Water-poor Jordan on Thursday launched a project using seawater to produce crops with clean energy.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Crown Prince Haakon of Norway, which contributed most of the $3.7 million cost, inaugurated the facility in the kingdom’s Red Sea port city of Aqaba.

Haakon told reporters he was “impressed by the way innovative ideas have been translated into a plant the size of four football fields.”

The facility, part of the Sahara Forest Project (SFP), produces “energy, freshwater and food and all this in an arid desert,” he said.

The facility, surrounded by rocky desert, uses seawater to cool greenhouses. A solar-powered plant then desalinates the water for irrigation.

Inside the greenhouses, pesticide-free cucumbers flourish.

The project is set to produce 130 tons of vegetables a year and 10,000 liters of freshwater a day.

“This is just the start,” said Joakim Hauge, head of SFP. He said the organization selected Jordan because it has the required abundance of sunlight and seawater.

Last month, a report by Stanford University suggested that Jordan, one of the world’s driest countries, could face more severe droughts unless new technologies are applied in farming and other sectors.

“Future adaptation to extreme droughts in Jordan will be an immense challenge,” said the report by the university’s School of Earth Science. “The projected negative impacts of more severe droughts of greater duration calls for essential alternatives.”
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They took to Twitter, Facebook and their corporate blog posts. They called their congressional representatives, signed letters and pledged to fight.  

This week, many tech industry leaders geared up for battle after the Trump administration announced it was ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows people in the U.S. without legal documents to live, work and go to school without fear of deportation.

The fate of young adults who benefited from DACA is a civil rights issue, say tech executives and leaders.

However, the lengths to which the tech industry will go to get Congress to act before the program expires in six months remain unclear.

Already, some tech executives have pledged not to fire employees who are DACA beneficiaries, even if they lose the legal right to work in the U.S.

Tools of political action

But there is more the tech industry could do. It could use its very services to put out a call to employees and customers to lobby Congress, something many firms and organizations did in 2012 when they successfully fought anti-copyright piracy legislation.

​Tech companies also could pledge not to disclose personal information collected on their platforms to authorities to help deport people.

While many tech leaders spoke out this week against the decision, it’s not clear how uniform the industry is about how to advocate for DACA beneficiaries.

“They need to go to Washington and sit down with people and say, ‘Get this done,’” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an advocacy group co-founded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It is a must-pass legislative item.”

DACA before tax reform

Some companies have promised to make congressional legislation their No. 1 issue, even putting aside their long-held hopes for tax reform, which congressional leaders pledged to address this fall.

Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer at Microsoft, said Congress should pursue DACA legislation before tax reform.

“We need to put the humanitarian needs of these 800,000 people on the legislative calendar before a tax bill,” Smith wrote in a blog post.

The software giant also is pledging to help with the legal costs of the 39 DACA beneficiaries who it knows work at its company, he said.

Zuckerberg, in a Facebook post, called on people to contact congressional representatives.

In an email to employees, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company would provide help to the more than 250 employees who are in the program, according to CNET.

Ads attacking Trump

The Emerson Collective, the philanthropic organization run by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow, began airing political ads Wednesday in some cable markets criticizing the Trump administration action regarding DACA.

Outside of Silicon Valley, business leaders also were joining the call for action.

Stas Gayshan, managing director of Cambridge Innovation Center, a workspace business in the Boston area catering to entrepreneurs, said he planned to be part of “ramping up pressure to make it clear that these folks are Americans.”

“This is a pretty clear assault on what makes our country great,” said Gayshan, who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Uzbekistan when he was nine years old.

In Chicago, Rishi Shah, chief executive officer and founder of Outcome Health, a digital health firm currently valued on paper at more than $1 billion, said he was seeing the tech industry move quickly to get Congress to act.

“This is not a niche issue for the industry,” said Shah, whose father emigrated to the U.S. from India. “We really see this as a defining moment.”
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Facebook Inc. said on Wednesday it had found that an influence operation likely based in Russia spent $100,000 on ads promoting divisive social and political messages in a two-year-period through May.

