News

  • Happy New Year! Newsletter

    January 08, 2021

    Happy New Year! One of our resolutions is to produce an outstanding virtual March meeting for our members. Do you have a story to share on how 2020 changed your workflow for good: What tools/tech/innovation proved invaluable? How relationships between employees and organizations will look going forward? How have networks changed? If you have a suggestion for a topic, we are all ears.

    In the meantime, we have much to look forward to. Israel, New Zealand, and Germany will be the first stops on a global start-up series kicking off this month. Register today!


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  • TTI/Vanguard Notes & News: Auld Lang Syne - December 18, 2020

    December 18, 2020

    There were not many dry eyes on the TTI/V team when the first covid-19 vaccine was administered to a nurse in New York on Monday. Godspeed to the much awaited vaccines as they make their much-needed way across the world.
    www.abc7ny.com/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-pfizer-ny/8763858/

    Also bringing us happiness is the TTI/V 2021 schedule:
    www.ttivanguard.com/content/2021-Conference-and-Virtual-Event-Calendar

    Of all the ravages of COVID-19, hampering the sustainable growth of the world’s 122 developing nations ranks right up there, as William Haseltine (San Diego, Feb 2015; San Jose, Feb 2012; Phoenix, Dec, 2008) opines. These nations need support from wealthy nations to avoid reverting to unsustainable economic development, such as ill-conceived logging or mining operations.
    www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/

     


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  • TTI/Vanguard: Hyundai goes holiday shopping for robots - Newsletter Dec 11, 2020

    December 11, 2020

    Note from Lisa Yao: I've been looking for the silver linings of 2020 and, amidst plenty of tragic news, they do exist. One of the best was TTI/V’s virtual [next] conference which concluded on Tuesday. Thank you to legendary tech reporters John Markoff and Gregg Zachary for programming the meeting. Thank you to our speakers for inspirational talks. Thank you to our Advisory Board and members for fascinating questions. And thank you to our team—Kelly Baughman, Robin Lockett, and Nancy Kleinrock—who made [next] and everything else in 2020 better by their commitment to this community. [next] Highlights, videos, and available presentations are now posted in our archive.

    Looking ahead, mark your calendars! Our 2021 schedule is here:
    www.ttivanguard.com/content/2021-Conference-and-Virtual-Event-Calendar

     


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  • Notes & News: 2021 Calendar & More - December 10, 2020

    December 04, 2020

    TTI/Vanguard Notes & News: 2021 Calendar & More; December 10, 2020

    [next] 2020 has just one more session left. Please join us on Tuesday, December 8 for:

    George Church, Harvard University: Synthetic Biology, Aging Reversal, Machine Learning
    Julie Hanna, Kiva & Alphabet: From Moonshots to Blockchain to Sustainability
    John C. Mallery, MIT: Strategies and Tactics for Cyber Defense
    Ethan Rublee, farm-ng: Open Software for Tractors & Emerging Agro Innovations

    The first quarter of 2021 is already packed, thanks to Nancy Kleinrock.  Israel, New Zealand, and Germany will be the first stops on a global start-up series that she pioneered amidst decreased travel and increased desire for global connections.


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  • 2021 Conference and Virtual Event Calendar

    December 03, 2020

    Israel Startup Forum

    January 26, 2021♦ Virtual

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    New Zealand Startup Forum

    February 9, 2021♦ Virtual

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    Germany Startup Forum

    February 23, 2021♦ Virtual


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  • TTI/Vanguard: Happy Thanksgiving! Newsletter Nov 20, 2020

    November 20, 2020

    Did you enjoy Tuesday’s sessions as much as we did? From Jerry Kaplan’s contrarian take on AI’s impact on jobs to Monica Lam’s ambitious AI assistant program (plus plenty of stuff in between!), the day was a home run. Relive the magic or experience it for the very first time - videos will be posted today, Highlights will follow early next week. Hans Peter Brondmo, Chief Robot Whisperer at the Everyday Robot Project, X (formerly Google[x]) will kick off our next session on December 1st. Register today! 

