connects

In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama highlighted an innovative educational program called P-TECH – an acronym for Pathways in Technology Early College High School. The first P-TECH school opened in Brooklyn, New York, in 2011. It was profiled in a 2014 cover story in Time magazine as “The School That Will Get You a Job.” Obama stated that all students should have educational opportunities such as P-TECH. What makes the school unique is that students can earn an associate degree at no cost while still in high school. Students at the schools get the opportunity to compete for paid industry internships. They are also given mentors and a clear pathway from school to college to career with a commitment from business partners like IBM that they are first in line for a...

Canadian artificial intelligence firm BlueDot has been in the news in recent weeks for warning about the new coronavirus days ahead of the official alerts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. The company was able to do this by tapping different sources of information beyond official statistics about the number of cases reported. BlueDot’s AI algorithm, a type of computer program that improves as it processes more data, brings together news stories in dozens of languages, reports from plant and animal disease tracking networks and airline ticketing data. The result is an algorithm that’s better at simulating disease spread than algorithms that rely on public health data – better enough to be able to predict outbreaks. The company uses the t...