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Ryan Loftus

Ryan Loftus is a freelance writer specializing in topics like technology, climate change, and the future of agriculture. He's interested in farming advancements and how they can help combat global warming.

Latest stories by Ryan

smart-hospitals

The hospital of the future: Could smart hospitals deliver better healthcare?

  • Emerging tech
  • min read
    • Population growth. Aging nations. A global pandemic. 2020 has been quite some year for the world's healthcare systems. How can they better handle this triple threat? Healthcare needs are getting more complex, and systems more stretched. To meet the demand for precision healthcare, hospitals need to evolve to become smarter and more efficient. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates healthcare will face a shortfall of more than 18 million healthcare professionals globally within the next decade. Is it sustainable to increase the workload of already stretched practitioners? Smart hospitals could make healthcare work more efficient and improve the quality of patient care. Smart hospitals and the rise of e-health Smart hospitals are part of the e-health phenomenon. A smart hospital improves patient care using optimized and automated processes, particularly the Internet of Things (IoT), to connect medical devices to AI and data analysis. Smart tech helps healthcare practitioners focus on providing high-quality care while reducing the barriers associated with using complex medical technology. Smart tech means smarter workflows One figurehead of the smart hospital movement is Humber River Valley Hospital, Canada. It's North America's first fully-digital hospital (think: online appointment scheduling, digital check-ins and your test results emailed.) It boasts robots and other tech to automate almost 80 percent of its back-office services like pharmacy, laundry and food delivery. This gives clinical staff more time to give back to patients. Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi (CCAD,) UAE, uses digital apps to support treatments. Pre-treatment, patients use apps to communicate with staff. During their stay, they use smart pads to access their info, daily plans and order food. At discharge, the app sends prescriptions to local pharmacies then sends them their bill. Neat. Can robots become care workers? Smart tech could help meet labor shortages: this means more android helpers. During the first COVID-19 outbreak, Wuhan Hospital, China, was staffed entirely by robots for several days. Produced by start-up CloudMinds Technology, they improved patient care and gave respite to over-stretched workers. Smart hospitals can automate and digitize traditional, labor-intensive processes. When healthcare is delivered quicker and more accurately, more people can be treated safer and quicker. Consider Johnson Control's Code Blue Activation system; When a patient reaches critical condition, it calls up an emergency care team in just 24 seconds. Could 3D printing replace donors? There's a relatively new tech in smart hospitals: 3D printing. Imagine the opportunities if surgical teams could print body parts, like prosthetic limbs or dental implants, on-demand. While the tech is in its infancy, there are promising advancements, though it's without the speed and capabilities needed for large-scale adoption. Engineers and medical researchers from the University of Minnesota recently created silicon-made scaffolding' that could benefit those with spinal cord injuries by restoring muscle control. Cells are printed onto the structure then implanted into the patient's spinal cord, with a bridge between cells. Can smart hospitals save lives? Given increased healthcare demands, hospitals may not have any choice but to change. Smart hospitals could improve the care we deliver and benefit our societies. But it will be a group effort. Professor Daniel Kelly, Cardiff University's School of Healthcare Sciences, thinks smart hospitals will be crucial for healthcare. But we have to understand how it will affect everyone, including those funding it. "As treatment for many diseases becomes more personalized, there's an urgent need for health systems to evolve. Smart hospitals are symbolic of a future standard of healthcare where we can remove the reliance on paper records and current digital systems' inefficiencies. Securing the smart hospital From sensitive patient information to medical records, it's easy to see why cybersecurity is a hot topic in healthcare. Hospital data and equipment are goldmines for hackers and criminal groups. Those goldmines become all the more accessible when introducing a connected system like a smart hospital. Firstly, traditional medical devices are outdated – they aren't secure by design. This means many wouldn't have been tested for vulnerabilities or built to connect with smart appliances or the internet. (A tough task to foresee the fourth industrial revolution, to be fair.) This gap can allow attackers to gain illegal access to systems and data. A survey by ENISA found the most critical threat to smart hospitals is malicious attacks – like malware blitzes and denial of service (DDoS) raids that take control of systems and devices, steal patient data (most likely to be sold on the dark web) and hold patient data hostage with ransomware. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, attacks on hospitals and health organizations have increased drastically, including this fatality triggered by ransomware in Germany. Human errors still pose one of the biggest threats to patients. Take drug pumps; smart hospitals, or more specifically their workers, deliver controlled doses of medications to patients. These systems prevent over or under-administration, but they have an over-ride button for emergencies. But what if the device isn't configured correctly? Someone could tamper with drug delivery, inadvertently or intentionally, which might have deadly consequences. These technological advancements are not just projects for the IT department: The smart hospital involves participation between technologists and healthcare practitioners. Ongoing collaboration is needed to protect it from cyberthreats to ensure smart systems can save more lives.
Smart agriculture and food