    Mark your calendars! In addition to the two upcoming sessions of [next] on Dec 1 and 8, we’re excited to announce a series of international startup forums for early 2021: Jan 26, Israel; Feb 9, New Zealand; Feb 23, Germany. All will take place at 1 pm EST; stay tuned for further details.

    There has been quite the spate of encouraging news on the vaccine front this week: Pfizer–BioNTech was first to report (and then update) positive early COVID-19 vaccine trial results; Moderna’s are equally rosy, plus this Operation Warp Speed-backed entrant requires merely refrigeration, not a deep freeze, and that’s a big deal when it comes to distribution (Ellen Levy and Phil Levy, virtual meeting, Apr 2020; Mark Tibbitt, San Francisco, Dec 2016).
    www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/11/16/covid-moderna-vaccine/


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  • Newsletter: Bats, Birds & Bias - November 13, 2020

    November 13, 2020

    [next] kicked off onTuesday with a knock-out round of speakers. And the hits will keep coming this Tuesday with Jerry Kaplan, Nick Melosh,Noemi Bonessio, Manu Prakash, Jeanette Garcia, and  Monica Lam. We emphasized transportation on the 10th and you’ll see some extra doses of material sciences on the 17th - but we’ve carefully worked each session to have something for everyone.

    Stay tuned for our first batch of videos and Highlights in the archives and please see our agenda and registration.


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  • November 6, 2020 Newlsetter: TTI/Vanguard: Drink to your (and the planet's) health

    November 06, 2020

    [next] begins on Tuesday. Please see our agenda and registration. The first session (topics and speakers below) kicks off on November 10th:

    Techno-Political Responses to the Pandemic
    Milana Trounce, MD, Faculty Mentor, Stanford Global Catastrophic Risk Initiative, Stanford

    Future of Urban Transportation: A Fireside Chat
    Tony Fadell, Member of original iPhone Team, Inventor of the iPod and Co-Founder of Nest
    John Markoff, former New York Times technology reporter and author Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

     


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  • All Treats, No Tricks

    October 30, 2020

    November promises to be action-packed and unpredictable because [next] is upon us: agenda and registration. Beginning on November 10 and running until December 8, you’ll hear from names you know such as George Church, Tony Fadell, Gill Pratt, Jerry Kaplan—and a slew of others whose names you will not forget! 

    Did you join us for our virtual field trip to the New Jersey Institute of Technology on Tuesday? TTI/V staffer Nancy Kleinrock and longtime community member David Bader exceeded our highest expectations. If you missed the event, please visit the video link and presentations in our archive. Kelly Baughman can help you access all the treats. 

    (Speaking of field trips, stay tuned for our 2021 calendar which includes armchair visits to technology hubs around the world, such as Berlin, New Zealand, Israel, and more. We may all still be safe at home, but that hasn’t slowed our quest for the most cutting-edge technologies and research.)

    Yesterday, on the 51st anniversary of the dawn of the Internet, the website of Len Kleinrock’s UCLA Connection Lab went live. The Lab, which is situated just down the hall from where the first ARPANET connection emanated, supports advanced research in technologies at the forefront of all things regarding connectivity: networks, wireless, security, cryptography, blockchain, advanced network protocol design, and distributed systems. Connect with the Connection Lab through Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

    Economist Mariana Mazzucato provides a bit of speculative fiction depicting life in 2023—a picture that is likely rosier than what will actually come about from the literal snafu that is 2020. Of course, what she sees as a utopian vision includes losers as well as winners. So, depending on your industry or outlook, it might strike you as a Halloween-worthy horror story, instead. https://time.com/collection/great-reset/5900739/fix-economy-by-2023/ 

