Bill Gates’s new $1 billion fund will back radical clean energy ideas

Bill Gates has announced a $1 billion investment fund to back radical approaches to clean energy.

Last year, Gates established the Breakthrough Energy Coalition with more than 20 billionaires, among them Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, and Virgin’s Richard Branson. At the time, they promised to invest at least $2 billion into new technologies.

The Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund is the first wave of that investment. Established to take a long-term approach to funding energy ideas, it will help startups considered to be too risky by regular venture capital firms. In a statement announcing the launch of the fund, John Arnold, who is one of the billionaire investors, explained that the “dearth of venture funding for clean energy technologies threatens to create a valley of death for the industry, with emerging ideas unable to find the necessary capital to reach commercialization.”

The new fund plans to step in and bridge that gap. Its investments, which will take place over the next 20 years, won’t be limited to electricity production—they’ll also include new technologies for transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and construction. It will fund projects that promise the biggest possible benefit to the planet’s future climate, as long as the science underlying the application has been proved in the lab and can plausibly be scaled up.

The 20-year fund length isn’t random. In an interview with MIT Technology Review earlier this year, Gates argued that in terms of carbon dioxide emission, “rich countries need to be net zero by 2050, if you really want just 2 degrees of warming.” Gates and his co-investors hope that they will be able to fund plans that are audacious enough to have a profound impact on the planet before then.

Not that it will be easy. In the same interview, Gates admitted that one of the biggest problems facing the fund was finding enough companies doing the right kinds of work to invest in. “I wish just writing a bigger check was the solution,” he explained. “I’ll be fascinated as we get this fund together how quickly we’ll be able to invest.” As will we, Bill.

(Read more: Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Telegraph, “Q&A: Bill Gates“)

7,500 Faceless Coders Paid in Bitcoin Built a Hedge Fund’s Brain

Richard Craib is a 29-year-old South African who runs a hedge fund in San Francisco. Or rather, he doesn’t run it. He leaves that to an artificially intelligent system built by several thousand data scientists whose names he doesn’t know.

Under the banner of a startup called Numerai, Craib and his team have built technology that masks the fund’s trading data before sharing it with a vast community of anonymous data scientists. Using a method similar to homomorphic encryption, this tech works to ensure that the scientists can’t see the details of the company’s proprietary trades, but also organizes the data so that these scientists can build machine learning models that analyze it and, in theory, learn better ways of trading financial securities.

“We give away all our data,” says Craib, who studied mathematics at Cornell University in New York before going to work for an asset management firm in South Africa. “But we convert it into this abstract form where people can build machine learning models for the data without really knowing what they’re doing.”

He doesn’t know these data scientists because he recruits them online and pays them for their trouble in a digital currency that can preserve anonymity. “Anyone can submit predictions back to us,” he says. “If they work, we pay them in bitcoin.”

The company comes across as a Silicon Valley gag. All that’s missing is the virtual reality.

So, to sum up: They aren’t privy to his data. He isn’t privy to them. And because they work from encrypted data, they can’t use their machine learning models on other data—and neither can he. But Craib believes the blind can lead the blind to a better hedge fund.

Numerai’s fund has been trading stocks for a year. Though he declines to say just how successful it has been, due to government regulations around the release of such information, he does say it’s making money. And an increasingly large number of big-name investors have pumped money into the company, including the founder of Renaissances Technologies, an enormously successful “quant” hedge fund driven by data analysis. Craib and company have just completed their first round of venture funding, led by the New York venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. Union Square has invested $3 million in the round, with an additional $3 million coming from others.

Hedge funds have been exploring the use of machine learning algorithms for a while now, including established Wall Street names like Renaissance and Bridgewater Associates as well as tech startups like Sentient Technologies and Aidyia. But Craib’s venture represents new efforts to crowdsource the creation of these algorithms. Others are working on similar projects, including Two Sigma, a second data-centric New York hedge fund. But Numerai is attempting something far more extreme.

On the Edge

The company comes across as some sort of Silicon Valley gag: a tiny startup that seeks to reinvent the financial industry through artificial intelligence, encryption, crowdsourcing, and bitcoin. All that’s missing is the virtual reality. And to be sure, it’s still very early for Numerai. Even one of its investors, Union Square partner Andy Weissman, calls it an “experiment.”

But others are working on similar technology that can help build machine learning models more generally from encrypted data, including researchers at Microsoft. This can help companies like Microsoft better protect all the personal information they gather from customers. Oren Etzioni, the CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, says the approach could be particularly useful for Apple, which is pushing into machine learning while taking a hardline stance on data privacy. But such tech can also lead to the kind of AI crowdsourcing that Craib espouses.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/7500-faceless-coders-paid-bitcoin-built-hedge-funds-brain/.

