallowed their medication. Read more here.
Remote Wellbeing and Mood Monitoring
Employer responsibility for employee wellbeing and mental health is something that has come up a lot in my discussions (in particular look out for the video with Kenjo’s COO). However well intentioned this moodtracker wearable is, the potential for accidental or deliberate misuse of the data it creates should not be overlooked. Read more here.
AI & Digital Imaging Partnership to Improve Cervial Cancer Diagnosis
Google and MedTech company, Hologic, partner to add artificial intelligences into digital imaging systems to help improve the reliability and accuracry of cervical cancer diagnostics. Read more here.
Food shortage, human health and extreme weather
Three Tech for Good AI projects that are looking to help uncover links between environmental factors and human health, predict extreme drought and deadly heat, and food shortage Read more here.
Virtual Tourism Takes Off
Virtual Tourism was bound to boom. I hope technology shifts like this end up making the technology more accessible to those who really need it, in particular for mental health and therapeutic use cases. If these topics are of interest to you, make sure you sign up to hear Graeme Cox from Emteq Labs talk about their technology in my Tech Leader Talks series. Read more about the VR tourism boom here.
Savings Lives with Digital, Smart Technologies
RapidSOS raised a good chunk of cash to continue helping emergency services to save lives. They are also recruiting heavily, read about the funding here and there hiring here.
AI supercharges antibody therapies
Powered by AI, BigHats technology supercharges design and development of antibody therapies. BigHat claims its wet lab can go from designs to hundreds of “expressed, purified, and characterized” antibodies in days, as opposed to weeks. Read more here.
Fifty Cucumbers, a win for autonomous greenhouses
Microsoft researchers achieve 50 cucumbers per square kilometre, beating competitors, in an autonomous greenhouse grow-off Read more here.
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