The pressure was on for Abdul Gouda and his classmates at George Mason University: not only did their graduation depend on the success of their project, but so did the hopes of impossibly cute 10-year-old girl.

Fifth-grader Isabella Nicola wanted to play the violin, but she was born with no left hand and a severely abbreviated forearm. Her music teacher at Island Creek Elementary in Fairfax County had built her a prosthetic allowing her to move the bow with her left arm and finger the strings with her right — the opposite of how violin is usually taught. But the prosthetic was heavy and he thought there might be a better option. He reached out to Mason, his alma mater.

As it happened, Gouda and his four teammates in the bioengineering department were in the market for a project — students are required to take on a capstone project their senior year, and their initial idea had fallen through.

Still, Gouda admitted some hesitation at the outset.

“It’s sort of a lot of pressure,” he said. “You’ve got this young girl whose counting on you and you’re expected to deliver.”

The team — Gouda, Mona Elkholy, Ella Novoselsky, Racha Salha and Yasser Alhindi — developed multiple prototypes throughout the year. There was a fair amount of literature on similar projects that helped them get a good start, but Isabella’s case is unique to her, and the project included plenty of trial and error.

Isabella communicated easily with the group and provided feedback, especially about the weight. The first came in at 13 ounces; the final version shaved an ounce or two off of that after feedback from Isabella.

The team enlisted a music professor at Mason, Elizabeth Adams, who provided feedback on what Isabella would need to play the violin with some finesse.

On Thursday, Isabella received her final prosthetic, built from a 3-D printer, and hot pink (at her request) with “Isabella’s attachment” emblazoned on the forearm.

She played some scales as she adjusted the fit, and even a few bars of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

“Oh my gosh, that’s so much better,” Isabella said as she tried out the new prosthetic.

And the team had a surprise for her, a plug-in attachment designed to let her grip a handlebar and ride a bicycle.

“I feel very blessed that I have this amazing group of people,” Isabella said.

Isabella had her heart set on playing music when the school began offering strings lessons in fourth grade.

“I’ve never told her no. I told her we would try. There was no guarantee the school would be able to do an adaptation,” said her mother, Andrea Cabrera. “Through these little miracles, it kept going forward.”

Isabella never had any doubt it would come together.

“I felt right away that I’d be able to play,” she said. “I’ve always had perseverance.”
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A Bavarian startup is developing a five-seat “flying taxi” after successful test flights over Germany of a smaller version of the electric jet, the company said Thursday.

Munich-based Lilium, backed by investors who include Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, said the planned five-seater jet, which will be capable of vertical takeoff and landing, could be used for urban air taxi and ride-sharing services.

In flight tests, a two-seat prototype executed maneuvers that included a midair transition from hover mode, like a drone, to wing-borne flight, like a conventional aircraft, Lilium said.

Potential competitors to Lilium Jet include much bigger players such as Airbus, the maker of commercial airliners and helicopters, which aims to test a prototype self-piloted, single-seat “flying car” later in 2017.

Slovakian firm to take orders

Slovakian firm AeroMobil said at a car show in Monaco on Thursday that it would start taking pre-orders for a hybrid flying car that can drive on roads. It said it planned production beginning in 2020.

But makers of “flying cars” still face hurdles, including convincing regulators and the public that their products can be used safely. Governments are still grappling with regulations for drones and driverless cars.

Lilium said its jet, with a range of 300 kilometers (190 miles) and cruising speed of 300 kph (185 mph), is the only electric aircraft capable of both vertical takeoff and jet-powered flight.

“We have solved some of the toughest engineering challenges in aviation to get to this point,” Daniel Wiegand, Lilium co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

The jet, whose power consumption per kilometer is comparable to that of an electric car, could offer passenger flights at prices comparable to those of normal taxis but with speeds five times faster, Lilium said.

Lilium, founded in 2014 by four graduates from the Technical University of Munich, is unusual on the German startup scene, which is dominated by e-commerce firms largely based in Berlin and self-financed engineering firms dotted around the country.

It raised $11.4 million (10.6 million euros) in 2016 from Zennstrom-led venture firm Atomico Partners and e42, the investment arm of entrepreneur Frank Thelen, a juror on the German investment reality TV show “Lion’s Den.”

