Category Archives: Formats

IEEE Spectrum, Lausanne, News

Can We Automate Eureka Moments?

JUST OUTSIDE LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND, in a meeting room wallpapered with patent drawings, Ioannis Ierides faced a classic sales challenge: demonstrating his product’s advantages within the short span of his customer’s attention. Ierides is a business-development manager at Iprova, a company that sells ideas for invention with an element of artificial intelligence (AI).

When Ierides gets someone to sign on the bottom line, Iprova begins sending their company proposals for patentable inventions in their area of interest. Any resulting patents will name humans as the inventors, but those humans will have benefited from Iprova’s AI tool. The software’s primary purpose is to scan the literature in both the company’s field and in far-off fields and then suggest new inventions made of old, previously disconnected ones. Iprova has found a niche tracking fast-changing industries and suggesting new inventions to large corporations such as Procter & Gamble, Deutsche Telekom, and Panasonic. The company has even patented its own AI-assisted invention method.

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IEEE Spectrum, News

European Satellite Burns Up for Science

Just how hot was that salsa? A European Space Agency (ESA) aircraft embarked on a mission on Sunday, 8 September, to answer this very question. The agency’s observational airplane—taking off from Easter Island, Chile—was geared up to collect data on a 24-year-old Earth observation satellite called Salsa as it burned up during atmospheric re-entry. The researchers wanted to know if Salsa would disintegrate completely or if it would instead take a long, slow tumble through the thickening air, with still unburnt pieces surviving the re-entry to splash into the ocean or make landfall somewhere. 

As of press time, the team is still analyzing its images and streams of instrument output from Sunday’s re-entry. But they do at least report success in gathering the data. “With the knowledge gained, ESA’s Space Debris team hope to improve current prediction models,” a Monday blog post from the researchers stated, “As well as learn more about how a satellite burns up.”

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IEEE Spectrum, News

Europe Struggles to Quit Chinese Telecom

This month Huawei filed a complaint against Spain’s rural 5G contracting process, because the tender made it too risky for bidders to include the Shenzhen, China telecom giant’s hardware. The filing is the company’s latest move in its long, involuntary departure from Europe and other global telecom network markets.

Huawei holds a strong, global market-leading position in telecom network hardware, says Stéphane Téral, founder and chief analyst of Téral Research in San Francisco. However, he adds Ericsson and Nokia have in recent years made “competitive hardware in a timely manner” such that they should be up to the challenge of replacing Huawei networks wherever there’s demand. 

Huawei and ZTE, the other major Chinese-headquartered telecom supplier, are stuck between a law and a hard place. Two, actually: the equipment manufacturers are subject to a pair of laws that, if enforced, could require them to comply with security-related instructions from the Chinese government. On the other hand, other countries are writing more and more restrictive language into their telecom and security regulations that restrict suppliers subject to such explicit pressure from third countries—which effectively means China.

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Civio, Data visualization, Features

Investigation: People of no nation: how being stateless means living without rights

This is the third of a three-part investigation I co-reported and co-wrote with María Álvarez del Vayo, Ter Garcia, Carmen Torrecillas, and Adrián Maqueda of Civio with help from some EDJNet partners. Part 1, “Investigation: One small step for a few, one giant leap for the rest: how to become a European citizen” is here. Part 2, “Stranger in a native land” is here. The data visualizations are only visible at the Civio website. También hay una versión en español.

Imagine not being able to sign a work contract or not being able to access social or even health services. Forget travelling, enrolling in university or getting married. That is the reality for thousands of people not recognised as nationals by any state. “They have no rights,” says Nina Murray, head of policy and research at the European Statelessness Network (ENS) a London, United Kingdom-based network of civil society organisations.

Many stateless people, Murray explains, come from states that have disappeared. Or they have been displaced from their homes by war or for other reasons. Others have no nationality, because of gaps in the laws of their country of birth: they may be the children of stateless persons or of people whose countries do not recognise as citizens the children born to their citizens abroad. Some people are stateless because the country where they live does not recognise their country of origin as a state, as in much of the European Union (EU) for people from Palestine or Western Sahara.

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