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Creative Destruction Lab launches a new startup program dedicated to COVID-19 response

Global academic science and tech startup accelerator program Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) is adding a dedicated stream to its existing areas of focus, which include AI, health sciences, space, quantum computing, blockchain, energy, and oceans. The new addition is a timely one: CDL Recovery, which is designed to help turn science and research work into scalable products and services to address the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of both its effects on public health and on the economy.

CDL’s model for helping startups move from concept to product is fairly unique, and potentially uniquely well-suited to addressing new needs that emerge as a result of how the world is changing in response to the novel coronavirus. Many of the efforts to address needs both in terms of therapeutics, and in medical hardware to help shore up shortages are originating at schools and universities around the world, and CDL’s expertise heavily favors moving deep tech and hard science from inside the research lab to the market.

The program will be aimed at helping usher innovations from innovation to product in key areas including around diagnostic testing, vaccine development, remote care and telemedicine, as well as in areas of economics support like virtual work, talent re-training, remote equipment operation, automation and food production and supply. CDL founder and University of Toronto Professor Ajay Agrawal said in a blog post about the new program that many have suggested there’s a need “to assume a wartime footing in response to COVID-19,” and that’s one of the aims of the program.

It’s definitely true that crises like the one we face currently have a way of decreasing the turn around time from research, to development and deployment. And already, CDL’s program is designed from the ground-up to try to accelerate the pace at which that happens, working with academic institutions around the world including the University of Oxford, HEC Paris, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of British Columbia, HEC Montreal, the University of Calgary and Dalhousie University, as well as the University of Toronto. Teams who are approved to join take part in a series of sessions that set objectives, and then measure their progress, guided by mentors including the founders and executives of world-leading companies and institutions.

The CDL Recovery program will follow the same structure as its standard streams, but will be done at twice the pace in order to expedite the results. Applications are open now, and the program is available at no cost, and without any equity taken by any of the program operators.

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Myriota raises $19.3 million to expand its IoT satellite constellation

Internet of things satellite connectivity startup Myriota has raises a $19.3 million Series B funding round, led by Hostplus and Main Sequence Ventures, with additional funding from Boeing, former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull, Singtel Innov8 and others. The company has now raised $37 million in Funding, and has four satellites on orbit already, with a plan to expand that to 25 by 2022 with the help of this new funding.

Myriota provides low-cost, power efficient direct satellite connectivity for IoT uses, including industrial applications like equipment monitoring and measurement of environmental measures like groundwater levels. The Adelaide-based company has developed its own proprietary low-over iOT communications technology, that claims big advantages over existing solutions in terms of battery life, security, scalability and cost.

With this new funding, it also hopes to expand headcount, adding 50 percent more employees over the course of the next two years, with a focus on expanding globally to provider service to more international markets. It’s also going to concentrate on building out product to enable real-time reporting across all its offerings.

Already, Myriota has begun its expansion plans with a new acquisition of assets from another space tech company, Canada’s exactEarth. The company has purchased four satellites on orbit from the company, and brought on new employees as well as six ground stations located in new international locations, including in Canada, the U.S., Norway, Singapore, Panama and Antarctica.

In total, Myriota has a goal of building out a constellation of 50 IoT satellites to provide global scale and service.

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WHO Africa hosts hackathons, offers seed funds to fight COVID-19

The World Health Organization in Africa is holding virtual hackathons and offering up to $20,000 in seed-funds to finalists with digital solutions to stem COVID-19.

The regional office of the UN agency completed its first challenge earlier this month and will host a second, for French speaking Africa, in coming weeks, WHO’s Technical Officer Moredeck Chibi told TechCrunch.

According to Dr. Chibi, the WHO-AFRO Digital Hackathon series aims to prompt tech applications — with specificity to Africa — to curb the spread and negative impact of COVID-19 — which began to spike on the continent in March.

