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Instagram Accounts Are Being Abducted and No One Knows Why Exactly

Around 2000 Instagram users have reported that they have been locked out of their accounts, seemingly the result of a widespread hacking campaign originating from Russia.

Victims say that they have been logged out of their accounts, have had their profile pictures and handles changed, as well as the email addresses and phone numbers associated with their accounts. Those who have requested a password reset have discovered that their accounts are now linked to .ru emails.

This pattern has been reported since the beginning of the month according to Mashable. The digital media website notes that reports of this kind of hack on Twitter have spiked dramatically. “According to data from analytics platform Talkwalker,” their article reads, “there have been more than 5,000 tweets from 899 accounts mentioning Instagram hacks just in the last seven days.” Many of those tweets were directed at Instagram’s official Twitter account seeking help.

Though Instagram claimed that this was commonplace, Mashable notes that the number of such tweets – tweets directed at Instagram with the word “hack” in them – has reached close to 700 since the beginning of the month, compared to about 40 for the previous month.

The pattern can also be observed on Reddit and in a Google Trends search for “Instagram hacked”.

In a blog post, Instagram urged users to update their security settings and enable two-factor authentication. Problem is that some of the accounts that were hacked already had 2FA enabled. The good news, however, is that Instagram says that it is planning on upgrading its 2FA, which currently relies on text messages instead of an authenticator app.

The bizarre twist to the story is that the hijackers don’t appear to be doing much with the stolen accounts, which seem to have remained static since the hack. What the hackers did do was merely changing all of the contact information linked to the accounts, making it impossible for the original owners to recover their accounts using the automated processes that Instagram has in place for such occurrences.

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The Digital Mystery Shopping War and The Bots Arms Race

In the early 40s, mystery shopping became a popular method used to measure employee integrity. Pretend customers would walk into stores, interact with the staff, observe and later document their performance. Since then, the practice has grown to encompass a number of additional functions, including competitive price audits – i.e. the collection of price information from competitors. With the advent of online shopping, market research companies and the retailers themselves turned to software to gather pricing data, a process which came to be known as scraping.

Naturally, retailers love scraping but hate being scraped. As such, several techniques have been developed to subvert the process – for instance, technology can be used to spot a scraping bot and alter prices, often dramatically, to throw it off.

How To Spot a Bot

There are several ways to detect a bot. If a device makes hundreds of requests per minute, it is most probably a bot; if requests are coming from a cloud computing service, it is most likely a bot too. Captchas can help spot and stop bots as well.

A Bots Arms Race

These anti scraping bot measures, however, have led to the creation of apposite countermeasures. One way to avoid detection involves making bots appear as if they were human smartphones users.

This bot masking technique resembles a botnet – a network of internet-connected devices running bots and controlled as a group, typically used to launch attacks. But unlike a botnet, the process is performed with the knowledge and consent of the device owner. The process has gotten smarter: instead of sending requests all day long, each recruited smartphone will scan prices for a few minutes a day; the reduction in the number of requests per bot is offset by the high number of recruitable smartphones.

The detection methods described above become ineffective in this scenario. As a consequence,  developers have sought to explore other avenues for detecting bots. One method relies on motion: when a person uses his phone, the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope record some movement, even if faint. By contrast, the absence of any movement indicates that the requests are generated by a bot.

Fear of Collateral

We should remember that completely sealing the door on bots could be detrimental for online retailers. Doing so would mean that they would no longer appear in search results. Price comparison sites also use scraping to gather and list prices.

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Study: How Fake News is Destroying Trust

Following our post on the dominance of fake news over the truth, we will share stats from another study, the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual trust and credibility survey that’s been running for 18 years. The results largely corroborate what the previous story revealed and sheds light on the repercussions.

To give you a quick idea about the previous study. A group of researchers at MIT looked at more than a hundred thousand rumour cascades on Twitter and compared their performance to truthful tweets. They found that the truth does not stand a chance; fake news spread faster and further in every topic they studied.

Now the Edelman report revealed that the ascendancy of fake news is having severe implications on people’s faith in the media: In 22 out of the 28 countries they surveyed, trust in the media fell below 50%.

Blurring Lines

The report bases its conclusions on answers from 33 thousand respondents. Here’s what they learned from it:

63% said they can longer differentiate good journalism from rumours and falsehoods

59% said it was becoming harder to tell if a media organization behind a piece of news was trustworthy

And nearly 7 in 10 respondents said that they were worried about the potential use of false information as a weapon

The study also gleans an interesting insight: the confusion regarding the credibility of news probably stems from people’s broad definition of what constitutes the media, with some including platforms in the media:

48% included social media

25% included search engines

World’s Apart

In previous surveys, trust has moved largely in tandem in different countries, but for the first time ever the study found that there is a distinct split between trust gainers and losers. The US for instance witnessed a hard decline in trust – a 37-point aggregate drop across all institutions – whereas China experienced a 27-point gain. Those two countries represented the two ends of the spectrum.

Journalists Buck the Trend

While trust in media witnessed a historic fall, people’s opinion of journalists rose substantially. A number of factors are driving this paradox. This trend also extended to what the report calls “voices of expertise”.

The credibility of journalists experienced a double-digit increase in 20 of 28 surveyed countries

Journalists gained 12 points

CEOs gained 7 points

Technical experts, financial industry analysts, and successful entrepreneurs all registered credibility levels of 50 percent or higher

On the other hand, the credibility of peers dropped for the first time in 7 years, losing six points to 54%.

Finally, NGOs also seemed to suffer: trust in NGOs dropped by three points globally. This may be driven by a lack of transparency or action.

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The Damning Statistics from a Study on the Spread of Fake News

Fake news travels farther, spreads faster, and lasts longer. A damning new study by MIT showed that the truth simply cannot compete with falsehood.

The study analyzed rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017, which amounted to 126,000 rumors tweeted by over 3 million people more than 4.5 million times.

One observation that the researchers made was that false news reached more people than the truth – “the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people” read the study’s abstract. Additionally, the researchers also found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests the emotional reaction of recipients to this novelty may have been what motivated people to share.

The Truth Machine

The study used an algorithm developed by Vosoughi, then an MIT Ph.D. student, to dig out truth from twitter. The algorithm was designed to sift through thousands of tweets and glean true facts from them.

For fake news, the research team extracted ten of thousands of rumors from 6 third-party fact-checking sites, including Snopes, Politifact, and FactCheck.org, then looked for these rumors on Twitter. All six organizations seemed to agree in the crushing majority of instances – exhibiting “95 to 98% agreement on the classifications”.

The analysis focused on three attributes:

Was the author verified

Is the language used sophisticated

How did the tweet spread through the network

Here are some key takeaways:

False stories outperform the truth on every subject: politics, terrorism, war, natural disasters, science, urban legends, business, financial information, technology, and entertainment. Fake news about politics fared best.

False stories spread much faster.  On average, a false story will reach 1,500 people six times faster than a true story does, increasing the likelihood of it going viral.

