Technology

By using digital payments to pay Ebola response workers, Sierra Leone massively cut payment times, avoiding large-scale strikes and ensuring a stable workforce to defeat Ebola. Sierra Leone’s experience shows the critical importance of preparing early for digital payments before crises hit.

Nearly a third of American teens with iOS devices do not have a data plan, according to Juxta Labs. Photo credit: Pabak Sarkar (Creative Commons)

forbes.com - by Parmy Olson - June 10, 2015

“What most people don’t realize,” says Jared Allgood, the co-founder behind the hot new messaging app that’s spreading quickly across U.S. middle and high schools, “is that we have a developing nation within America. It’s the American teen.”

Allgood’s app, Jott, has been seeing the kind of hockey-stick growth that app developers dream of: a 10x increase in users between March and May 2015, and almost entirely across that elusive demographic of teens. Adding 10-20,000 users a day it’s up to 500,000 active users on iOS, and is coming to Android this fall, when Allgood expects a jump in users as the new school year gets underway.

What’s compelling about Jott is that its growth isn’t the result of a snazzy new feature that all the kids are raving about. It’s simply met an economic need.

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Guessing the location of a randomly chosen Street View image is hard, even for well-traveled humans. But Google’s latest artificial-intelligence machine manages it with relative ease.

CLICK HERE - PlaNet - Photo Geolocation with Convolutional Neural Networks

CLICK HERE - GeoGuessr

technologyreview.com - by Emerging Technology from the arXiv - February 24, 2016

Here’s a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the Web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. . . .

. . . Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, and a couple of pals . . . have trained a deep-learning machine to work out the location of almost any photo using only the pixels it contains.

Their new machine significantly outperforms humans and can even use a clever trick to determine the location of indoor images and pictures of specific things such as pets, food, and so on that have no location cues.

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Improving local health workers’ access to real-time health information will enable a faster and better response to global health threats. / Neil Brandvold, USAID

medium.com/usaid-2030 - by Ann Mei Chang - February 11, 2016

. . . The next generation of health information systems have to not only quickly and accurately deliver the necessary information to healthcare workers, but they need to be able to communicate with each other. The wide range of people involved in combating epidemics such as Ebola need to be able to efficiently and seamlessly share information to ensure coordinated responses and better resource distribution. . . .

. . . To get the conversation started, USAID put out a call for innovative concepts for improving interoperability within health information systems in the developing world. We gathered over 40 organizations for a three-day co-creation workshop in Washington, D.C. in November. Almost 100 experts — including donors, engineers, software developers and implementers in the field — arrived to co-design a solution. . . .