University of California, Berkeley

BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES STUDENT WINNER OF NINTH ANNUAL BREAKTHROUGH JUNIOR CHALLENGE SCIENCE VIDEO COMPETITION

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, February 7, 2024

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 6, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The Breakthrough Prize Foundation today announced Sia Godika, 17, a senior at Neev Academy, an international school in Bangalore, India, as winner of the ninth annual Breakthrough Junior Challenge, a global science video competition designed to inspire creative thinking and communications skills around fundamental concepts in the life sciences, physics, and mathematics.

Key Points: 
  • The Breakthrough Junior Challenge will award a total of $400,000 in educational prizes for Sia, her science teacher, and her school.
  • Sia was informed of her win by her older brother Samay Godika, who is himself a previous winner of the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, topping the competition with his original video on circadian rhythms.
  • Having watched him receive the prize six years ago, Sia will now be honored alongside the 2024 Breakthrough Prize laureates at a ceremony in Los Angeles this spring.
  • Sia's submission is titled Yamanaka Factors, and explores discoveries made by 2013 Breakthrough Prize winner and Nobelist, Shinya Yamanaka.

BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES STUDENT WINNER OF NINTH ANNUAL BREAKTHROUGH JUNIOR CHALLENGE SCIENCE VIDEO COMPETITION

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, February 7, 2024

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 7, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The Breakthrough Prize Foundation today announced Sia Godika, 17, a senior at Neev Academy, an international school in Bangalore, India, as winner of the ninth annual Breakthrough Junior Challenge, a global science video competition designed to inspire creative thinking and communications skills around fundamental concepts in the life sciences, physics, and mathematics.

Key Points: 
  • The Breakthrough Junior Challenge will award a total of $400,000 in educational prizes for Sia, her science teacher, and her school.
  • Sia was informed of her win by her older brother Samay Godika, who is himself a previous winner of the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, topping the competition with his original video on circadian rhythms.
  • Having watched him receive the prize six years ago, Sia will now be honored alongside the 2024 Breakthrough Prize laureates at a ceremony in Los Angeles this spring.
  • Sia's submission is titled Yamanaka Factors, and explores discoveries made by 2013 Breakthrough Prize winner and Nobelist, Shinya Yamanaka.

Leading Neuroscientists Bring Elemind Out of Stealth, Close $12 Million Seed Round for AI-enhanced Neurotech Wearable

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Elemind , the new AI-enhanced neurotech health company, emerged from stealth today, closing a $12M Seed round to further develop its first product ahead of its reveal in the coming months.

Key Points: 
  • Elemind , the new AI-enhanced neurotech health company, emerged from stealth today, closing a $12M Seed round to further develop its first product ahead of its reveal in the coming months.
  • The company’s wearable neurotechnology reads individual brainwaves and guides them in real-time by responding with tailored stimulation.
  • The company partnered with multiple leading research institutions to validate the technology and build applications for it.
  • Clinical trials also demonstrate Elemind is effective at increasing pain thresholds and enhancing sedation ; this study is currently in peer review.

Anne Belinn Joins Alliant Insurance Services’ Employee Benefits Group

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Anne Belinn has joined Alliant Insurance Services as a Vice President within its Employee Benefits Group .

Key Points: 
  • Anne Belinn has joined Alliant Insurance Services as a Vice President within its Employee Benefits Group .
  • Based in the Bay Area, Belinn will provide employee benefits consulting to a wide variety of clients across the nation.
  • “Anne’s niche is helping growing start-ups, mid-sized, and larger mid-sized employers recruit and retain the best talent,” said Kevin Overbey, President, Alliant Employee Benefits.
  • Prior to joining Alliant, Belinn had a lengthy tenure as a Senior Vice President and Partner of a large consulting firm.

Fascination, persistence and optimism: how Fei-Fei Li helped shape the AI revolution in a field dominated by alpha males

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, February 6, 2024

One of the key figures in this, as a contributor to both the science and the debate, is Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, and co-director of AI4All, a non-profit organisation promoting diversity and inclusion in the field of AI.

Key Points: 
  • One of the key figures in this, as a contributor to both the science and the debate, is Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, and co-director of AI4All, a non-profit organisation promoting diversity and inclusion in the field of AI.
  • One thread is the coming-of-age of the science of AI; the other is an account of her own coming-of-age as a scientist.
  • The personal dimension came to the fore, she says, after what was initially a “very nerdy book” was given the thumbs-down by a colleague.

Matter becomes mind

  • Her academically trained maternal grandparents found themselves on the wrong side of history during the Cultural Revolution.
  • He was, says Li, the kind of parent a child might design for themselves if left to their own devices.
  • Throughout The Worlds I See, Li reflects on the influence of this parental binary on her advancing career as a scientist.
  • Without her father’s childlike capacity to pay total attention to random phenomena, her research might never have found its innovative path.
  • Her own audacious question – “what is vision about?” – came into focus by degrees.
  • For someone given to describing her enterprise in terms of revelation and revolution, her actual research on vision seems anything but visionary.
  • Matter somehow becomes mind.”

    Read more:
    AI is our ‘Promethean fire': using it wisely means knowing its true nature – and our own minds

What is data?

  • She becomes convinced that the principle can be applied to machine learning.
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk escalated the scale and speed of their research as categories multiplied, from the original ten to thirty, a hundred, a thousand.
  • For Li, the apparently humdrum conviction that learning should be driven by data rather than algorithms arrives as “a moment of epiphany”.
  • Digital agents scan diverse areas of data and exchange what they have learned to generate more sophisticated modes of correlation.

