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Schmidt Sciences Fosters AI Research

household chores - all with an emphasis on the safety and effectiveness of AI systems.“The AI2050 program gathers experts across disciplines, continents and career stages to imagine a future that is brighter because of AI,” said James Manyika, co-chair of AI2050 and a senior vice president at Google. “I am excited about the work these fellows will undertake, motivated by our AI2050 challenge to tackle the hard problems associated with achieving beneficial outcomes for society from AI.”The senior fellows are selected based on existing contributions to the field, and early career fellows

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Google to Build Subsea Cable for Christmas Island

Australia's Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island will be connected by subsea cable to the northern garrison city of Darwin, a project backed by Alphabet's Google that Australia says will boost its digital resilience.Christmas Island is 1,500 km (930 miles) west of the Australian mainland, with a small population of 1,250, but strategically located in the Indian Ocean, 350 km (215 miles) from Jakarta.The cable announcement comes as the Australian and U.S. militaries upgrade airfields in Australia's north, where a rotating force of U.S. Marines will be joined by Japanese troops next

The CHARM coral farming robot, equipped with its new soft robotic hand, in action at the CHARM facility on Magnetic Island. (Source: CSIRO)

Lending Oceans a Robotic Hand

and hovers above the seabed, picking individual nodules with robotic arms. There is no sediment release mid-water and no noise from pumps or the DP system of vessels.It is an example of how hopeful industry players are that they can counter environmental concerns. Over 20 countries and companies such as Google, BMW, Volvo and Samsung have indicated their opposition to seabed mining. They prefer to protect the unique and largely unknown ecology of the seafloor.Will the human and robotic helping hands being developed be enough to protect the beauty and mystery of the deep for future generations? Time will tell

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Underwater Power Grids Could Revolutionize How the US East Coast Gets Its Electricity

of power grids and reduce the need for new transmission lines over land, which have been notoriously difficult to gain approval for, especially on the East Coast.Coordinated offshore transmission was part of early U.S. discussions on offshore wind planning and development. In the late 2000s when Google and partners first proposed the Atlantic Wind Connection, an offshore transmission project, the benefits in both offshore renewables and the entire energy system were intriguing. At the time, the U.S. had just one utility-scale offshore wind project in the pipeline, and it ultimately failed.Today

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Breathing New Life Into Fight to Save the Seas with Artificial Intelligence

called machine learning. Here algorithms are trained on big sets of data or images to quickly recognise the presence of a whale in a shipping lane, for example, or a fishing vessel in a marine protected area. The tools have become more powerful in recent years, with some of the biggest companies, like Google and IBM, using their software to map coastal blue carbon.“It’s not really possible for a human to look at all of the data that's available and interpret it and draw out what really matters in any reasonable length of time, particularly given that fishing activities and other maritime

Figure 1. Stony Brook University PhD candidate, Ashley Nicoll, assembles the interior mount for a GoPro Hero/CamDo Blink controller time lapse underwater camera. The springs are used to gently press the camera against the interior face of the acrylic viewport. Read about Ashley’s MS project in Lander Lab #2, MTR, Vol. 65, #3, March/April 2022. (Photo by Kevin Hardy, Global Ocean Design.)

MTR100: Underwater Cameras, Lights and Ocean Landers

devised, from acrylic flat plates to clear silicone rubber sheets. Some cast the LEDs in a block of clear acrylic. Heat is the principal enemy of LEDs. Much has been written about topside luminaire design, including the use of heat transfer material behind the PCB to carry the heat away from the LEDs (google “CREE LED Luminaire Design Guide”). LEDs are completely pressure tolerant as they have no compressible volume. A pressure compensating fluid, such as mineral oil may be used. Avoid silicone oil has the cast dome on an LED is often silicone, and may be affected by immersion in a fluid

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Indian Fishermen Use Smartphones to Map a Vanishing Way of Life

always owned the land. But the government keeps changing the rules not realising that our customs and our livelihood here is older than their rules,” said Raji, a 33-year-old father of two.Raji and his fellow fishermen of Gunankuppam have captured the co-ordinates of hundreds of special places on Google Maps and other apps, none of them designated as landmarks in official government maps.Industrial proposals to develop the creek around Gunankuppam label the places the fishermen most cherish as “wastelands”, Raji said, fearing the rapid industrialisation that is tranforming much of India

Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, 2019 Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration

Deep-sea Mining: A New Gold Rush or Environmental Disaster?

the data they're based on, which is limited for deep-sea environments".Lusty, who led a British government-commissioned review on deep-sea mining published in 2021, said companies also face challenges in creating a business case.Some would-be buyers like major technology and car companies like Google, Samsung and BMW have called for a temporary ban, and there are likely extra costs compared to mining on land."Naturally, the economics of mining certain minerals on land will be preferable to doing that in the deep sea," Lusty said.(The Thomson Reuters Foundation - Reporting by Jack Graham

Inside the Subsea Cable Firm Secretly Helping America Take on China

emerges as the world’s preeminent superpower.SubCom, a company born out of a U.S. Cold War project to spy on Soviet submarines, is living a double life.Publicly, it is one of the world’s biggest developers of undersea fiber-optic cables for telecom firms and tech giants like Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta Platforms.Behind the scenes, SubCom is the exclusive undersea cable contractor to the U.S. military, laying a web of internet and surveillance cables across the ocean floor, according to the four people with knowledge of the matter: two SubCom employees and two U.S. Navy

Subsea Vehicle technology is front and center in MTR, with a focus on increased levels of autonomy, reliability and flexibility.
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