Facebook, the dominant social media network, said that many of the ads promoted 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages that it has now suspended. The ads spread polarizing views on topics including immigration, race and gay rights, instead of backing a particular political candidate, it said.

Facebook announced the findings in a blog post by its chief security officer, Alex Stamos, and said that it was cooperating with federal inquiries into influence operations during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The company said it found no link to any presidential campaign. Three-fourths of the ads were national in scope, and the rest did not appear to reflect targeting of political swing-states as voting neared.

Facebook did not print the names of any of the suspended pages, but some of them included such words as “refugee” and “patriot.”

Even if no laws were violated, the pages ran afoul of Facebook requirements for authenticity, setting up the

suspensions.

More than $1 billion was spent on digital political ads during the 2016 presidential campaign, 10,000 times the amount identified by Facebook’s security team.

But the findings buttress U.S. intelligence agency conclusions that Russia was actively involved in shaping the election.

Facebook previously published a white paper on influence operations, including what it said were fake “amplifier” accounts for propaganda, and said it was cracking down.

As recently as June, it told journalists that it had not found any evidence to date of Russian operatives buying election-related ads on its platform.

A Facebook employee said Wednesday that there were unspecified connections between the divisive ads and a well-known Russian “troll factory” in St. Petersburg that publishes comments on social media.

Beyond the issue ads, Facebook said it uncovered $50,000 more in overtly political advertising that might have a link to Russia. Some of those ads were bought using the Russian language, even though they were displayed to users in English.
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Forty years ago, as President Carter was spending his first year in office, NASA launched two spacecraft hoping to learn about Jupiter, Saturn and Saturn’s moon Titan. But beyond all expectations, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still communicating. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Facebook’s $600 million losing bid to buy the streaming rights to a hugely popular cricket tournament in India shows the social network is willing to spend big bucks for high-profile sporting events to keep users engaged on its platform.

Facebook on Monday emerged as the highest bidder for the rights to stream the Indian Premier League (IPL) through 2022, but lost out to Twenty-First Century Fox’s Star India, which bid $2.55 billion for the television and streaming rights combined.

Cricket is the most popular sport in India and the IPL is watched by more than a billion people worldwide. The tournament began in 2008 with franchise owners including movie stars and India’s richest man.

The bid by Facebook also highlights the company’s efforts to accelerate its push into video as it tries to take advertising dollars from television and increase the time people spend on its platform. Facebook currently offers live video from a number of news publishers as well as its users.

“[Facebook’s bid] is still significant because it’s such a large amount of money in a market that’s still nascent,” Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser said. “It clarifies that they intend to be a real player in traditional premium video content.”

With a cash pile of $6.25 billion, Facebook will have even more shots at bidding for live sporting events as it seeks to keep people glued to its expanding media network.

Facebook kicked off live-streaming sports events about a year ago with a soccer match between Manchester United and Everton. It has since streamed basketball, baseball and more soccer matches.

Another significant deal for Facebook was its agreement with Major League Baseball in May to live-stream 20 games this season.

However, the social network lost out to Amazon.com in April for the highly coveted rights to stream 10 U.S. National Football League (NFL) games this year.

Amazon agreed to pay the NFL five times the amount Twitter had spent on the rights last year, which was reported to be $10 million, a source told Reuters at the time.

Facebook was also competing with Twitter and Snapchat parent Snap to score the online rights to video highlights from Fox for next year’s soccer World Cup, Bloomberg reported in July.

Facebook might also eye other big events such as the Olympics or the soccer World Cup, the world’s most viewed sports event, Tigress Financial Partners analyst Ivan Feinseth said.
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Natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey pose a threat not only to human lives but also to telecommunication systems. When they go down, entire cities and communities are cut off from each other. But mesh networks can get people connected again and, during emergencies, be a crucial link to information. VOA’s Tina Trinh explains.
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In Silicon Valley, all eyes are on Dara Khosrowshahi, the new CEO of Uber, who starts his turnaround of the ride-hailing firm on Tuesday.