Two-seat ‘multicopter’

Other potential rivals include crowd-funded eVolo, a firm based near Mannheim that has said it expects to receive special regulatory approval for its two-seat “multicopter” with 18 rotors to be used as flying taxis in pilot projects by 2018.

Terrafugia, based outside the U.S. city of Boston and founded a decade ago by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates, aims to build a mass-market flying car, while U.S.-Israeli firm Joby Aviation has said it is working on a four-seater drone.

Google, Tesla and Uber have also reportedly shown interest in the new technology.
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China on Thursday launched its first unmanned cargo spacecraft on a mission to dock with the country’s space station, marking further progress in the ambitious Chinese space program.

The Tianzhou 1 blasted off at 7:41 p.m. (1141 GMT) atop a latest-generation Long March 7 rocket from China’s newest spacecraft launch site, Wenchang, on the island province of Hainan.

Minutes later, as the spacecraft cleared the atmosphere, the mission was declared a success by administrators at ground control on the outskirts of Beijing.

It is programmed to conduct scientific experiments after reaching the now-crewless Tiangong 2, China’s second space station. A pair of Chinese astronauts spent 30 days on board the station last year.

China launched the Tiangong 2 precursor facility in September and the station’s 20-ton core module will be launched next year. The completed 60-ton station is set to come into full service in 2022 and operate for at least a decade.

Communications with the earlier, disused Tiangong 1 experimental station were cut last year and it is expected to burn up on entering the atmosphere.

China was excluded from the 420-ton International Space Station mainly due to U.S. legislation barring such cooperation and concerns over the Chinese space program’s strong military connections.

Chinese officials are now looking to internationalize their own program by offering to help finance other countries’ missions to Tiangong 2.

Since China conducted its first crewed space mission in 2003, it has staged a spacewalk and landed its Jade Rabbit rover on the moon. A mission to land another rover on Mars and bring back samples is set to launch in 2020, while China also plans to become the first country to soft-land a probe on the far side of the moon.

The two-stage, medium lift Long March 7 is expected to form the backbone of China’s rocket fleet, and burns a fuel combination that is safer and more environmentally friendly.

It is tasked with the launch of the Shenzhou capsules that have carried out six crewed missions and, along with the heavy lift Long March 5, is key to the assembly of the Tiangong 2.

 
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A pet can provide comfort and companionship for an elderly person or someone who is disabled. But in the future that pet may be a robotic animal that uses artificial intelligence to interact with humans. The British company that developed the cute android says it would provide emotional support and interaction. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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Facebook on Wednesday pulled aside the curtain on a secretive unit headed by a former chief of the Pentagon’s research arm, disclosing that the social media company is studying ways for people to communicate by thought and touch.

Facebook launched the research shop, called Building 8, last year to conduct long-term work that might lead to hardware products. In charge of the unit is Regina Dugan, who led a similar group at Alphabet’s Google and was previously director of the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

Dugan told software developers at Facebook’s annual F8 conference that the company was modeling Building 8 after DARPA, a government office founded in the 1950s that gave the world the internet and the miniaturized GPS receivers used in consumer devices.

Any hardware rollouts are years away, Dugan said in a speech. Potential products could, if successful, be a way for Facebook to diversify beyond its heavy reliance on advertising revenue.

One example of Building 8’s work so far, Dugan said, was an attempt to improve technology that allows people to type words using their minds.

“It sounds impossible, but it’s closer than you may realize,” Dugan said.

Using brain implants, people can already type eight words a minute, she said. Facebook’s goal, working with researchers at several U.S. universities, is to make the system non-invasive, as well as fast enough so that people can type 100 words a minute just by thinking.

Possible uses include helping disabled people and “the ability to text your friend without taking out your phone,” she said.

Another Building 8 project, she said, was trying to advance the ability to communicate through touch only, an idea with roots in Braille, a writing system for the blind and visually impaired.

A video played at the conference showed two Facebook employees talking to each other through touch. As one employee, Frances, wore an electronic device on her arm, the other, Freddy, used a computer program to send pressure changes to her arm.