In replies, false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise; true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust.

And the most worrisome stat of all: we are responsible, not the machines. The study found that Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones, implying that false news spreads more because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.

Though the study was conducted using data from Twitter, the same applies to any platform that amplifies novel content – think Facebook, YouTube, and almost any major social network you can think of.

What about the repercussions? How has fake news altered people’s behavior? We’ll explain that in an upcoming post.

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The EU’s Copyright Directive Could Kill Memes

As the dust settles from the General Data Protection Regulations act, lawmakers in the EU are set to meet tomorrow to vote on the Copyright Directive, a legal proposal critics say could lead to broad censorship. The Legal Committee of the EU Parliament will vote on whether the law will progress any further.

The Copyright Directive was designed to protect copyrights; it is meant to regulate illegal streaming and downloading of pirated content, namely movies and music. Online freedom activists, however, were quick to point out two practices in the directive that they saw as problematic.

Article 11

Article 11 seeks to force publishers into paying a so-called “link tax.” The link tax will be incurred anytime a publisher posts a link to copyrighted material – the publisher has to pay the content creator. This spells disaster for online bloggers and content creators in general. Just think of the repercussions that this article will have on the flow of information on the web. One journalist has likened the effect that the article might have to “carpet bombing”.

Article 13

As things stand, information sharing platforms and channels are not liable when it comes to the content that passes through them, instead, the law holds the persons sharing or receiving the data to be liable. But if the directive passes, according to article 13, those websites and platforms will be held responsible for any violation of copyright rules. The article seeks to implement AI technology to inspect the data being shared.

Opponents of the idea cite the fact that artificial intelligence probably isn’t good at differentiating between plagiarized work and work that falls under fair use. Sure, if there is an error it can be reported and will be corrected, but can small publishers keep up with lengthy and probably costly appeal processes. Can AI distinguish between a quote and plagiarism or when a photo is used as a meme?

YouTube is of particular interest here, as it represents the biggest video sharing platform. What’s more, YouTube has been known not to be very diligent when it comes to copyright infringement enforcement. The streaming service has, on quite a few occasions, taken down content merely based on takedown requests without actually inspecting the material themselves.

The directive will also force platforms like Facebook, Reddit and 4chan to block their users’ content before it gets online.

You should also know that both Tim Berners-Lee, credited with the creation of the worldwide web, and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales are among those that have signed a protest letter to the European Parliament in which they describe Article 13 as “a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users”.

Visit savetheinternet.info and sign the petition to help defeat the proposal.

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Explaining the mysteries of the universe

Last November, I wandered the physics department at the American University of Beirut looking to for a professor to help me script a short video series about quantum mechanics. It was Friday afternoon so the department was virtually empty, save for one office with its door left ajar. Little did I know when I walked in and introduced myself that I was shaking the hand of a man responsible for many theories and models that are aiding humanity unravel the mysteries of the universe.

I did find that out after I had gone back to the office and read up on his work online. I recently paid a second visit to his office for a one on one interview to talk about his work on Supersymmetry and noncommutative geometry, and the state or research in the Middle East.

“As a child I was completely absorbed in mathematics,” explains Ali Chamessdine, who is currently serving as a physics professor. But as chance had it, he ended up enrolling in physics for his undergraduate degree. He humorously attributed it to the fact that his older brother was already studying math, and that the family would not allow both siblings to learn the same trade. He chuckles, and then tells me that at the time, mathematics at the Lebanese University was taught in French, and that that was the real reason he opted for physics instead.

He completed his degree and received a scholarship to work on his PhD at Imperial College London. There, he was advised by Mohammad Abdus Salam, a Pakistani theoretical physicist and a future recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize for physics, while working on thesis about Supersymmetry. The perk of working under such an esteemed figure, according to Chamseddine, is that you get to attack the best problems, “that you really go to the frontiers immediately.”

Going beyond the Standard Model

The Standard Model is a theory that was developed in the second half of the 20th century and finalised in the mid 70s. Using a number of particles of matter and forces, it explains an awful lot of experimental results as we study matter and energy. The problem however is that it only explains an awful lot, and not everything. There are many phenomena, such as the expansion of the universe, dark matter, and some aspect of the theory of gravitation that the theory cannot account for. And as such, other models have been built.

Enter Supersymmetry

Supersymmetry suggests that for each of the elementary particles there exists a so called super partner. Elementary particles are either fermions or bosons. Those elementary particles, with a few exceptions, have extremely short lifespans, about 10 to the power -23 seconds. Fermions and bosons are distinguished by their spin, an inherent form of angular momentum. Fermions have half integer valued spin, 1/2, 3/2, 5/2, etc, while bosons have integer spin. There are 48 types of fermions and 12 types of bosons.

The theory states that each of those particles must have a partner from the other group, known as its superpartner, with a spin that differs by half an integer, so for each fermion a boson and vice versa.

None of the existing fermions and bosons are partners; in fact, a supersymmetry partner has never been observed. So if the theory is proven, we will have double the amount of elementary particles: 48 + 12 partners.

“It will be the biggest revolution since Einstein with his special and general relativity”

The plight is that in order to find these particles, you have to create them, and in order to do so, you must build accelerators that reach these very high energies. The accelerators at CERN have been recently upgraded with the Large Hadron Collider, and “hopefully, with this energy it will be sufficient to create these particles that have not been seen yet.” Just finding one or a couple at first would be sufficient to prove that the model works, and that would mean that “physics as we know it would completely change,” he explains, “this supersymmetry is a fundamental symmetry of spacetime.”

After he completed his thesis, he joined the European Organization for Nuclear Research, more commonly known as CERN, as a research associate. There he proposed a theory in 1981, which later became a basic theory of String Theory. In it he proposed that our world is in 10 dimensions of space.

Following CERN, he went to Northeastern University in Boston. It was a time when Supersymmetry wasn’t fashionable in the US according to Chamseddine. But that didn’t deter him. There he proposed a model that predicts where the Supersymmetric particles should be and what are their signatures; “you have to tell them what to look for,” he explains.

With more than 2000 citations, the paper is “very influential” and is still used by experimentals today looking for Supersymmetry. Chamseddine calls it his best work.

The big shift: Noncommutative geometry

After 1985 he left the US and joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, known as ETH Zurich, as a research professor. From then on, his research took a different path into noncommutative geometry, and during his 12 year stay there, he worked on this new kind of geometry.

“When Einstein came, what he discovered essentially was that the space we live in is not flat,” he explains. “What Einstein discovered was that matter in space, like the Sun, will curve the space,” which in turn creates a gravitational force.

Euclidean geometry, the one we learn in school, cannot be used in such a theory. As an example, imagine a triangle drawn on a sphere. The lines here are in fact arcs, and consequently the angles do not add up to 180 degrees.

And so Einstein had to resort to another geometry to explain his general theory of relativity and, one that was invented decades earlier, by a German mathematician called Bernhard Riemann.

