July
Top UN official calls for AI adoption to take on climate change “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re running out of time,” stated Doreen Bodgan-Martin, secretary-general of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, at this year’s AI for Good Summit in Geneva.
Situated just opposite the flags of the UN, TI attended the summit designed to showcase how artificial intelligence could contribute to the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At the time of reporting, only 12% of the SDGs were on track, and according to Bogdan-Martin, poverty, hunger, pollution, biodiversity loss, and global temperature remained on the rise.
“Using AI to help put the 2030 agenda back on track is no longer an opportunity, it’s our responsibility.”
How Unilever is using AI to make its products more sustainable As an enormous corporation, Unilever is one enterprise using the technology to help it hit net zero at pace.
The running of its ice cream cabinets, for example, is responsible for 10% of the company’s emissions. Solutions to this include ‘warming up’ the freezers and using AI to create ingredients for the ice cream so that they can withstand a slightly higher temperature.
Alongside this, Unilever also uses AI to optimise waste reduction, and use the lowest possible energy levels required. The FMCG giant is also using AI to create ingredients for laundry detergents which aren’t fossil fuel derived.
Elon Musk announces gen AI firm xAI After joining the protest for a pause in AI development earlier in the year, Elon Musk – X owner, Tesla CEO, and SpaceX founder — announced the launch of his own generative artificial intelligence startup, xAI.
The firm hired a team of engineers who previously worked at OpenAI and DeepMind. Musk posted on X: “Announcing the formation of @xAI to understand reality.”
Police, Data, Action! On average, the UK’s West Midlands Police deals with around 2,000 emergency calls a day. Before its move to the cloud, all the data captured within its day-to-day ran in disparate silos, making some of the data inaccurate or outdated.
While on patrol, response time is critical in policing, and WMP realised that unlocking this siloed information presented a great opportunity to improve efficiency.
TI spoke with the force’s IT and digital director, Helen Davis, on how the force was the first in the UK to take a data and cloud transformation journey, and how it has enhanced the work of officers on patrol, plus the lessons it has learned.
Assessing extreme weather impact on critical infrastructure During a summer of catastrophic floods and wildfires across the globe, towns and cities are putting in their defences both physically and digitally to help maintain critical infrastructure.
For floods in the UK, smart city firm Connected Places Catapult collaborated with water industry firm Anglian Water, telecoms provider BT, and electricity provider UK Power Networks to create a digital twin demonstrator. The digital twin uses the joint data points from the water and sewage assets, telecom assets, and power assets in a town to present how a flood disturbing one asset can affect another.
Biggest moment of Q3
Elon Musk confirms he took Starlink sat offline during attack on Russia
In September, Starlink, X, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that he chose not to activate one of his Starlink satellites during a Ukraine attack on Russia.
Musk said he sought to avoid being “complicit in a major act of war,” and took to X to explain that Ukraine called for connectivity from Starlink for an “emergency request” which he denied.
The “emergency” was a planned attack on Russia’s navy off the coat of Crimea 2022, using ships and marine drones that depended on Starlink connectivity. Russian ships were left unharmed.
Still, the news conjured up conversation and debate in industry on the power tech giants have on geopolitics.
Human rights consultant Siyabulela Mandela said on a panel at TechBBQ that if connective technologies like Starlink were made accessible to both the privileged and the marginalised, and were not controlled by autocratic governments, then it could be a force for good.
August
UK Home Office covertly backs facial recognition cameras in retail shops Although two years ago the US facial recognition firm Clearview AI received an £17m fine from the UK’s ICO for secretly collecting images of British people, the UK Government covertly made plans this August to support the rollout of the tech in high-street shops. The Home Office allegedly made the strategy in March in a closed-door meeting between senior Home Office officials, and facial recognition camera firm Facewatch.
A HO spokesperson defended the decision, arguing that shops are at the heart of our communities, and that it was important that businesses could trade without fear of crime or disorder.
Hinkley Point C: Constructing nuclear power on a digital platform In the transition to green energy, the UK’s first nuclear power station in over 20 years is designed to reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels.
The plant has around 5,000 to 10,000 people working on it daily, with about 50 cranes working concurrently. The project also saw the implementation of a cloud-based mobile solution created to replace pen and paper – to use in the field for forms, defect management, project delivery and handover processes.
Meet the AI whisperer AKA: Albert Phelps, prompt engineer at consultancy firm Accenture, spoke with TI about the new, and ‘in-demand’ job role which may hold the key to unlocking the full potential of AI systems, and help firms get the most out of what large language models have to offer. Phelps described the work as “a hybrid of critical thinking and programming in natural language.”