“If you ask Frances what she feels,” Dugan said, “she’ll tell you that she has learned to feel the acoustic shape of a word on her arm.”

In December, Facebook signed a deal with 17 universities including Harvard and Princeton to allow swifter collaboration on projects with Dugan’s team.
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Khailee Ng wanted name brand clothes. So, as a suburban teenager in Malaysia, he shoplifted.

He could have continued with his criminal life, he said, but took a different route. Ng started to build web pages because it was a better way to make money, he told a crowd at F8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Jose, California, this week.  

“It’s depressing when your only natural talent is shoplifting,” he said.  

More than 4,000 developers from all over the world have gathered at the conference to hear about Facebook’s newest technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality.

But the social networking giant also paid homage to the work of international developers and entrepreneurs.

In his keynote address Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said 80 percent of developers building apps on Facebook are international. To that end, the company is hosting meetings in more than 40 cities worldwide for watching the conference.

One advantage entrepreneurs in developing countries have is that the existing industries are not mature, said Peng Zhang, founder and president of GeekPark, an incubator and media company in China. Of the startups in China worth more than $1 billion, two-thirds are focused on improving traditional industries, he said.

“There are huge gaps,” he said.

A Malaysian journey

Ng described his journey from suburban teen shoplifter to web developer, to founder of two companies – a news site and an e-commerce firm – which he sold. He bought a ticket to Silicon Valley to find out more about the tech industry.

Now Ng is a managing partner at 500 Startups, an investment and incubator firm that has invested in more than 1,800 companies worldwide.

Beyond telling his personal story, Ng said there are key steps to making tech entrepreneurship more accessible for people worldwide. One is investing in local entrepreneurs building businesses who don’t necessarily match the pattern of the Silicon Valley startup founder.

“If our tunnel vision only goes for the pedigree path, we will not be able to complete the entire spectrum of human potential,” he said.

Testing ideas in Peru

Gary Urteaga, a Peruvian entrepreneur, told his own story of trying and testing company ideas. Inspired by the success of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, the Chinese online commerce firm, Urteaga co-founded Cinepapaya, a way for people to buy movie tickets and find out about movie showings. It was bought late last year by Fandango.

Now Urteaga is the vice president of business development at Fandango Latam and an investor. He says the next opportunity is in solving problems people have worldwide.

“If we develop and solve the problems of security, education, health and water, then we can create the next billion-dollar companies,” he said.

 
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Every now and then scientists stumble upon a discovery that opens up new possibilities for research and lead to solutions for existing problems. Researchers at the University of Maryland say a fiery phenomenon called blue whirl could someday help clean up oil spills on water.
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When Mark Pavlyukovskyy, founder of a do-it-yourself computer kit maker, was looking for investors last year, he wanted someone who knew the Chinese market.

Turns out, Pavlyukovskyy didn’t have to go to Beijing or Shanghai. Chinese venture capitalists are everywhere in Silicon Valley.

Last year, Pavlyukovskyy, a Ukrainian-born American entrepreneur working in San Francisco, raised $2.1 million from nine investors, including a Chinese firm based in the Valley.

“We’re looking not just for financial capital, but interpersonal capital with expertise and knowledge of the education market in China,” said Pavlyukovskyy. His company, Piper, sells a $299 augmented reality computer kit that children assemble themselves. Now, Piper is in schools in Hong Kong. Over 150,000 kits have been distributed around the world.

For the past decade, Silicon Valley money flowed to China as the communist country opened its markets and companies sought to expand there. That cross-border investing reversed as Chinese companies started to look outside their borders for investment opportunities. While Chinese investors have made their impact felt in the U.S. real estate, energy and transportation sectors, it was only in recent years they turned to tech.

Chasing U.S. innovation

Now, Chinese investors are pouring money into Silicon Valley deals, where it might take longer to see a return on an investment than in commercial real estate but where the potential to strike it big is higher.

“This is the very beginning,” said David Cao, who came from Singapore as a programmer before founding F50, a full-service investment firm, in 2014.