    Even if Mazzucato’s future doesn’t play out in full, researchers at the University of Surrey are using structural health and functionality monitoring data to influence proactive infrastructure decision making to render transport networks more robust to natural disasters. (Jennifer Mathieu, McLean, Sep 2017) https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-roadmap-critical-infrastructure-safer-natural.html 

    Marko Papic (San Francisco, Dec 2019; virtual, Sep 2020) recently warned us of a global decoupling in technology, especially amidst trade tensions with China. And here it comes: The Chinese leadership is meeting to develop the nation’s 14th Five Year Plan, a top-down blueprint for the nation’s activities and direction. Although still a behind-closed-doors discussion, this year’s deliberations appear to point significantly toward Chinese self-reliance, both for chip development and production and for general consumerisms. (Perspectives on China, workshop, Philadelphia, Apr 2006)

    In an Americanized echo of the Arab Spring (Revolutions conference, Washington, D.C., May 2012), Portland (OR)-based activists are using Google’s TensorFlow to perform facial recognition to deanonymize police officers, even when they wear masks. (Andrew Bud, Washington, D.C., Sep 2017) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/technology/facial-recognition-police.html 

    An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Kansas reports that it’s not whether people trust in other people or in artificial-intelligence systems; instead, those with a trusting affect toward other people are easier to convince to view AI as yet another trustworthy team member. (Julie Ancis and Senjuti Basu Roy, NJIT field trip, Oct 2020) https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-artificial-intelligence-boosted-people-relationship.html 

    Bristol Myers Squibb is underwriting work by inistro, which is applying machine learning to the development of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived disease models as well as candidates for drug discovery for two debilitating diseases: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). (Jamie Heywood, Jersey City, Oct 2009; Sean Scott, Boston, Sep 2007) https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/bristol-myers-insitro-ally-to-apply-machine-learning-to-als-r-d

    Gary Marcus (San Francisco, Dec 2019; Brooklyn, Jun 2018; San Diego, Feb 2015; Boston, Apr 2014) and Rodney Brooks (Atlanta, Dec 2004) have raised a pile of Series A cash for their cognitive-engine startup Robust.AI. https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/28/robust-ai-raises-a-15m-series-a-to-improve-problem-solving-for-collaborative-robots/

    A doctoral student at the University of Waterloo provides a k-nearest neighbors-based proof of concept of an AI model derived from “less than one”-shot (LO-shot) learning, which requires tiny training sets by pre-compressing a conventional (i.e., giant) training set into one with just a handful of examples that are highly distilled and with carefully engineered so-called soft labels. “With two points, you can separate 1000 classes or 10K classes or 1M classes,” says the researcher. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/16/1010566/ai-machine-learning-with-tiny-data 

    TTI/Vanguard is bicoastal (is the new word “distributed”?), but the group was born and bred in Santa Monica. So congratulations to the Los Angeles Dodgers!

    “If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.”—Aristotle


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  • October 23, 2020 -NEWSLETTER: Collaboration everywhere!

    October 23, 2020

    [next] registration is open for members. Do not miss big name speakers such as Tony Fadell, Sebastian Thrun, George Church and others. We’ll also explore cutting-edge topics such as socio-political-techno responses to the pandemic, autonomy and privacy, the chemistry of quantum computing, wastewater as a forensic tool and so much more! We kick off with a virtual field trip to the New Jersey Institute of Technology this Tuesday, October 27.

    Members do have to register separately for the visit to NJIT and [next]
    NJIT virtual field trip
    agenda and registration
    [next] conference agenda and registration

    Thank you so much for all of the compliments we have already received for these two upcoming events. Let's give credit where credit is due. Longtime TTIV community member David Bader and our own incomparable Nancy Kleinrock designed Tuesday's visit to NJIT. Legendary journalists (amongst other things) John Markoff (former New York Times) and Gregg Zachary (former Wall Street Journal) built the [next] agenda. Hats off and thank you for a yeoman job by all. 

     


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