BOLDTalks Innovation 2013 at DUCTAC

BOLDtalks made its second specialized foray on 16 Nov, hosting a morning and afternoon of talks themed on innovation, held at DUCTAC.

The event began with Dubai SME's Alexander Mathew Williams talking about local challenges and cycles in innovation. From Williams' statistics-filled talk, a couple of points that stood out were obstacles faced in getting local universities -- many of which do not have R&D programs -- to foster innovation among their students, and local perceptions of mentoring as wasta-dealing rather than the provision of guidance. He also attempted to explain the fees levied on startups by the state as a sort of pre-earning taxation scheme; I'm not sure how many entrepreneurs would agree that is necessarily better than taxes on earnings.

Some of the other talks were about innovation cycles in the region, microfinance, regional fast food franchising, educational innovation, and branding. For me, three talks were particularly fascinating.

Bastian Schaefer is a designer from Airbus -- which was one of the sponsors -- but his talk was not a lot of PR spiel. He walked us through the innovation process in developing the airplane of the future, starting with demographic shifts, and why and how these matter. He presented an example of a lighter, computer-designed, 3D-printed crew rest bracket that they created, and concisely described how advances in technology will impact construction, seating, aesthetics and efficiency in the kind of aircraft they are developing.

I also liked Dr Alejandro Rios G.'s talk a lot, and not just because he is also from Masdar Institute. He described the food-water-energy nexus, the growth of aviation emissions growth, and talked about his research center's project to use seawater -- available in overwhelming abundance -- to farm marine life for human consumption, as well as grow specialized mangrove plants that can be used to produce biofuels. I have long wondered if something could be done using mangroves, and I was pleased to know that it's happening, and right here in the UAE.

Possibly the most inspiring talk that day was that of Hind Hobeika. Although she is developing a rather niche product -- albeit one related to her passion -- she captivated us with tale of a journey from inspiration to conception to prototyping to funding to manufacturing. Most importantly (from an entrepreneurial and innovation perspective, especially), she recounted both successes and failures, and provided specific anecdotes and observations from along the way, about team-building, investment, patenting, production, and challenges specific to the region. Only a tiny minority of us are training swimmers, but I'm sure she had everyone there sincerely and enthusiastically wishing for her success by the end of that talk.

Rahwan, I., Dsouza, S., Rutherford, A., Naroditskiy, V., McInerney, J., Venanzi, M., Jennings, N., Cebrian M. (2012) "Global Manhunt Pushes the Limits of Social Mobilization", Computer, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 68-75, April, 2013

And to compound the honor of our social mobilization work being published in PNAS, we also had work on a related topic published in IEEE Computer magazine this month. It was complemented in the same issue by an editorial piece "Equal Before the Bar", written by David Alan Grier himself, in which he describes his role in our victory, and why it is significant to the field of study. This one was about the US State Department Tag Challenge, a social mobilization challenge that our lab played a leading role in winning as Team CrowdScanner (web application developed by me for the challenge).

From the article:

Using social media and only the targets’ mug shots, a team competing in the
US State Department-sponsored Tag Challenge located three of five targeted
people in five cities in the US and Europe in less than 12 hours.
...
The Tag Challenge was significantly harder than the
Red Balloon Challenge because it required locating people
in highly populated cities, where the pace of life can help
people “hide in plain sight,”
 and making it much more difficult to spot the suspects than to find large red balloons.
Furthermore, people are mobile, making it difficult to rule
out locations that have already been visited.

Rutherford, A., Cebrian, M., Dsouza, S., Moro, E., Pentland, A., Rahwan, I. (2013) "Limits of Social Mobilization", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The PNAS paper is finally out, with me as third author. All of us are elated, of course, as PNAS is one of the top scientific publications. This project has also been the subject of a 2012 NetSci conference presentation and a 2012 WIDS workshop poster, so our team has been into it for a while now.

Masdar Press Release:

Abu Dhabi-UAE: 18 April, 2013 – Time-critical social mobilization is the ability of social networks to mobilize rapidly to address challenges such as disaster response or finding a missing child.

While social media is a very effective tool for mobilizing volunteers, it still has its limits, according to a research paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) journal, considered the second most-cited scientific journal in the world.

The scientific paper is a result of two years of research at the Social Computing and Artificial Intelligence laboratory, led by Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Associate Professor and Head of Computing & Information Science at Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.

The first author of the paper is Dr Alex Rutherford, post-doctoral fellow at Masdar Institute and member of Dr. Rahwan’s lab. The other co-authors are Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr. Manuel Cebrian, from National ICT Australia, Sohan D’Souza of Masdar Institute, and Prof. Esteban Moro, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

We also got got coverage at LiveScience.com and Phys.org.