But for Iranian Americans working in tech, Khosrowshahi’s appointment is not just about who will guide Uber, a nearly $70 billion company that has searched since June for a new leader.

Khosrowshahi, 48, is Iranian American. Born in Tehran, he came to the U.S. when he was nine. His appointment highlights the prominence of people of Iranian descent in the tech industry at a time when many feel under increased scrutiny.

“The Persian Mafia in Tech gets $70B bigger!” noted one Iranian American tech investor.

Khosrowshahi’s hiring prompted Ali Tahmaseb, a tech entrepreneur, to compile a list of more than 50 Iranian Americans who have founded companies, become tech investors or are in leadership roles at tech firms.

They include Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and Falon Roz Fatemi, founder and chief executive of Node.io and, when she was 19, Google’s youngest employee at the time.

Uber board’s appointment of Khosrowshahi comes at a time when Iranian Americans are increasingly worried about how they are perceived, said Leila Austin, executive director at the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans, a non profit organization based in Washington, D.C.

More than 80 percent of Iranian Americans in a recent survey said they worried about rising discrimination, double those had expressed the same concern in 2015. And 56 percent said they had personally experienced discrimination.

Khosrowshahi, until recently the chief executive at Expedia, spoke out against the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict Iranians traveling to the U.S.

The Trump administration argues that its more restrictive visa and immigration policies will make the United States safer, and American citizens more prosperous.

In January, Khosrowshahi told his employees in a memo, obtained by Business Insider, that the travel ban would make the U.S. “ever so slightly less dangerous as a place to live, but it will certainly be seen as a smaller nation, one that is inward-looking versus forward thinking, reactionary versus visionary.”

Khosrowshahi faces a long list of problems at Uber. Sexual harassment claims. An aggressive, break-things culture. Internal strife within the board.

And then there is the actual Uber business, which has transformed transportation worldwide. The company has faced more pressure from Lyft, its main U.S. competitor. It has given up in big global markets, ceding to rivals in China, Russia and India. In his first all-hands meeting with Uber employees, Khosrowshahi said the company planned to go public in 18 to 36 months.

No doubt Khosrowshahi’s job at Uber is a big one, yet the enormity of the challenge adds to the Iranian community’s sense of pride, said Pirooz Parvarandeh, a longtime Silicon Valley executive who created a nonprofit to gather and analyze data about Iranian Americans’ contributions to the U.S.

Khosrowshahi’s ascendancy at Uber is “symbolic of the value and service that Iranian Americans bring to America,” he said.
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Tesla Inc. is starting production of the cells for its solar roof tiles at its factory in Buffalo, New York.

The company has already begun installing its solar roofs, which look like regular roofs but are made of glass tiles. But until now, it has been making them on a small scale near its vehicle factory in Fremont, California.

Tesla’s Chief Technical Officer, JB Straubel, says the company now has several hundred workers and machinery installed in its 1.2 million-square-foot factory in Buffalo.

“By the end of this year we will have the ramp-up of solar roof modules started in a substantial way,” Straubel told The Associated Press Thursday. “This is an interim milestone that we’re pretty proud of.”

The Buffalo plant was originally begun by Silevo, a solar panel startup, on the site of an old steel mill. Solar panel maker SolarCity Corp. bought Silevo in 2014. Then Tesla acquired SolarCity for around $2 billion late last year.

SolarCity was run by cousins of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who sat on SolarCity’s board.

“This factory, and the opportunity to build solar modules and cells in the U.S., was part of why this project made sense,” Straubel said.

Tesla’s partner, Panasonic Corp., will make the photovoltaic cells, which look similar to computer chips. Tesla workers will combine the cells into modules that fit into the roof tiles. The tiles will eventually be made in Buffalo as well, along with more traditional solar panels. Panasonic is also working with Tesla at its Gigafactory battery plant in Nevada.