This new tech could help produce enough food for a population of 10 billion

  • Tech for good
  • min read
    • The UN estimates nearly 10 billion people will inhabit our planet by 2050 – two billion more than today. How will we feed them? With the current population path, global food production must increase by 25 to 70 percent before 2050. It may seem impossible, but 'smart agriculture' is starting to help farmers increase production, lower costs and conserve water. Sensors, satellites and internet-connected tractors Smart agriculture often involves capturing and analyzing data in new ways to give farmers information that helps them make better decisions. For example, smart sensors can give farmers detailed maps of topography, resources and soil temperature. They can use climate forecasts to predict weather patterns in the coming days and weeks – predicting weather is hard in the developing world because weather forecasting infrastructure is less developed. The benefits of smart agriculture's big data use are shaping today's farming more than we might think. Climate Edge uses data capture and analysis to help farmers in the developing world farm better. They're fighting common problems like lack of affordable farm insurance and barriers to joining cooperatives by providing farmers with sensors and data-analyzing equipment. When the challenge is to do more with less, data-driven agriculture has a lot to offer. Internet-connected tractors can ensure no waste through overlap when sowing seeds or spraying. Satellites can monitor crop health and sustainability. It's easy to see why IoT is a hit with farmers. Business Insider Intelligence projects farms will install nearly 12 million agricultural sensors worldwide by 2023. It seems this part of smart agriculture is here to stay. Artificial intelligence in the wild Soil quality is one of the biggest challenges in the way of healthier, more abundant food. In recent decades, agricultural output has fallen by up to 13 percent because of the degradation of two billion hectares of global farmland. Berlin-based agricultural tech startup PEAT is out to solve the problem of degraded soil. PEAT developed Plantix, a deep learning application helping farmers identify soil defects and giving soil restoration advice. It also helps identify and correct plant pests and diseases. Plantix uses deep learning to help farmers identify and solve soil quality problems. It's not all daisy chains and smarter yields, mind. Agriculture 4.0 could help us feed billions sustainably and fairly. But, as with all seismic tech shifts, there are risks. One of those is cybersecurity. The cyber risks for smart farmers These new technologies rely on data and internet connection, opening a world of opportunity for hackers and cybercriminals to disrupt the system. If compromised, smart devices, IoT and connected infrastructure on farms could be controlled from the outside. We could see severe consequences, like turning pesticide-spreading drones against their owners or rendering expensive equipment completely useless. Historically, agricultural sector cyberattacks have been few and far between. The US Council of Economic Advisers reported the agricultural industry experienced just 11 cyber incidents in 2016. That's not to say agricultural cyberattacks won't happen more in future. And it goes beyond farms themselves. Where smart agriculture connects farmers with logistics companies and consumers, disruptions to IT systems in those supply chains, particularly logistics, could have catastrophic effects. For example, delayed shipments could mean spoiled produce, leaving shelves empty and raising prices. It's happened before. The 2017 WannaCry ransomware and Petya malware attack on shipping company Maersk led to a complete IT shutdown, causing 300 million US dollars in losses and a stadium-load of missed deliveries of products agriculture relies upon, from food to fuel. The future of farming is in collecting and analyzing big data to maximize efficiency. With the right regulation and widespread adoption of smart farming, farmers could boost yields to meet incoming population growth. But with any advance in technology must be fully safeguarded before we rely on it.
360 Stories interview

