Sat, 11/06/2021
Welcome to ‘Tech Roundup,’ where we highlight some of the most significant tech news items from Nebraska and the surrounding area. If you have a news item you would like to see in the Roundup, please email neil.rutledge@unl.edu.
Local/Regional
Seed Companies Submit Plan to Clean-Up AltEn Plant Contamination in Mead, Nebraska
Nebraska Public Media
- Former seed corn suppliers to the now-shuttered AltEn ethanol plant in Mead, Nebraska have submitted a detailed plan on how they will clean-up pesticide-contaminated waste and water at the site.
- The report says 250,000 cubic yards of so-called “wetcake”, what’s left over when the seed corn is processed, still has to be removed, along with millions of gallons of pesticide-contaminated water in several lagoons at the site. The plan also suggests some of the cleaned water from the plant could be used on nearby farm fields.
- “I’m not sure if I were an agriculturist in that area, I’d want that water spread on my property,” former State Senator Al Davis, a member of an organization monitoring clean-up of the former plant, said. “What is the answer? Is it pollute, dilute, and then distribute? Is that what we’re going to be doing, because that’s not a palatable answer to me.”
Updated Mapping Project Highlights Areas of Lincoln Facing Big Challenges
Nebraska Public Media
- An updated, data-driven mapping project in Lincoln that tracks how where a person lives affects their health has been unveiled and shows a slight decline in poverty since 2019, but also some troubling trends when it comes to outcomes for people of color.
- The mapping project, called “Place Matters 4.0”, uses health data to produce maps that illustrate how where a person lives can drastically affect their health and financial stability.
- Lori Seibel is president of the organization and said the biggest takeaway this year is that poverty has a dramatic and direct impact on life expectancy in Lincoln.
Researchers awarded $5M bridge safety grant
Nebraska Today
- Using rural Nebraska bridges as full-scale “testbeds,” Gandhi, Linzell and other Nebraska U researchers, in collaboration with the Kinnami Software Corp., will conduct research and development relating to data collection at the edge using internet of things including sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles and more; secure data processing and management from the edge to the cloud; visualizations and analytics of data using machine learning; socio-technical impacts such as fairness of data, algorithms, and analysis; and decision support systems.
Supply Chain Disruptions Affecting Farmers on Multiple Fronts
Nebraska Public Media
- Consumers are not the only ones being affected by current supply chain issues. The agriculture industry from farmers to food processors are also suffering from its effects. Major shortages from products needed to help farmers grow crops and fix equipment are sweeping the agriculture industry especially in Nebraska. Due to the limited supply of products prices are also increasing.
- Due to shortages in the labor force, adds Sonzmez, millions of pounds of fresh produce are staying in the fields unable to be harvested which also adds to a higher labor rate and higher rates of food, globally.
Farmers Try To Figure Out How Much Carbon They Could Sell
Nebraska Public Media
- Some Midwestern farmers are involved in a research project to help determine how good some practices are for the environment, and it may help them take advantage of new attempts to establish a carbon credit trade market.
- The project run by Missouri Corn Growers Association and Missouri Soybean Association is looking at quantifying the reduction of carbon emissions when farmers take on practices like no-till, planting cover crops and refining fertilizer application schedules.
Ask UNL's Food Doc: Food innovations on the horizon
Lincoln Journal Star
- In this series, Bob Hutkins, Professor of Food Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, discusses interesting new innovations in food science, including a company that has developed a microbe that can “capture carbon and nitrogen from the air and convert them into carbohydrates, fats, and proteins,” which they reassemble to create synthetic meat. The name of the company is Air Protein.
UNeTech, Bio Nebraska grant will support women in STEM
Silicon Prairie News
- In a move that will support more women launching tech ventures in the state, Bio Nebraska and the UNeTech Institute have received a $250,000 grant to enable the launch of Opportunity Corps, a program designed to support women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) as they explore the viability of launching tech ventures.
Husker engineers developing tool to combat internet congestion
Nebraska Today
- (T)he internet must be reliable in complex environments — on the road, in the ocean and underground, to name a few. A major blockade to consistent performance is network congestion, which happens when a network is overloaded with data.
- The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Lisong Xu and Hamid Bagheri are using a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a tool that will address one of the most significant drivers of network congestion: buggy congestion control algorithms, whose misfires can lead to the all-too-familiar internet freeze or interrupted video streaming during peak usage times.
Regional Startup Spotlight
Silicon Prairie news
- Startup Sioux Falls, a hub that offers guidance and resources to South Dakota’s budding small business orders, was one of 51 grantees to qualify for the Small Business Administration’s Community Navigator Pilot Program. .
- The Community Navigator Pilot Program seeks to fund underserved entrepreneurs through investing in hubs that will offer programs to their communities.
What We Are Reading
In this installment of “What We Are Reading”, Adam Thompson, Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Assistant Director of the Kutak Ethics Center, recommended the following article:
Scientists Built an AI to Give Ethical Advice, But It Turned Out Super Racist
Futurism
- We’ve all been in situations where we had to make tough ethical decisions. Why not dodge that pesky responsibility by outsourcing the choice to a machine learning algorithm?
- That’s the idea behind Ask Delphi, a machine-learning model from the Allen Institute for AI. You type in a situation (like “donating to charity”) or a question (“is it okay to cheat on my spouse?”), click “Ponder,” and in a few seconds Delphi will give you, well, ethical guidance.
- The project launched last week, and has subsequently gone viral online for seemingly all the wrong reasons. Much of the advice and judgements it’s given have been… fraught, to say the least.
Thompson offered the following observation:
For those in the back, I’ll say it loudly again: moral reasoning is difficult. Notice, any question about things like what one ought to do, whether something is more valuable than something else, or the extent to which one bears responsibility for the outcome of their attempt to do good is a philosophical question. Philosophy is fundamentally focused on attempting to determine what there is and what the nature of what there is is. Thus, part of its subject matter is to study what reason there is, if any, to do this or that, to value this or that, to praise/blame this or that, and to study what the nature of that reason is.
Those are significantly tough questions to answer. It’s part of why teaching ethics is so difficult. There is no rule book that we can upload to a machine to make it act morally. Likewise, there is no set of precepts that we can inject into an AI’s programming that will ensure that it reliably delivers sound moral judgments. One must develop their understanding of the moral universe through reflection on moral philosophy and the normative contours of our human experience.
Hence, it is not surprising that the AI cited in the article cannot reliably render accurate moral judgments for humans. It has not developed its person in light of moral concern as it navigates the morally rich landscape of human existence on Earth.
Still, I am confident that the trend toward actively ignoring or dismissing expertise especially in academia (see UNL’s own ACE program) will continue to produce sad attempts to game the moral system. So, I fully expect to be out of work while robots attempt to teach courses like mine. Sad.
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