Category Archives: Technology

The COVID-19 pandemic has dominated headlines with public fears mounting and governments around the world scrambling to find ways to control the spread of the virus. Many governments have declared national emergencies, with the Canadian federal government also considering this as option.

In the midst of these fears, tech companies in the United States have reportedly been in talks with the U.S. government and other agencies to use their data gathering and data location tools to track virus transmission trends. This includes the controversial facial-recognition startup, Clearview AI.

The use of Clearview AI by Canadian police agencies has sparked much media coverage focusing on the privacy implications of the application. It matches uploaded photographs of individuals with billions of other photos scraped mainly from social media and stored on Amazon servers. The technology infringes privacy laws by exploiting the biometric data of ordinary individuals without their consent.

As reports first began to emerge on the use of Clearview AI by American police, it became evident that Canadian police were also testing and using the technology; not all were initially forthcoming on their use.

One of the common themes among police agencies in Canada was that Clearview AI was used by individual officers within different investigative units. What became apparent was the lack of knowledge of Clearview AIs use by senior management in some police departments. It was only after leaked documents of Clearview AIs client list that police agencies began conducting internal investigations to see which of their officers used the application, in what units, and how many times.

The use of such technologies reveals a larger issue that goes beyond privacy, namely how surveillance technologies are deployed by police agencies in the first place.

This is not the first time that police agencies in Canada have adopted a technology in a similar ad hoc manner. Long before Clearview AI, senior management within local police agencies in Canada began to adopt social media as an investigative tool, after individual officers noticed their utility for investigations and intelligence gathering. Research has also shown police officers in Canada utilizing new methods of investigations including monitoring social media, initially unbeknownst by senior management.

Police agencies newfound interest in social media fostered a new market for tech companies selling social media monitoring or listening technologies. These use natural language processing to identify and monitor keywords not protected by privacy settings on social platforms, with some companies providing trials to police.

Both tech companies and police argue that social media accounts not set to private can be considered publicly available information, or open source, and available for anyone to see.

Tor Ekeland, the lawyer for Clearview AI, has used this very same logic, arguing that the photographs of the faces that the application gathers and stores is publicly available information.

Police forces are increasingly relying on AI for data collection and analysis. Open source information from social media is playing a role in shaping the development of new AI tools. Photographs may not be the only type of social media data subject to Clearview AIs algorithmic analysis voice recognition is also apparently under development.

Efforts are now being made by federal and provincial privacy regulators to build a framework on the use and regulation of biometric data, including facial recognition software used by organizations including the police, though it is unknown what this framework will look like until after the bodies complete their investigations.

In response to COVID-19, governments in Canada keep reminding the public that these are extraordinary times that require extraordinary measures. The effects of COVID-19 extend beyond its health impact. Tech companies can use the fear arising from the crisis to spread more surveillance technologies, offering them to governments as solutions to control the spread of the virus.

For example, facial recognition like Clearview AI could be used to identify anyone whos been in contact with an infected person similar to how tech companies responded in the U.S. after 9/11 with the passing of the Patriot Act, paving way to mass surveillance

Government and agencies including law enforcement need to practice extreme caution and openness if measures involve surveillance technologies. There is potential that they may become features of everyday life long after the virus has gone, opening up new areas of use (or abuse) a phenomenon known as surveillance creep.

Surveillance technologies can come at a cost not only to privacy, but to other political rights and freedoms their use can cost innocent people the right to live their lives free of surveillance. Marginalized communities are even more vulnerable given their history in being over-policed.

The revelations about the use of Clearview AI by police in Canada reveals little oversight on how surveillance technologies are adopted, used and for what purpose. This calls for more understanding on the use of such technologies by police and for proper internal and external mechanisms of accountability. Fears from COVID-19 shouldnt lead to any knee-jerk reactions that will affect our democracy once the pandemic is over.

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Police and governments may increasingly adopt surveillance technologies in response to coronavirus fears - The Conversation CA

Even though an annual choral festival in San Bernardino County, California was canceled this year because of coronavirus concerns, a group of high school choir singers wanted their community to hear their voice anyway.

On May 13, all 35 schools in the district shut their doors, Imee Perius, director of communications for Chino Valley Unified School District, told CNN. The Chino Valley Unified School District Choral Festival, originally scheduled for Wednesday, was one of the first events canceled following that announcement.

That's when 19 Chino Hills High School chamber singers stepped up to record their individual parts to a song they'd practiced together for months, only this time, they had to sing alone and on camera. An editor working with the district took each student's part and spent 36 hours stringing together this performance.

In the video, the singers fill the screen to deliver their portion of the classic "Over the Rainbow," in the style of Israel Kamakawiwoole. After a quick countdown, in full harmony, the virtual performance begins.

Camille Cortes, one of the singers in the video, told CNN she's been in choir all four years of her high school career.

"It was really devastating for all of us knowing that we might not get the opportunity to sing together anymore," she said. "Our choir is more of a family."

The end product shows a video with 19 voices woven together. Cortes said it took her two hours to get the right video version done for her part.

Cortes said she was skeptical of how the song would turn out, but pleased when she saw the end result.

"The students have come together even though they are apart and contributed to this time in our history and I think they're so happy about that," Perius said. "This is the kind of silver lining that we all need right now."

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When their high school choir concert was canceled, technology helped them sing together anyway - CNN

COMMENTARY

Poor workforce decisions will undermine a critical national security asset

As the government moves through the COVID-19 crisis and asks its employees and contractors to telework from home, work in small group shifts, or perhaps not come in and work at all - even on fully funded programs, I was reminded of a maxim from my father.

He was one of the early employees of SRA International and a noted Vietnam era combat veteran and soldier. He said to me when I first went in the Army myself, youre going to fall in love at times with the Army, but dont be too disappointed when it struggles to find ways to love you back.

I pondered that for many years, trying to understand this enigmatic bit of advice, but what it really meant didnt sink in until I was a senior government official in the national security community. Then I saw that sometimes when a large institution undertakes its actions through the local decisions of its many constituent parts, it somehow finds ways to act in contravention to its own long-term interests. It ends up not loving the people it needs the most.

This phenomenon has happened too often over the past twenty years to the high-tech cleared contractor workforce that serves the national security community. Sensible and completely understandable decisions taken at local levels by government managers or prime contractors, who have a purposefully limited scope of authority, end up potentially damaging the long-term viability of the entire institution.

This has happened during the many budget imbroglios and sequestration crises over the past 10 years and is happening again in parts of the national security community as agencies respond to the Coronavirus pandemic.

In those cases, a partial shutdown of some kind was necessary because of a lack of funding or, at this current time, because a government site must be thinned out or closed as we aim to limit the spread of the virus through social distancing.

Nobody would argue with the absolute necessity of both of those actions. It would be wrong in a budget crisis to spend money the government has not appropriated, and wrong in a viral pandemic to keep sites fully staffed in the middle of the COVID-19 response.

But, the workforce implications of both necessary decisions are profound. And only one half of the governments national security workforce is insulated from the long-term debilitating effects that the stopping and starting of work can have on technology professionals who are looking to have a reliable and coherent career path.

