Hyperloop Transit Technologies (HTT) said that it had reached an “exploratory agreement” with the Czech city of Brno on a super-fast rail connection with Bratislava, Slovakia.

The bigger vision was to connect to the Czech capital of Prague, according to a statement by the company and local officials.

“Connecting Brno with Prague, and the existing efforts in Bratislava along with other cities in the region with the next generation of transportation will set the stage for a new era,” Brno mayor Petr Vokrall said.

HTT said that it was working with officials in Slovakia, Abu Dhabi and elsewhere in the hope of establishing uniform regulations for hyperloop systems.

“Since we have solved all the technical issues, it is now crucial for us to collaborate with governments around the world,” said HTT chief executive Dirk Ahlborn.

“New rules and frameworks will need to be written as we begin building out systems in Slovakia, the Emirates and several other to come.”

HTT was born out of crowd-funding platform JumpStartFund in late 2013. Its list of collaborators includes engineering management giant Atkins and Europe railway operator Deutsche Bahn.

Rival US startup Hyperloop One earlier this month disclosed a list of locations around the world vying to put the futuristic rail transit system to the test.

The startup company keen to revolutionize the way people and cargo travel said that 35 contenders remained from a field of 2,600 teams in a Hyperloop One Grand Challenge launched in May 2015.

Hyperloop One wants to get three systems underway, according to chief executive Rob Lloyd.

Dubai late last year agreed to a deal to evaluate construction of a hyperloop link that could slash travel times to Emirati capital Abu Dhabi to minutes.

Both hyperloop startups, each of which boasted investments valued at more than $100 million, are building on an idea laid out by billionaire Musk, the entrepreneur behind electric car company Tesla and private space exploration endeavor SpaceX.

Pods would rocket along rails through reduced-pressure tubes at speeds of 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) per hour.—AFP

Image: http://hyperlooptransp.com/

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Now imagine you’re riding in the back of a self-driving car. How would it decide?

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are asking people worldwide how they think a robot car should handle such life-or-death decisions. Their findings so far show people prefer a self-driving car to act in the greater good, sacrificing its passenger if it can save a crowd of pedestrians. They just don’t want to get into that car.

The findings present a dilemma for car makers and governments eager to introduce self-driving vehicles on the promise that they’ll be safer than human-controlled cars.

“There is a real risk that if we don’t understand those psychological barriers and address them through regulation and public outreach, we may undermine the entire enterprise,” said Iyad Rahwan, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab. “People will say they’re not comfortable with this. It would stifle what I think will be a very good thing for humanity.”

After publishing research last year surveying U.S. residents, Rahwan and colleagues at the University of Toulouse in France and the University of California, Irvine, are expanding their surveys and looking at how responses vary in different countries.

They also are using a website created by MIT researchers called the Moral Machine , which allows people to play the role of judging who lives or dies. A jaywalking person or several dogs riding in the driverless car? A pregnant woman or a homeless man?

Preliminary, unpublished research based on millions of responses from more than 160 countries shows broad differences between East and West. More prominent in the United States and Europe are judgments that reflect minimizing the total harm, Rahwan said.

But to those focused on how the vehicles act in ordinary situations, the research scenarios are too unrealistic.

Just 5 miles from the lab in Cambridge, the first self-driving car to roll out on Massachusetts public roads began testing this month in Boston’s Seaport District.

“We approach the problem from a bit more of a practical, engineering perspective,” said NuTonomy CEO Karl Iagnemma, whose Cambridge-based company has also piloted self-driving taxis in Singapore.

Iagnemma said the study’s moral dilemmas are “vanishingly rare.” Designing a safe vehicle, not a “sophisticated ethical creature,” is the focus of his engineering team as they tweak the software that guides their electric Renault Zoe past Boston snowbanks.

“When a driverless car looks out on the world, it’s not able to distinguish the age of a pedestrian or the number of occupants in a car,” Iagnemma said. “Even if we wanted to imbue an autonomous vehicle with an ethical engine, we don’t have the technical capability today to do so.”

Focusing too much on worst-case moral dilemmas risks taking attention away from how best to address self-driving ethics, said Noah Goodall, a scientist at the Virginia Transportation Research Council. Engineers already program cars to make moral choices, such as when they slow down and leave space after detecting a bicyclist.

