Back in May, we looked at seven start-ups participating in this year’s Intel Edge AI incubator, which sets out to help companies integrate computer vision into their tech solutions.

Now in its second year, the incubator was first held in 2019 in association with Dublin City University’s Talent Garden. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s programme has been held online.

Image: Jonathan Byrne of Movidius. Image: Intel  

CNN - This novel coronavirus is bizarre for many reasons, making its spread unpredictable and hard to control.

One oddity is how easily people can get infected by someone without symptoms. But there's a difference between asymptomatic spread and pre-symptomatic spread.

In the March 1988 issue of Popular Mechanics, the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote an article describing his vision for humanity's return to the moon.

In the article, Asimov envisioned the year 2028. Humans—or Lunarians, as he called them—are thriving on the moon. They've erected a massive radio telescope on the moon’s far side and have built research stations, factories, and celestial observatories, all powered by nuclear and solar energy.

I am the son of an immigrant who worked late almost every night and weekend to give his family a good life.

Now, as an investment banker in the U.S. middle market, I work with clients who do the same. They dream, sacrifice and sometimes succeed.

However, sweeping legislation designed to solve the current economic crisis ushers in monetary changes that may erode the entrepreneurial foundation of the business landscape.

Before COVID-19, workplace teams as we know them were changing. Will their evolution continue, or will we go backwards?

Many expert observers have made predictions about the “new normal” of work after the pandemic. Some are optimistic, envisioning a paradigm shift towards a more flexible, empowered future for workers through remote working. Others are pessimistic, even somewhat dystopian, projecting a future workplace that is disconnected and highly surveilled.

Image: https://knowledge.insead.edu

In May 25, George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds while Floyd lay handcuffed, facedown in the street. Floyd’s death, coming in the wake of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, has resulted in a wave of demonstrations against police brutality, white supremacy, and the ongoing injustices the Black community faces. In response to these demonstrations, university administrators have sought to reassure their students and faculty and staff members that Black lives do matter by demonstrating their commitments to diversity, inclusivity, and equity through a variety of institutional statements, tweets, and blog posts, as they have done in response to similar demonstrations in Charlottesville and Ferguson.

Image: Ashley Gilbertson, VII, Redux

In early 2020, Wafels & Dinges, the popular Belgian waffle truck fleet, was in major expansion mode. It was planning to add brick-and-mortar restaurants in some markets, including in the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., and American Dream in the Meadowlands of New Jersey, where it would peddle espressos and cranberry-rosemary waffles. But when the COVID-19 national emergency was declared on March 13, owners Thomas de Geest and Rossanna Figuera realized they had exactly enough cash on hand to give their workers two weeks’ severance pay. Tearfully, they said goodbye and emptied their bank account.

The National Institutes of Health has launched a $1 million Technology Accelerator Challenge (TAC) to spur the design and development of non-invasive, handheld, digital technologies to detect, diagnose and guide therapies for diseases with high global and public health impact. The Challenge is focused on sickle cell disease, malaria and anemia and is led by NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is cooperating with NIH to help accelerate the transformation of design concepts into products for low-resource settings.

Image: https://www.nibib.nih.gov

Once upon a time, developing a new vaccine was a step-by-step process that went from concept, to design, to tests in humans, to regulatory approval, to manufacturing.

It was a process that could take a decade or more.

But the urgent need for a COVID-19 vaccine has radically changed all that. Now, the hope is the entire process can be completed in a year or less.

Image: Cell culture operators prepare a 2000-liter single-use bioreactor to produce proteins used to make vaccines. Philip Taciak/Emergent Biosolutions

Numerous coronavirus vaccine development programmes are currently being run at a fast pace, with some promising candidates going into phase 1 (dosage and absence of toxicity), some advancing into phase 2 (efficacy on small groups of individuals), and some arguably with the potential to move into phase 3 before the summer (use across groups of thousands of patients, across multiple countries).