Chamseddine says that in this instance, the geometry shaped the dynamics of the gravitational force. Here, the wisdom of all of Einstein’s studies is that “geometry fixes the physics.”

At the time when Einstein was alive, only two forces were known: gravitational force and electromagnetic force. Since then, it has been discovered that there are two additional forces; one is called the weak force, the other is called the strong force.

Einstein was able to build a theory that describes gravitation using Riemannian geometry, but it could not account for the other three forces. You need a new kind of geometry explains Chamseddine, “this is noncommutative geometry.”

Noncommutative geometry was initially invented by a French mathematician and fields medalist by the name of Alain Connes. Currently, both he and Chamseddine have been working on building the theory, trying to understand all four forces in this new geometry. “Recently, we were able to figure out the nature of geometry that gives you all the forces together.”

This is an ongoing project. In the summer, Chamseddine travels to France for three months to the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS), as a Louis Michel Chair, a post for distinguished long term visitors. “We keep making advancements and simplifications,” Chamseddine concludes. “It is the frontiers of mathematics.”

Coming back to Lebanon

In 1998, he was lured back to Beirut, with the promise of building a research center, the Center for Advanced Mathematical Sciences. But soon after, the support became minimal. “They wanted the center to bring money, but research in fundamental science doesn’t pay.” As a consequence he left the center.

Chamseddine was also very briefly involved in the Jordan based SESAME project, a cooperative research venture by scientists and governments from all over the region built around a repurposed, “outdated” cyclic particle accelerator. “It’s a big mess; I think it will have a rough ride.” The launch date for the center has been pushed back at several occasions.

The sad state of scientific in the Arab world

“It is really bad, you know…” Chamseddine runs out of words for a moment, this was the only time he struggled for an answer. Even before all the events that have recently unfolded in the Arab world, one barely had any hope he says, but right now “we are going backwards at the speed of light.”

Back in 1980, when he was working at ETH Zurich, “that center alone received two billion swiss francs each year from the government...” His pause this time was followed by a short burst of laughter. Adjusted to inflation, that rounds up to about 3.7 billion dollars. Bear in mind that Switzerland is a relatively small country. At the time it had about 6 million citizens. For comparison, that sits between Lebanon and Jordan right now.

The heart of the problem is the lack of long term vision. Here, he says, they would think that such an investment would be a waste, but elsewhere they see it as an investment in the people. “They throw money into research and it pays off, everything pays off.” But not directly.

The monetary rewards usually come as a byproduct. “How can you put a value on the world wide web? It came from CERN you know.” Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the internet, was a scientist at CERN. He initially devised a network to share information among universities, and later grew and evolved to become the internet.

Monetary return isn’t always guaranteed, but that is not a loss. What we get in return is much more important. And that is...

Another type of gold

What people like Chamseddine are trying to do is to explain the universe. “In research, we don’t say we do something because it has a certain application.” In fact, “there is a high probability that out of what we do, nothing practical will come out.” Explaining it is not easy either because “every time you find an explanation something deeper lies behind it. In this way science never finishes.”

It is like looking for gold. “You go to a field where you think gold may exist, so you start digging. You find something and you say, ok, i want to find some more, so you dig deeper. Now how far should you dig until you find something, it is not known, nobody knows.”

The Paradox

Chamseddine’s two main researches are at odds. “They don’t talk to each other.” Unlike Supersymmetry, non-commutative geometry tells us that we found almost everything that there is. Any new discoveries will be marginal, which the theory can more or less predict, but not accurately. The picture that we have right now is almost complete; no new particles, let alone doubling the number.

“To us it is like a game, we are puzzle solvers, we sit down for days sometimes thinking of a little mathematical puzzle and we try to make sense of it. Where it would take us? We don’t know. But if we knew, it would not be fun anymore.”

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Birth from a Transplanted Uterus

The name Vincent is derived from the Roman name Vincentius; the name Vincentius is derived from the Latin word Vincere; Vincere means ‘to conquer’. And so it was, that, on September 4, 2014, little Vincent’s birth cry would fittingly proclaim a new conquest for modern medicine.

Vincent was the first child to have ever been born after a uterus transplantation. Sixteen years prior, his mother, Malin Stenberg, had quizzed her doctor, Dr Mats Brännström, on the possibility of having her recently removed uterus replaced. Not much attention was ever given to that idea. In fact, over the course of the 60s and 70s, much of endeavour to combat infertility was devoted to solving the issue of malfunctioning fallopian tubes.

And once in vitro fertilization (IVF) proved successful - the world's first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born on July 25, 1978 - interest in the subject dwindled and research efforts trailed off.

Her inquiry sparked Dr Brännström’s interest, who saw this uncharted territory as an opportunity. He tallied  the number of potential candidates for such a procedure. It included women born without a uterus, due a condition known as Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, which occurs in one of every 4500 women; women who had their uterus removed, typically due to cervical cancer; and women who suffer from a host of birth defects, such as Leiomyomas or intrauterine adhesions. All in all, he reckoned that as many as one in 500 women might need a transplant. This aggregation of cases is known as Absolute Uterine Factor Infertility (AUFI).

He flew back from Australia to Sweden and mooted the idea of a uterus transplantation with Lebanese Dr Randa Akouri, a then molecular biologist and geneticist who was also specializing in uterus transplant. Brännström and Akouri had been colleagues since early 90s, working at the same hospital and research lab in Sweden. Brännström later became Akouri’s main supervisor when she started her PhD studies on uterus transplantation as well.

Currently, 35 year old Akouri is an assistant professor at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, and holds an MD and a PhD in Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Initial trials started in the year 2000 with the purpose of testing the theory that a transplant was even possible. The microsurgery involved twin mice, in which case immunosuppressants were unnecessary; the scale of things was so small that everything was done under microscopes.

Four months down the line, Akouri, was able to successfully conclude the experiment: the uterus lasted after surgery, blood supply was adequate, and a transfer of embryo into the transplanted uterus was a success as well, proving that it was able to hold an embryo.

It should be noted that in cases where the uterus has been transplanted, no natural insemination can occur. This is because the fallopian tubes aren’t reconnected in the patient. Fertilization instead happens in vitro. Reconnecting the tubes would be too risky reckons Akouri: if a naturally fertilized egg fails to reach the uterus, it would put the patient at risk of an ectopic pregnancy, which puts her life in serious danger.

This initial success generated a lot of buzz. The team then moved on to tackle gradually larger animals in their trials. Over an eleven year period, they were able to replicate the transfer on rats, pigs, lambs and finally on chimps in 2012.

Their diligent work ethic would prove its worth years later. Nine years after they had started their trials, the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) enacted new regulations regarding animal testing which mandated researchers to test on gradually larger animals.

Human trials begin

The first human uterus transplant was performed in 2011, but it did not involve Akouri or her team. Doctors in Turkey had obtained a license from their local government to perform the operation on a human. The transplant itself, which was based on the research published by Akouri and her colleagues, was successful. The patient however was never able to carry.