Watch NASA launch a rocket full of satellites into orbit from the belly of a plane

Today, NASA will attempt to launch eight small satellites to space on board a Pegasus XL rocket, manufactured by private spaceflight company Orbital ATK. Called the CYGNSS mission, the probes are meant to study various aspects of tropical storms and hurricanes from orbit, in order to help scientists better understand how these cyclones form. But launching these satellites into orbit won’t look like your typical trip to space, where a rocket takes off vertically from a launch pad on the ground. Instead, this launch will take place in the air

This launch will take place in the air

That’s because the Pegasus XL rocket launches after being dropped from the belly of an airplane. First, Orbital’s Stargazer L-1011 aircraft will take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida and carry the rocket to a target drop zone over the Atlantic Ocean, an area that sits at an altitude of 39,000 feet. There, the Pegasus is released and ignites its main rocket motor about five seconds later. The vehicle will then ignite two additional motors over the course of the flight to get to the right altitude and orientation for the eight spacecraft to deploy properly into lower Earth orbit.

Once that happens, the spacecraft depart in twos. Opposing pairs of CYGNSS probes will separate every 30 seconds from the deployment module — a tube-like structure that the satellites are connected to throughout launch. The module is also responsible for helping to “kick” the spacecraft out into orbit. About 10 minutes after one satellite deploys, it will automatically open up its solar arrays to get energy from the Sun. Overall, the entire trip — from the launch of the rocket to the last spacecraft deployment — will take about 14 and a half minutes.

CYGNSS will “see” through the parts of hurricanes where its raining. NASA will then make contact with the satellites about three hours after they’ve deployed, and that’s when the science work begins. From orbit, the CYGNSS satellites will be studying the ocean surface winds within the inner cores of hurricanes — important indicators of how intense a storm can get. To do this, the probes will receive reflected signals from GPS satellites, which will allow the CYGNSS team to “see” through the parts of hurricanes where it’s raining and measure the surface winds in those areas. It’s something that most Earth science missions aren’t able to do, according to NASA. These measurements will help scientists better predict how strong a hurricane or storm is going to be when it makes landfall.

Today’s mission gets underway at 7:30AM ET, when Orbital’s Stargazer airplane taxis onto the runway before taking off at 7:37AM ET. Originally takeoff was supposed to be at 7:26AM ET, but the time was delayed due to fog in the area. The launch window for the Pegasus rocket then opens about an hour later at 8:19AM ET, with release of the vehicle slated for the (revised) time of 8:40AM ET.

Up until now, weather hasn’t looked too great for the mission. There was a 40 percent chance of favorable conditions, thanks to a cold front that just moved through southern Florida. As the front moves out of the area, there’s a chance that the region could see some rain, and Orbital ATK doesn’t want to launch the Pegasus through any precipitation or heavy clouds. It seems that the weather forecast has improved somewhat though, as there’s now a 60 percent chance of good conditions. But if the launch doesn’t happen today, there is always backup option on Tuesday.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/11/13912548/nasa-cygnss-hurricane-mission-orbital-atk-pegasus-xl.

Pebble smartwatch maker will shut down and sell its intellectual property to Fitbit

Pebble Technology Corp., one of the first companies to manufacture smartwatches, said it will shut down and sell its software and intellectual property to Fitbit Inc., which also plans to hire some of Pebble’s “key personnel.”

“Due to various factors, Pebble is no longer able to operate as an independent entity,” Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky said in a blog post published Wednesday on the Palo Alto company’s website.”We have made the tough decision to shut down the company and no longer manufacture Pebble devices.”

Migicovsky did not explain why Pebble could no longer operate independently, and the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As part of the shutdown, Pebble will stop selling and promoting its line of smartwatches. Pebble watches already out in the world will continue to work “as normal,” but “functionality or service quality may be reduced in the future,” Migicovsky said. 

Those who helped fund the watch on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter who have not yet received their backer rewards — perks given in exchange for financial support — are to receive full refunds. 

Fitbit, the publicly traded fitness tracker firm, confirmed it will snap up Pebble’s “key personnel and intellectual property related to software and firmware development,” but the acquisition excludes hardware.

The San Francisco company wouldn’t disclose the terms of the deal because “the acquisition is not material to Fitbit’s financials,” Fitbit spokeswoman Paula Conhain said in an email. 

For many in the technology industry, Pebble’s sale and shutdown seemed inevitable after major firms such as Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google threw their hats into the smartwatch ring.

Despite offering the first smartwatch that enabled users to receive phone notifications on their watch, send and receive text messages from their wrist and change their digital watch faces using software, Pebble was dealt a blow when Google released Android Wear in 2014 and Apple launched the Apple Watch last year.

Analysts noted that the company lacked the resources to compete with the likes of Apple and Google and that it failed to attract and keep a large enough audience.

“Pebble had first-mover advantage, but what they lost sight of was they needed to build a relevant ecosystem,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. “They did not, and they didn’t add enough incremental value to overcome the lack of a robust ecosystem.”

The company helped put smartwatches on the tech radar in 2012 when it launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of the first Pebble watch. The campaign raised more than $10 million in 30 days, making it one of the most successful Kickstarter fundraisers at the time.

The company attracted a loyal following of early adopters, but it struggled to crack the mainstream market.