For the first virtual challenge, WHO selected participants via an online application process and split them into teams via Zoom. Groups were tasked with developing scalable concepts aligned with WHO’s current COVID-19 response strategy, which includes infection prevention and control, case management, surveillance and continuity of health services.

The winning hackathon group, led by Ghanaian Entrepreneur Laud Basing, developed a screening tool concept — operable via mobile app or USSD code — that maps COVID-19 test cases, classifies them according to risk and provides data to national authorities to plan responses. The team will receive $10,000 from the WHO to pilot their concept, and support in locating additional funding and expertise.

Image Credits: World Health Organization Africa

WHO aggregates coronavirus data on its Africa incident tracking database.

Early in March, the continent’s COVID-19 cases by country were in the single digits, but by mid-month those numbers had jumped — leading the WHO’s Regional Director for Africa Dr. Matshidiso Moeti to sound an alarm on the virus at a March 19 press conference. She noted at the beginning of March there were only five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with cases. That had grown to 30 by mid-month and now stands at 44. 

By the World Health Organization’s stats Monday there were 6023 COVID-19 cases in Sub-Saharan Africa and 240 confirmed deaths related to the virus, up from 463 cases and 8 deaths on March 18.

The hardest hit country so far, South Africa, has gone into a government enforced lockdown.

As COVID-19 spreads in Africa’s major economies, policy-makers and founders have looked to the continent’s tech sector to shapes responses.

Africa Roundup: Africa’s tech ecosystem responds to COVID-19

The central banks of Ghana and Kenya have turned to mobile-money as a public-health tool, adopting measures to shift a greater volume of transactions toward digital payments and away from cash — which the World Health Organization flagged as a conduit for coronavirus.

Africa’s largest incubator, CcHub, launched a fund and open call for tech projects aimed at curbing COVID-19 and its social and economic impact.

And Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia has offered African governments use of its last-mile delivery network for distribution of supplies to healthcare facilities and workers.

The WHO’s COVID-19 related Africa hackathons aren’t the first time the organization has turned to the continent’s techies. In 2019, the Geneva based body launched the WHO Innovation Challenge — a competition to shape “home-grown innovations with potential to solve African health challenges”. It drew 2400 entries from 44 countries.

Those interested in pitching a solution to the World Health Organization’s next hackathon in response to COVID-19 can contact WHO’s regional Africa office.

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New York City bans Zoom in schools citing security concerns

As schools lie empty, students still have to learn. But officials in New York City say schools are not permitted to use Zoom for remote teaching, citing security concerns with the video conferencing service.

“Providing a safe and secure remote learning experience for our students is essential, and upon further review of security concerns, schools should move away from using Zoom as soon as possible,” said Danielle Filson, a spokesperson for the New York City Dept. of Education. “There are many new components to remote learning, and we are making real-time decisions in the best interest of our staff and students.”

Instead, the city’s Dept. of Education is transitioning schools to Microsoft Teams, which the spokesperson said has the “same capabilities with appropriate security measures in place.”

The ban will cover some 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 schools across the city’s five boroughs. The decision to ban Zoom from schools was made in part by New York City’s Cyber Command, which launched in 2018 to help keep the city’s residents safe.

Zoom did not immediately comment.

Maybe we shouldn’t use Zoom after all

News of the ban comes after a barrage of criticism over the company’s security policies and privacy practices, as hundreds of millions of users forced to work during the pandemic from home turn to the video calling platform. On Friday, Zoom’s chief executive apologized for “mistakenly” routing some calls through China, after researchers said the setup would put ostensibly encrypted calls at risk of interception by Chinese authorities. Zoom also apologized for claiming its service was end-to-end encrypted when it was not.

Zoom also changed its default settings to enable passwords on video calls by default after a wave of “Zoombombing” attacks, which saw unprotected calls invaded by trolls and used to broadcast abusive content.