The start-up using VR to bring the joy of travel home

  • Bring on the Future
  • min read
    • As part of Kaspersky's Bring on the Future series, we meet people and businesses around the world who are changing their industry and society for the better. COVID-19 has hit the travel industry hard. As new travel norms establish, new innovations are taking flight. One travel tech trailblazer is 360 Stories. The company set out to film 360-degree, or immersive, videos of destinations around the world for travel guides, so travelers arrive enriched and more connected to its culture. But in the wake of a global pandemic, 360 Stories added something new – a VR live tour you can experience from your home, like this trip to Notre Dame in Paris. Will this change tourism for the better, or create a niche for armchair travel? I spoke to CEO Albert Poghosyan to find out more. Hi Albert. First up, what's the story behind 360 Stories? With my business partner, Vahagn Mosinyan, we ran a marketing agency just as VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) were developing. We used this tech to create content for some of the biggest brands in the world, like Coke and Google. But we wanted to scale up beyond one-off activations. We thought about which industries could use this tech. Travel came to mind; we didn't know anything about the industry, but as travelers ourselves, we were tired of booking tours based on stock photography, which rarely captures reality. We knew we could do better using 360-degree videos. This format captures a view in every direction using an omnidirectional camera. Our research showed that 360-degree video converts twice as many customers than stock photos and descriptions. So it can help travel agents boost their sales, give tourists piece of mind about their vacation choice, and in the wake of the pandemic, offers an entirely virtual experience where travelers don't even need to leave their homes! We started experimenting in Rio de Janeiro then Prague. Some people in the travel industry didn't think we could scale the project because it hadn't been tried and tested. But we scaled from four cities to 32 in 16 months. Now we work with brands like Lonely Planet and have a worldwide community of travelers. Nice. So what's the big vision for 360 Stories? To give travelers a more immersive, trustworthy and flexible way to research destinations and book travel experiences – like museums, attractions or personal tour guides. In 2019, only 17 percent of experiences were booked online, most are walk-ups. We want to help them understand where to go, on the go. With 360 Stories, they can watch short, immersive videos about their destinations on their phone then book their 'real world' experience straight away. Sounds great. How does your technology work? We use 360-degree cameras to create videos. For example, in the Miami art district, we employ a local filmmaker to film what people can expect from the area. Then we partner with travel companies, like Lonely Planet, to include these videos on their apps and websites. And it's working: testing shows conversion rates have doubled. That's huge! What are the benefits of using 360 Stories? For tourists, before you go anywhere, you can be sure what you will get instead of relying on stock photos. Instead of researching a city once you're there, you can know before you go. For travel companies and tour guides, it's simple: you have something more enticing to show potential customers. Let's talk COVID-19, how has it affected 360 Stories? In 2019, our business relied on partnerships with travel guides and tour operators, but when the pandemic hit, nobody was traveling. We lost thousands of bookings. So we decided to offer virtual experiences from home using our content and pre-filmed video guides, like this trip to Tokyo. Our virtual experiences are a mix of two technologies – Google Street View and Google Meet (previously Google Hangouts), but using all our 360 content and tech, so people can experience the tours from the comfort of their own home. You log in, then the guide at the location gives you a real-time tour. We've gamified it so the guide can give the viewer different tasks to do or solve a puzzle, like a scavenger hunt. It's been hugely successful and means we can grow our business and not worry about travel bans. How do you keep your customer and company data secure?   We're always growing, and that means keeping an eye on our cybersecurity measures. Right now, we're looking into security testing and black-box testing to protect our network as we expand into AR. What's the biggest challenge you've faced so far? When you're doing things in new ways, like digitizing tourism, you need a community to support you and convince the travel industry this is the future. That said, we've built an impressive worldwide community of 250,000 users who have booked tours, with 60 percent booking twice or more. It's a very rewarding feeling. It seems to be working out, so I'm happy! Nice! On the flip side of that, what's the biggest success you've had? All of it! We found a problem in the travel industry – people weren't booking online because they couldn't truthfully see the experience – and we found a solution that helps everyone. It works for travelers and tour guides alike. A good day. So what does the future hold for 360 Stories? We're taking our services to the next level. AR is the next step. Right now, we're developing 360 Stories to include AR. Imagine you visit New York. With a pair of AR glasses, you can be joined by a virtual guide, on hand to give you the best restaurant recommendations, tell you about landmarks close to you, with information overlaid on your glasses. Recently we participated in the Kaspersky Exploring Russia Tourism Accelerator program, which is hugely helpful for us. The program included workshops and advice from leading travel industry experts including Booking.com. There were more than 500 applications from 47 countries – we were delighted to win first place!  We will now take part in a disruptive strategy course at Harvard University to learn how to create even more opportunities for us in the travel industry. Thanks, Albert, and good luck!
stethoMe interview

Could this digital stethoscope boost an e-health revolution?

