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Copyright: © Richard Jacobs
"One of the biggest issues we face is that often when people think of scrap or recyclables, they think of waste, and scrap and waste are two very different things," says Robin Wiener, President of the Washington DC-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI). Wiener goes on to explain that while waste is material that has reached the end of its useful life and will end up in a landfill, scrap material gets recycled into commodity-grade products. In fact, more than 40% of the raw material needs of global manufacturing is met through scrap products.
As an annual purchaser of over $5.6 billion worth of US-based scrap materials, China has played an integral part as a major consumer of US-based recyclable goods. But in the face of a massive environmental crisis, China is implementing serious change, including increased restrictions on the import of goods. Weiner discusses the cause and effect of these restrictions and the way in which the US is responding. As part of the effort to mitigate these changes, ISRI is working closely with US-based manufacturers to increase the use of recyclable materials in their manufacturing processes, identifying the challenges that prevent certain goods and products from being recycled, and exploring solutions to those challenges.
Also discussed is the US Department of Energy REMADE Institute, whose efforts in enabling early-stage applied R&D to reduce embodied energy and carbon emissions are closely tied to recycling. Wiener addresses a range of interesting and informative topics--all of which implicate the future of the US and the world at large.
To learn more, visit www.isri.org.
Online shopping these days is more popular than ever, with many people relying on content sites for product reviews and recommendations before deciding to make purchases. But with Google Search and Amazon having a monopoly over the direction of product links within publisher articles, along with an over-reliance on banner ads leading consumers to install ad blockers, the publishers who provide consumers with valuable content reviews are losing revenue.
This is where Narrativ steps in, a company that's utilizing AI to allow multiple advertisers to bid to get connected with publisher content, freeing publishers from the burden of making deals with advertisers themselves or worrying about which retailer actually carries the product. This is also providing consumers with a wider range of websites that are selling the product they're interested in. By identifying more websites and retailers that are willing to pay to have their name injected into a content article, Narrativ is ensuring that consumers will be directed to websites that have products in stock, and locating retailers with the best rates--ultimately increasing revenue for content publishers.
Since using Narrativ's links for the majority of the products they review, New York Magazine's content commerce site, The Strategist, has seen a significant increase in revenue. Tune in for the full conversation, and visit narrativ.com to learn more.
Jason Sosa, founder and CEO of Blackbox AI (blackboxai.com), delivers an overview of his company's visionary approach to improving the way we work and connect. Blackbox AI's mission is to help corporate and industrial teams better understand and enact advancing technologies such as AI, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Blockchain, Computer Vision and other technologies to solve challenging business problems.
As Sosa explains, Blackbox AI is a decentralized talent platform that allows entrepreneurs to focus on what they do best by providing a means for them to modify their skills from anywhere in the world. With talent comprised of PhDs, executives, and technologists, Blackbox AI strives to bring leaders and business minds together by using machine learning to optimize information and match teams and projects to those who are best suited for the tasks, regardless of where they are physically located in the world. This is the backbone, Sosa states, for creating smart contracts. Regarding payment, Blackbox AI utilizes a token system that creates a trust transaction for people in the network who are working together. Blackbox AI looked to cryptocurrency to solve their problem of building a brand new economic model that they refer to as 'boosted capitalism,' a system in which workers find a deeper meaning in the work they do. Essentially, Blackbox AI seeks to enable people to open up their network, work on the projects they choose, from anywhere they exist.
The groundbreaking vision of Blackbox AI empowers people to have a third alternative regarding work. As opposed to just working for corporate as many do, or working for yourself (which comes with a whole host of issues such as the need for marketing and legal, and so on), Blackbox AI offers a solution that capitalizes on the best parts of both systems. By decentralizing the traditional work platform, connections are extended deeper creating an optimum situation in which team members and project operators, managers, entrepreneurs, executives, and technologists can come together.
The technology-based alternative work expert discusses how his company protects against fluctuations in the economy by holding client revenues in reserve to be available for liquidity into the AI ecosystem. Blackbox AI's platform is helping to solve the feast or famine problem that freelancers often face as they go from lean periods to periods of excessive incoming work. Sosa refers to his platform and network as a type of co-op with guard rails that embodies a level of higher trust amongst respected, intelligent individuals seeking to accomplish their goals and commit to projects that interest them.
Dan Baird, CEO of Wrench.AI (wrench.ai), embarks on an intricate analysis of the future of marketing strategies and consumer data as AI opens the secret door to better client and consumer profiles. Dan Baird's entrepreneurial spirit as a self-described launch strategist has driven him to create and launch multiple startups in a wide variety of sectors. From oversized beanbags to fundraising entities, when it comes to launching businesses, Baird has always been curious about the journey as well as the destination. His company, Wrench.AI collaborates with entrepreneurs to help simplify their product launches and thus build a better gateway to success. Through the use of AI-powered software, Wrench.AI is a tool that combines aggregate data and information about existing customer and client bases to provide a deeper understanding of how they think, and what type of products may interest them.