Fueling the Chinese capital is a perception that the majority of innovation is still coming out of the U.S., and that China is playing catch-up, said Chris Evdemon, who in 2014 opened Sinovation, the U.S. arm of Chuangxin, one of China’s leading early-stage venture firms. There are now 38 startups in his portfolio, which includes firms specializing in internet-of-things, robotics and education technology.

“We thought we should put some capital to work and see if we can be a great go-to market,” said Evdemon.

Chinese investors, particularly traditional media groups, are interested in firms specializing in virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, which might enhance digital entertainment. Other areas of interest for Chinese backers include robotics, artificial intelligence and technologies that focus on the financial, health and education markets. There are now more than 30 Chinese incubators in Silicon Valley.

Strategic U.S.-developed tech

But this wave of Chinese investment has called into question whether advanced technologies that are seen as critical to U.S. strategic interests are, instead, going to a competitor. A recent Pentagon report raised concerns about whether the Chinese government and Chinese investors in Silicon Valley were gaining access to key technologies through these investments.

Those concerns did not gain much attention at a recent cross-border investment summit held by F50 in Menlo Park. Instead, investors talked about how Chinese investors have become more savvy, with an emphasis on working with Silicon Valley companies to test their ideas in the U.S. first, before thinking about the Chinese market.

“I don’t see any barriers anymore between the two ecosystems,” said Evdemon. “I’m enjoying seeing wall gardens disappear.”
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In the science fiction series Star Trek, a doctor can use a handheld device called a “tricorder” to check a person’s vital signs and diagnose illness. What once was imagined is now a reality. The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE challenged scientists to develop a “tricorder-like” device to improve health care globally. The winners were recently announced in Los Angeles.
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Facebook’s annual developer conference F8 kicks off this week in San Jose, California, at a time when the social network giant faces more competition in the United States and around the globe.

Developers from Brazil, France, India and Mexico are to gather Tuesday and Wednesday at F8, looking for new tools and features for Facebook’s biggest products — its flagship social network, Instagram, the mobile photo sharing service; and WhatsApp, the instant messaging service Facebook acquired in 2014.

Facebook is expected to show new features for all its main products and woo developers and businesses to make greater use of its services. It’s a technical gabfest, but one that Facebook executives use to unveil new features and talk about the firm’s future. The name of the conference — F8 — comes from Facebook’s tradition of hosting eight-hour hackathons.

While thousands are expected to gather at a convention center in downtown San Jose, elsewhere, in more than 45 cities worldwide, developers will meet to watch Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s opening speech Tuesday morning. The challenge Facebook faces is two-fold — to find more users, and give them more to do.

With 1.9 billion users, Facebook is coming up against the natural limits of its growth. It already reaches more than 20 percent of the 7 billion people on the planet. In the U.S., Canada and Europe, its user growth has been somewhat flat for several years. Competitors such as Snapchat, whose parent company Snap recently went public, are popular with teens and 20-somethings.

“There are no more users to tap into in mature countries,” said Brian Blau, research vice president at research firm Gartner. That leaves the rest of the world, where Facebook continues to grow quickly.

Facebook has worked through an initiative called internet.org to expand global connectivity through programs such as Aquila, a solar-powered drone that delivers wi-fi, and Free Basics, which offers access to websites and other services. While the company said last year that it has helped connect more than 40 million people worldwide, Facebook has stumbled in some of these efforts, such as in India.

Ads

Facebook’s other big challenge is to deliver more services and features to its existing users so they spend more time during the day in Facebook’s world and, therefore, see more advertisements.

To that end, the conference’s events include sessions on advertisements, games, virtual reality and augmented reality, mixing the digital and virtual realms.

Messenger

One thing Facebook will likely focus on is offering developers more features for Messenger, its homegrown messaging service, Blau said. The company may decide to allow Messenger, which already has more than 1.2 billion users, to be more independent from Facebook itself, competing against big global messaging systems such as Kik, WeChat, Line and others.