That event goaded the Swedish team to press their government for a licence;  they had worried that inevitably someone else would steal their thunder. Eventually, the Swedish government, which up until then had been reluctant to grant them permission, complied and awarded them a licence to perform 10 operations in 2012.

Nine operations were conducted; the team opted against operating on their tenth selected candidate because she was missing a kidney, a common occurrence for people that suffer from MRKH syndrome. The doctors worried as immunosuppressants strain the kidneys.

Of the nine women, eight had been born without a uterus due to MRKH; the ninth candidate had had hers removed seven years prior due to cervical cancer. The idea from the latter was to show that such patients could be eligible for the process as well.

Based on their animal trials, the team had estimated that the operation would take four to five hours. Three hours to remove the uterus and another two to implant it. The first operations however lasted 10 to 14 hours, as removing the uterus proved very time consuming. The uterus itself is about 7 to 8 cm x 5 to 6 centimeters, but the pelvic area carries a lot of veins and other tracts; surgeons must be careful and slow.

A total of ten doctor, operating four or five at a time, hunched over in two operating rooms, completed nine procedures.

Of the nine procedures, seven proved a success in the long term. In the remaining two instances, the surgeons unfortunately had to remove the new uterus: one patient had suffered an infection, the other had Activated Protein C resistance (APCR) and suffered a thrombosis as a result [HOVER DEFINITION: local coagulation or clotting of the blood].

All the operations involved a living donor. In five instances, the donors were the mothers. Typically, kinship between donor and recipient means that the body is less likely to reject the transplanted organ, since there is a higher probability that the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) match, or are at least partially similar. The MHC is a set of proteins that sit on the surface of a cell, acting as a code for the immune system to differentiate between foreign and non foreign molecules.

In the case of a mother donor, there is an inherent 50% match. Donor and recipient must be of the same blood type as well. If no eligible related donor can be found, then doctors are forced to look to the general population. In the case of Vincent, the donor was a 61-year-old friend of the family.

Recipients must then wait a whole year for their bodies to recover. The dosage of immunosuppressants is gradually decreased as well during that time period. And after a year passes, artificial insemination can occur.

Delivery is cesarean; doctors worry that a possible rupture could result from the pressure. Akouri doesn’t rule out allowing natural delivery in the future however.

The results

All in all the, five children - four boys and a girl - have been birthed from five different patients. One of the patients is currently carrying for the second time. Three have opted to remove the transplanted uterus after birthing. The sixth patient has had two miscarriages so far, whereas the seventh hasn’t been able to carry yet.

Removing the uterus is standard procedure if the patients does not want to have any more children. The uterus is not a critical organ, the body is able to function without it, and removing it eliminates the need to administer immunosuppressants. Overall the doctors do not advise carrying more than twice for a patient, the uterus should be optimally removed within five years.

Spreading the knowledge

In December of last year, doctors and surgeons from 22 countries flocked to Madrid for the world’s first uterine transplant convention. Discussions involved opening centers for uterine transplants around the globe. The Swedish team has taken it upon itself to help spread the knowledge and set up centers around the world.

Akouri was able to convince the team that Lebanon should host a regional center. After deliberations and negotiations with several facilities, they settled on the Bellevue Medical Center in Mansourieh in Lebanon.

A deal was signed in March. Currently the paperwork is being reviewed by the ethical committee at the ministry of health for final approval. Akouri has already met with a number of potential patients and their respective donors from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya and Saudi Arabia.

She estimates that the first operation could take place towards the end of the current year.

What’s next?

Meanwhile the team is still working on improving their technique in Sweden. They recently got a new licence for an additional 10 operations. These will be performed using robots which means that the procedure will be less invasive, involve less bleeding and less scarring. They also hope that this new technique could reduce the time to 8 hours. Operations are expected to begin in early 2017.

The team is also contemplating using deceased donors. Though there are important advantages to using live donors - primarily, the fact that you can test and monitor your donor over an extended period of time - deceased donors also have their advantages. For example, surgeons need not be as careful, and consequently as slow, when operating on them. They are also more at liberty of removing as much tissue as they want. Typically, when removing a uterus, surgeons need to remove other parts as well: vessels as well as part of the donor’s vagina, which is used to help keep the uterus in place in the recipient.

The problem with deceased donors however is that there is a waiting period. Organs are prioritized. The heart for instance takes top priority. And so by the time the critical organs are harvested, more often than not, the body would have been dead too long or is too mangled to be of any use.

“Perhaps that’s what happened in Cleveland,” concluded Akouri, referring to a failed uterine transplant that involved a deceased donor, where doctors detected a fungus infection. “Maybe it was because it wasn’t instantaneous like it would have been with a live donor.” It’s just a guess she tells me. Research into the matter is still ongoing

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Harvesting fog

A peculiar little insect known as the Fogstand Beetle trots the Namib Desert, unaware that it carries the blueprint for harvesting fog on its back. At the same time, over by the sea, marine mussels lazily gather on the shore, equally oblivious to their role in this story.

Fog may well be a nuisance for urban commuters, but over arid lands, it is a blessing in disguise.

A team of scientists at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), led by researcher Peng Wang, are currently working on a new method to collect vaporised water from fog.

This is not the first time that scientists have looked into harvesting fog, but previous research had only led to techniques that were both complex and costly. These techniques relied on lithography, a method that need to be performed in high-level clean rooms and at high-end facilities. Wang, who is one of the founding members of KAUST, explains that “the motivation was to make an easier method; the goal was to develop [a method] that could be conducted in ambient conditions and that is scalable.”

The beetle

They looked to the Fogstand Beetle for inspiration, “a very happy little creature,” as Wang describes it, given its plight of inhabiting one of the world’s harshest environments. For years, scientists had taken interest in this curious insect, particularly, in the distinct structure on its back.

Composed of a hydrophobic surface interspersed by hydrophilic bumps, it allows the beetle to survive the parched landscape by collecting moisture from early morning fog. To do so, the beetle has to climb up to a sand ridge and face oncoming damp winds. Fog condenses on its wings and the resulting moisture forms in small droplets that stay attach to the hydrophilic spots. The process endures until the droplet becomes too heavy and drops. Detached beads of water then glide off of the bumps, onto the hydrophobic surface and into the beetle’s mouth.

Mussels, a delicacy and a chemical wonder

Producing such surfaces is hard; hydrophilic and hydrophobic substances do not attach easily. As mentioned above, the current techniques for creating such surfaces are expensive and inefficient for large-scale production. For that purpose, the team drew inspiration from another creature, marine mussels, a delicacy for some, a chemical wonder for others.

Marine mussels have the exceptional ability to stick to almost any type of surface, including both superhydrophobic and superhydrophilic surfaces. The mechanism isn’t very well understood, but what we know is that a protein, a polydopamine bioadhesive, is the secret ingredient to its adhesiveness.