Our government workforce is comprised of both government employees and contractors of course, and both parts perform critical and complementary roles. In the case of the government employees, interruptions to their work (caused by budget issues or pandemics) do not disrupt the flow of their career or their paycheck. or get made up in arrears.

In the case of their partners working side-by-side with them from the highly skilled technology contractor community, that is often not the case. If contractors get sent home for any reason or are not allowed to work and bill on projects, they often must take leave (with or without pay) or the company that employs them must carry them on overhead. All of which can be done - but none of which are sustainable.

I once got a call on a Thursday afternoon from a national security customer who said due to the budget issues on the Hill, on Monday I run out of money for half your people so youll have to keep them home perhaps for a few weeks. I reminded him that these employees were cleared computer scientists and crypto-mathematicians with long professional careers - not day laborers. What makes them want to stay in this industry the profession of a cleared national security professional - if they are being treated like day laborers who can be picked up (or not) for the day depending on funding or site access?

He agreed of course, thought it was a terrible situation and was sympathetic, but the conversation ended with an above my paygrade shrug. He was doing his job he was a government PM out of money for now and I couldnt blame him. The challenge of how my company and thousands of other companies were supposed to go about giving cleared technology professionals a coherent and rewarding career when they were on stop-start-stop-start programs was somebody elses problem.

But this long-term institutional necessity, for the contractor community to maintain, for the exclusive use of its government customers, a highly trained cleared technology workforce ready to shift, surge, or deploy on short notice, needs to be in somebodys paygrade. These professionals take a long time to recruit and grow. The government is short tens of thousands of them and critical work goes unfilled. We have become so accustomed to being perennially short of the needed workforce that this self-inflicted situation has become an accepted scandal the national security community has learned to live with.

When I was the chairman of the Professional Services Council, I met in 2013 with the then Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary. I told my day laborer vignette directly to them. They were also very sympathetic and extremely attendant to the need to treat their contractor workforce with the same care and long-term vision as their government workforce. They viscerally grasped that contractors were their workforce and one that takes a long time to assemble and train. They bemoaned the fact that mid-level managers in their organization were not following the guidance from above to be creative and productive in keeping the workforce engaged during the budget impasse.

That was the good news. They were disturbed by the phenomenon and knew it needed to be addressed. The bad news was finding someone below their paygrade who could own a long-term institutional plan to give contractors the same crisis-proof reliability in their career.

In addressing these issues, nobody is talking about hand-outs or giving a contractor a job for life we all know that we compete and work program by program. Programs start and programs end. This was about when a contractor is being prevented by the customer from doing the work for which they are currently contracted - for whatever reason. This was about insulating the long-term institutional requirement of building and maintaining a reliable trained workforce from the shut-down/stand-up decisions an agency or program manager may need to make in a crisis.

Every time our government goes through a crisis like a budget-driven shutdown or, as now, a pandemic-driven stoppage of some work, we lose technology talent to the commercial market. Why bother with a long intrusive clearance process only to get to work for a fickle customer who backstops their internal workforce during a crisis but not their contractor partners? During sequestration I watched some of our best data scientists in our Austin Texas office, after being told to stop work for three weeks on their program, walk across the street to a commercial tech company and never come back.

On Friday afternoon, OMB, DoD, and DHS all put out guidance explicitly recognizing this phenomenon declaring the contractor work force essential, part of our critical infrastructure, and imploring agencies to be flexible, adaptive, and think long term in maintaining as normal a work schedule as possible for contractors. In the case of necessary site closures or shift work, this could simply mean some short term provisions to let the contractors make up the work they will miss after the crisis passes, or accept unclassified site work plans that would bolster the mission goals of the classified site work. The guidance suggests using special procurement authorities and other means to keep this workforce hale and engaged.

Even so, some agencies, sub-agencies, programs, sites, and even prime contractors are making COVID-19 decisions that are not inline with this intent a directive from our national security authorities. These decisions will hurt many smaller companies and drive talented and cleared technology workers out of the industry deepening the hole we are in for qualified and cleared personnel. Our adversaries are going to school on how we handle this crisis. What lessons are they learning?

We cannot afford to let the necessary short-term decisions about funding or site access undertaken in a crisis undermine the longer-term necessity of building and maintaining a high-tech cleared contractor work force. And a bail out is not necessary to do this. In fact, in the case of the COVID-19 crisis, the money is already funded for the programs on which some contractors are being told their work is limited during the social distancing period. As the OMB and DOD guidance states, let the contractors do their work and bill their hours over the course of time so that individual professionals can have the same comfort as their government counterparts about the long term.

No extra money is needed by the government to keep its contractor work force intact during a crisis, but some ownership of the situation is. Government officials at all levels, not just at the top, should be cognizant of their responsibility to keep both their workforces intact and motivated during crisis moments.

About the Author

John Hillen is the CEO of EverWatch Solutions and is a former Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, and former Chairman of the Professional Services Council.

Continued here:

Don't take the national security contractor workforce for granted - Washington Technology

Posted March 24, 2020 06:09:13

Every Australian newborn could soon have access to donated breastmilk no matter where they are after scientists pioneered a way to convert the milk into powder without losing its critical life-saving properties.

While donor milk banks exist, both in hospitals and in the community, priority is given to premature babies who need shielding from complications or deadly diseases.

Scientists and lactation experts say the new technology means milk can be stored at room temperature for years, allowing it to be stockpiled and to support newborns otherwise unable to access milk.

Mother's Milk Bank on the Gold Coast offers donated milk to all mums, but the need for refrigeration limits how much can be sent and how far.

It will now supply its donated milk to the newly formed Australian Breast Milk Bank, which will process it into powder.

From there, the packets containing five feeds can form part of a national emergency reserve and be dispatched with a pouch of clean water to anywhere in the country even across the world.

Milk bank director Marea Ryan said the technology would save lives.

"This is amazing. It's just going to transform the health of babies right across Australia," she said.

The goal of the new national milk bank is to have the equivalent of 33,000 litres of powdered milk in storage enough for almost half a million feeds for a newborn.

At the moment, if a mum is unable to produce enough milk for their baby perhaps due to stress or a medical issue they either access a milk bank or begin using formula.

Ms Ryan said, once the bank reached capacity, any newborn who needed breastmilk would be able to access it.

She estimated that with four breastfeeding women donating one feed per day, the new bank could be fully stocked within two years.

Danielle Martin's six-week-old daughter Willow is happily sleeping on her lap. The pair seem content.

But Ms Martin, who lives in the Queensland town of Sarina, said feeding was not so blissful with her son Elijah, now 18 months old.

Within days of what she described as a "traumatic birth", she said her body was not producing enough milk to fill Elijah's belly. Ms Martin was eventually advised to switch to formula.

"He was starving. He wasn't getting enough from me," she said.

"I felt like I couldn't give him the one thing that my body should have been able to give him.

"I struggled to bond with him."

She said from there baby Elijah became constipated and irritable because the formula did not agree with him.

As her new baby battled so did she, eventually grappling with depression.

Ms Martin was not alone. A study of 2,500 women found those who had a negative experience with breastfeeding were more likely to endure post-natal depression two months after the birth of their baby.