  • Business
  • min read
    • As part of Kaspersky's Bring on the Future series, we meet people and businesses around the world who are changing the industry and society for the better. Telemedicine – the art of making healthcare digital. It's a burgeoning industry, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted the urgent need for remote patient care and e-health. One company leading the telemedicine revolution is StethoMe. Its digital stethoscope takes you from smartphone to smart diagnosis in real-time using AI-powered software. But how does it work? And can it pave a new route for patient-doctor consultations? I spoke with Slawomir Kmak, StethoMe's Business Development Director and public health specialist, to find out more. Ryan Loftus: Hi, Slawek. What's the story behind StethoMe? Slawomir Kmak: The company started in Poland about five years ago. Initially, three of our co-founders ran a successful software company but were keen to start a new venture. Sharing frustrating medical experiences as parents, and with children with respiratory ailments, they wanted to explore how telemedicine could help. After looking into the industry, they met two scientists, or acousticians to be precise, also sharing frustrating medical experiences as parents, who wanted to build a digital stethoscope for child healthcare. Initially, it was aimed at children to make consultations easier between doctors and pediatric patients. StethoMe name comes from 'to stethoscope me.' It's a system built for smart lung and heart screening consultations, capturing sounds from inside the human body and transferring them to medical consultants for diagnosis. We've just celebrated our fifth year in business. Happy anniversary! So what's the big vision for StethoMe? We make the patient-doctor consultation process easier and quicker for both parties, and AI algorithms make it more clinically accurate. A stethoscope is a primary tool for patient-doctor interaction. Auscultation exams (using a stethoscope to listen to sounds inside the body) is essential, especially for children. We want to be able to make the tech available to do this in every home. At first, we focused on pediatric care, but now we're expanding it to adults. StethoMe works with many partners, from healthcare providers to public health organizations. We want to expand that to include insurance companies, outpatient clinics, telemedicine brands and more. As common as thermometers. How does your technology work? There are two elements to StethoMe: hardware and software. The hardware is unique and designed by us; it recently won a 2020 IF design award. It's the device that you hold up to a patient's chest to capture lung and heart sounds. Then you have the software, with AI algorithms that analyze the sounds and provide digital information to each party. StethoMe algorithms indicate and inform patients about abnormalities in their respiratory system; a doctor then receives the waveforms in real-time with an indication of these abnormalities. Our AI algorithms are based on 12,000 recordings, 40,000 medical descriptions and one million medical tags, which are used to classify waveforms and their attributes. For a patient, it works like this: you follow an easy, step-by-step tutorial to make the right auscultation exam at home, then StethoMe's AI analyzes the sounds and provides immediate results. There are three outcomes: red, orange and green lungs. Green lungs mean everything's fine; orange means there are some abnormalities, and red lungs indicate there may be a problem. This is when you can send your results to a doctor who receives precise information about the abnormalities. On the StethoMe doctor platform, physicians can playback sounds, see spectrograms with an accurate indication of abnormalities at each auscultation point, and understand relative risk and heart beats-per-minute (BPM) values. This gives healthcare professionals clinical advice on how to diagnose the patient. Smart diagnosis indeed. What are the benefits of using StethoMe? For patients, StethoMe means auscultation exams previously only available in a doctor's office can be performed at home. You'll know straight away if you or your child's lung condition needs further treatment. StethoMe also allows telemedicine to be more precise – this limits the need for physicals visits to your doctor. For doctors, StethoMe offers easy, swift remote consultations, reducing the load on healthcare systems, while AI ensures precise, clinical interactions. It can also benefit the monitoring of ongoing chronic diseases like asthma. StethoMe stethoscope provides a clear sound that's louder and much more precise than a traditional stethoscope. But perhaps one of the most significant benefits is that anyone, including parents and caregivers, can use StethoMe. That sets us apart from many competitors and similar innovations. Let's talk COVID-19. How has it affected StethoMe or vice versa? As with all businesses, COVID-19 has been a demanding time for our organization. That said, as it's a respiratory disease, our product has made an impact for doctors and health workers on the frontline who can't easily use a real stethoscope through their PPE as it increases the chances of transmitting the virus. We've developed a unique feature for frontline doctors in isolation hospitals so they can use StethoMe through headphones, underneath their PPE. StethoMe gives the freedom to outsource auscultation examinations to a nurse or even directly to the patient at home. Remote auscultation is crucial during a pandemic to limit the probability of health workers becoming infected. That's huge. How do you keep your customer and company data secure? We don't provide a platform for the data; StethoMe is an open API. Which means we can integrate into existing platforms and systems. We don't hold any customer data on our servers and our partners have cybersecurity measures in place. The only data we process is the wave file, which from a GDPR or other data regulation point of view isn't considered to be personal data. Across our business, we make sure that we're fully protected against cyber-risks – everything from encrypted communications and VPNs to keeping our servers up-to-date. What's the biggest challenge you've faced so far? Many! StethoMe is a very demanding project; we've had to work hard to get the required medical industry certification. The biggest challenge was building the AI algorithm, which was difficult to get clinical validation due to its complexity. But we did it, and now it's out there and working, a proud moment for us. Nice! On the flip side of that, what's the biggest success you've had? Again, medical certification! Clinical validation is a huge motivation for us; it means the project has been recognized as having credible potential. We recently launched with our first customers, ranging from healthcare providers to consumers and public health organizations. It's great to see our product being used across Europe. Additionally, being able to help hospitals to work more safely during the pandemic gives us a big, motivational kick. We know what we do could change healthcare. A good day. So what does the future hold for StethoMe? We want to grow and expand, focusing initially in the EU then over to the US, where we're currently in the middle of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certification process. From there, we'd love to expand to the Middle East and beyond. As we're AI-driven, we're developing more features based on our algorithm. Right now, we're working on a health index to monitor the exact progression of chronic disease in the patient's record. Once this is built, we'll be able to offer an even more effective service. Thanks, Slawek, and good luck!
project vesta