The team started with dopamine, a neurotransmitter with a well-known chemistry, in order to develop polydopamine, which forms when dopamine is placed in a slightly basic pH solution. But this presented a problem of its own: since the polymerization requires an aqueous solution - a solution in which the solvent is water. Placing it on a hydrophobic surface becomes problematic; the dopamine would form into droplets as soon as it came into contact with the hydrophobic surface. The challenge then became to flatten it out and increase its surface area, which was accomplished by adding ethanol to the aqueous dopamine solution.

Adding Ethanol to the aqueous solution reduced the surface tension of the dopamine solution, increasing its ‘wettability’, but the researchers soon discovered that this also had a major drawback: a high evaporation rate. So as a final piece to the puzzle, they added another solvent, ethylene glycol, which would lower the vapour pressure - the tendency to vaporize - of the solution. These two compounds made the dopamine stable enough on the surface to allow it to transform into polydopamine.

And an inkject printer

By contrast, producing the pattern was done in a surprisingly simple way. With the use of an inkjet printer, the researchers were able to lay the desired patterns of hydrophilic spots, drawn with a computer, while solvent replaced the ink in the printer.

Since their work concluded about six months ago, the team has been working on optimizing the design of the surface - the penultimate act before heading into large-scale production. Tests with simulated fog over several printed surfaces with different patterns revealed that their water collection efficiency still fell below that of the beetle’s bumpy back. Looking ahead, their efforts will focus on trying out other arrangements.

For now, the beetle still prevails.

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Are e-cigarettes just as bad?

Picking a brand of cigarettes wasn’t easy half a century ago. “As your dentist, I would recommend Viceroys”, yet “more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” Luckies, on the other hand, “are less irritating”, some twenty thousand physicians proclaimed. So read the cigarette ads of the 50s and 60s, a time when smoking was believed to soothe coughs and sore throats.

Nowadays, electronic cigarettes have come to be generally regarded as a healthy alternative to smoking. However, just like with cigarettes, new research is showing that they contain many of the awful components.

Youngsters have been flocking to e-cigarettes: a recent study has shown that roughly 70 percent of current users picked up the habit sometime in the last year. It’s become fashionable, explains Najat Saliba, a Professor of Chemistry at American University of Beirut (AUB) who is also part of a team that is investigating the phenomenon.

First shisha

The endeavour is lead by Dr. Alan Shihadeh, Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at AUB. Prior to this research, about ten years ago, Shihadeh was involved in a five-year long study project on hookah - alternatively known as shisha or argileh - run in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the United States. At the time, the NIH had growing concerns regarding the surging popularity of hookah on college campuses across the country and was trying to understand and quantify the health impact and consequences of that habit.

Incidentally, it was that project that lead to the smoking ban in Lebanon. After the study was done, the same team worked with members from the health science and mechanical engineering departments to push for the short lived anti-smoking legislation.

Then e-cigarettes

About two years ago, the proliferation of e-cigarettes caught the attention of NIH and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Together, they decided to investigate this new phenomenon and put forth a call for proposals. E-cigarettes were marketed as a substitute for patches, a tool to stop smoking, yet their production remained largely unregulated. The FDA, it should be noted, regulates e-cigarettes that are marketed for therapeutic use, but a large number of brands and models remain uncontrolled.

The winner was a consortium of three universities: Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Penn State University, and AUB. VCU is studying the behavior of smokers, Penn State is assessing the popularity of the habit while AUB is tasked with chemical analysis and reverse engineering.

As an expert in atmospheric chemistry, Saliba was approached by Shihadeh and asked to help with the chemical identification of the particles present in the vapor emitted from e-cigarettes, and to do so they constructed robots that simulate smoking e-cigarettes, a practice known as vaping (the process by which one inhales vapor from an e-cigarette). Located at AUB’s mechanical engineering department, these robots are able to simulate various patterns of smoking using combinations of different voltages, different puff and inter-puff duration.

“We are studying everything,” says Saliba. “What are the chemical components of the liquid? What happens to these components when you inhale? Do you get any toxins at all, and how much nicotine gets deposited in the lungs?”

With a master’s degree from California State University, Long Beach, a PhD from the University of Southern California and a postdoc from the University of California, Irvine, Saliba specializes in atmospheric chemistry, a field concerned with studying the chemical composition of material in the air, water or soil.

“Initially people believed that it was a healthy thing because it helped them stop smoking,” Saliba says.

The fact that they are “easy to use, easy to light” made them even more popular. In stark contrast to the older generation of ill designed e-cigarettes that tended to spill, newer models are clean and look polished, even sophisticated; “people started taking it everywhere, offices, planes, etc” she adds.

Same old story

When lit, cigarettes produce more than 4000 chemical components: some that naturally form when tobacco is burnt and others that are added by the manufacturers. E-cigarettes, in theory at least, rid users of those 4000 components, leaving just the nicotine. The nicotine itself is dissolved in a liquid, known as the carrier. The idea is simple enough: people that crave nicotine could use e-cigarettes as a toxins-free substitute.

AUB’s research has so far shown that the carrier, which is neither water nor oil, but a viscous liquid called propylene glycol, contains more than just nicotine. They found many additives – aldehydes, mainly acetaldehyde and pyrazine among others - that increase addiction.

Another observation made by the researchers regards the battery. They noticed that the voltage affects the amount of nicotine and the types of toxins that are emitted, a fact that was previously unknown. The higher the current, the higher the nicotine intake; different currents seemed to be produce different toxins too.

Overall, nicotine yields from fifteen different puffs increased by more than 50-folds in some instances. This discovery is of particular interest to the FDA and can act as a guide to help them set a cap on the power emitted by the batteries.

More is expected to be revealed over time; the research is estimated to last another five years. Saliba expressed her worry regarding the fast changing landscape in which they are working. “They are much faster than we are, it’s an $11 billion industry,” she remarked. And while they dive deeper into the chemical makeup of this new epidemic, their colleagues at VCU are trying to answer the most alarming question of them all: if a non-smoker picks up the habit of smoking e-cigarette, will they be more likely to move to regular cigarettes?

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Drones that think for themselves

In the land of Oz, the Tin Man wanted a heart, the Cowardly Lion wanted courage, and the Scarecrow wanted a brain. A hundred and plus years later, tech companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have sought to endow their personal assistants with a soul – and, in the case of Siri, some sass. NAR, meanwhile, is working on bestowing intelligence upon drones.

NAR, short for Next Automated Robots, is an up and coming startup from Beirut that is developing smart drones. NAR does not manufacture drones. Instead, the company has chosen to supplement existing models with a processor, software, and sensors if need be, for the purpose of hastening certain processes.

“The drone is a platform”

The idea belongs to Charlie El Khoury and Nicolas Zaatar, both 23 years of age, who had initially devised it during their last year of college for their final year project. Typically, drones mechanistically collect data and relate it back to an earthbound system. NAR, however, sees the marriage of drones and onboard software as the true essence of the technology; “The drone is a platform,” proclaimed El Khoury. The primary benefit of their approach, he says, is the ability to produce real-time notification in critical, time-sensitive situations.