Wrench.AI is the clever combination of a marketing agency that specializes in equity crowdfunding and a software company focused on delivering simple, accurate code. Their primary goal is to provide a simplified process in which companies can utilize the incredible power of their data to automate manual processes and maximize their marketing efforts via AI and machine learning. Wrench.AI seeks to create data-driven solutions that push business marketing, sales, and efficiencies forward while reducing the exorbitant costs of acquiring capital. Wrench.AI is engaged with many types of B2B organizations such as commercial real estate firms, funds, merchant and online lenders, credit unions, cash advance companies, mezzanine financiers, packaged goods companies, and many more.
The entrepreneurial strategist states that through the combination of digital marketing strategies and existing public data, Wrench.AI offers a more precise and detailed look at where the true potential lies within potential investor and client lists. As Baird explains, the AI provides a wealth of information that gives incredible insight into groups and individuals to understand how informed they are about product lines or services, and as such provides an indisputable inside edge with marketing.
As Baird states, every company on the planet has a marketing and sales division and Wrench.AI's platform enables them to nail their goals more efficiently. Baird remarks how the AI can, amazingly, reverse engineer specific personality types based on words and language to provide a keen insight into who your target demographic or potential lead, or customer actually is at the core. Utilizing this information and data offers an opportunity to go forward into a point of contact or engagement with a potential customer or client armed with knowledge of their specific grasp of a particular product, line, or service, as well as their potential for buying. Also, by pairing individuals with similar personality traits, Wrench.AI allows for conversations and engagement points to be streamlined, which creates a greater opportunity for success, and most assuredly a decreased stress interaction.
Baird muses that as the AI develops, the question companies will pose is, how can we do bigger, better, and fewer innovation strategies in the future and Wrench.AI is poised to be there for companies to help them push their marketing forward to the next level.
Patrick Gray, CEO of HashChain Technology, a global blockchain company focused on mining cryptocurrencies, was an early adopter in the space. Gray saw the potential of blockchain and cryptos early on and has rode the waves up and down in this turbulent industry. Part of this "ride" has led to the established mining operations HashChain Technology currently operates, as well as the acquisition of super companies focused more on growing their blockchain presence in the space, including recently acquiring NODE40.
In this interview Gray explains his passion for the blockchain and crypto space and why he believes, there needs to be long-term, "ride or die" mentality for the old-timers, as well as a continued push to see new investors.
Gray also lets us in on how HashChain will continue both the aggressive scaling of mining operations while continuing to diversify beyond being just a cryptocurrency mining company to a full-scale blockchain company.
Orvium is the first open source and decentralized framework powered by Blockchain for managing scholarly publications' life cycles and the associated data. Orvium improves the quality and effectiveness of scientific publishing while returning the benefits of science to the society.
Dr. Ryan Lowery, CEO of Ketogenic.com, delivers an informative overview of how a ketogenic diet and lifestyle can greatly enhance health. Dr. Lowery's passion is to bring the healthy benefits of a ketogenic lifestyle to everyone, on a global level. Lowery holds a masters in exercise and nutrition science and he has published over 100 papers, abstracts, and chapters on nutrition, physical training, diet, and general exercise.
Along with partners, Dr. Jacob Wilson and Sam Beeler, Lowery founded the Applied Science and Performance Institute (ASPI), an advanced research and performance facility focused on bringing science and application together through innovation and study. In 2017, Lowery, along with partner Dr. Jacob Wilson, published, The Ketogenic Bible, which is now heading to print in multiple languages, to further Lowery's goal of achieving a global reach for his message.
Ketosis is a metabolic state in which your body produces and utilizes ketones as its number one energy supply. A ketogenic lifestyle is based primarily on, essentially, what's going in our bodies. Ketones, specifically, are chemicals made by the liver. They are created when there isn't enough insulin in the body to turn glucose into energy, so the body uses fat instead. As the liver turns fat to ketones, it then sends them pumping through the bloodstream, which muscles and tissues utilize for powerful fuel.
Lowery discusses his goal to show the science behind the diet and lifestyle, so that people understand this is not a fad but is backed by real science that can produce real results for better health. Lowery is seeing a shift, as people move to the ketogenic diet, but not everyone is experiencing full ketosis. He discusses how athletes have traditionally been utilizing 'sideline sugar' as a performance tool, but Lowery provides that their brains are actually starved for a true, pure energy source. The brain cannot use fatty acids for production of energy when levels of blood glucose are compromised, thus ketone bodies can be utilized to deliver an alternative, extremely viable source of energy to the brain.
Lowery discusses how the body breaks down fat and the chemical science behind the process, and how we can use this to reconfigure our nutritional cycle in our carb-adapted world. He gives an overview on some simple measures anyone can do to get that 'full' feeling without loading up on calories, such as starting a meal with a healthy salad, and hydrating regularly, before and during the meal. And as carbohydrates raise insulin levels, a carb-heavy diet creates tiredness, a general lethargy, that depleted energy feeling. As Lowery describes, it's a vicious cycle that doesn't need to happen.
The nutrition expert delivers an overview on exogenous ketones and the improvement the body can experience in insulin sensitivity and other areas, especially during intermittent fasting. By supplementing exogenous ketones, one can get their energy up, and extend fasting periods. He discusses the various chemical formulations and their individual benefits, from energy improvement to boosting sleep quality.