“All these cars do risk management,” Goodall said.

Still, Rahwan worries that progress could be stalled without a new social compact that addresses moral trade-offs.

Current traffic laws and human behavioral norms have created “trust that this entire system functions in a way that works in our interests, which is why we’re willing to fit into large pieces of metal moving at high speeds,” Rahwan said.

“The problem with the new system is it has a very distinctive feature: algorithms are making decisions that have very important consequences on human life.”—AP

Image: AP

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So far it’s been tested only in animals, improving blood flow in pigs. But this “soft robotic” device mimics the natural movements of a beating heart, a strategy for next-generation treatments of deadly heart failure.

The key: A team from Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital wound artificial muscles into the thin silicone sleeve, so that it alternately compresses, twists and relaxes in synchrony with the heart tissue underneath.

It’s a dramatically different approach than today’s therapies and, if it eventually is proven in people, it might offer a new alternative to heart transplants or maybe even aid in recovery.

“You can customize the function of the assist device to meet the individual needs of that heart,” said Dr. Frank Pigula, a cardiac surgeon who, while at Boston Children’s, took the idea to Harvard colleagues developing soft robotics.

More than 5 million Americans, and 41 million people worldwide, suffer heart failure, a number growing as the population ages. A heart left damaged by a heart attack, high blood pressure or other conditions becomes progressively weaker and unable to pump properly.

For severe cases, the only options are a scarce heart transplant or battery-powered mechanical pumps that are implanted into the chest to take over the job of pumping blood. These VADs, ventricular assist devices, prolong life, but running blood through the machinery can leave patients at risk of blood clots, strokes and bleeding.

That shouldn’t be a risk with the robotic sleeve.

“The nice thing about this is it can go on the outside of the heart, so it doesn’t have to contact blood at all,” said Harvard associate engineering professor Conor Walsh, senior author of the research published Wednesday.

Unlike with traditional rigid medical devices, the soft robotics approach allowed design of a sleeve that could fit snugly over a heart’s irregular surfaces. It moves thanks to artificial muscles, a concept developed in the polio era that’s now being used in robotics. They’re powered by pressurized air that would have to be carried in a pump in a backpack or fanny pack much like the batteries that power today’s VADs.

The researchers programmed the robotic sleeve to move in the same pattern as the weakened heart muscle it surrounds while strengthening and optimizing each heartbeat. The device can be tailored to compress different sections of the heart.

And importantly, as the sleeve relaxes, it helps the damaged heart better expand and refill with blood ready to be pumped out with the next heartbeat, said Pigula, who is now with the University of Louisville.

The big test: The sleeve restored normal blood flow in six pigs that had been put into heart failure, Walsh’s team reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The experiments were short, lasting only a few hours, and more research to test how long animals could live safely with the implanted sleeve is crucial before it ever could be studied in people, Walsh cautioned. He’d also like to study if physically moving damaged heart muscle — essentially exercising it — might spur it to heal and require less assistance from the sleeve over time.

“I’m quite impressed with where this research is going,” said Dr. Christopher O’Connor, chief executive of the Inova Heart and Vascular Institute in suburban Washington, who wasn’t involved with the sleeve’s development.

Researchers have previously tried “socks” and other ways to encase or compress the heart with little success.

Unlike those prior attempts, the new sleeve is “smart, it’s robotic,” said O’Connor, who edits an American College of Cardiology heart failure journal. “They really worked on developing a device that can mimic the contraction of the weakened heart muscle and augment it so there is improved heart function without the theoretical clot risk.”—AP

Image: AP

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After industrial robots and international trade put paid to many manufacturing jobs in the West, millions of white-collar workers could now be under threat from new technology such as artificial intelligence (AI).

The issue of how best to face up to this “Fourth Industrial Revolution” has been exercising politicians and business leaders this week at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alpine town of Davos.

The progress of artificial intelligence has been “staggering” in recent years, said Vishal Sikka, chief executive of Indian IT services giant Infosys.

“But in many ways we are at the beginning of this evolution and we face the prospect of leaving a larger part of humanity behind than in any other (industrial) advance,” he warned.

Public disquiet about technological change and globalisation has already sparked a populist backlash in Western countries, culminating in Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president on Friday.

But much more dislocation could yet be coming, and both the public and Western governments need to wake up to the challenge, observers say.