The ready supply of breastmilk could also help those newborn bubs whose lives are touched by natural disasters or, more recently, a pandemic.

Ms Ryan said it was not unusual for mums to produce less milk as a result of stress and upheaval.

She said the goal was to stop babies from having to go without, regardless of whether a family was fleeing a storm or were forced into isolation due to COVID-19.

"When we go through things like floods, droughts or fires, they can have the breastmilk there for these babies under 12 months," Ms Ryan said.

"Because at the moment we have no contingency plans for emergency reserves of this essential food for babies."

University of Sydney Professor Richard Banati said the new technology took about three years for his team to perfect, and it was time to show the world.

"Australia could definitely become the first country to have absolute food security and food sovereignty for all its newborns," he said.

The milk powder acted as a top-up, so mothers could focus on recovering or building up supply whatever was needed so they could continue to feed their baby.

The process allowed the milk to be freeze-dried, so the need for cold storage was gone.

"And it can last essentially for years," Professor Banati said.

"If stored at room temperature and under dry conditions, it can be sent around the world."

Ms Ryan knows what it means to have to tell a mother they must go without breastmilk.

And in her career as a midwife, she watched babies perish because there was no alternative.

"I worked in a special care nursery and my role was to make sure that every baby in that nursery had breastmilk. I would go around and all the mothers with extra milk would give it to us," Ms Ryan said.

She said in the 1980s, a ban on sharing breastmilk came in as a result of rising HIV infections.

The deaths that followed inspired her to stop it ever happening again, and that led to the initial idea of removing water from breastmilk.

"When that stopped on the Friday, within three weeks, we had a baby that got an infection and died, which we'd never seen before," she said.

"I thought then, we are doing a disservice to the babies of the future because we're can't provide for them. And now we can."

And while Ms Martin and baby Willow did not need powdered breastmilk for now, the Queensland mum knew what it meant for those who came next.

"I think it would have made all the difference honestly," she said.

"It's amazing they won't have to go through the same struggle that I did."

Topics:breast-feeding,breastfeeding,womens-health,child-health-and-behaviour,pregnancy-and-childbirth,science-and-technology,family-and-children,women,health,human-interest,maroochydore-4558,tugun-4224,sydney-2000,australia

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Breastmilk available to every newborn thanks to new technology - ABC News

Thank you, DJ D-Nice. I wanted to put on my new spring hat and maybe go to a lounge or a grown and sexy set where one of my DJ friends could be spinning. The coronavirus and social distancing necessitated a different way for me to kick it. D-Nice supplied the necessary ammunition to quell my uncomfortable new paradigm. Quarantining in solitude has led to writing a new book that is due out in September.

Cultural connection describes the DJ D-Nice set and underscores the values of African-Americans who have used and leveraged their musical creativity to entertain the world and push forward the narrative of our needs, hopes and dreams in a setting that allows others to create new universes. To explore and to create for the pleasure of others connects us on several levels. But we must continuously protect our cultural ingenuity from others inclination to profit and steal our intellectual property.

Club Quarantine had lines wrapped around the world, wrapped around the universe, giving us a brief but necessary respite from the fact-challenged White House briefings. In our virtual club, our forever first family, the Obamas joined to dance and commiserate and many other VIPs were shouted out and recognized. We were all alone, but together at the same time. The DJ reminded the revelers to hold up those who are on the front line of this pandemic and to encourage clubbers to do our part to practice social distance. D-Nice demonstrated that he wanted to share a transformative creative experience. Did we really pay attention to all of the hats he was wearing literally and figuratively?

D-Nice embracing his unique gift and sharing it with all of us allowed him to be able to give our community a room that Mark Zuckerberg maybe never envisioned for his platform. We all now recognize that the platform supported a dream redefined, for its existence for a community that had a need for true healing, spiritual and cultural evolution and hope. D-Nice used music to summon a spirit of transformation from the Obamas, to everyday people, to major corporations around the world.

Click continue to read more.

Founder and publisher of rolling out's parent company Steed Media Group.

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DJ D-Nice, hip-hop music, and the cultural reification of technology - Rolling Out

For a child prodigy, learning didnt always come easily to Derek Haoyang Li. When he was three, his father a famous educator and author became so frustrated with his progress in Chinese that he vowed never to teach him again. He kicked me from here to here, Li told me, moving his arms wide.

Yet when Li began school, aged five, things began to click. Five years later, he was selected as one of only 10 students in his home province of Henan to learn to code. At 16, Li beat 15 million kids to first prize in the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad. Among the offers that came in from the countrys elite institutions, he decided on an experimental fast-track degree at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. It would enable him to study maths, while also covering computer science, physics and psychology.

In his first year at university, Li was extremely shy. He came up with a personal algorithm for making friends in the canteen, weighing data on group size and conversation topic to optimise the chances of a positive encounter. The method helped him to make friends, so he developed others: how to master English, how to interpret dreams, how to find a girlfriend. While other students spent the long nights studying, Li started to think about how he could apply his algorithmic approach to business. When he graduated at the turn of the millennium, he decided that he would make his fortune in the field he knew best: education.

In person, Li, who is now 42, displays none of the awkwardness of his university days. A successful entrepreneur who helped create a billion-dollar tutoring company, Only Education, he is charismatic, and given to making bombastic statements. Education is one of the industries that Chinese people can do much better than western people, he told me when we met last year. The reason, he explained, is that Chinese people are more sophisticated, because they are raised in a society in which people rarely say what they mean.

Li is the founder of Squirrel AI, an education company that offers tutoring delivered in part by humans, but mostly by smart machines, which he says will transform education as we know it. All over the world, entrepreneurs are making similarly extravagant claims about the power of online learning and more and more money is flowing their way. In Silicon Valley, companies like Knewton and Alt School have attempted to personalise learning via tablet computers. In India, Byjus, a learning app valued at $6 billion, has secured backing from Facebook and the Chinese internet behemoth Tencent, and now sponsors the countrys cricket team. In Europe, the British company Century Tech has signed a deal to roll out an intelligent teaching and learning platform in 700 Belgian schools, and dozens more across the UK. Their promises are being put to the test by the coronavirus pandemic with 849 million children worldwide, as of March 2020, shut out of school, were in the midst of an unprecedented experiment in the effectiveness of online learning.

But its in China, where President Xi Jinping has called for the nation to lead the world in AI innovation by 2030, that the fastest progress is being made. In 2018 alone, Li told me, 60 new AI companies entered Chinas private education market. Squirrel AI is part of this new generation of education start-ups. The company has already enrolled 2 million student users, opened 2,600 learning centres in 700 cities across China, and raised $150m from investors. The companys chief AI officer is Tom Mitchell, the former dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and its payroll also includes a roster of top Chinese talent, including dozens of super-teachers an official designation given to the most expert teachers in the country. In January, during the worst of the outbreak, it partnered with the Shanghai education bureau to provide free products to students throughout the city.