“If you think about it, Facebook’s mission has always been around community and communication and online social activities,” Blau said. “And providing communication to people who don’t have that is a way to do it.”
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Traditionally built houses in old Europe are vulnerable to earthquakes, which again was demonstrated last August when a 6.2 magnitude quake devastated an area in central Italy. Italian engineers are researching ways to minimize the damage. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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The impact of automation on U.S. jobs is open to debate. Robots have displaced millions of manufacturing workers, and automation is getting cheaper and more common, raising concerns it will eventually supplant far more workers in the services sector of the economy, which includes everything from truck driving to banking. 

University of Virginia Darden School of Business Professor Ed Hess says we are just starting to see automation’s impact. “It is going to be broad and it is going to be deep,” he said, adding that “tens of millions” of jobs could be at risk.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have disappeared already.

While some politicians blame trade for the job losses, most economists say automation is mainly to blame as robots do routine factory tasks previously done by humans. 

Hess calls self-driving cars and trucks a threat to millions of human jobs, and says fast-food workers are also vulnerable, as companies install electronic kiosks to take restaurant orders. McDonalds says displaced workers will be reassigned to other tasks.

The professor says research shows nearly half of U.S. jobs could be automated, including retail store clerks, doctors who scan X-rays for disease, administrative workers, legal staffers, and middle managers.

Future of jobs

Starting more than a century ago, advancing technology changed the United States from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy. Displaced farm hands eventually found factory work, but the transition took years. This new transition may also take a time because, Hess says, “We’re not going to anywhere produce the number of jobs that we automate.”

But 50 years of experience in banking shows that while automation may change the industry, it does not necessarily end jobs for humans. 

The first Automatic Teller Machines, or ATMs, were installed 50 years ago, and there are now 420,000 in the United States. International Monetary Fund analysis shows the number of human tellers did not drop, but rose slightly.

“Humans were doing mostly service and routine types of tasks that could be converted into more automated tasks,” Tremont Capital Group’s Sam Ditzion said. But “the humans then became far more valuable in customer service and in sales in these branches.”

In a Skype interview, Ditzion said that while automation can be “scary,” the oversight of ATMs created new kinds of work for “tens of thousands of people.”

Automation grows

A report by Redwood Software and the Center for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) says surging investment and falling prices will help robotics grow.

Redwood’s software handles business processes that are repetitive, rule-bound and tedious.

CEBR Economist David Whitaker says as growing fleets of robots take over mundane tasks, higher productivity could bring higher wages for some human workers. He says people who want to stay employed must hone skills that robots can’t handle, such as unpredictable work or the need for an emotional human connection.

One example, according to Alex Bentley of Blue Prism software, is a program that helps law firms examine visa applications. The robot enters data but gets help from a human partner with problems such as missing information. Bentley says some human jobs have been lost, but in other cases displaced workers move within the firm to new work, particularly jobs that are “customer-centric.”

U.S. Senator Chris Coons says Germany and other nations use training programs to help their citizens get and keep jobs in a changing economy. The Democrat says America’s competitors invest six times what the U.S. does in skills development and workforce training, while Washington has slashed funding for such programs. Coons and a Republican colleague, Senator Thom Tillis, are seeking more help for schools, companies, workers and government agencies operating programs to upgrade the workforce.

New opportunities

While workers need to make some changes, philosopher and professor Ed Freeman of UVA’s Darden School of Business says companies also need to rethink their basic purpose. He says businesses must do more than just maximize value for shareholders.

“I need red blood cells to live,” he said. “It doesn’t follow that the purpose of my life is to make red blood cells. Companies need profits to live, it doesn’t follow that the purpose of a company is to make profits. We have to think through this idea about what purpose is in business.”

Freeman says he is “optimistic” because many jobs, such as creating applications for smartphones that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, are creating thousands of opportunities. He is also encouraged by his many students who, he says, bring new ideas, passion and energy to the task of starting businesses that will create new kinds of jobs.

Freeman is convinced that the problem isn’t the tsunami of lost jobs, it is the lack of “really good ideas” for creating a safety net for people who will lose jobs to automation.

Many experts worry about growing levels of automation — particularly advanced forms known as artificial intelligence — hurting employment for U.S. workers.

But U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says it will be “50 or 100 years” before artificial intelligence takes American jobs. In an interview with Mike Allen of AXIOS, Mnuchin said, “I think we are so far away from that, [it is] not even on my radar screen.”
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