Not all schools are said to be finding the transition easy. As first reported by Chalkbeat, Zoom quickly became the popular video calling service of choice after city schools closed on March 16. But one school principal in Brooklyn warned the publication that the shift away from Zoom would make it harder to remotely teach their classes, citing a “clunkiness” of Microsoft’s service.

The city spokesperson said it had been training schools on Microsoft Teams for “several weeks.”

But the spokesperson did not rule out an eventual return to Zoom, saying that the department “continues to review and monitor developments with Zoom,” and will update schools with any changes.

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Valispace raises $2.4M to become the ‘Github for hardware’, joins fight against COVID-19

Hardware engineering is mostly document-based. A typical satellite might be described in several hundred thousand PDF documents, spreadsheets, simulation files and more; all potentially inconsistent between each other. This can lead to costly mistakes. NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because one engineering team used metric units while another used English units, for instance.

Germany-HQ’d Valispace, which also has offices in Portugal, dubs itself as “Github for hardware”. In other words, it’s a collaboration platform for engineers, allowing them to develop better satellites, planes, rockets, nuclear fusion reactors, cars and medical devices, you name it. It’s a browser-based application, which stores engineering data and lets the users interconnect them through formulas. This means that when one value is changed, all other values are updated, simulations re-run and documentation rewritten automatically.

That last point is important in this pandemic era, where making and improving medical ventilators has become a huge global issue.

Indeed, the company is currently partnering with initiatives that develop open-source hardware solutions to the COVID-19 crisis. They are partnering with several initiatives that gather thousands of engineers working on the problem, most prominently the CoVent-19 Challenge and GrabCAD, as well as Helpful Engineering. Engineers working on ventilators can apply here for free accounts or email engineering-taskforce@valispace.com.

Valispace has now raised a Seed Extension funding round of €2.2M / $2.4M lead by JOIN Capital in Berlin and was joined by HCVC (Hardware Club), based in Paris.

The funding will be used to expand into new industries (e.g. medical devices, robotics) and expansion of the existing ones (aeronautics, space, automotive, energy). The company is addressing the Systems Engineering Tool market in Europe which is worth €7Billion, while the US market is at least as big. Its competitors include RHEA CDP4, Innoslate, JAMA and the largest player Status Quo.

Marco Witzmann, CEO of Valispace said: “Valispace has proven to help engineers across industries to develop better hardware. From drones to satellites, from small electronic boxes to entire nuclear fusion reactors. When modern companies like our customers have the choice, they chose an agile engineering approach with Valispace.”

Tobias Schirmer from JOIN Capital commented: “Browser-based collaboration has become a must for any modern hardware company, as the importance of communication across teams and offices increases.”

The company now counts BMW, Momentus, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Airbus as customers.
Witzmann previously worked on Europe’s biggest Satellite Program (Meteosat Third Generation) as a Systems Engineer, while his Portugal-based co-founder Louise Lindblad (COO) worked at the European Space Agency, developing satellites and drones.

As satellite engineers, both were surprised that while the products they were working on were cutting edge, the tools to develop them seemed to be from the 80s. In 2016 they launched Valispace as a company, convincing Airbus to become one of their first customers.

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Google and USCF collaborate on machine learning tool to help prevent harmful prescription errors

Machine learning experts working at Google Health have published a new study in tandem with the University of California San Francisco (UCSF)’s computational health sciences department that describes a machine learning model the researchers built that can anticipate normal physician drug prescribing patterns, using a patient’s electronic health records (EHR) as input. That’s useful because around 2 percent of patients who end up hospitalized are affected by preventable mistakes in medication prescriptions, some instances of which can even lead to death.

The researchers describe the system as working in a similar manner to automated, machine learning-based fraud detection tools that are commonly used by credit card companies to alert customers of possible fraudulent transactions: They essentially build a baseline of what’s normal consumer behavior based on past transactions, and then alert your bank’s fraud department or freeze access when they detect a behavior that is not in line with and individual’s baseline behavior.