Though the most ambitious features have yet to be built into Squirrel AIs system, the company already claims to have achieved impressive results. At its HQ in Shanghai, I saw footage of downcast human teachers who had been defeated by computers in televised contests to see who could teach a class of students more maths in a single week. Experiments on the effectiveness of different types of teaching videos with test audiences have revealed that students learn more proficiently from a video presented by a good-looking young presenter than from an older expert teacher.

When we met, Li rhapsodised about a future in which technology will enable children to learn 10 or even 100 times more than they do today. Wild claims like these, typical of the hyperactive education technology sector, tend to prompt two different reactions. The first is: bullshit teaching and learning is too complex, too human a craft to be taken over by robots. The second reaction is the one I had when I first met Li in London a year ago: oh no, the robot teachers are coming for education as we know it. There is some truth to both reactions, but the real story of AI education, it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated.

At a Squirrel AI learning centre high in an office building in Hangzhou, a city 70 miles west of Shanghai, a cursor jerked tentatively over the words Modern technology has opened our eyes to many things. Slouched at a hexagonal table in one of the centres dozen or so small classrooms, Huang Zerong, 14, was halfway through a 90-minute English tutoring session. As he worked through activities on his MacBook, a young woman with the kindly manner of an older sister sat next to him, observing his progress. Below, the trees of Xixi National Wetland Park barely stirred in the afternoon heat.

A question popped up on Huangs screen, on which a virtual dashboard showed his current English level, unit score and learning focus along with the sleek squirrel icon of Squirrel AI.

India is famous for ________ industry.

Huang read through the three possible answers, choosing to ignore treasure and typical and type t-e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y into the box.

T____ is changing fast, came the next prompt.

Huang looked towards the young woman, then he punched out e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y from memory. She clapped her hands together. Good! she said, as another prompt flashed up.

Huang had begun his English course, which would last for one term, a few months earlier with a diagnostic test. He had logged into the Squirrel AI platform on his laptop and answered a series of questions designed to evaluate his mastery of more than 10,000 knowledge points (such as the distinction between belong to and belong in). Based on his answers, Squirrel AIs software had generated a precise learning map for him, which would determine which texts he would read, which videos he would see, which tests he would take.

As he worked his way through the course with the occasional support of the human tutor by his side, or one of the hundreds accessible via video link from Squirrel AIs headquarters in Shanghai its contents were automatically updated, as the system perceived that Huang had mastered new knowledge.

Huang said he was less distracted at the learning centre than he was in school, and felt at home with the technology. Its fun, he told me after class, eyes fixed on his lap. Its much easier to concentrate on the system because its a device. His scores in English also seemed to be improving, which is why his mother had just paid the centre a further 91,000 RMB (about 11,000) for another year of sessions: two semesters and two holiday courses in each of four subjects, adding up to around 400 hours in total.

Anyone can learn, Li explained to me a few days later over dinner in Beijing. You just needed the right environment and the right method, he said.

The idea for Squirrel AI had come to him five years earlier. A decade at his tutoring company, Only Education, had left him frustrated. He had found that if you really wanted to improve a students progress, by far the best way was to find them a good teacher. But good teachers were rare, and turnover was high, with the best much in demand. Having to find and train 8,000 new teachers each year was limiting the amount students learned and the growth of his business.

The answer, Li decided, was adaptive learning, where an intelligent computer-based system adjusts itself automatically to the best method for an individual learner. The idea of adaptive learning was not new, but Li was confident that developments in AI research meant that huge advances were now within reach. Rather than seeking to recreate the general intelligence of a human mind, researchers were getting impressive results by putting AI to work on specialised tasks. AI doctors are now equal to or better than humans at analysing X-rays for certain pathologies, while AI lawyers are carrying out legal research that would once have been done by clerks.

Following such breakthroughs, Li resolved to augment the efforts of his human teachers with a tireless, perfectly replicable virtual teacher. Imagine a tutor who knows everything, he told me, and who knows everything about you.

In Hangzhou, Huang was struggling with the word hurry. On his screen, a video appeared of a neatly groomed young teacher presenting a three-minute masterclass about how to use the word hurry and related phrases (in a hurry etc). Huang watched along.

Moments like these, where a short teaching input results in a small learning output, are known as nuggets. Lis dream, which is the dream of adaptive education in general, is that AI will one day provide the perfect learning experience by ensuring that each of us get just the right chunk of content, delivered in the right way, at the right moment for our individual needs.

One way in which Squirrel AI improves its results is by constantly hoovering up data about its users. During Huangs lesson, the system continuously tracked and recorded every one of his key strokes, cursor movements, right or wrong answers, texts read and videos watched. This data was time-stamped, to show where Huang had skipped over or lingered on a particular task. Each nugget (the video to watch or text to read) was then recommended to him based on an analysis of his data, accrued over hundreds of hours of work on Squirrels platform, and the data of 2 million other students. Computer tutors can collect more teaching experience than a human would ever be able to collect, even in a hundred years of teaching, Tom Mitchell, Squirrel AIs chief AI officer, told me over the phone a few weeks later.

The speed and accuracy of Squirrel AIs platform will depend, above all, on the number of student users it manages to sign up. More students equals more data. As each student works their way through a set of knowledge points, they leave a rich trail of information behind them. This data is then used to train the algorithms of the thinking part of the Squirrel AI system.

This is one reason why Squirrel AI has integrated its online business with bricks-and-mortar learning centres. Most children in China do not have access to laptops and high-speed internet. The learning centres mean the company can reach kids they otherwise would not be able to. One of the reasons Mitchell says he is glad to be working with Squirrel AI is the sheer volume of data that the company is gathering. Were going to have millions of natural examples, he told me with excitement.

The dream of a perfect education delivered by machine is not new. For at least a century, generations of visionaries have predicted that the latest inventions will transform learning. Motion pictures, wrote the American inventor Thomas Edison in 1922, are destined to revolutionise our schools. The immersive power of movies would supposedly turbo-charge the learning process. Others made similar predictions for radio, television, computers and the internet. But despite small successes the Open University, TV universities in China in the 1980s, or Khan Academy today, which reaches millions of students with its YouTube lessons teachers have continued to teach, and learners to learn, in much the same way as before.

There are two reasons why todays techno-evangelists are confident that AI can succeed where other technologies failed. First, they view AI not as a simple innovation but as a general purpose technology that is, an epochal invention, like the printing press, which will fundamentally change the way we learn. Second, they believe its powers will shed new light on the working of the human brain how repetitive practice grows expertise, for instance, or how interleaving (leaving gaps between learning different bits of material) can help us achieve mastery. As a result, we will be able to design adaptive algorithms to optimise the learning process.

UCL Institute of Education professor and machine learning expert Rose Luckin believes that one day we might see an AI-enabled Fitbit for the mind that would allow us to perceive in real-time what an individual knows, and how fast they are learning. The device would use sensors to gather data that forms a precise and ever-evolving map of a persons abilities, which could be cross-referenced with insights into their motivational and nutritional state, say. This information would then be relayed to our minds, in real time, via a computer-brain interface. Facebook is already carrying out research in this field. Other firms are trialling eye tracking and helmets that monitor kids brainwaves.