This start-up is turning the tide on climate change

  • Tech for good
  • min read
    • As part of Kaspersky's Bring on the Future series, we meet businesses around the world who are changing their industry and society for the better. The seaside. For some, a place of rest, relaxation, and perhaps a hint of volleyball. But, to Eric Matzner, CEO of Project Vesta, beaches, and more importantly, olivine rocks, could hold the solution to our climate change battle. I spoke to Eric about Project Vesta's mission, the Paris Agreement, and how a little-known rock could pull trillions of tons of carbon from our atmosphere. Ryan Loftus: So what's the story behind Project Vesta, Eric? Eric Matzner: Project Vesta was born out of my climate angst, to be honest. It started when I was looking through various climate agreements, like the Paris Agreement. The secret, hidden in plain sight, is that even with these proposals and the suggested cuts, to keep global warming below 1.5C by the end of the century, we need to remove between 100m to a trillion tons of CO2. Large-scale carbon removal is imperative. I started thinking about different technologies that could do the job, but nearly all of the suggested techniques have challenges, such as limitations on ­scale, requiring a lot of energy or competing for land use. Then I came across a paper called Rolling Stones, which focused on a scalable way detailing how olivine rock can capture CO2 economically to mitigate global warming, while also combating ocean acidification. The basic idea was that olivine rock, placed on shell beaches, could help remove total human carbon emissions. Other research shows that olivine rock weathering could scale up easily, wasn't too energy-intensive and didn't compete for arable land. I searched far and wide to find the current status of the technique to see if there was a pilot project, emailing scientists and asking people in the industry but found that no one was doing it. So after researching it, I decided that if this were to become a reality, I would need to create the project. So, I started Project Vesta, formed a team, and launched on Earth Day 2019. It's ambitious! What's the big vision? At its peak, I hope Project Vesta can galvanize the world into removing large quantities of CO2, by providing irreversible, permanent storage of CO2 at an economically viable price, that doesn't compete for farmland or other resources. Exactly what the world needs right now. How does the process work? There are reserves of a rock called olivine, all over the world, for which there is almost no demand. Project Vesta wants to mine these rocks from quarries on the surface and then place them on high-energy beaches in tropical areas. This is part of Earth's natural carbonate-silicate cycle: rain mixes with CO2 to create carbonic acid, which falls on rocks, weathering them down and transporting water (filled with ions) into rivers, which eventually ends up in the ocean. Over time, usually millions of years, the carbonic acid becomes bicarbonate and then calcium carbonate, which corals and other marine animals use to build shells. When they die and fall to the seafloor, the shells turn into sediments and then form limestone, trapping CO2 for millions of years. By adding olivine directly to the ocean, we dramatically speed up the carbon removal process, by cutting out these steps in the middle. The bicarbonate molecule is alkaline, as opposed to the acidic CO2 dissolved in water, so we can help create this molecule, which raises the PH of the ocean, helping to de-acidify it. In turn, other parts of the rock are inert or not available to organisms, and are not predicted to have any adverse effects. The reason we use beaches is to make the process efficient; otherwise, we would use too much energy to grind the rocks down to very fine particles. This is how it works: reserves of olivine near coastal areas are located and then harvested; the rock is then lightly crushed to pebble-sized grains and placed onto beaches where the wave motion tumbles them and grinds them down. The process also removes a coating on the surface that would typically slow the reaction. That's some process. How will you do that? Right now, we're looking for states and cities with access and legal ownership over beaches to help provide a testbed for our pilot safety study. We need two bays nearby each other, one as control and one in which to put olivine rocks. Then we'll measure the results. Once we have our pilot project, we'll write a research paper summarising all of the