My Triumvirate: Rice, MIT, and Google® Scholar

How do you keep up on developments in emerging technology without spending every waking (or sleepless) moment browsing the Internet?

Here is my triumvirate of sources that help me stay on top of new technology developments while still having time to eat and sleep. Maybe something similar will work for you.

• Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy (https://www.bakerinstitute.org/)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT The Download (https://www.technologyreview.com/newsletter-preferences/)
• Google® Scholar Alerts (https://scholar.google.com/)

The three sources enable me to understand energy policy (Baker Institute), how technology interacts with society (The Download), and papers detailing research results in specific technologies (Scholar).

There are many, many public policy organizations to choose from. I chose to follow the Baker Institute because, based as it is in Houston, its focus tends to be on policy as it impacts energy, and vice versa. It helps me understand the universe within which technologies pertaining to energy develop.

A good description of the Baker Institute appears in a Wikipedia article located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Baker_III_Institute_for_Public_Policy

Here is a description of two of the Institute’s recent Webinars …

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Webinar — Entrepreneurship and the Energy Transition: Part I
Monday, April 25, 2022
Zoom Webinar
In the accelerating transition to a lower-carbon world, no city in the United States stands to gain or lose more than Houston, with entrepreneurial businesses and start-up technologies playing critical roles. Part I of this timely series explores Houston’s position at the locus of the global energy transition and offers a national perspective on business and policy considerations affecting energy entrepreneurship. Part II will examine the local and regional ecosystem for energy entrepreneurship and how Houston can maintain its preeminence as the energy capital of the world.
Panelists
Bobby Tudor, J.D.
CEO, Artemis Energy Partners; Retired Founder and CEO of Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co.
Adria Wilson, Ph.D.
Manager, U.S. Policy and Advocacy, Breakthrough Energy
Bryan Guido Hassin
Co-Founder and CEO, Third Derivative
Moderator
George Webb, J.D.
Scholar for Entrepreneurship, McNair Center for Entrepreneurship & Economic Growth, Baker Institute
This webinar is co-sponsored by the Baker Institute McNair Center for Entrepreneurship & Economic Growth and Center for Energy Studies.
This webinar is free, but registration is required. Once you register, you will receive a confirmation email with instructions about how to access the webinar.
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Webinar — Entrepreneurship and the Energy Transition Part II: The Houston Ecosystem
Monday, May 23, 2022
Zoom Webinar
In the transition to a lower-carbon world, no city in the United States stands to gain or lose more than Houston, with entrepreneurial businesses and start-up technologies playing critical roles. Yet even with its history as a business-friendly city, Houston faces challenges as a hub for energy entrepreneurship. This webinar, the second of a two-part series, brings together key leaders of the energy entrepreneurship ecosystem in Houston to discuss these challenges and explore how entrepreneur-driven innovation can help the city maintain its preeminence as the energy capital of the world. The panel’s focus on Houston builds on Part I of the series, which explored national perspectives on the business and policy considerations affecting energy entrepreneurship.
Panelists
Barbara Burger, Ph.D.
Former President of Chevron Technology Ventures and Former Vice President of Innovation, Chevron
Jan Odegard, Ph.D.
Executive Director, The Ion
Brad Burke
Executive Director, Rice Alliance for Technology & Entrepreneurship
Lara Cottingham
Chief of Staff, Greentown Labs
Moderator
George Webb, J.D.
Scholar for Entrepreneurship, McNair Center for Entrepreneurship & Economic Growth, Baker Institute
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT The Download helps me understand how emerging technologies help – and hurt – society. Their approach is to scour the news universe for items of interest, and then to offer commentary on why they matter. We could do the same thing on our own, of course. But why do what The Download folks are already doing for us? Save time. Make yourself a sandwich. Take a shower. Grab some shut eye.

Here are a few items recently profiled by The Download …

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Yann LeCun has a bold new vision for the future of AI
Around a year and a half ago, Yann LeCun realized he had it wrong.

LeCun, who is chief scientist at Meta’s AI lab and one of the most influential AI researchers in the world, had been trying to give machines a basic grasp of how the world works—a kind of common sense—by training neural networks to predict what was going to happen next in video clips of everyday events. But guessing future frames of a video pixel by pixel was just too complex. He hit a wall.

Now, after months figuring out what was missing, he has a bold new vision for the next generation of AI.

In a draft document shared with MIT Technology Review, LeCun sketches out an approach that he thinks will one day give machines the common sense they need to navigate the world.

For LeCun, the proposals could be the first steps on a path to building machines with the ability to reason and plan like humans—what many call artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

His vision is far from being comprehensive; indeed, it may raise more questions than it answers. The biggest question mark, as LeCun points out himself, is that he does not know how to build what he describes. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkiläa & Will Douglas Heaven

The smart city is a perpetually unrealized utopia
In a new essay, Chris Salter, an artist and professor of immersive arts at the Zurich University of the Arts, talks about how the concept of the smart city has always changed through the decades.