My initial impression was that this new paradigm is hardly any different from what’s currently achievable. Shouldn’t data collection, transmission, and processing be exactly the same as collection, processing, followed by the transmission? All the elements are still there; we’ve merely flipped two around. Not so. Because in the first scenario, transmission is considerably more time-consuming. Since processing happens on the ground, the drone has to transmit sizable chunks of data, particularly when photographic or video content are needed. Typically, to decrease the load, the quality of the content is reduced. Transmission becomes faster, but the tradeoff yields lower quality data, which, in turn, might lead to lower quality or even faulty analysis.

However, if the processing were to take place on board the drone, then the data transmitted would be substantially smaller. Take the case of a drone monitoring an oil pipeline, the message could be: “leak detected; size: medium; location coordinates: X,Y”. Mere bytes.

With that in mind, Khoury and Zaatar mulled over their target market. They narrowed it down to industries which involve sizable expanses that are hard to access or too large to monitor effectively; industries where risks are high and severe and where timely intervention would be critical. Ultimately, the pair opted to focus on the oil and gas industry and develop software capable of detecting spills and leaks. For this purpose, the drone has been equipped with an image sensor and a thermal sensor.

NAR is keen on collaborating with drone manufacturers. The company is in contact with a number of manufacturers from France, Australia, the US, and Canada, whose response has been positive so far according to El Khoury. Discussions have typically revolved around the technical aspects of the machines on offer: the types of sensors on board, the payload capacity, and the physical design of the drone.

Dabbling with hardware

While NAR’s focus and forte lie in software, it does dabble with hardware: Some of the models on offer already come equipped with sensors, but they’ve had to add some themselves in some instances. At times, manufacturers have been open to perform minor tweaks on their designs to accommodate NAR’s requirements too.

El Khoury did concede however that they entertain the idea of building drones themselves. As a small startup, they’ve strategically chosen to concentrate on software for the time being, but he assured me that the passion and ambition to create their own machines are there. If all goes to plan, El Khoury estimates that their hardware venture could begin in about three to five years’ time.

There are several benefits to building your own hardware. First and foremost, it would mean that you are no longer dependent on other entities, which entails fewer chances for unexpected changes and upsets. If a supplier decides to withdraw for example, then NAR would have to rework their design to fit a new model. Making your own drone also means that you are no longer forced to compromise with your suppliers, who oftentimes have different priorities when it comes to the design and performance of the drone.

NAR, which officially launched in September of 2015, has so far undergone three acceleration programs. After winning the Microsoft Imagine Cup in May in that same year, it enrolled in Beirut’s SPEED accelerator, which culminated in a trip to Silicon Valley where it came in second in its demo day. That was followed by two months at Blackbox Connect in California, before finally returning back home, incorporating the company and joining the Berytech incubator where NAR currently resides.

NAR expects its first commercial product to be available in 3 months. Beyond that, NAR is aiming far beyond oil and gas, as its model can be replicated in a number of suitable industries, including wildfire monitoring, agriculture, rescue, surveillance, shipping and traffic monitoring.

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Wrappup adds a layer of intelligence to your meetings

Martin Luther King recounted his seminal dream in 17 minutes. The haunting peroration of Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech lasted a mere minute. Allegedly, legendary Manchester United coach Sir Alex Ferguson once gave his players a team-talk that consisted of just three words before facing Tottenham Hotspurs. “Lads, it’s Tottenham,” he scoffed.

Lengthy discourse rarely makes for inspiring, motivating, or memorable moments, and anyone that has had to endure protracted meetings can attest to the same effect.

Death by meetings

French polling company IFOP surveyed 1002 managers and found that meetings last an average of an hour and nineteen minutes. Not surprisingly, it also found that the average attention span of a manager falls significantly short of that duration, lasting just 52 minutes. This problem is even more apparent in younger managers: aged 35 and under, their attention tends to drop after 45 minutes.

Ironically though, staff meetings are precisely what inspired Wrappup, an up and coming startup based in Dubai, led by entrepreneurs Rami Salman, Ayush Chordia and Rishav Jalan.

Wrappup is a cloud-based meeting productivity tool that uses smart recording to capture and summarize meeting discussions. Once a meeting is over, the audio is sent to the cloud, where it gets transcribed using IBM Watson and becomes immediately searchable.

Participants can also pin notes to the timeline to mark specific sections or moments during a recording. Notes, which can be either text or audio format, are then shared as minutes of meeting. Notes are also playable, and can be categorized as tasks, which load into a task list with due dates, or decisions, which mark conclusions in the discussion. The app allows users to take images and tag them to the timeline as well.

Salman, 26, had the idea for Wrappup while he was employed at Bain & Company. He was frequently tasked with taking meeting minutes, sometimes as often as five times a day, and pondered if it were possible to automate that process effectively. Salman met Chordia, 22, and Jalan, 21, during a hackathon; the three developed the idea together and built the initial version within 24 hours.

Watson currently support 17 languages; Arabic is not yet included. Chordia asserts that Cognit, a joint venture between IBM Watson and Mubadala, an investment vehicle of the Government of Abu Dhabi, is currently working toward adding Arabic to Waston.

Augmented Audio

Chordia, who is in charge of the backend development, has developed a number of proprietary algorithms for the service. He created a search algorithm that searches audio instead of text. “It’s phonetically powered which means it searches on how word sounds rather than the actual transcript, which increases the likelihood of finding a search result by three times,” he explained.

Another algorithm enables Wrappup to recognize different speakers automatically. The system can discern distinct voice prints, which users can then associate with the names of their owners manually. From thereon, Wrappup becomes able to automatically identify which person is talking – provided that his or her voice print has already been identified – and tag his or her speech accordingly. Furthermore, using Watson’s tone analyzer, the system is able to perceive and gauge a speaker’s mood; it can tell for instance how confident he or she is, whether they are analytical, angry, joyful, agreeable, or open.

As a practical example, let’s imagine that a manager has decided to examine one meeting and derive useful insights using these tools. He could segment the meeting based on topics and label each part accordingly, specifying that the first 30 minutes revolved around project A, that the following 20 revolved around financials, and so on.

Then, using the information about tonality, the manager could note for example that while employee X spoke at length when financials were discussed, he seemed to shy away during the rest of the meeting; the manager could observe that employee Y is typically hostile when conversing with employee X; employee Y’s tone might also reveal that he is particularly passionate about project A, and so on and so forth.

A third algorithm allows Wrappup to make use of several mics from several devices simultaneously. This feature was developed with meetings that involve a large number of people in mind, where employees might be sat far apart. Wrappup is able to combine all the recordings into one high quality audio file.

Beyond meeting minutes

Wrappup is in private beta with several multinationals already on board. The idea is to gather as much user insight as possible: how is the app being used, which types of users are logging in most often and which types of features are they using most.