existing literature on coastal weathering, including our results and findings, to demonstrate the viability of our process and take it to policymakers. What are the benefits of fighting climate change this way? This is a method of carbon removal that Earth uses to put 99.9 percent of its carbon into rock. We know the process works and can scale to the trillion-ton level that we need to have a chance to stop catastrophic global warming. By using undeveloped coastlines with otherwise unwanted resources, we can scale this project to global levels without disrupting food systems or other limited resources in a world with a growing population. This is a solution that's permanent, scalable and can be done with today's technology. We could reach an operational price of below ten dollars for each tonne of CO2 removed. And there are co-benefits too. Olivine is made up, in part, by magnesium and silica. The latter, when released through weathering, becomes shells for diatoms – microalgae found in oceans, comprising a hugely important part of the food chain – which is threatened by ocean acidification. Our project might be worthwhile just for the acidification effects. A recent study reported that Dungeness Crab's shells are dissolving much sooner than predicted due to pockets of ocean acidity, so that lends extra importance to our work. Another benefit of this method – if the world gets hotter and the oceans more acidic, our weathering process will speed up, making it future proof.  Two-pronged benefits then. How do you differ from other companies doing the same? I don't know of anyone else doing this, beyond the scientists we're working with across the world. But if there is, we'd love to collaborate. We're a non-profit on a mission to solve humanity's biggest challenge, and we're always looking for partners and friends in the industry. In terms of the security of your project, how do you keep your customer and technology data secure? For our donors, we use a tokenization system through Stripe, where we do not even possess credit card information. We don't have a vast amount of proprietary data, but we limit access strictly to the key decision-makers. We're an open-source non-profit, so as we generate scientific data, we'll publish that openly. Good practice. What significant challenges have you faced so far? Trying to bring together scientists who have been working on different elements of this concept for years, then uniting them across different time-zones, dialects, regions and fields! On the flip side, what big successes have you had? Well, to date, we've raised over $100,000 for our pilot project. We've had great feedback about how elegant our solution is. We're giving people hope because they see this could be a significant part of the solution to climate change. And we have key scientists in the field on board working on a paper about olivine weathering. Well said. What does the future hold for Project Vesta? We need to raise $1.5M to deploy our two pilot projects and monitor them for two years. So, we're fundraising, crowdfunding and selling our line of olivine jewelry to raise money. Right now, the money is helping fund our operations and spread awareness. Once we have two beaches for our pilot project, the funds raised from the jewelry will correlate to an amount of olivine we will place on a beach. Eventually, we'll make peridot gemstone rings – olivine is also known as peridot, the august birthstone, in its crystal form – which we hope will replace the role of diamonds in our society. We aspire to shift society's value from the past compression of carbon (which is how a diamond is formed) to the future removal of carbon (which is how the "profit" from the ring will be used). We hope the jewelry will connect people to their carbon removal, giving them something tangible and symbolic, as opposed to just a donation. Right now, we're selling a necklace called the Grain of Hope, which is a single grain of olivine suspended in a sand timer vial, a metaphor to demonstrate that olivine has the potential to stop time from running out on us to combat this most pressing of human issues. Soon you'll be able to subscribe to Project Vesta for $25 a year, which will place one ton of olivine rock onto a beach for you – almost removing your yearly CO2 emissions per year. Project Vesta wants to prove the viability of olivine weathering for CO2 removal. In turn, de-risking the process and making it an easy choice for policymakers, who can then, we hope, action it to help save our planet.
ai government