Straubel says Tesla eventually hopes to reach 2 gigawatts of cell production annually at the Buffalo plant. That’s higher than its initial target of 1 gigawatt by 2019. Straubel said Tesla has been working on making the factory more efficient.

One gigawatt is equivalent to the annual output of a large nuclear or coal-fired power plant, Straubel said, “so it’s like we’re eliminating one of those every single year.”

Straubel wouldn’t say how many customers have ordered solar roof tiles, but said demand is strong and it will take Tesla through the end of next year to meet its current orders. Both he and Musk have had the tiles installed on their roofs.

Tesla shares were up less than 1 percent to $355.65 in afternoon trading.
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Microsoft and Amazon are pairing their voice assistants together in a collaboration announced Wednesday.

Both companies say later this fall, users will be able to access Alexa using Cortana on Windows 10 computers and on Android and Apple devices. They’ll also be able to access Cortana on Alexa-enabled devices such as the Amazon Echo.

Microsoft says the tie-up will allow Alexa customers to get access to Cortana features such as for booking meetings or accessing work calendars. Cortana users, in turn, can ask Alexa to switch on smart home devices or shop on Amazon’s website.

The use of voice assistants is growing. Google and Amazon already have smart speakers on the market. Apple has HomePod coming with its Siri assistant, while Samsung plans one with Microsoft’s Cortana.

Amazon has little to lose from the partnership, and Microsoft’s Cortana — which has been largely limited to laptops — might get discovered by more users because of it, said Carolina Milanesi, a mobile technology analyst at Creative Strategies.

“Cortana might get a little bit more out of it because it gets Cortana out of the PC,” she said. “For Cortana to really get to be more important, it needs to be consistently used every day for different tasks.”

Milanesi said that for Amazon especially, which wants more people to consider Alexa as their first choice, the partnership also might be designed to send a message to customers and rivals.

“They both get something out of it, which is mainly showing Apple and Google that they’re willing to work together to get stronger,” Milanesi said.
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Tanzania is set to launch the world’s largest drone delivery network in January, with drones parachuting blood and medicines out of the skies to save lives.

California’s Zipline will make 2,000 deliveries a day to more than 1,000 health facilities across the east African country, including blood, vaccines and malaria and AIDS drugs, following the success of a smaller project in nearby Rwanda.

“It’s the right move,” Lilian Mvule, 51, said by phone, recalling how her granddaughter died from malaria two years ago.

“She needed urgent blood transfusion from a group O, which was not available,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Malaria is a major killer in Tanzania, and children under age 5 often need blood transfusions when they develop malaria-induced anemia. If supplies are out of stock, as is often the case with rare blood types, they can die.

Tanzania is larger than Nigeria and four times the size of the United Kingdom, making it hard for the cash-strapped government to ensure all of its 5,000-plus clinics are fully stocked, particularly in remote rural areas.

The drones fly at 100 kph (62 mph), much faster than traveling by road. Small packages are dropped from the sky using a biodegradable parachute.

The government also hopes to save the lives of thousands of women who die from profuse bleeding after giving birth.

Tanzania has one of the world’s worst maternal mortality rates, with 556 deaths per 100,000 deliveries, government data show.

“It’s a problem we can help solve with on-demand drone delivery,” Zipline’s chief executive, Keller Rinaudo, said in a statement. “African nations are showing the world how it’s done.”

Companies in the United States and elsewhere are keen to use drones to cut delivery times and costs, but there are hurdles ranging from the risk of collisions with airplanes to ensuring battery safety and longevity.

The drones will cut the drug delivery bill for Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma, one of two regions where the project will first roll out, by $58,000 a year, according to Britain’s Department for International Development, one of the project’s backers.

The initiative could also ease tensions between frustrated patients and health workers.