The supposed AI education revolution is not here yet, and it is likely that the majority of projects will collapse under the weight of their own hype. IBMs adaptive tutor Knewton was pulled from US schools under pressure from parents concerned about their kids privacy, while Silicon Valleys Alt School, launched to much fanfare in 2015 by a former Google executive, has burned through $174m of funding without landing on a workable business model. But global school closures owing to coronavirus may yet relax public attitudes to online learning many online education companies are offering their products for free to all children out of school.

Daisy Christodoulou, a London-based education expert, suggests that too much time is spent speculating on what AI might one day do, rather than focusing on what it already can. Its estimated that there are 900 million young people around the world today who arent currently on track to learn what they need to thrive. To help those kids, AI education doesnt have to be perfect it just needs to slightly improve on what they currently have.

In their book The Future of the Professions, Richard and Daniel Susskind argue that we tend to conceive of occupations as embodied in a person a butcher or baker, doctor or teacher. As a result, we think of them as too human to be taken over by machines. But to an algorithm, or someone designing one, a profession appears as something else: a long list of individual tasks, many of which may be mechanised. In education, that might be marking or motivating, lecturing or lesson planning. The Susskinds believe that where a machine can do any one of these tasks better and more cheaply than the average human, automation of that bit of the job is inevitable.

The point, in short, is that AI doesnt have to match the general intelligence of humans to be useful or indeed powerful. This is both the promise of AI, and the danger it poses. Peoples behaviour is already being manipulated, Luckin cautioned. Devices that might one day enhance our minds are already proving useful in shaping them.

In May 2018, a group of students at Hangzhous Middle School No 11 returned to their classroom to find three cameras newly installed above the blackboard; they would now be under full-time surveillance in their lessons. Previously when I had classes that I didnt like very much, I would be lazy and maybe take naps, a student told the local news, but I dont dare be distracted after the cameras were installed. The head teacher explained that the system could read seven states of emotion on students faces: neutral, disgust, surprise, anger, fear, happiness and sadness. If the kids slacked, the teacher was alerted. Its like a pair of mystery eyes are constantly watching me, the student told reporters.

The previous year, Chinas state council had launched a plan for the role AI could play in the future of the country. Underpinning it were a set of beliefs: that AI can harmonise Chinese society; that for it to do so, the government should store data on every citizen; that companies, not the state, were best positioned to innovate; that no company should refuse access to the government to its data. In education, the paper called for new adaptive online learning systems powered by big data, and all-encompassing ubiquitous intelligent environments or smart schools.

At AIAED, a conference in Beijing hosted by Squirrel AI, which I attended in May 2019, classroom surveillance was one of the most discussed topics but the speakers tended to be more concerned about the technical question of how to optimise the effectiveness of facial and bodily monitoring technologies in the classroom, rather than the darker implications of collecting unprecedented amounts of data about children. These ethical questions are becoming increasingly important, with schools from India to the US currently trialling facial monitoring. In the UK, AI is being used today for things like monitoring student wellbeing, automating assessment and even in inspecting schools. Ben Williamson of the Centre for Research in Digital Education explains that this risks encoding biases or errors into the system and raises obvious privacy issues. Now the school and university might be said to be studying their students too, he told me.

While cameras in the classroom might outrage many parents in the UK or US, Lenora Chu, author of an influential book about the Chinese education system, argues that in China anything that improves a childs learning tends to be viewed positively by parents. Squirrel AI even offers them the chance to watch footage of their childs tutoring sessions. Theres not that idea here that technology is bad, said Chu, who moved from the US to Shanghai 10 years ago.

Rose Luckin suggested to me that a platform like Squirrel AIs could one day mean an end to Chinas notoriously punishing gaokao college entrance exam, which takes place for two days every June and largely determines a students education and employment prospects. If technology tracked a student throughout their school days, logging every keystroke, knowledge point and facial twitch, then the perfect record of their abilities on file could make such testing obsolete. Yet a system like this could also furnish the Chinese state or a US tech company with an eternal ledger of every step in a childs development. It is not hard to imagine the grim uses to which this information could be put for instance, if your behaviour in school was used to judge, or predict, your trustworthiness as an adult.

On the one hand, said Chu, the CCP wants to use AI to better prepare young people for the future economy, and to close the achievement gap between rural and urban schools. To this end, companies like Squirrel AI receive government support, such as access to prime office space in top business districts. At the same time, the CCP, as the state council put it, sees AI as opportunity of the millennium for social construction. That is, social control. The ability of AI to grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner through the surveillance of peoples movements, spending and other behaviours means it can play an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability.

The surveillance state is already penetrating deep into peoples lives. In 2019, there was a significant spike in China in the registration of patents for facial recognition and surveillance technology. All new mobile phones in China must now be registered via a facial scan. At the hotels I stayed in, Chinese citizens handed over their ID cards and checked in using face scanners. On the high-speed train to Beijing, the announcer repeatedly warned travellers to abide by the rules in order to maintain their personal credit. The notorious social credit system, which has been under trial in a handful of Chinese cities ahead of an expected nationwide roll out this year, awards or detracts points from an individuals trustworthiness score, which affects their ability to travel and borrow money, among other things.

The result, explained Chu, is that all these interventions exert a subtle control over what people think and say. You sense how the wind is blowing, she told me. For the 12 million Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, however, that control is anything but subtle. Police checkpoints, complete with facial scanners, are ubiquitous. All mobile phones must have Jingwang (clean net) app installed, allowing the government to monitor your movements and browsing. Iris and fingerprint scans are required to access health services. As many as 1.5 million Uighurs, including children, have been interned at some point in a re-education camp in the interests of harmony.

As we shape the use of AI in education, its likely that AI will shape us too. Jiang Xueqin, an education researcher from Chengdu, is sceptical that it will be as revolutionary as proponents claim. Parents are paying for a drug, he told me over the phone. He thought tutoring companies such as New Oriental, TAL and Squirrel AI were simply preying on parents anxieties about their kids performance in exams, and only succeeding because test preparation was the easiest element of education to automate a closed system with limited variables that allowed for optimisation. Jiang wasnt impressed with the progress made, or the way that it engaged every child in a desperate race to conform to the measures of success imposed by the system.

One student I met at the learning centre in Hangzhou, Zhang Hen, seemed to have a deep desire to learn about the world she told me how she loved Qu Yuan, a Tang dynasty romantic poet, and how she was a fan of Harry Potter but that wasnt the reason she was here. Her goal was much simpler: she had come to the centre to boost her test scores. That may seem disappointing to idealists who want education to offer so much more, but Zhang was realistic about the demands of the Chinese education system. She had tough exams that she needed to pass. A scripted system that helped her efficiently master the content of the high school entrance exam was exactly what she wanted.

On stage at AIAED, Tom Mitchell had presented a more ambitious vision for adaptive learning that went far beyond helping students cram for mindless tests. Much of what he was most excited by was possible only in theory, but his enthusiasm was palpable. As appealing as his optimism was, though, I felt unconvinced. It was clear that adaptive technologies might improve certain types of learning, but it was equally obvious that they might narrow the aims of education and provide new tools to restrict our freedom.

