Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Some 50 fintech entrepreneurs gathered for breakfast at the Shoreditch headquarters of Rise, Europe’s largest fintech workspace, to hear how the bank’s funding platforms can help their companies make the move from start-up to tech star.

Managing Director of WBCSD’s Natural Capital Area, Maria Mendiluce, speaks to We Mean Business about the Paris Agreement and what companies are doing to take action.

Through a partnership with Sharklet Technologies Inc. we are taking Ultracast to an entirely new application space—instead of aesthetic textures, the patterns used are functional.

Anne Arundel County leadership in Maryland recently celebrated the successful completion of upgrades to the Cox Creek Water Reclamation Facility (WRF), designed to drastically reduce pollutants in local waterways.

On the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) blog, Tetra Tech’s Nilmini Rubin and Jennifer Hara discuss the benefits of practice sessions for public-private partnerships teams tasked with addressing complex infrastructure issues. Nilmini and Jennifer discuss the applications of multiplayer simulations across multiple sectors, allowing teams to try out approaches and see challenges from partners’ viewpoints.

Water providers have been collecting and utilizing data to perform important but traditional tasks: Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices speed information across networks, and smart metering infrastructure systems measure consumption and contribute to customer billing. But, as utilities wrestle with addressing aging foundational assets while balancing limited capital and rising calls for lower costs and safer water, there is new urgency to explore how data can drive and optimize asset performance and reduce risk.

Scientists will get a better understanding of our planet’s carbon cycle and vegetation health through a first-of-a-kind NASA instrument built by Lockheed Martin. The Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory (GeoCARB) mission will use an advanced infrared spectrograph hosted on a commercial geosynchronous satellite. The project is led by Principal Investigator Dr. Berrien Moore at the University of Oklahoma.

Critical infrastructure comprises the giant systems that support modern life, from power plants and water treatment plants to mass-transit systems. These facilities are operated through industrial control systems, sensors and components that talk to each other and to facility operators. These systems, like a smartphone, provides easy access to information and controls that would otherwise be difficult to get.

Yahoo!, the Democratic National Convention and the U.S. Department of Justice were among the high-profile victims hit by major cyber attacks in 2016. Many people believe it’s only a matter of time before a water utility joins the list. Some consider physical security to be the weak link in ensuring a well-protected water supply; while others worry that the Internet of Things has created an incalculable number of entry points for hackers to create mischief.