“We always accuse nurses of stealing drugs,” said Angela Kitebi, who lives 40 kilometers east of Dodoma. “We don’t realize that the drugs are not getting here on time due to bad roads.”
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You might have gotten a taste of “augmented reality,” the blending of the virtual and physical worlds, as you chased on-screen monsters at real-world landmarks in last year’s gaming sensation, “Pokemon Go.”

Upcoming augmented reality apps will follow that same principle of superimposing virtual images over real-life settings. That could let you see how furniture will look in your real living room before you buy it, for instance.

While “Pokemon Go” didn’t require special hardware or software, more advanced AR apps will. Google and Apple are both developing technology to enable that. Google’s AR technology is already on Android phones from Lenovo and Asus. On Tuesday, Google announced plans to bring AR to even more phones, including Samsung’s popular S8 and Google’s own Pixel, though it didn’t give a timetable beyond promising an update by the end of the year.

As a result, Apple might pull ahead as it extends AR to all recent iPhones and iPads in a software update expected next month, iOS 11. Hundreds of millions of AR-ready devices will suddenly be in the hands of consumers.

But how many are ready to give AR a try?

Early applications

Of the dozen or so apps demoed recently for Android and iPhones, the ones showing the most promise are furniture apps.

From a catalog or a website, it’s hard to tell whether a sofa or a bed will actually fit in your room. Even if it fits, will it be far enough from other pieces of furniture for someone to walk through?

With AR, you can go to your living room or bedroom and add an item you’re thinking of buying. The phone maps out the dimensions of your room and scales the virtual item automatically; there’s no need to pull out a tape measure. The online furnishing store Wayfair has the WayfairView for Android phones, while Ikea is coming out with one for Apple devices. Wayfair says it’s exploring bringing the app to iPhones and iPads, too.

As for whimsical, Holo for Android lets you pose next to virtual tigers and cartoon characters. For iPhones and iPads, the Food Network will let you add frosting and sprinkles to virtual cupcakes. You can also add balloons and eyes — who does that? — and share creations on social media.

Games and education are also popular categories. On Apple devices, a companion to AMC’s “The Walking Dead” creates zombies alongside real people for you to shoot. On Android, apps being built for classrooms will let students explore the solar system, volcanoes and more.

Beyond virtual reality

Virtual reality is a technology that immerses you in a different world, rather than trying to supplement the real world with virtual images, as AR does. VR was supposed to be the next big thing, but the appeal has been limited outside of games and industrial applications. You need special headsets, which might make you dizzy if you wear one too long.

And VR isn’t very social. Put on the headset, and you shut out everyone else around you. Part of the appeal of “Pokemon Go” was the ability to run into strangers who were also playing. Augmented reality can be a shared experience, as friends look on the phone screen with you.

Being available vs. Being used

While AR shows more promise than VR, there has yet to be a “killer app” that everyone must have, the way smartphones have become essential for navigation and everyday snapshots.

Rather, people will discover AR over time, perhaps a few years. Someone renovating or moving might discover the furniture apps. New parents might discover educational apps. Those people might then go on to discover more AR apps to try out. But just hearing that AR is available might not be enough for someone to check it out.

Consider mobile payments. Most phones now have the capability, but people still tend to pull out plastic when shopping. There’s no doubt more people are using mobile payments and more retailers are accepting them, but it’s far from commonplace.

Expect augmented reality to also take time to take off.
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In the straight-laced world of the U.S. military, the big room with glossy white paint stands out.

Beyond the desks lined with computer screens, the overhead projectors or the digital clock displaying the time in various world cities, the walls demand your attention.  

They are covered from floor to ceiling with questions, equations, sketches and ideas — scribbled frantically or in moments of inspiration — all representing the best thinking of some of the U.S. military’s best analysts.

“There are precious few places in this building where you can write on a wall,” said Albert Bolden, not surprisingly given that this is, after all, part of a military base.

But according to Bolden, the director of innovation at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, that’s part of the point for the so-called Innovation Hub, or iHUB.

“People from across the agency can come into this space and figure out how to solve our problems,” he said.