Similarly, the model trained by Google and UCSF worked by identifying any prescriptions that “looked abnormal for the patient and their current situation.” That’s a much more challenging proposition in the case of prescription drugs, vs. consumer activity – because courses of medication, their interactions with one another, and the specific needs, sensitivities and conditions of any given patient all present an incredibly complex web to untangle.

To make it possible, the researchers used electronic health records from de-identified patient that include vital signs, lab results, prior medications and medical procedures, as well as diagnoses and changes over time. They paired this historical data with current state information, and came up with various models to attempt to output an accurate prediction of a course of prescription for a given patient.

Their best-performing model was accurate “three quarters of the time,” Google says, which means that it matched up with what a physician actually decided to prescribe in a large majority of cases. It was also even more accurate (93%) in terms of predicting at least one medication that would fall within a top ten list of a physician’s most likely medicine choices for a patient – even if its top choice didn’t match the doctor’s.

The researchers are quick to note that though the model thus far has been fairly accurate in predicting a normal course of prescription, that doesn’t mean it’s able to successfully detect deviations from that yet with any high degree of accuracy. Still, it’s a good first step upon which to build that kind of flagging system.

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Forward launches ‘Forward At Home’ primary care service to address COVID-19 healthcare crunch

The global coronavirus pandemic has already caused a tremendous strain on healthcare resources around the world, and it’s leading to a shift in how healthcare is offered. Startup Forward, which debuted in 2016 and has since expanded its tech-focused primary care medical practice to locations in major cities across the U.S., is launching a new initiative called ‘Forward At Home’ that reflects those changes and adapts its care model accordingly.

Forward’s primary differentiator is its focus on what it terms a patient’s ‘baseline,’ which is established by an in-person visit they make when they join that employs a body scanner at a doctor’s office to take a number of readings and produce an interactive chart displayed on-screen in the doctor’s exam room. Forward founder and CEO Adrian Aoun, who previously led special projects at Google before building the health tech company, said that as the company has ramped its efforts to support patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, including through in-clinic and drive-through testing, it also wanted to address the ongoing need for care for non-COVID patients.

“If people aren’t leaving their homes, and frankly, you don’t really want them to leave their homes unless you need them to, you have to figure out how to do all that remotely,” Aoun said in an interview, referring to Forward’s comprehensive biometric data gathering process. “So we’ve we’ve implemented a bunch of different things as rapidly as possible. The first is, how do we collect some biometrics – so we put together a kit that has a bunch of sensors in it that we actually mail to you. This includes an EKG, a connected thermometer, connected blood pressure cuff and a pulse oximeter.”

This approach provides a whole new level of remote care, over and above what’s typically defined as “telemedicine,” which generally amounts to little more than video calls with doctors, Aoun points out. Forward’s approach includes automated vitals monitoring for alerting a doctor if a patient needs intervention, and a patient has access to all their own data in the app as well. The Forward At Home product also take their exam room smart display and brings it to their mobile devices, presenting it for shared consultation between doctor and patient during viral visits, which are available 24/7 to Forward members.

At launch, the service also includes home visits to collect urine and blood samples, as an added measure designed specifically to help patients adhere to CDC and health agency guidelines around self-isolation while also getting a detailed and thorough level of care. Aoun says that this part of the offering doesn’t make sense at scale, and will likely revert to in-clinic visits once the COVID-19 crisis passes.

The rest of the model, though spurred into deployment because of the coronavirus conditions, and the need to limit the number of people going in to medical facilities and hospital all across the country unless they absolutely need to, is here to stay, however. Aoun says that Forward’s goal has always been to address the need for tech-friendly, advanced and comprehensive primary care for everyone, but that it took an approach similar to Tesla’s by addressing the top end of the market first in order to be able to fund development of more broadly available services later on.

Meanwhile, the need to shift as much care as possible to in-home is pressing, and evidence from countries around the world is increasingly pointing to how important that is to stopping the spread.