Could AI improve the way a government runs its nation?

  • Future tech
  • min read
    • PwC estimates that artificial intelligence could increase business productivity by up to 14 percent by 2030; this could prove to be very useful than the public sector. Or governments, to be precise. As our world and society begin to respond to increased threats, from climate change to crime sprees, governing organizations are constantly looking for ways in which to make the most of their often-stretched resources. Now, with the introduction of AI, there are more opportunities to streamline their operations with the help of machines. But how will it improve the way the public sector works? Let's take a look. Starting a digital conversation A *relatively* simple AI development that could make federal and local government customer and information centers more efficient. As our societies become more connected, the ability of local governments to reduce face-to-face interactions and phone calls by using digital chatbots could free workers up to do more focused work. Case in point: the US Citizenship and Immigration Services of Department of Home Land Security recently developed EMMA. Named after the poet Emma Lazarus, this chatbot handles requests on immigration services, green cards, passports and other departmental services. Available in both English and Spanish, it manages one million interactions a month. Other examples include TravelBot – an AI-powered Messenger chatbot launched by Transport for London in the UK. It helps users with travel information within the city, including bus arrival times and service updates. Even the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore is jumping on the trend. They're working with Microsoft to develop conversational interfaces (bots) for their Smart Nation initiative. Connecting the dots Digital connected devices – also known as the internet of things (IoT) – could have a considerable part to play in the future of government. The city of Jacksonville, US, piloted "intelligent streetlights."  These use cameras connected to the lights to track traffic and pedestrian movements and decide when to dim or brighten each lamp. Sensors in these lights can also give people a heads up as to where parking spots are. The cameras also helped police keep the streets clear and raise revenue by catching more parking violators per month. Darting through data Identifying patterns in large datasets is hard. Not least because it takes a long time, but because we're human, and there's a chance we might miss something. Machine learning (ML) is a fundamental aspect of AI: the ability for computers to learn, analyze and act on data at a rapid rate. And its use in the public sector has been proven by the Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) in a recent pilot project. SNHD carries out inspections relating to food poisoning cases. In recent years, instead of random checks, they deployed a machine learning software to analyze data from Twitter. Specifically posts from people claiming to have food poisoning from a restaurant, and collated them into high-risk venues. During investigations, they found an average of nine failings out of ten against the average of six for random inspections. Research estimates that if every inspection were adaptive, it could result in 9,000 less food poisoning incidents each year in the US alone. Bringing in the admin bots You might immediately think of robots here, but it's far more than that. Robotic process automation (RPA) is more on the money. RPA involves using software, or bots, to automate tasks rapidly. Anything from processing application forms to filling out endless spreadsheets – RPA can do it all. It's best suited for repetitive, predictable and time-consuming tasks – all the work your staff probably hate doing. Automation means dramatically reducing the time spent on admin and freeing up more time for skilled work. How can governments keep cyber-secure? There are many ways in which AI could change the way our governments work, but we need to be careful. As the government and public sector begin to experiment with AI, there are several challenges towards successful, widespread adoption. Budget restraints and employee training and security – notably the need for active cybersecurity measures with AI programs and developments – could be stumbling blocks. Perhaps the most important of those is security, and as governments deal with masses of sensitive data daily, AI could enable new ways for hackers to infiltrate government systems. If AI supports publicly-funded services, like the military or healthcare, hackers who compromise these systems have a higher capacity to do considerable damage more quickly than before. AI uptake is one thing, but how will we protect our governments, and more importantly, our data, in the age of the machine?
by Innovating leaders.
Innovative tech.
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