‘Relevant in this digital age’

While all this may sound like a feel-good tale of military structure melding with Silicon Valley ingenuity to make life easier by using technology, it is actually about much more.

“If we don’t embrace it, our adversaries will,” said outgoing DIA Director, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart. “The fight for remaining relevant in this digital age is what keeps me awake.”

And Stewart was clear. It is, in many ways, an arms race.

“Our adversaries have been modernizing,” he warned, speaking to a small group of reporters in August, as the agency welcomed private companies and academics to the iHub for a series of so-called Industry Days.

And it is these encounters between the DIA’s own top thinkers and some of the best outside of government that form a second, crucial component of the iHub strategy. It is a chance to see how off-the-shelf technologies might be able to help solve problems the agency’s analysts have identified.

One company making a pitch to be part of this overall effort is an Austin, Texas-based artificial intelligence start-up called SparkCognition.

SparkCognition already has attracted interest from the U.S. Air Force. And companies like Verizon and Boeing are now investing more than $30 million in the company’s neural networks, designed to mimic the functionality of a human brain in order to predict likely outcomes.

“What we’ve done is automate that research that a data scientist would do,” said SparkCognition’s Sam Septembre following a question-and-answer session at the DIA’s iHub.

Instead of taking weeks or days, however, Septembre said SparkCognition’s systems can deliver results in hours or even minutes.

“We’re not just a black box,” added the company’s director of business operations, Timothy Stefanick. “We have why the [computer] model thought that.”

SparkCognition says its platforms already have succeeded in predicting Brexit, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. And the company says it nearly correctly predicted President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by looking at sales of campaign merchandise, like Trump’s “Make America Great Again” baseball caps.

“The human factor got involved and skewed it,” said Stefanick, explaining that in the run-up to the election, the company’s analysts didn’t trust the initial prediction of a Trump victory because it differed so much from the polls. He said they then decided to have the computer models take into account additional factors, causing them to predict a Trump loss.

AI for video

Another company vying for a DIA contract is Percipient.ai, which focuses on applying artificial intelligence to video.

“This is a kind of capability that helps you get into productive analytics and helps you protect forces,” said company co-founder, ret. Brig. Gen. Balan Ayyar, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who commanded a task force in Afghanistan.

“You can check any person in any video,” he said.

Ayyar and fellow Percipient.ai co-founder Raj Shah, say their platform can save analysts considerable time, for example scouring hundreds of hours of video from the scene of a terror attack to quickly identify if any suspected terrorists were nearby.

Even mobile phones could be used to track potential adversaries, programmed to vibrate, for instance, if a person of interest turns up in a “selfie.”

“With this kind of system, the [terror] watch list could be much, much bigger,” said Shah, who previously headed up Google Maps.

Already, Ayyar and Shah say Percipient.ai’s systems can identify suspicious activity, or tradecraft, like the use of specific getaway vehicles.

Handwriting on the wall

For DIA, the early results have been promising.

“We’ve seen examples when machines are able to provide insights to the analysts that they haven’t had,” said Randy Soper, a senior DIA analyst for analytics modernization.

To speed up the process, DIA even awards seed money — up to about $250,000 — to projects that have shown the most promise.

Two have already been approved and another four projects are set to receive funding once the once the money becomes available.

More projects could soon be added to the list. DIA’s Innovation Hub is still considering the latest pitches from industry and academia, like those from SparkCognition and Percipient.ai.

The agency says that overall, the response has been “overwhelming.”

But the success in reaching out to industry and academia also has brought some changes to the program.

Last week [August 22], the DIA opened up a new Innovation Hub.

At first glance, it looks sleek and modern, a row of screens and a digital world clock etched smoothly into wood-paneled walls, while a large conference table dominates the center of the room.

To be sure, it seems like quite a departure from the old iHub, which almost had the feel of a useful but makeshift classroom.

Some things, though, have not changed. The wood-paneling only extends so far. Much of the rest of the room is covered in that white, glossy paint.

“You can still write on the walls,” said one official.

 
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