“The big thing to flatten the curve, the whole point of it, is that the hospitals are going to be overrun,” Aoun said. “So you want to take as many cases as you can, where they don’t actually have to be in the ICU, and treat them outside of the ICU – that’s your first principle. Then your second principle is, and China kind of discovered this early […] they started moving to getting people out of the hospitals, as much as possible for a second reason, which is not that the hospitals are overloaded, but that the hospitals are one of the fastest ways to spread COVID-19.”

That’s a perspective also supported by lessons shared from Italian medical professionals in their effort to deal with the COVID-19 situation there, which has essentially decimated large parts of their medical facility infrastructure.

Forward is also still continuing the other work it’s doing to address COVID-19 needs, including providing its risk assessment screening tool to all, as well as offering testing via clinics and drive-throughs to members, as well as mental health support. It’s also looking to expand its drive-through testing to new sites across the U.S. The Forward At Home initiative, meanwhile, will help ensure that clients who have other pressing health needs aren’t left behind while the effort to combat COVID-19 continues.

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DeepMind’s Agent57 AI agent can best human players across a suite of 57 Atari games

Development of artificial intelligence agents tends to frequently be measured by their performance in games, but there’s a good reason for that: Games tend to offer a wide proficiency curve, in terms of being relatively simple to grasp the basics, but difficult to master, and they almost always have a built-in scoring system to evaluate performance. DeepMind’s agents have tackled board game Go, as well as real-time strategy video game StarCraft – but the Alphabet company’s most recent feat is Agent57, a learning agent that can beat the average human on each of 57 Atari games with a wide range of difficulty, characteristics and gameplay styles.

Being better than humans at 57 Atari games may seem like an odd benchmark against which to measure the performance of a deep learning agent, but it’s actually a standard that goes all the way back to 2012, with a selection of Atari classics including Pitfall, Solaris, Montezuma’s Revenge and many others. Taken together, these games represent a broad range of difficulty levels, as well as requiring a range of different strategies in order to achieve success.

That’s a great type of challenge for creating a deep learning agent because the goal is not to build something that can determine one effective strategy that maximizes your chances of success every time you play a game – instead, the reason researchers build these agents and set them to these tasks at all is to develop something that can learn across multiple and shifting scenarios and conditions, with the long-term aim of building a learning agent that approaches general AI – or AI that is more human in terms of being able to apply its intelligence to any problem put before it, including challenges it’s never encountered before.

DeepMind’s Agent57 is remarkable because it performs better than human players on each of the 57 games in the Atari57 set – previous agents have been able to be better than human players on average – but that’s because they were extremely good at some of the simpler games that basically just worked via a simple action-reward loop, but terrible at games that required more advanced play, including long-term exploration and memory, like Montezuma’s Revenge.

The DeepMind team addressed this by building a distributed agent with different computers tackling different aspects of the problem, with some tuned to focus on novelty rewards (encountering things they haven’t encountered before), with both short- and long-term time horizons for when the novelty value resets. Others sought out more simple exploits, figuring out which repeated pattern provided the biggest reward, and then all the results are combined and managed by an agent equipped with a meta-controller that allows it to weight the costs and benefits of different approaches based on which game it encounters.

In the end, Agent57 is an accomplishment, but the team says it can stand to be improved in a few different ways. First, it’s incredibly computationally expensive to run, so they will seek to streamline that. Second, it’s actually not as good at some of the simpler games as some simpler agents – even though it excels at the the top 5 games in terms of challenge to previous intelligent agents. The team says it has ideas for how to make it even better at the simpler games that other, less sophisticated agents, are even better at.

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Operation Covid-19 will allow self-reporting of cases, to get ahead of official figures

The Canadian founder of a startup who caught Covid-19 from Justin Trudeau’s wife has launched an initiative to allow anyone to self-report their own case of the disease and publish the results, helping authorities to get ahead of the pandemic.

