The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's issue.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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| As 150 Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), CEOs, law enforcement officials, heads of national cyber agencies and representatives from academia and civil society were gathering in Geneva this week for The World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity global insurance company Axa released its 2023 Global Risks Report. Almost 90% of experts surveyed for the report say the risk of a massive cyberattack is significant at a global level.
“The fears are certainly there,” says Akshay Joshi, the Head of Industry and Partnerships for the Forum's Centre for Cybersecurity, “It underscores the need for greater collaboration because the problem is not going away.”
The Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity’s three priorities are helping corporates build cyber resilience, strengthening global collaboration and “navigating cyber frontiers”, ie new threats posed by emerging technologies. The meeting focused on all three topics.
Read on to get the key takeaways from the conference and the week's most important technology news impacting business. |
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| For almost 20 years the scientific community has talked about how graphene, a super strong, super thin, and super versatile new material could change the way products are made. That promise is literally about to become concrete.
Graphene Innovations Manchester (GIM), a scale-up located in The University of Manchester’s Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC), has entered into a $1 billion deal with Quazar Investment Company to create a new company called Giga Graphene Technologies in the United Arab Emirates. The new company aims to build a gigafactory and produce premium, environmentally-friendly products using advanced 2D materials, including breakthrough graphene-enhanced concrete that does not need cement or water and can be made using recycled materials. It is one of the most ambitious projects to date to commercialize graphene.
“This is a tipping point,” says Vivek Koncherry, PhD, founder of GIM, which designs graphene-based compounds and production systems that allow partners to commercialize graphene at scale. “You need investment to scale. Now graphene can have real impact on global problems.”
Potential uses of graphene are wide-ranging. Among other things the new material could be used to increase the lifespan and decrease the charging time of lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors; improve the propulsion and thermal management of satellites, making them cheaper and more efficient; replace current desalination technologies; make pipes and storage tanks corrosion-resistant; develop stronger adhesives; create flexible, low-cost, transparent solar cells that can turn virtually any surface into a source of electric power; to develop optical communications and transparent circuits that can be bent and twisted and build bigger and lighter wind turbines and more resilient space habitats. (GIM has built a prototype of a space station habitat using graphene and carbon composites. See the rendering pictured here). |
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Who: Rob Carlson, PhD, is a Managing Director of Planetary Technologies (née Bioeconomy Capital) and an Affiliate Professor in the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. At the broadest level, Carlson is interested in the future role of biology as a human technology. He has worked to develop new biological technologies in both academic and commercial environments, focusing on molecular measurement and microfluidic systems. Carlson has also developed a number of new technical and economic metrics for measuring the progress of biological technologies. He is the author of the book Biology is Technology, the Promise, Peril and New Business of Engineering Life, published in 2010 by Harvard University Press. He was a speaker at the PUZZLE X conference in Barcelona which took place November 7-9.
Topic: Why DNA data storage could be the Next Big Thing.
Quote: "I am not seeing a lot of options for adequate data storage capacity other than DNA. Biology is more sophisticated at information processing than anything humans have invented. We are going to learn a lot from biology over the next decades and what I hope is that we can harness it to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems, including the data storage crisis."
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| In 2019 The World Economic Forum named social robotics as one of the 10 top emerging technologies that has the potential to alter established ways of living and provide major benefits to societies and economies. If Furhat Robotics, a spin-out of KTH Innovation, the innovation arm of Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, has its way that prediction will become true sooner rather than later.
Global pharmaceutical company Merck is piloting a pre-screening medical application with one of Furhat's robots. Germany’s Deutsche Bahn has field tested one of the company’s robots use as a multilingual travel concierge at Frankfurt Airport and in train stations in Japan and Germany. The organizers of an exhibition in Saudi Arabia used Furhat robots to conduct a visitor survey, collecting some 30,000 responses. Microsoft is using the robot on its platform to demonstrate how customers can connect with OpenAI.
Furhat grew out of a research project at KTH. The co-founders - Samer Al Moubayed, Gabriel Skantze, Jonas Beskow and Preben Wik - are researchers. Two are part-time professors at the university. “The whole idea was how far can we go to recreate human interaction,” says Viktor Lundberg, Furhat’s Head of Marketing. . |
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Number of operations per second that a new supercomputer called Aurura is expected to be able to process. Housed at the U.S. Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory, Aurora is among a new breed of machines known as exascale supercomputers. Built by Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Aurora is the size of two tennis courts, weighs 600 tons and is powered by more than 60,000 graphics processing units, or GPUs. The supercomputer’s high-performance capabilities will be matched with the latest advances in artificial intelligence. The supercomputer, which was unveiled this week, will be used by scientists researching cancer, nuclear fusion, vaccines, climate change, encryption, cosmology and other complex sciences and technologies, reports the Wall Street Journal.
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DLD, January 11-13, Munich, GermanyWorld Economic Forum Annual Meeting, January 15-18, Davos, Switzerland.4YFN, February 26-29, Barcelona, Spain, February |
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