New technologies are “going to completely disrupt and change the working place for a long time”, and governments must put in place policies, skills training and safety nets to cope, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde said.

Education systems are failing to plug skills shortages, experts say.

Europe and the United States have hundreds of thousands of vacancies in IT and engineering which often get filled by immigrants, for want of homegrown talent, feeding in turn the anti-globalisation backlash.

And according to a survey of 18,000 employers in 43 countries by employment consultancy ManpowerGroup, up to 45 percent of tasks done daily in the workplace could be automated using current technology.

For its part, global consultancy McKinsey said more than 60 percent of jobs and 30 percent of business activities could be automated today.

“We can’t rely on government to re-skill people in the face of rapid technological change and automation. Business will have to drive this,” said McKinsey’s global managing partner, Dominic Barton.

“Back office” labour in banking, insurance and other financial services, which involves clerical work such as data inputting, is seen as most at risk from IT automation.

But even professions like medicine and accountancy could face upheaval as AI evolves to ever-more sophisticated heights.

A computer using machine intelligence is perfectly equipped to crunch through the available academic literature when analysing suspected cancer in a doctor’s patient.

But the doctor would still be needed ultimately to exercise his or her judgement over the best course of treatment, a pattern of adding specialist value that needs to be replicated in other professions if they want to stay relevant.

People have managed to adapt to past shifts as new industries and types of work emerge.

Telephone operators used to be a ubiquitous feature of daily life. Now they are extinct, but life goes on and IT support staff are instead found in most companies.

Companies such as Uber and Airbnb are disrupting old business models, creating new opportunities, albeit ones that pay less well than the stable industrial jobs of the past.

And people will need to be more flexible, transitioning over multiple careers during their working lifetimes, experts predict.

“We’ve seen this problem before. The issue is it’s happening faster and faster,” Mike Gregoire, CEO of US software company CA Technologies, told AFP.

“If we can’t figure out a way between businesses and government to proactively help that population learn new skills where they can be productive, I think you’re going to see a very unstable society,” he said.

For Alain Roumilhac, president of ManpowerGroup France who started his working life as a welder, “it all comes down to one word: education”.

Certain skill-sets will likely remain in demand. “It’s always hard to find a good plumber,” said the Frenchman.

But even that kind of skilled trade can find it useful to take on board elements of training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Gregoire said that his home in Greenwich, Connecticut lies adjacent to a river and his garden has a maze of pumps to guard against flooding, all hooked up to an iPhone app and programmed by his plumber.

“That plumber is as STEM-aware as any programmer,” he said.—AFP

Image: Alamy

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The Government Accelerators initiative was launched by Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, in line with the goals of the UAE National Agenda.

The workshop aimed to tackle the current challenges, and find creative solutions to reduce the death rate from traffic accidents on the five main roads of the State by 21 per cent, when compared to the same period last year.

The government accelerators team shared their experiences at the workshop, in addition to the lessons learnt and the proposed steps. The team also made a presentation on their achievements so far.

The government accelerators initiative is seen as a future mechanism, which includes joint working groups from both the public and private sectors, aimed at fast-tracking the national goals. These teams work under the supervision of highly qualified trainers and supervisors.

They provide services to governmental agencies working in the fields of national indicators, policies, programmes and initiatives, and services.—WAM

Image: WAM

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While globalisation’s detractors blame countries such as China and Mexico for stealing the factory jobs of the West, experts point to less obvious culprits which are harder to scapegoat and to overcome in an interconnected economy with complex supply chains.

Since US manufacturing employment peaked in the late 1970s, according to Michael Hicks of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana, “95 percent of job losses were due to productivity improvements including automation and computer technology, rather than trade”.

Indiana is one of the rust-belt states where Trump triumphed in November, and the president-elect has promised a punitive border tax against outsourcing companies as he bids to become “the greatest jobs producer that God ever created”.

But while the US economy is pumping out manufactured goods in record volumes, it is achieving that feat with 7.3 million fewer factory hands than in 1979, government figures show.

Automation has transformed the productivity of manufacturing since industrial robots first started painting, cutting, welding and assembling in the 1960s.

And experts point to more recent innovations such as artificial intelligence, management apps and 3D printing as new threats to shop-floor workers as well as to white-collar staff.