Distributed intelligence

  • Distributed intelligence means distributed opportunities to participate in the co-evolution of human and machine intelligence.
  • Big science and high technology cease to be the exclusive preserve of specialists whose modes of knowledge are beyond the understanding of ordinary people.
  • It is the dedicated school teacher, Li says, who is the real emblem of the future in human technology.
  • She completed high school while supplementing the family income with a $2 an hour job in a Chinese restaurant.
  • Her exams at Princeton were done by special arrangement at the hospital clinic where her mother was undergoing surgery for a deteriorating cardiovascular condition.
  • If Li’s efforts can be seen as a feminist enterprise, it is perhaps because the field in which she works is dominated by male celebrities, who persist in seeing the future as a Darwinian struggle between human and machine intelligence.
  • If there is an overriding theme in The Worlds I See, it is that human and artificial intelligence form a double helix.


Jane Goodall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Matica Bio Appoints Life Sciences Veteran Paul Kim as Chief Executive Officer

Retrieved on: 
Monday, February 5, 2024

Key Points: 
  • View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240205648112/en/
    Paul Kim, Matica Bio's new CEO (Photo: Business Wire)
    As incoming CEO, Kim will manage daily operations and provide strategic direction to Matica Bio as it rapidly expands its capacity and capabilities in the U.S. and Korea.
  • Yun Jeong Song, outgoing president and CEO, will take on a new role as president of Matica Holdings.
  • Kim brings to Matica Bio nearly three decades of experience across the CDMO, CRO and R&D biopharma sectors as CEO, managing director, chief business officer, managing partner and executive board member at WCCT Global, Genopis, Cobra Biologics, Cognate BioServices, and Novartis Venture Fund.
  • Kim is also the founder of Forward Equity Partners (formerly Medivate Partners), a private equity firm focused on cross-border healthcare and life sciences investments – the first ever in Korea.

ExaBITS Raises Oversubscribed Round Addressing GPU Shortage in AI

Retrieved on: 
Friday, February 2, 2024

Oversubscribed Pre-Seed Round

Key Points: 
  • San Francisco, California--(Newsfile Corp. - February 2, 2024) - ExaBITS.ai , a pioneer in the decentralized cloud computing space for AI, is pleased to announce the closing of its oversubscribed pre-seed round.
  • The funding will enable the team to scale the GPU optimization technology to address the shortage of resources that has left AI companies in limbo waiting for available compute or paying inflated rates.
  • As ExaBITS advances in the decentralized computing domain, they invite forward-thinking organizations, AI developers, and GPU owners to join the mission.
  • For those who share the vision of democratizing building and shaping the future of the space, ExaBITS welcomes users to join the new revolution in AI.

Generation Lab Emerges from Stealth with Funding Round and Mission to Extend the Human Healthspan – Waitlist for Its Clinically Driven At-Home Aging Test + Personalized Aging Intervention Opens Today

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, January 30, 2024

The company works with clinicians who can recommend personalized interventions, and Generation Lab can measure the effectiveness of these over time.

Key Points: 
  • The company works with clinicians who can recommend personalized interventions, and Generation Lab can measure the effectiveness of these over time.
  • These diseases are a major cause of morbidity and mortality and place a significant burden on our healthcare system.
  • Moreover, the biological age is quantified by Generation Lab for each function of the body: inflammation, regeneration, homeostasis, reproduction, etc.
  • After subsequent Generation Lab tests, your clinician can review how effective each intervention was and its impact on your health and rate of aging.

NewHydrogen CEO Steve Hill Discusses Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Future with UCI Expert

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, January 30, 2024

SANTA CLARITA, Calif., Jan. 30, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NewHydrogen, Inc. (OTCMKTS:NEWH), the developer of ThermoLoop™, a breakthrough technology that uses water and heat rather than electricity to produce the world’s cheapest green hydrogen, today announced that in a recent podcast the Company’s CEO Steve Hill spoke with Dr. Jeffrey Reed, Chief Scientist at the Advanced Power and Energy Program at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The episode explores the latest developments in renewable fuels and energy storage, hydrogen blending for power generation and examining strategies to utilize gaseous fuels for a sustainable future.

Key Points: 
  • The episode explores the latest developments in renewable fuels and energy storage, hydrogen blending for power generation and examining strategies to utilize gaseous fuels for a sustainable future.
  • Dr. Reed, renowned for his contributions to the field, shares a mission aligned with NewHydrogen's commitment to a more sustainable future.
  • The conversation navigates through crucial topics, ranging from the potential future of hydrogen power to innovative renewable energy experiments, offering a comprehensive view of the landscape.
  • He is the principal author of the first renewable hydrogen production roadmap for the state of California.

SK Networks Collaborates with Vivek to Propel AI-centered Business-oriented Investment Company Through 'SK Networks Renaissance Project'

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, January 31, 2024

SK Networks (CEO: Hojeong Lee) announced on 31 January that it has taken a significant stride towards its AI-centered Business-oriented Investment Company ambitions by officially signing a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the 'SK Networks Renaissance Project.'

Key Points: 
  • SK Networks (CEO: Hojeong Lee) announced on 31 January that it has taken a significant stride towards its AI-centered Business-oriented Investment Company ambitions by officially signing a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the 'SK Networks Renaissance Project.'
  • The signing ceremony, held at Samil Building in Jongno-gu, Seoul, included key officials such as SK Networks President & COO Sunghwan Choi, and Managing Director Ranadivé.
  • In a strategic move to maximize its value as an AI-centered business-oriented investment company, SK Networks is set to establish a consortium for future large-scale investment cooperation, concurrently optimizing its value as an AI-centered business-oriented Investment company.
  • Under the terms of this accord, Ranadivé and prominent U.S. investors would assume control of a portion of SK Networks' treasury stocks during forthcoming investment endeavors.