Hinkley Point C
OpenAI releases ChatGPT Enterprise with extra business-focussed features OpenAI launches a business-focussed edition of its popular chatbot app ChatGPT which introduces new features such as ‘enterprise-grade privacy’, unlimited data analysis features, and enhanced customisation offerings.
The Silicon Valley AI company has sparked privacy concerns, however, and in its enterprise grade version sought to reassure businesses that this release is safe to use and was not trained on any business data.
Pass new AI legislation or fall behind the EU and the US, UK MPs warn Finally, for August, the world saw increasing pressure and panic to catch up with AI legislation, or “risk falling behind”, as UK MPs worried.
The Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee stated that the UK government needed to put in a new AI legislation as soon as possible, particularly in the lead up to its AI summit, set in November. An interim report set out twelve challenges that needed addressing including AI bias, privacy, the need for large datasets (held by few organisations) job replacement, as well as the potential threat to human life.
September
Ministry of Defence suffers data breach UK military and intelligence information was reportedly leaked online following a data breach at a partner firm. Security firm, Zaun, which handles the safety of military locations such as nuclear submarine bases, a chemical weapon lab, and GCHQ listening post, was the victim of the breach.
Zaun attributed the data breach to “a rogue Windows 7 PC that was running software for one of our manufacturing machines”.
Hacking group LockBit released the information on the dark web. “This is potentially very damaging to the security of some of our most sensitive sites,” commented Labour MP Kevan Jones, who sits on the UK’s Commons Defence Select Committee.
Climate protestor interrupts Shell at CogX While attending London-based conference CogX, TI became witness to a climate protest while general manager of AI at Shell, Amy Challen, spoke on stage.
“Shell is a climate criminal,” the protestor accused as security removed her from the talk.
In her speech, Challen said that “AI and digital will have a really fundamental role to play in the energy transition,” and that it is something that “we should really take seriously.”
However, the climate protestors from Fossil Free London, told TI afterwards: “We can’t let Shell get off the hook anymore. Most of Shell’s investments are still in oil and gas.”
MGM Resorts hit with major cyberattack Hackers shut down the Las Vegas strip last September, causing considerable disruption to key systems at MGM Resorts.
Reservations, bookings, hotel key cards, casino floors, and company email systems all went down because of the attack, turning all screens in the casinos blue.
TechBBQ 2023: The ‘hygge’ Nordic start-up even with big ideas Reporting from Copenhagen, our deputy editor Ann-Marie Corvin spoke on stage, and off, to entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts on their views and technologies.
The event hosted a ‘smorgasbord’ of talks, and tech, with a fair ratio of gender representation, with 52% of speakers women, which translated to a diversity of ideas.
TechBBQ
One example being a technology to ‘Save the Vagina’ which helps support midwives and health workers in their efforts to protect and reduce birth ruptures.
Ann-Marie also moderated a panel, with human rights consultant Siyabulela Mandela, foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Sune Rasmussen, and founder of DKTech4Ukraine on the role of tech and media in human rights activism.
A greener boat for Orange The French telco broke a bottle of champagne on its new undersea cabling vessel at its launch ceremony at the end of the quarter.
The new cable-laying ship aims to provide “efficient and sustainable global connectivity” with the help of automation technology, a more sustainable hybrid engine, and its new robot: Alpha.
Submarine cables carry 99% of intercontinental telephone and data communication, and Orange Marine owns 15% of the global cable-laying fleet, the new ship was welcomed by many including Meta, Google, and the French Navy, who were all in attendance of the ceremony.
According to Orange, enhanced capacity will not only help with increased internet traffic but also with the rapid growth of advanced technologies like AI.
Writer’s pick of 2023
How can digital twins make hydrogen cheaper and available faster?
Located at AVEVA World 2023 in downtown San Francisco, I chatted to sustainability and product chief of industrial software firm AVEVA on how their digital twin technology can make hydrogen production more efficient.
In a nutshell, the digital twins uses sensor technologies and AI to visualise how hydrogen electrolysers manufacturers can build their facilities most efficiently; effectively making production cheaper, and thus the products, too.
“Realistically, to make it economically feasible, they’re going to have to design it in an optimal way, and for that you will need software support to design those in more optimum ways,” said its director of product management.
The prospect of hydrogen energy is really exciting for me, but the expense has always worried me – so to see solutions being made is electrifying (pardon the pun!).