Li insists that one day his system will help all young people to flourish creatively. Though he allows that for now an expert human teacher still holds an edge over a robot, he is confident that AI will soon be good enough to evaluate and reply to students oral responses. In less than five years, Li imagines training Squirrel AIs platform with a list of every conceivable question and every possible response, weighting an algorithm to favour those labelled creative. That thing is very easy to do, he said, like tagging cats.

For Li, learning has always been like that like tagging cats. But theres a growing consensus that our brains dont work like computers. Whereas a machine must crunch through millions of images to be able to identify a cat as the collection of features that are present only in those images labelled cat (two triangular ears, four legs, two eyes, fur, etc), a human child can grasp the concept of cat from just a few real life examples, thanks to our innate ability to understand things symbolically. Where machines cant compute meaning, our minds thrive on it. The adaptive advantage of our brains is that they learn continually through all of our senses by interacting with the environment, our culture and, above all, other people.

Li told me that even if AI fulfilled all of its promise, human teachers would still play a crucial role helping kids learn social skills. At Squirrel AIs HQ, which occupies three floors of a gleaming tower next door to Microsoft and Mobike in Shanghai, I met some of the companys young teachers. Each sat at a work console in a vast office space, headphones on, eyes focused on a laptop screen, their desks decorated with plastic pot plants and waving cats. As they monitored the dashboards of up to six students simultaneously, the face of a young learner would appear on the screen, asking for help, either via a chat box or through a video link. The teachers reminded me of workers in the gig economy, the Uber drivers of education. When I logged on to try out a Squirrel English lesson for myself, the experience was good, but my tutor seemed to be teaching to a script.

Squirrel AIs head of communications, Joleen Liang, showed me photos from a recent trip she had taken to the remote mountains of Henan, to deliver laptops to disadvantaged students. Without access to the adaptive technology, their education would be a little worse. It was a reminder that Squirrel AIs platform, like those of its competitors worldwide, doesnt have to be better than the best human teachers to improve peoples lives, it just needs to be good enough, at the right price, to supplement what weve got. The problem is that it is hard to see technology companies stopping there. For better and worse, their ambitions are bigger. We could make a lot of geniuses, Li told me.

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Original post:

Can computers ever replace the classroom? | Technology - The Guardian

TORONTO, March 23, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- iSIGN Media Solutions Inc. (iSIGN or Company) (TSX-V: ISD) (OTC: ISDSF), a leading provider of interactive mobile proximity marketing and public security alert solutions, today announced the offer of free use of its Safety Alert Messaging (SAM) solution to all levels of medical, health and emergency responders across Canada for the next six months.

SAM is a technology based mobile messaging system that enables the controlled broadcast of critical information to registered recipients. Registered recipients can be as broad as the general public, or as narrow as salaried and contract employees and can be assigned into various sub-groups, allowing for messages to be directed only to specific groups or to everyone, depending on needs. Due to SAMs message received alert function, SAM messages are more obvious to recipients when they are received than texts and email.

As an example, should a hospital administrator want to message individual groups of workers, such as doctors, nurses, cleaning staff, etc., iSIGNs backend dashboard can be used to assign all registrants into their respective groups. Then the administrator would simply select who they wished the message to be sent to one group, multiple groups or all groups.

As SAM supports iOS and Android in-app messaging, the SAM app is available in both the Google Play and Apple app stores. Broadcasters log into the SAM dashboard via their web browser, create and then send messages to their registered recipients in a matter of minutes. Sent messages are stored within the dashboard for later reference as required until the sender deletes them.

iSIGN is pleased to announce that the Abington Court Retirement Residence, located in Hamilton has accepted our offer for no charge SAM messaging.

iSIGN has been requested to contact a major health facility located in iSIGNs home city of Richmond Hill, Ontario, who recently honoured iSIGN as one of the Citys four recipients of the 2019 Innovators of the Year.

iSIGN has made the same no charge offer to Hi-Tek Media and its sister company Omni Veil Inc., located in Las Vegas, Nevada, who has gladly accepted. They will be reaching out to their various contacts to extend the same offer.

The goal of iSIGN and Hi-Tek Media/Omni Veil Inc. is to help our respective medical services, governments, schools and communities combat the spread of COVID-19 and aid in the return of normalcy to everyday life.

About iSIGN MediaiSIGN, a Canadian company based in Toronto (Richmond Hill), Ontario is a data-focused, software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that is a pioneering leader in the areas of location-based security alert messaging and proximity marketing utilizing Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity in complete privacy. Creators of the Smart suite of products, a patented interactive proximity marketing technology, iSIGN enables the delivery of messages to mobile devices in proximity, with real-time reporting and analytics on a variety of metrics. 2019 winner of Richmond Hills Innovator of the Year award. Partners include IBM, Keyser Retail Solutions, Baylor University, Verizon Wireless, TELUS and Mtrex Network Solutions. http://www.isignmedia.com

About Hi-Tek MediaHi-Tek Media is a full-service digital advertising and marketing company with 21 years of experience in marketing. Hi-Tek is uniquely positioned to provide cutting edge marketing, digital production and media management Hi-Tek is certified with Google and Facebook and the expansion of our Omni Veil Digital Platform will set us apart from our competitors. http://www.Hi-TekMedia.com

About Omni Veil Inc.The Omni Veil is a 24/7 Digital Network based in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Network sends out instant traffic notifications, safety messages and branded content for all mobile users. The revolution of the mobile machines Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Application technologies was developed to keep the public notified, consider first responders safety and modernize the way businesses advertise in real time. http://www.theomniveil.com

Forward-Looking StatementsThis news release may include certain forward-looking statements that are based upon current expectations, which involve risks and uncertainties associated with iSIGN Medias business and the environment in which the business operates. Any statements contained herein that are not statements of historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking, including those identified by the expressions anticipate, believe, plan, estimate, expect, intend and similar expressions to the extent they relate to the Company or its management. The forward-looking statements are not historical facts but reflect iSIGN Medias current expectations regarding future results or events. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations. iSIGN Media assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements.

2020 iSIGN Media Solutions Inc. All Rights Reserved. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.

Company contacts:

Alex RomanovPresidentiSIGN Media Solutions Inc.alex@isignmedia.com

Hi-Tek Mediasales@hi-tekmedia.com

Lacy RamonDirector of Digital TechnologyOmni Veil Inc.lacy@theomniveil.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor Its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the accuracy of this release.

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iSIGN Media Contributes its Safety Alert Messaging (SAM) Technology Solution to Provide the Public with Instant Mobile Alerts for COVID-19 at No...

In the Budget 2020 speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made a welcome announcement for Indian science over the next five years she proposed spending 8,000 crore (~ $1.2 billion) on a National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications. This promises to catapult India into the midst of the second quantum revolution, a major scientific effort that is being pursued by the United States, Europe, China and others. In this article we describe the scientific seeds of this mission, the promise of quantum technology and some critical constraints on its success that can be lifted with some imagination on the part of Indian scientific institutions and, crucially, some strategic support from Indian industry and philanthropy.