Hicks — who has known former Indiana governor Mike Pence, Trump’s incoming vice president, for years — dismissed recent announcements by Ford, Indiana air-conditioning brand Carrier and others as “political theatre”.

“The apparent change of heart of these American companies is due to the hard math of expected tax cuts and regulatory changes (under the Trump administration),” he told AFP in a phone interview, noting that under company projections, robots rather than wages will account for the bulk of planned investment that is being redirected from Mexico to the US.

Vows to renegotiate trade pacts, or declare China a currency cheat, played well for Trump on the campaign trail but trends such as automation have already rendered much low-skilled US labour obsolete.

The total output of US manufacturing rose more than 250 percent from 1980 to 2015, but its workforce slumped by roughly 40 percent in that time, according to analysis by the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“These diverging lines — which reflect the sector’s improved productivity — highlight a huge problem with Trump’s promises to help workers by reshoring millions of manufacturing jobs,” Brookings expert Mark Muro wrote in a blog post.

“America is already producing a lot. And in any event, the return of more manufacturing won’t bring back many jobs because the labour is increasingly being done by robots.”

Annual data from the International Federation of Robotics show an inexorable rise in the worldwide use of industrial robots. China is now the biggest market for them.

Even if jobs did return, Western consumers are likely to balk at paying the higher prices that companies would have to charge to reflect the higher input prices — everything from wages to property leases and electricity tariffs — of making those goods at home.

Take television manufacturing. Had that stayed in America, experts say, each set would cost hundreds of dollars more than they do now on average, limiting their affordability. Households would have stuck with one TV in the living room, instead of several dotted around the home.

“Trade doesn’t kill jobs, it protects consumption,” Hicks said, while also stressing that globalisation had created millions more jobs in Western nations’ services and logistics sectors than it has destroyed in industry.

So if those manufacturing jobs are gone forever — and new developments such as machine learning and nanotechnology portend a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — what can be done to assure the future of workers in the developed world?

Some ideas are in their policy infancy, such as a universal basic income, but others are well-known and perhaps more pressing than ever, including better education and re-training.

Such discussions will inform the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, coming up in the same week that sees Trump inaugurated as the 45th US president on January 20.

“We are at some kind of turning point in history,” WEF founder Klaus Schwab said. “We need new concepts. We cannot have just populist solutions.”—AFP

Image: Thomson Reuters

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Twenty-two companies, including Pfizer, Merck , Novartis, Roche, Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline, will contribute funds and expertise to the project, which is backed by the World Bank.

The so-called Access Accelerated initiative was announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos and aims to improve both treatment and prevention.

In the past, the focus of healthcare in poorer parts of the world has been on fighting infectious diseases, whether through vaccinations, drug programmes or the roll-out of anti-malarial bednets.

Today, however, the healthcare burden is shifting as deaths from these conditions decline and people in increasingly urbanised populations succumb to diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart and lung disorders fuelled by Western lifestyles.

Such non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are responsible for nearly 70 percent of all deaths worldwide and almost three quarters of them occur in low- and middle-income countries, according to the World Health Organization.

Severin Schwan, the chief executive of Roche, the world’s largest maker of cancer drugs, said his company and others were already implementing preferential pricing for the developing world but cost was only one obstacle.

Countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America also need improved healthcare systems if patients are to benefit from the latest developments in medicine.

“It has a lot to do with hospital infrastructure. You can’t administer modern cancer medicines if you don’t have sophisticated lab facilities,” he told Reuters. “We’re going to institutionalise cooperation in this area.”

Cancer is the initial focus and drug companies will work with the Union for International Cancer Control to test out new diagnostics and treatments in several cities around the world on a pilot basis.

Sanofi CEO Olivier Brandicourt said the $50 million commitment – a relatively small sum for an industry with global sales of around $1 trillion a year – was just a start.

“The $50 million is more like seeding funding, if you want, and based on the results we’ll gather afterwards we will have a more ambitious programme with more stakeholders between 2020 and 2030,” he said. —Reuters

Image: Alamy

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But in the rush to collect all manner of information about customers, tensions are rising in Silicon Valley over whether such practices amount to a form of surveillance that customers will ultimately find invasive.

Whether ordering an Uber, streaming music, shopping online or tracking a health condition, consumers are giving an unprecedented amount of information to technology companies.

