New Florence. New Renaissance.

Silicon Collar excerpt: Financial Advisers

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

As FastCompany reported, "Companies such as Wealthfront, Betterment and FutureAdvisor offer ‘robo-adviser’ services. Rather than investing money based on the decisions of a human expert, they use technology to manage a portfolio and recalibrate it on an ongoing basis. Doing so allows them to grind down fees, and poses a threat to the conventional business model of a company like Schwab, which is very much used to monetizing the wisdom of human beings."

So Schwab has responded with its own Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, which it markets as "an online investment advisory service that builds, monitors, and rebalances your portfolio—so you don't have to."

While it's still tiny—the service has $6 billion under management and a team of 300 (out of a total staff of 15,000)—it positions Schwab to compete with the start-ups as the market gradually warms up to robo-advisers.

 

 

Remaking companies around AI

Google is not alone in this rapid re-orientation. Amazon is building a similar group cloud computing group for AI. Facebook and Twitter have created internal groups akin to Google Brain, the team responsible for infusing the search giant’s own tech with AI. And in recent weeks, Microsoft reorganized much of its operation around its existing machine learning work, creating a new AI and research group under executive vice president Harry Shum, who began his career as a computer vision researcher.

Oren Etzioni, CEO of the not-for-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, says that these changes are partly about marketing—efforts to ride the AI hype wave. Google, for example, is focusing public attention on Fei-Fei’s new group because that’s good for the company’s cloud computing business. But Etzioni says this is also part of very real shift inside these companies, with AI poised to play an increasingly large role in our future. “This isn’t just window dressing,” he says.

Wired

Gogole’s Fei-Fei Li explaining how they use computers to understand pictures

 

 

Tourists’ Little Helpers

Handy apps for your globe trotting from Wired

Nano-level Concrete

“Many ancient civilizations came up with lime-based cementlike materials to use as mortar in construction, from the gypsum-based plaster used on the pyramids in Egypt to sticky rice/lime mortar employed in parts of the Great Wall of China, but it was the Greeks and Romans who got lucky by adding locally abundant volcanic ash to their cement mix. This formula resulted in a mortar that not only set up quickly and with great strength but could also harden under water and then survive 2,000 years of crashing seas, as the seawall in Italy’s Pozzuoli Bay has. When the Romans mixed in bits of brick and gravel, they got opus caementicium, which we now know as concrete from the Latin, concretus, which means “to grow together.” Ever visited the Pantheon in Rome? That amazing freestanding dome with a 142-foot diameter is made of the stuff. Unreinforced. It has survived 1,890 years and multiple earthquakes with little or no maintenance. So why can’t our roads and bridges survive a tiny fraction as long?

Research just released in February by MIT, Georgetown University, the French National Center for Scientific Research, and the Concrete Sustainability Hub aims to provide some answers. For all these millennia, nobody has fully understood the atomic-level crystal grain structure of this miraculous material that upon adding water becomes a paste that can flow into complex forms and then harden into a strong solid in a matter of hours or weeks depending on the formula used.”

Motor Trend

Photo Credit

Easing flow of data from aircraft

The partnership was logical because Teledyne’s GroundLink technology is equipped on more than half of Boeing’s in-service aircraft and about 70% of the Airbus fleet—or about 10,000 aircraft total. “There has been a move to wirelessly enabled aircraft because it eliminates manual downloads,” says Cecil.

The partnership focuses on making the data flow more simply off the aircraft, enriching it with other sources to provide more value and quickening the process of delivering the value to the operators, says Nelson.

Initially the partnership will focus on post-flight data collection for GE engine-powered aircraft data, with real-time data collection later. “There is still a lot of value to be gained from post-flight data collection,” capturing the low-hanging fruit that is easy to gain, says Nelson.

MRO Network

 

 

The Trump Polymath meeting

5 years President Obama had dinner at John Doerr’s with an impressive group of Valley technology leaders. I wrote this back then.

Today, a similar brain trust, from the Valley and beyond visited with President-Elect Trump in New York. Whatever your politics you have to admire the intellectual firepower POTUS will be able to marshal. Glad he is reaching out to this group at the start of his term. 

Photo Credit

Better Shelter

Just as DIY experts have found ways to remodel Ikea staples into expensive-­looking furniture, refugees and aid agencies are turning Better Shelter structures into hospitals, reception areas and more. In Greece and on its border with Macedonia, the shelters are being linked together and used as early-­childhood-­development centers; in Djibouti, their walls have been retrofitted with “air conditioners” (plastic bottles cut in half to facilitate air flow). Now designers are trying to revamp the Better Shelters to allow for even more flexibility. After all, says Johan Karlsson, managing director of Better Shelter, “we cannot design a one-for-all shelter.”

Time

 

Silicon Collar excerpt: Automation and the UPS driver

Silicon Collar looks at machines and humans at work in over 50 settings across industries and countries. On this blog I will excerpt many of those settings over the next few weeks. On Deal Architect I will excerpt more of the policy parts of the book.

Let's next meet Ken, the UPS deliveryman for our neighborhood. For over two decades, he has had a constant companion: The Delivery Information Acquisition Device (DIAD), which guides delivery routes, gets delivery confirmations from customers, and helps the drivers in many other ways. Without DIADs, it is highly unlikely UPS could deliver over 35 million packages a day during the peak holiday season.

DIAD was developed for UPS in the late 1980s by Motorola, and first deployed in 1990, before the iPhone or the iPad was even conceived. Its battery lasts all day—much longer than the batteries in most Apple or Android devices. Now in its fifth generation, it can communicate with both CDMA and GPRS cellular technologies to stay connected with multiple carriers.

Sensors on the UPS truck track engine performance and simulate what the driver does all week long. That data has led to reductions in excessive idling, and the now-famous UPS "no left turns" dictum on the majority of their routes (to reduce time, fuel, and accidents). It has also allowed UPS to reduce reversing occurrences by a quarter. One mile per driver per day over one year can save UPS up to $50 million in fuel costs. One minute of time saved per driver is worth half a million dollars a year to UPS, so the technologies have made them highly productive workers. They are also much safer drivers, as they log nearly three billion miles per year with less than one accident per million miles driven. UPS inducts drivers who have 25 years of incident-free driving into its "Circle of Honor." In 2016, 8,700 drivers had reached that milestone,

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The Great Texas Wind Boom

Texas produces about four times more wind power than 3rd place California and three times more than 2nd place Iowa. Pretty amazing for Texas, an energy juggernaut that also supplies about 28% of our natural gas and 37% of our crude oil. Texas has surged its wind power capacity 80% to 18,000 megawatts since 2010, with actual wind generation more than doubling over that time.

There are more than 10,000 wind turbines in Texas, and at times last winter, wind supplied 40-50% of the state’s electricity. The Great Texas Wind Boom has all come without much help from legendary Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, who backed out of his grandiose wind plans in the state.

Texas now produces more wind power alone than 25 U.S. states produce from all power sources combined!

Forbes

 

Self-lacing shoes

When wearers press a button near the tongue, the HyperAdapt 1.0s automatically tighten and loosen around their foot. And although this technology may sound frivolous, it’s not just for kicks: simplified shoe fastening could give athletes an edge during competition, and it’s especially useful for people with impaired motor function.1.0s automatically tighten and loosen around their foot. And although this technology may sound frivolous, it’s not just for kicks: simplified shoe fastening could give athletes an edge during competition, and it’s especially useful for people with impaired motor function.

Time