Quantum mechanics was developed in the early 20th century to describe nature in the small at the scale of atoms and elementary particles. For over a century it has provided the foundations of our understanding of the physical world, including the interaction of light and matter, and led to ubiquitous inventions such as lasers and semiconductor transistors. Despite a century of research, the quantum world still remains mysterious and far removed from our experiences based on everyday life. A second revolution is currently under way with the goal of putting our growing understanding of these mysteries to use by actually controlling nature and harnessing the benefits of the weird and wondrous properties of quantum mechanics. One of the most striking of these is the tremendous computing power of quantum computers, whose actual experimental realisation is one of the great challenges of our times. The announcement by Google, in October 2019, where they claimed to have demonstrated the so-called quantum supremacy, is one of the first steps towards this goal.

Besides computing, exploring the quantum world promises other dramatic applications including the creation of novel materials, enhanced metrology, secure communication, to name just a few. Some of these are already around the corner. For example, China recently demonstrated secure quantum communication links between terrestrial stations and satellites. And computer scientists are working towards deploying schemes for post-quantum cryptography clever schemes by which existing computers can keep communication secure even against quantum computers of the future. Beyond these applications, some of the deepest foundational questions in physics and computer science are being driven by quantum information science. This includes subjects such as quantum gravity and black holes.

Pursuing these challenges will require an unprecedented collaboration between physicists (both experimentalists and theorists), computer scientists, material scientists and engineers. On the experimental front, the challenge lies in harnessing the weird and wonderful properties of quantum superposition and entanglement in a highly controlled manner by building a system composed of carefully designed building blocks called quantum bits or qubits. These qubits tend to be very fragile and lose their quantumness if not controlled properly, and a careful choice of materials, design and engineering is required to get them to work. On the theoretical front lies the challenge of creating the algorithms and applications for quantum computers. These projects will also place new demands on classical control hardware as well as software platforms.

Globally, research in this area is about two decades old, but in India, serious experimental work has been under way for only about five years, and in a handful of locations. What are the constraints on Indian progress in this field? So far we have been plagued by a lack of sufficient resources, high quality manpower, timeliness and flexibility. The new announcement in the Budget would greatly help fix the resource problem but high quality manpower is in global demand. In a fast moving field like this, timeliness is everything delayed funding by even one year is an enormous hit.

A previous programme called Quantum Enabled Science and Technology has just been fully rolled out, more than two years after the call for proposals. Nevertheless, one has to laud the governments announcement of this new mission on a massive scale and on a par with similar programmes announced recently by the United States and Europe. This is indeed unprecedented, and for the most part it is now up to the government, its partner institutions and the scientific community to work out details of the mission and roll it out quickly.

But there are some limits that come from how the government must do business with public funds. Here, private funding, both via industry and philanthropy, can play an outsized role even with much smaller amounts. For example, unrestricted funds that can be used to attract and retain high quality manpower and to build international networks all at short notice can and will make an enormous difference to the success of this enterprise. This is the most effective way (as China and Singapore discovered) to catch up scientifically with the international community, while quickly creating a vibrant intellectual environment to help attract top researchers.

Further, connections with Indian industry from the start would also help quantum technologies become commercialised successfully, allowing Indian industry to benefit from the quantum revolution. We must encourage industrial houses and strategic philanthropists to take an interest and reach out to Indian institutions with an existing presence in this emerging field. As two of us can personally attest, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), home to Indias first superconducting quantum computing lab, would be delighted to engage.

R. Vijayaraghavan is Associate Professor of Physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and leads its experimental quantum computing effort; Shivaji Sondhi is Professor of Physics at Princeton University and has briefed the PM-STIAC on the challenges of quantum science and technology development; Sandip Trivedi, a Theoretical Physicist, is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research; Umesh Vazirani is Professor of Computer Science and Director, Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center and has briefed the PM-STIAC on the challenges of quantum science and technology development

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Picking up the quantum technology baton - The Hindu

Environmental technology company Bygen is taking technology out of University of Adelaide labs and using it to give agricultural waste a higher purpose. Brent Balinski spoke to co-founder and CEO Dr Lewis Dunnigan about using almond shells and other ingredients to supply the growing activated carbon market.

It is hard to find a business with plans unaffected by the unfolding COVID-19 crisis. Startup technology companies, which face a generally complicated life, are seeing things become more complicated still.

But the show, as they say, must go on.

This is the case for Bygen, a University of Adelaide spin-out that recently went through the Startmate accelerators climate cohort. (It is the case for Startmate, too, which is preparing to host its demo day by live stream next month.)

Bygen is commercialising chemical engineering work spun out of the University of Adelaide. This promises a process for low-cost activated carbon out of agricultural waste, following pyrolysis.

According to one market research firm, the global market for activated carbon was $US 4.7 billion in 2015, and will grow 9.4 per cent annually to reach $US 8.1 billion in 2021, or 5,400 kilotons by volume. It is widely used in filtration in the food and beverage industry, in metal extraction, sewage treatment, cleaning up industrial gas produced and many other applications. Prices are roughly $2,000 a tonne currently.

Bygen believes theres a niche in there for a bespoke product, and are targeting an unmet demand for purpose-specific products, where their process allows for the control of pore size.

Bygen has completed an initial $300,000 seed funding round, and is in the middle of a $600,000 second seed round to fund a first full-scale plant. Further, in November last year they announced they had seen early success adapting their process to plastics, turning these into activated carbon and possibly one much-needed answer to Australias acknowledged plastics crisis. It is seeking industrial partners to take this work further.

Late last week @AuManufacturing spoke to CEO Dr Lewis Dunnigan, who founded the company in 2018 with CTO Ben Morton and chemistry senior lecturer Dr Philip Kwong.

@AuManufacturing: Whats the businesss origin story?

Lewis Dunnigan: Im originally from Scotland. I did my chemical engineering degree at the University of Edinburgh. And I came over to Adelaide for six months during my masters degree. Essentially after I finished my masters degree I was offered a scholarship to come do a PhD at the university of Adelaide. So I did that. Six months before I finished my PhD, we actually started the company. As soon as I finished my PhD, I went straight into full-time work. Which was good. We managed to raise some money in between starting the company and me becoming a full time staff member. Ive been in Australia ever since.

@AuManufacturing: Whats the secret sauce that allows you to turn ag waste, and more recently, plastic into activated carbon?

Lewis Dunnigan: Our technology allows us to avoid the hugely energy-intensive nature of conventional means to make activated carbons. So theres two main ways to do it, currently. You either do something called physical activation, which requires temperatures around 1000 degrees, or you have another option which is called chemical activation and involves the use of really strong acids or bases. Both have their negatives. And what we are focused on is the physical activation. What weve developed is an alternative to those extremely high-temperature methods of making activated carbon. Our methods can operate at much lower temperatures. We can use cheaper gas mixtures. Our reaction times are quicker and also because of our lower temperatures we also have a reduction in the capital costs as well, because we dont need to use the same types of steel that conventional producers need to use.

@AuManufacturing: Roughly speaking, is the Bygen process building on your PhD work or related to it?

Lewis Dunnigan: Basically myself and my co-founder, Ben Morton, we were both PhD students in the same group at Adelaide Uni. And we basically felt like we had two complimentary research projects that we were doing. And if we combine them together we had quite a promising technology for the activated carbon market, which we knew at the time was a large market and the technology has potential commercial implications.