“We’ve seen it picked up in sales environments where people want to act on information quickly; we’ve seen project managers use it in steering committees; even in HR, when you’re sharing a lot of info across the team to evaluate people. We’ve seen students that listen back to the work assignments, take a picture of the whiteboard and tag it to the timeline,” explained Salman.

Looking ahead

There are 15 multi-nationals that are currently using Wrappup, including Emirates Airlines, which has deployed it in its internal app store.

Wrappup has already closed a seed funding round, which was led by BECO Capital. At a later stage, the company intends to sell its service using a freemium SaaS business model. Premium features will include features such as unlimited storage, speech search or analytics.

“We also think that the employees are at the forefront of making IT decisions. It’s not longer something that comes top down, but it’s actually driven bottom up. People are beginning to use these products, mainly millennials, in their environment, in their large enterprise, and it slowly grows form one person to one team and to one division,” concluded Salman.

For the record, Fergie went on to amass a record 38 wins against Spurs in his career.

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Proximie is using augmented reality to create a bridge between experienced and inexperienced surgeons

If I had closed my eyes, I could have easily believed myself to be standing in the operating room in Gaza. I could hear Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta debate the best place to start the incision with the other surgeons. Occasionally, the reassuring beat of the heart monitor was interrupted by a soft clatter of surgical utensils. But I wasn’t in Gaza; I was in Beirut, sat in a far less stimulating conference room. Next to me, Dr. Abu Sitta stared attentively into his laptop.

I was attending a live demo of Proximie, a newly launched SaaS-based augmented reality (AR) enabled telesurgery platform. Proximie’s main feature combines conventional teleconferencing with AR, creating a real time, interactive communication channel that allows doctors to supervise less experienced colleagues through surgical processes. During this demo, Dr Abu Sitta, head of the plastic surgery division at American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC), oversaw a reconstruction of a blast injury of the hand being performed in Gaza from a conference room at the AUBMC.

Watching the operation on his laptop, Dr Abu Sitta was able to pinpoint the exact starting point and course of the incision virtually on the patient’s arm with the tip of a bic pen.

Proximie was founded by Nadine Hachach-Haram, a 34-year-old Lebanese surgeon based in the UK who specializes in reconstructive surgery, and Talal Ali Ahmad, a quadragenarian telecom engineer based in Boston.

A 2015 Lancet Commission on Global Surgery report stated that as many as 5 billion people did not have access to safe surgery, and that only 6% of the 313 million procedures that are undertaken worldwide each year occur in the poorest countries, where over a third of the world’s population lives. Furthermore, the report stated that 1.27 million additional surgical providers will need to be trained by 2030 in order to cope with this burden. As such, broadening the reach of trained surgeons and transfering their expertise would represent an invaluable opportunity to improve local surgical competence in disadvantaged areas.

“The idea is to really create an integrated tool that would allow doctors to guide, help, support and train surgeons remotely through the use of augmented reality,” explained Hachach-Haram. Targeting both professional and educational medical institutions, Proximie is able to integrate and adapt the platform to their particular needs. So far, the platform has been used in over 20 operations.

How does the AR function work?

In order to put together its augmented environment, Proximie simply overlays two video feeds – in this instance, the one emanating from Gaza, and another shot through a standalone camera hooked to Dr Abu Sitta’s laptop. The first camera videos the operation; the second should point at a blank, preferably dark, surface. Users then have to manually balance the transparency of the feeds, up to a point where both are simultaneously discernable in one combined view.

As a result, anything that gets introduced into the sight of Dr Abu Sitta’s camera will be overlayed on top of the broadcast of the surgery. In this case he used a bic pen, with its cap still on, which is bright and contrasts well enough with the other elements to show clearly in the combined feed.

Hachach-Haram is keen to stress that Proximie is hardware agnostic; “the good thing about Proximie is that it’s a platform that you can link in with any hardware”. Proximie does work with third party distributors to provide hardware however, and currently has two operating room models: a mobile medical cart that sports a screen and a camera mounted in an arm swivel that can be dragged into operating rooms as well as fixed mounting solutions.

At the moment, in order to use the telesurgery feature, doctors need to schedule appointments in advance. In a future iteration, the service will host a database of surgeons, listed according to expertise, that would allow colleagues to see who is available, in real time, and seek their assistance.

In addition to the AR telesurgery feature, Proximie also offers an integrated medical records system. During surgery, doctors can take snapshots that, along with any video recording, are stored automatically onto the patient’s file. This is particularly useful for patients who change doctors within the same institution.

Furthermore, Proximie is developing an interface aimed at medical students, whereby students and junior residents can log in and watch surgeries, or seek assistance from more experienced doctors. This feature is reminiscent of Touch Surgery.

Looking ahead

Right now, the company’s client list comprises University College London, the University of California Riverside and the American University of Beirut. Proximie is also in talks with two medical institutions, one in London and one in Boston, as well as a medical devices company.

Proximie is evolving. The company is developing a photo cataloguing system that would be able to read images and automatically share relevant info from the institution’s library. So for instance, if a doctor takes a snapshot of a cleft palate, the system will recognize it and share relevant information with the doctor, such as pre surgery instructions.

As the company evolves further, it increases the opportunities that can bridge the gap between surgeons operating in developed countries and those operating under austere conditions, which would inevitably lead to more successful surgeries and better outcomes for patients.

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Two companies from the Middle East are working on prosthetics to reduce hardships for people with amputations

Oscar Pistorius’ tragic infamy obscures his many achievements. The South African runner is perhaps remembered by most from his highly publicized murder trial and conviction. Fewer people would identify him as the first Paralympic athlete to compete at the olympic games.

Getting to compete against able bodied athletes wasn’t easy, and not merely because of what one intuitively assumes. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the international governing body for the sport of athletics, had objected to his inclusion in the tournament on the grounds that his prosthetic legs gave him an unfair advantage. A-five-year dispute eventually ended in Pistorius’ favor; a court of arbitration ruled that there was no evidence that his legs allowed him any real edge. Pistorius’ sporting dispute was the first thing that came to my mind while I was chatting with 21-year-old Amjad Osman, founder of prosthetics company called Owl Bionics.

Evolution instead of repair

Owl Bionics’ vision is radical. Unlike similar companies, they are not solely interested in restoring normality for amputees, so to speak. Instead the company embraces the idea that these individuals are unique. “We see technology as a way to exceed biology,” he says, “we have to accept the idea that they are special.” It’s evolution instead of repair.

Osman was born and raised in Saudi Arabia to Sudanese parents and attended high school in neighbouring Bahrain. His interest in robotics stems from his childhood and his graduation project consisted of designing a prosthetic hand. Nearly one year after graduating as a mechanical engineer, he founded Owl Bionics in Khartoum. The company currently employs eight individuals along with two more co-founders from Sudan: Ali Bashir Ali, 23 years old, and Omar Ahmed Suleiman, 24. Both are mechanical engineering graduates: Ali is a self taught industrial designer whereas Suleiman specializes in software.