“The data that companies … have on you is significantly greater than you appreciate,” Mark Suster, managing partner at venture capital firm Upfront Ventures, said in an interview at a conference in Santa Barbara, California, sponsored by CB Insights, a business data firm.

Discussions during the two-day conference centered on the importance of ‘big data,’ the catchphrase referring to massive information sets that are stored and analyzed by companies.

Collecting big data helps Airbnb, for instance, know whether its customers prefer to travel to the beach or mountains, and Uber knows popular drop-off locations and how to price trips.

Collecting large amounts of data is also paramount to developing artificial intelligence (AI), among the most highly sought technologies in Silicon Valley, which teaches machines to make decisions that humans previously had. AI can, for example, help a shopper decide on a new pair of shoes, help a doctor diagnose a disease and enable a car to drive itself.

But questions loom about how much personal information startups are collecting and how securely they store the data, with whom they share it and how they intend to use it.

“We are going to become comfortable with a level of surveillance that we never would have previously been comfortable with, because it makes things just a little easier,” said Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist with Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Some startups have overstepped. Uber Technologies Inc faced an investigation by New York’s attorney general into a feature known internally as “God View,” which allowed employees to access and track the location of individual Uber riders without obtaining permission. Uber settled the matter and agreed to encrypt customers’ geo-location data.

Peter Coles, head economist for Airbnb, said the data his company guards is fairly benign. “I think it is very unlikely that we would be collecting anything about users that they would be surprised to know.”

But the tension was pronounced in one on-stage discussion at the conference. Matthew Zeiler, founder and chief executive of Clarifai, a visual recognition tool used in healthcare, suggested creating a Wikipedia-style database of anonymous patient data that was open to the public.

“That can be very harmful, especially to the patients,” argued Gabriel Otte, founder and CEO of Freenome, a cancer-detection startup. Patients would be loath to tell the truth, he said, if they knew their most private health information was going to end up on the internet, even without their name attached.

Still, it is unclear if younger generations, who have grown up with apps such as Facebook and Snapchat that encourage sharing, view privacy in the same way.

“People don’t care as much as they profess,” Dave McClure, founding partner of 500 Startups, said in an interview. “Convenience is generally going to win over privacy.”—Reuters

Image: Alamy

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If successful, the achievement would cement its place as a leading power in the world of supercomputing.

The Asian giant built the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight machine, in June last year, which was twice as fast as the previous number one.

It used only locally made microchips, making it the first time a country has taken the top spot without using US technology.

Exascale computers are even more powerful, and can execute at least one quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second.

Though a prototype was in the pipeline, a complete version of such a machine would take a few more years to complete, Xinhua news agency cited Zhang Ting, application engineer at the National Supercomputer Center in the port city of Tianjin, as saying.

“A complete computing system of the exascale supercomputer and its applications can only be expected in 2020, and will be 200 times more powerful than the country’s first petaflop computer Tianhe-1, recognised as the world’s fastest in 2010,” said Zhang.

The exascale computer could have applications in big data and cloud computing work, he added, noting that its prototype would lead the world in data transmission efficiency as well as calculation speed.

As of last June, China for the first time had more top-ranked supercomputers than the US, with 167 compared to 165, according to a survey by supercomputer tracking website Top500.org.

Of the top 10 fastest computers, two are in China and five in the US as of November, the ranking said. Others are in Japan and Switzerland.

China has poured money into big-ticket science and technology projects as it seeks to become a high-tech leader.

But despite some gains the country’s scientific output still lags behind, and its universities generally fare poorly in global rankings.—AFP

Image: JACK DONGARRA, SUNWAY TAIHULIGHT SYSTEM REPORT

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Developer of automatic 3D data-optimisation solutions, Simplygon was developed by Donya Labs AB, a privately-held company based in Sweden.

“This acquisition accelerates our 3D For Everyone vision and strategy, which we introduced with the Windows 10 Creators Update,” said Kudo Tsunoda, Corporate Vice President, Next Gen Experiences, Windows and Devices Group, in a Microsoft blog post on Tuesday.

Simplygon is a leader in 3D game optimisation, dedicated to helping creators and users of 3D data across industries optimise content pipelines and streamline workflows.

Simplygon’s technology and talent will strengthen Microsoft’s position in 3D creation, making it easier to capture, create and share in 3D, Microsoft said.—IANS

Image: simplygon.com

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