So basically the way the company was founded was while Ben and I were talking about starting a company, independently of that our supervisor actually got us into a waste and recycling accelerator run by Innovyz down at Tonsley and we basically just took off from there.

@AuManufacturing: Tell us about inputs and outputs. I read that youre producing activated carbon from agricultural waste at about 10 kilograms per hour. You might have scaled up since that article. What goes in and what comes out?

Lewis Dunnigan: The first pilot plant we built, like you said, can produce 10 kilograms an hour. We are just finishing off a new machine that can do about four times that, about 40 kilograms an hour. Our ultimate intention is to produce about 500 kilograms an hour or more. The first plant was very much about proving the technology could work. This one is about getting to that first level of commercialisation.

Essentially for every tonne you put in of weight agricultural waste, you get about 200 to 250 kilograms an hour out. So its about 20 to 25 per cent yield.

@AuManufacturing: And the rest escapes as gas slash heat?

Lewis Dunnigan: Yes, correct. We produce quite a lot of heat as a byproduct. The rest comes out and is turned into a gas that we can burn and we can re-circulate that gas internally for heating.

@AuManufacturing: How have you found the transition from engineer and scientist to entrepreneur? Has it been enjoyable or a headache? Do you miss the lab at all?

Lewis Dunnigan: Ive enjoyed it a lot and Ben has enjoyed it a lot. We have had to learn very, very quickly. But I think that the skills you learn when youre doing a PhD [are useful] in terms of having to be inquisitive about things, having to be really strict in how you use your time and your resources to achieve what you want to achieve. I think that mindset has helped us.

The other stuff that comes with running a company in terms of talking to customers, strategy, marketing, and all those other things weve had to learn really quickly. And our policy has always been that we need to surround ourselves with people with experience and skillsets that we dont have.

@AuManufacturing: Is grape marc a focus as an ag waste feedstock? Youve got plenty of it around Adelaide and its a waste stream in need of higher-value purposes.

Lewis Dunnigan: Thats one of them for sure. We also deal a lot with nutshells, specifically almond shells in the Riverland, as well as with people who produce large quantities of waste wood as well. Each feedstock stock makes a product that has slightly different properties, and therefore is suitable for different activated carbon markets. It really comes down to, whats our first target, and which feedstock should we use for that first market segment that were trying to get into.

@AuManufacturing: I see. I saw more recently that you started looking at plastics. Was there a Eureka moment? How does your process lend itself to processing various types of plastics?

Lewis Dunnigan: This was kind of around the time there were a lot of issues coming up with Australias ability to handle its own recycling, around the time when some countries stopped taking waste from us. And we felt like there was an abundance of plastics without the processing capabilities internally to deal with all that waste. We felt like theoretically we should be able to achieve a good quality activated carbon with some of the plastics that are available. We literally took some waste PET and applied some pre-processing to it, ran it through our process. Obviously there was a bit of optimisation involved in that. There were a few trials. But we managed to prove we could make high-quality activated carbon from it. We produce a lot of heat at the same time, so the plastics [application is] has the potential to have co-generation of activated carbon and electricity. And the good thing about our process is its durable enough to actually take mixed plastics as well. Although theres different qualities of activated carbon from different types of plastics, PET being the best that we found, it can certainly handle mixtures as well.

@AuManufacturing: Thats very handy, as sorting is a massive headache for plastics recycling, and a stray plastic bag in the mix can be a major issue.

Lewis Dunnigan: Yes, absolutely.

@AuManufacturing: What about the mass processed versus activated carbon coming out? Is it a similar sort of situation to wood waste or almond shells?

Lewis Dunnigan: It varies widely across different plastics. For some plastics you can have much more heat and less carbon coming out. Some are okay, PET for example is comparable yield-wise to the agricultural waste that we use. But some plastics give much lower yields of solids than PET does. At the same time theres some plastics that get slightly higher yields than PET. It varies widely and compared to agricultural waste. Generally theyre quite similar, but theres a much wider range.

Our current attitude with the plastics is were very much on the lookout for a partner who can bring the resources to actually commercialise this successfully. Our top priority right now is agricultural, because weve built up a lot of market knowledge around product quality, whereas with the plastics we have less experience with that. So its very much a case of we want to find the right partner to work with us and then use the technology to, to actually get into the markets.

@AuManufacturing: How is the second seed funding round progressing? Obviously there are some complications out there right now.

Lewis Dunnigan: Obviously we are trying to keep on top of the current situation. At the moment it seems to be okay. Were not raising any red red flags right now. Like for most companies, most startups, its a pretty tricky time. We are considering raising a bit more money than we initially planned to give us that security, longer term. But thats just a discussion that we are having with investors right now. But touch wood, it seems to be going quite well right now.

On the technical side there are two things that maybe I could mention please. When I was talking about the technology that we developed, in terms of lower energy, lower cost, um, theres a couple of other things I just wanted to add.

The companys reactor.

The first one is what weve found from doing analysis of the activated carbon on the market as well as market research and talking to customers one of the problems that we found is that the activated carbon thats available is almost like a one-size-fits-all approach. Theres little variation between products, despite their very wide range of applications that activated carbon is used in. What often happens is that customers have to buy different types of carbon, blend it together, do their own in-house R&D and figure out what the right ratio of different products is. Thats not great. What weve moved towards quite lately with our technology is becoming what we term a bespoke activated carbon producer. If you look at environmental remediation, which is probably the area we focus most heavily on, the pollutants that are out there vary widely in terms of their size, their chemistry, their structure. And we can design carbons that are tailored for these differences.

Usually what people look at is the surface area. Theres sort of the attitude that if you have a higher surface area, then that is better. And thats not necessarily always the case.

For PFAS, the firefighting foam, activated carbon is used for that. For remediating it from soil and water. PFAS is actually a very large chemical. Its a family of chemicals. But theyre generally quite large. And with the activated carbon thats out there, most of the pores which are the small holes that give the surface area to the carbon are actually not suited to PFAS in terms of their size and the structure. What we are doing right now is developing something that takes those unique properties of PFS into account, and this is something that were really excited about. Because that same model can be used for essentially any pollutant or any kind of water treatment process, and thats something that I think were very interested in. And weve kind of made it our mission now to become the bespoke activated carbon producer in the world.

And the other thing is, and which is why we got into [accelerator program] Startmate, is by using agricultural waste, our process is actually carbon negative, and that actually results in a net reduction of carbon.

The ag waste would become methane, a really bad green greenhouse gas, as it decomposes.

Absolutely. So either the agricultural waste would decompose into methane and CO2. We stop them from doing that. The other advantage is that the majority of the worlds activated carbon is made from coal. So that is certainly not a carbon negative process. Its about us finding a sustainable and climate-friendly alternative to coal-based activated carbon. To us, that sustainability, low-cost and tailoring approach is what we sell as our unique unique point.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Original post:

In the black: startup pushing ahead commercialising waste-to-activated-carbon technology - @AuManufacturing

Updated: May 25, 2018:

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