Image: Equipment at a British lab working on a potential vaccine for COVID-19. Image: Reuters/Carl Recine

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the functioning of organizations in several ways. One consequence of these disruptions that we have seen emerge quickly is the struggle of managers to lead employees who are out of sight. The sudden transition from having employees physically work in the office to remote work has revealed an ugly truth: Most companies fail in building trusting work relationships.

Across the economy, leaders of organizations of all sizes are stepping up to guide their teams through challenging and uncertain times. As crises extend past initial shock to a prolonged period of uncertainty, leaders must consistently project calm, stability, and control when there is ambiguity all around. As a leadership advisor, I am fortunate to advise and partner closely with many CEOs, boards, and investment funds in solving their most difficult leadership challenges. During the global COVID-19 crisis, I have discovered that many lessons learned during my career as a Navy fighter pilot on aircraft carriers are relevant for business leaders as they strive to maintain composure and keep teams focused during these troubled and fast-changing times.

On Monday, June 8, an official at the World Health Organization (WHO) made a surprising statement. People who have Covid-19 but are asymptomatic—meaning they never develop symptoms like fever, coughing, or gastrointestinal distress—very rarely gave it to others, stated Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on the Covid-19 pandemic, at a regularly-scheduled press briefing.

Image: AP PHOTO/PETROS KARADJIAS Distance still matters. TIME ALWAYS TELLS What you need to know about the WHO’s new statements on Covid-19 transmission June 9, 2020 Katherine Ellen Foley By Katherine Ellen Foley Health and science reporter

SINGAPORE - The urgent search for a Covid-19 vaccine should not be seen as a competition, said British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

In a press conference for global media outlets hosted online on Wednesday (June 10), the firm noted efforts by multiple players around the world to produce a vaccine amid the mounting death toll and economic disruptions caused by the coronavirus.

Image: There are currently more than 130 candidate vaccines being studied by research groups and pharmaceutical companies.PHOTO: ST FILE

For most people in this locked-down, riot-scarred world, the future beckons unpleasantly. There is a growing sense that, economically, the 2020s may look more like the 1930s than some halcyon post-industrial future. “Dark days ahead,” suggests The Week. “This is what the end of the end of history looks like."

For some workers, talking to other people is the absolute worst part of their day. But if they had a job where they kept human interaction to a minimum, they just might thrive.

To calculate the jobs with the least amount of human contact, we used data from the Department of Labor's O*NET Online occupational database, which lists seven job characteristics that involve talking to other people: Speaking; communicating with persons outside the organization; communicating with peers, supervisors, or subordinates; contact with others; face-to-face discussions; public speaking; and social orientation. 

Image: Fallers are one of the high-paying jobs with a low communication score in the US. Reuters/Lisi Niesner

Based on recent events, the drive-thru might be one of the most important inventions for the foodservice industry.

While they’ve been around for a long time, drive-thrus are seeing a huge surge in usage during the coronavirus pandemic. After all, most restaurants across the country still aren't allowed to offer indoor dining, and people looking to get out of the house for a bite to eat don't have to go much further than their car.

As Covid’s dizzying spin starts to slow, leaders are steeling themselves for the long road to recovery. An essential early step will be effectively addressing the anxieties of millions of workers who are worried about the future of their work and their health. Given the pain of this moment, there are plenty of “tips,” urging leaders to handle the journey’s challenges with resilience, authenticity, and connection. While these things have tremendous value in stabilizing human behavior at an emotionally volatile time, they are not enough.

The COVID-19 pandemic and widespread shelter-in-place orders have hit every corner of the country’s economy, including tech companies of all sizes. Many tech companies have traditionally maintained large patent portfolios to enhance company value and for defensive reasons—i.e. to dissuade competitors from filing suit. But monetizing these dormant patent assets—which can cost a great deal to simply maintain—may provide a solution during these difficult economic times.

There is great promise in 2020 that we might be able to make our bodies young without having to explicitly repair molecular damage, but just by changing the signaling environment.

Do we need to add signals that say “young” or remove signals that say “old”?

Does infusion of biochemical signals from young blood plasma rejuvenate tissues of an old animal? Or are there dissolved signal proteins in old animals that must be removed?

Image: https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com