In it he also asks what role people should play in future cities. He writes: “When we assume that data is more important than the people who created it, we reduce the scope and potential of what diverse human bodies can bring to the “smart city” of the present and future. But the real “smart” city consists not only of commodity flows and information networks generating revenue streams for the likes of Cisco or Amazon.
The smartness comes from the diverse human bodies of different genders, cultures, and classes whose rich, complex, and even fragile identities ultimately make the city what it is.” Read the full essay.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The Online Privacy Bill is gathering momentum
The bill aims to curb businesses’ collection of users’ personal data, as well as helping them opt out of targeted advertising. (WSJ $)
 
2 Carbon capture isn’t the quick fix we want it to be
Experts think it’s smarter to channel time, effort and funding into renewables instead. (WP $)
+ The UK wants to capture CO2 and turn it into baking soda. (New Scientist $)
+ Carbon removal hype is becoming a dangerous distraction. (MIT Technology Review)
+ Climate change is altering the way that wine tastes. (Knowable Magazine)

3 A UK musician sued his record label over streaming royalties
Kieran Hebden, better known as Four Tet, argued that the rate he received was unfair. (BBC)
+ Spotify is still waiting for its podcasting gamble to pay off. (Bloomberg $)
+ The platform is testing a social feature to share what you’re listening to. (TechCrunch)
 
4 It’s getting harder to access China’s internet from abroad
The tighter restrictions seem to coincide with the country’s covid-induced isolation. (LA Times)
+ Now China wants to censor online comments. (MIT Technology Review)
 
5 A recession could make some workers too nervous to work from home
Prompting them to head back into offices to prove their worth to their employers. (The Atlantic $)
+ Remote workers want to re-create those watercooler moments. (MIT Technology Review)
 
6 Controversial crypto founder Do Kwon is staging a comeback
Just weeks after his stablecoins imploded, he’s launched a new version of his embattled Terra blockchain network. (WSJ $)
+ Hackers have stolen $100 million from crypto bridge Horizon. (Bloomberg $)
 
7 Even DALL·E mini’s creator doesn’t know why it’s obsessed with women in saris
But the program’s dataset is the most probable culprit. (Rest of World)
+ Popular text-to-image AI generators are staring down the barrel of a safety reckoning. (Time)
 
8 How an AI app could help detect early dementia
It identifies early signs of mild cognitive impairment in under five minutes. (Neo.Life)
 
9 An excitable NFT conference fell for a fake Snoop Dogg called Doop Snogg
There’s a lesson in this, somewhere. (The Guardian)
+ NFT.NYC sounds completely unhinged. (Motherboard)
+ NFTs of canned ice tea is the industry’s hottest property right now. (The Information)
+ I tried to buy an Olive Garden NFT. All I got was heartburn. (MIT Technology Review)
 
10 Want to feel better? Turn off your phone notifications 📱
Ignoring a device’s default settings can free us from its irritations. (FT $)
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Google® Scholar Alerts help me scan the academic and professional literature for research results on particular technologies of interest to me. Creating a Scholar Alert is easy. Basically, you search for something on Scholar. Then you save the search as an Alert. [See Google Scholar Search Strategies Made Easy (https://desulf.blogspot.com/2014/04/google-scholar-search-strategies-made.html )]

One of my Alerts is based on the simple search term Aramco, because Aramco is such a heavy hitter in the energy arena. Aramco is also very involved in a number areas of research. [See Saudi Aramco Research Centers (https://desulf.blogspot.com/2013/04/saudi-aramco-research-centers.html )]

Here are a few of the articles that I have found thanks to the various Alerts I have created …

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Integration Of Industrial Co2 Capture With District Heating Networks-A Refinery Case Study (2021)
The Interaction Of Finance And Innovation For Low Carbon Economy-Evidence From Saudi Arabia (2022)
Digital Twin In Hydrocarbon Industry (2022)
Energy Driven by Internet of Things Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (2022)
Development of Spare-Parts Process Chain in Oil Gas Industry Using Industry 4.0 Concepts (2022)
Assessing Blockchain Technology Adoption In The Norwegian Oil And Gas Industry Using Bayesian Best Worst Method (2022)
Development and Hardware Implementation of IoT-Based Patrol Robot for Remote Gas Leak Inspection (Bahrain 2022)
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Google® Better!
Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian, Aramco Services, Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he performed for Aramco.

Follow Jean’s blog at: http://desulf.blogspot.com/ for continuing tips on effective online research
Email Jean at letters@jeansteinhardt.com with questions on research, training, or anything else
Visit Jean’s Web site at http://www.jeansteinhardtconsulting.com/ to see examples of the services we can provide