Operation Covid-19 will visualize both official and suspected cases of the Coronavirus in data lists and on a map, with the aim of saving lives and improving global public health systems. People will be able to self-report the case via an anonymous questionnaire.

The site aims to demonstrate how many official tests — compared to suspected COVID-19 cases — there are.

“The more people who can contribute their COVID-19 experiences, we can turn the table on this pandemic and build more intelligence to save lives,” said co-founder Jillian Kowalchuk.

Kowalchuk is cofounder of “street-smart” safety app Safe & The City, but fell ill with COVID-19 symptoms after meeting the Prime Minister of Canada’s wife, Sophie Trudeau — who later tested positive for the disease — on March 5th at Canada House in London, as she Instagrammed.

She was later dismayed to learn she was refused a test for COVID-19 in a UK hospital and was instead told to go home and self-isolate, making her concerned about the lack of testing and public awareness of the scale of the problem.

“First-hand experiences like this are becoming more common throughout the world as more are refused testing, leaving the majority of COVID-19 cases unknown, under-estimating the severity of the problem, limiting preventative measures and resource mobilization into other needed public health monitoring systems,” she told TechCrunch .

The initiative will collect insights from people who have contracted COVID-19 to provide back to the medical and public health authorities.

In doing so it will create a map visualization of both official and self-reported COVID-19 cases, recovered and deaths to support best practices globally, including more testing.

To contribute software development to the project you can access its Github here or volunteer by emailing operationcovid19@gmail.com or joining the Facebook group.

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Pre-school EdTech startup Lingumi raises £4m, adds some free services during Covid-19

At these difficult times, parents are concerned for their children’s education, especially given so much of it has had to go online during the Covid-19 pandemic. But what about pre-schoolers who are missing out?

Pre-school children are sponges for information but don’t get formal training on reading and writing until they enter the classroom when they are less sponge-like and surrounded by 30 other children. Things are tougher for non-English speaking children who’s parents want them to learn English.

Lingumi, a platform aimed at toddlers learning critical skills, has now raised £4 million in a funding round led by China-based technology fund North Summit Capital – a fund run by Alibaba’s former Chief Data Scientist Dr Min Wanli – alongside existing investors LocalGlobe, ADV, and Entrepreneur First.

The startup, launched in 2017, is also announcing the launch of daily free activity packs and videos to support children and families during the COVID-19 outbreak, and has pledged to donate 20% of its sales during this period to the Global Children’s Fund.

Lingumi’s interactive courses offer one-to-one tutoring with a kind ‘social learning’ and its first course helps introduce key English grammar and vocabulary from the age of 2.

Instead of tuning into live lessons with tutors, which are typically timetabled and expensive, Lingumi’s lessons are delivered through interactive speaking tasks, teacher videos, and games. At the end of each lesson, children can see videos of Lingumi friends speaking the same words and phrases as them. Because the kids are watching videos, Lingumi is cheaper than live courses, and thus more flexible for parents.

The company launched the first Lingumi course in China last year, focused on teaching spoken English to non-English speakers. The platform is now being used by more than 100,000 families globally, including in mainland China, Taiwan, UK, Germany, Italy, and France. More than 1.5 million English lessons have taken place in China over the past six months, and 40% of active users are also playing lessons daily. Lingumi says its user base grew 50% during China’s lockdown and it has had a rapid uptake in Europe.

“Lingumi’s rapid expansion in the Chinese market required a strategic local investor, and Dr Min and the team had a clear-sighted understanding of the technology and scale opportunity both in China, and globally.”

Dr Wanli Min, general partner at North Summit Capital, commented: “It is only the most privileged children who can access native English speakers for one-on-one tutoring… Lingumi has the potential to democratize English learning and offer every kid a personalized curriculum empowered by AI & Lingumi’s ‘asynchronous teaching; model.”

Competitors to include Lingumi include live teaching solutions like VIPKid, and learning platforms like Jiliguala in China, or Lingokids in the West.