The trick with prosthetics is balancing looks, functionality and cost according to Osman. Looks and functionality in particular are a trade-off relationship. A good functional arm, one that is capable of a number of moves and twists, usually looks grotesquely mechanical and tends to cost a handful as well, as much as $70,000. Better looking prosthetics, ones that try their best to look indistinguishable from a human limb, don’t do much he says. Most often, they are only capable of a single gripping motion.

Owl bionics’ prosthetic hand, Biotron, claims to solve for all three constraints. It utilizes technologies from three disruptive segments: 3D printing, the internet of things (IoT) and smart materials.

Biotron uses muscle wires instead of motors for movement. Muscle wires are thin wires that contract when an electric current is applied; a shape memory alloy that can transform between two shapes in relation to heat. This significantly reduces the weight of the appendage, by as much as 30%, which in turn results in a more natural and fluid movement of the limb.

The device can also sense liquids and heat using mechanical sensors, and is capable of relaying that information back to the user in the form of vibrations using vibrating motors. The frequency and length of the vibration indicate different temperatures and whether the material at hand is a liquid.

Finally, the device also integrates a number of connectivity modules: a GSM chip that allows it to connect to the internet, an infrared blaster and bluetooth. With the help of a specialized app, the hand can be used to execute a number of basic navigation functions on the mobile device for instance, such as scrolling, clicking and so on.

The company is currently beta testing its product and expects to launch in about two months time. The Biotron can be pre-ordered; there are two models to choose from. The basic model, which should cost around $2,000, will provide all the mechanical functions they’ve developed. A more advanced $5,000 model will include the sensing and connectivity features.

Making prosthetics accessible

In Jordan, another company is tackling the same problem, albeit with a different approach and focus. Dubbed Low Cost PPC Prosthetic Leg, it concerns itself primarily with affordability and access. This became immediately apparent when I spoke with its founder, 51-year-old Mohammad Ismail.

Ismail is quick to cite World Health Organization estimates on the number of amputees worldwide, which puts the figure at approximately 32 million. 80% of those individuals live in developing countries, and only 5% are fitted with prosthetics. “Many factors may contribute to this very low rate of prosthetic fitting. However, the economical factors are likely to play a substantial role.”

Typically, prosthetics are designed using unique and hard to find materials, which, although common in the Western countries, are typically hard to come by in our part of the world. But one of the main components of the composite they use is polypropylene, a plastic that can be found abundantly in everyday items, packaging, automotive parts, and so on. This lessens costs significantly.

Polypropylene is ideal for prosthetics as well; a tough yet flexible material that has a high melting point, which renders it resistant to heat induced deformations.

These prosthetics are also very light, almost 40% lighter than other prosthetics. This means that patients can move more freely and with less energy. What’s more, another used component, copolymer pylon, adds flexibility to the material. The added flexibility in turn means that the limb is able to absorb and release kinetic energy during the patient’s movement, making it feel even lighter. Combined, lightness and flexibility mean that the limb is able to sustain more impact as well.

The limbs cost around $150. The prosthesis and its manufacturing mechanism were patented in late 2014.

One of the problems associated with prosthetics is transport. Typically, prosthetics are urgently required in conflict zones where land transport is evidently difficult, if not impossible. Air transport isn’t easy either. Typically, prosthetics are made using liquid chemicals, which are difficult to transport in planes: they are toxic, they require a special permit to fly and they can be very costly to ship. Ismail’s composite plastic sheets by contrast do not suffer from any of those limitations.

Ismail holds a diploma in orthopedic Technology, which covers both Prosthetics and ’]Orthotics,from the  National Training Institute of Orthopedic Technologists, in Amman. He had been working on his tech for over 11 years, all through his tenures at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Iraq and in Sudan. He was finally able to implement it at the Project Hope, a Sudanese government rehabilitation hospital in Khartoum. So far he’s fitted about 700 individuals. His next goal is to help spread the technology to Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria.

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SocialDice incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning to streamline job recruitment

The workplace is constantly evolving. Interdisciplinary teams, cross departmental communication and collaborative platforms are the latest in vocational jargon. But practices that have recently come into vogue have spawned new challenges for managers and workers alike.

Human resources bears the brunt of this trend. As the newfangled wisdom of tearing down cubicles mandates that employees must be equipped with diverse skillsets, matching talent with vacancies may have never been harder. Moreover, the web has made it exceedingly easy to apply to heaps of job postings online.

Everyday, recruiters are flooded with resumes. To tackle this challenge, recruiters scurry to harness the latest tech. One such company is SocialDice, a startup from Ramallah with a new approach to recruitment. Founded by two Palestinians, 29-year-old Saed Shela and 42-year-old Nael Ramadan, SocialDice utilizes artificial intelligence to streamline hiring.

SocialDice is not a job portal. Instead, it adds a smart layer to already existing recruitment channels and processes. Primarily, it does two things: it helps recruiters spread the word about the vacancy and narrow down the pool of candidates.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Dubai, the company left beta in November 2015. Last year, it managed to attract 50 paying customers. Of the 150 jobs they posted, 143 have already been filled. In February of this year, it closed a second round of financing, which included Sadara Ventures, 500 Startups and RAED Ventures. The first round had taken place in April of 2015 and included Oasis500, Sadara Ventures and angel investor Zahi Khouri. This year, SocialDice made it to the final round of the MIT Enterprise Forum Arab Startup Competition.

How does it work

Users create job posts on SocialDice using a job post creation wizard. The wizard includes a number of editable job specific templates, such as .NET developer, 3D software engineer, acceleration officer and so on, with exhaustive lists of criteria for the job description, responsibilities and required qualifications.

The job profile can be promoted on any of a number of job sites – Bayt, Monster Gulf, Indeed and LinkedIn. The number of promoted postings depends on the plan that the recruiter is using – which can be either free or premium. After the job has been posted, SocialDice aggregates and displays the data from the applicants on a dedicated page.

Applicants are ranked automatically. Using machine learning technology, the system is able to analyse CVs and extract insights about the candidates’ careers. Those insights can then be used to score candidates relevant to specific job and company requirements. On the other hand, the needs of the hiring company is also determined by the system, which is also able to extract the hiring preferences from their job listings.

So for instance, whenever there is a match between a candidate’s strength and a company’s need, that applicant earns extra grades for his ranking that indicate that he is more suited for the job on offer.

The system also takes into consideration other qualities. The level and type of education as well as previous job experience play a part too. For example, candidates that have attended a renowned  college or worked at a Fortune 500 company typically score higher. Applicants that have worked similar jobs are a better fit, applicants that have experience in a required skill more so; the longer the experience, the better; and so on.

Ranks of the applicants include gold, silver and bronze medals, as well as a five-star scale for education, experience, loyalty and skills.

SocialDice also streamlines the hiring process by allowing several individuals from the hiring company to weigh in on the decision. Multiple individuals can view the candidates’ profiles, they can comment, communicate directly on the platform and advance the hiring process.

If all goes to plan for SocialDice, recruiters might find new meaning in the old adage that says talent is cheap.