Ultimately, as Lowery states, there is a big psychological aspect to beginning a ketogenic lifestyle, as we often feel like we're giving up so much. But Lowery suggests that the better way to look at it is to not dwell on the losses, but to look at all the things you can have on a ketogenic diet, and to remember the vast amount of benefits that the diet brings to good health.
Chris Weilemann, CTO of CloudSight (cloudsight.ai), provides a detailed overview of CloudSight's visual cognition and understanding API (application programming interface). CloudSight is a tech company based in Los Angeles that specializes in continuous real-time hybrid intelligence for visual understanding. They seek to create tailored solutions to a host of challenging problems by bringing together human and machine intelligence. They have developed image recognition API that provides actual understanding for digital media. Essentially, it's a means for processing media to deliver a visual understanding of that media.
Weilemann discusses how their API goes beyond traditional classification and machine vision, as their analysis is many times what normal methods could produce, a fine-grain detail analysis of what is actually going on in imagery. And the uses for CloudSight's tech are varied, from catalog discovery and product discovery to fully understand an inventory, to digital media management to better grasp and understand the content of a large volume of media.
The data expert explains how their system works, utilizing several microservices of AIs that work independently to gather data and learn from their own failures as they go, and by leveraging hybrid intelligence. Thus the combination of machine learning and human being input maximizes the end results in a successful manner. In any industry, from clothing and fashion, to sports, to manufacturing, CloudSight's team can build custom models to provide the data analysis needed to improve productivity overall. Analysis and tags are actually becoming so specific and full of detail that the results from CloudSight's image recognition AI are mind boggling and impressive.
As their technology pushes forward, Weilemann expects to see new advances in speed regarding the microservices and how the API handles data and operates, and advances in what could be possible with the new technology. And he expects more detailed work to be viable with computer vision as the embedded technology increases at lightning speed in our tech-forward world.
Cypherium is a highly scalable & permission-less hybrid blockchain platform based on proof-of-work and Byzantine fault tolerance consensus. The design goal of Cypherium focuses on achieving the apex of scalability, decentralization, and commercialization viability.
Cypherium's unique consensus mechanism provides unprecedented transaction throughput and contract execution time through PBFT while leveraging an ASIC-resistant PoW system for decentralized node election. By providing fundamental building blocks for developers to create groundbreaking applications, and an intuitive interface for users to access these functionalities, Cypherium aims to provide a comprehensive foundation for the future of blockchain technology.
For more information, visit https://www.cypherium.io
Dr. Alejandro "Alex" Chavez, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and cell biology at Columbia University, provides a detailed overview of the advances in CRISPR/Cas9 technology. CRISPR/Cas9 is a genome protection system utilized by many microbes to prevent foreign DNA and nucleic acids from infiltrating their genomes and potentially causing damage. Gene editing (changing the sequence of DNA) is not a new development, but the CRISPR/Cas9 technology allows for greater efficiency with gene editing at a lowered cost. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, and the Cas9 essentially acts, as Dr. Chavez states, like a targeted missile. It works by taking small pieces of a genome and utilizing Cas9 to target or hunt down other copies of the sequence. As researchers learned more, the push to increase human gene editing, to target and attack specific genes reached an intense demand, for the potential for medical and scientific breakthroughs is immense. As Chavez explains, once Cas9 learns that a particular sequence belongs to a virus it will then seek it out, bind to it, and cut it, thus rendering it ineffectual. And as the defense effect takes hold, it strengthens other DNA in a system increasing resistance overall. Dr. Chavez discusses how the use of Cas9 has to be extremely specific, as Cas9 is so hard-working that it's essential that it be carefully planned so as to attack only the intended target. The cell biology expert provides an overview of restriction enzymes and the targeting and cutting of DNA. As he states, with CRIPSR, researchers can target literally anything they want, making it more efficient in research as a precision tool. Dr. Chavez explains the remarkable possibilities that CRISPR technology has created, as it can be utilized to turn single genes off, one by one, to see what happens, thus allowing for a systematic pattern of research. But as CRISPR is excellent at cutting genes off, there hasn't been an easy way to use CRISPR to turn genes on, so as the cell biology professor explains, their research features study in this area. He expresses the importance of seeing the gene in various ways, to have two different pictures of what the gene is doing. Chavez's lab built a tool that allows researchers to use CRISPR to turn genes on, which gives researchers a deeper look into the gene's actions and how it works. Chavez discusses Cas9 variants in terms of how they are utilized, their specificities, and how they cut DNA. He explains that while the variations are many, most researchers use Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9 (SpCas9) due to its overall efficiency, for as Chavez states, it's a jack of all trades. The genome researcher provides information on some future developments on the horizon, such as in vivo recorders that make physical copies of events within the genome, and the packaging of CRISPR for sterilization in medical procedures. Additionally, he explains how CRISPR specificity can allow more targeted cutting such that an exact area can be cut to specifically kill only the part of a bacterium that is harmful. With the advances in CRISPR, Chavez's lab is diving deeper into study of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, as well as others, to understand the biology of diseases.
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