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LA Tech Week: 3 Student Projects Emerge from NASA’s Space Accelerator Program
Andria Moore
Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.
Almost every company in existence today has some sort of diversity and inclusion initiative. NASA, however, took theirs one step further — providing $50,000 in funding to three underrepresented groups in academia.
NASA’s Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) partnered with Starburst Aerospace and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) to work with students as part of their beta space accelerator program. The course was designed to serve as a platform for innovators to build businesses to support technology and economic development.
In the program, students from the University of Massachusetts Boston, California State University and Fayetteville State University, along with faculty mentors, spent 10 weeks developing venture-backable businesses that have applications in multiple markets.
On Wednesday, the projects were presented as business proposals as part of L.A. Tech Week.
“L.A. has long been the aerospace capital of the world, and as we enter a new space economy, it continues to be, and we want to continue to build the industry here,” said Elizabeth Reynolds, managing director at Starburst Aerospace.
The first proposal, Mission Proteus, presented by Nhut Ho, a professor and director of NASA-Sponsored Autonomy Research Center for STEAHM (ARCS) at California State University, was designed to eliminate inefficiencies in existing autonomous software development methodology.
Photo by Andria Moore
Developers designing for autonomous software face many of the same obstacles as traditional developers, but they also face unique challenges. Proteus wants to provide a platform that unifies development tasks and workflows and allows for rapid testing. Building on NASA’s hard-won knowledge in autonomous development, the goal of Mission Proteus is to enable these systems to grow much more rapidly in other industries. Ho explained that his team wanted to eliminate the “pain” surrounding technical limitations of existing software.
The second proposal, ITX Drones, was presented by Thomas Materdey, senior lecturer of engineering in the College of Science and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The ITX team felt that, while revolutionary, drones today are missing a “real-life component.” The goal of ITX Drones was to create technology that would allow drones to more specifically respond to niche customer needs in ways that existing drones cannot—deliver medicines, provide surveillance or communicate with other drones. “Imagine being able to personally deliver a gift to your sister in Europe without having to wait a week,” Materdey said to the room of onlookers.
To make that a reality, their proposal aims to create drones that are capable of sending and receiving long-range data, have longer battery life and the ability to fly at any time of day. Their design incorporates fixed-wing rotors, precision landing capabilities, and lidar navigation, which would allow the drones to operate with extreme precision in novel environments.
SpireNeural, the final business proposal, would act as a software development company focused on enabling near-real-time data processing for autonomous systems with existing integrated devices. In other words, software that will speed up decision-making for our increasingly connected world.
Grace Vincent, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. candidate at North Carolina State University, explained that her team created SpireNueral in response to the California wildfires and the inefficiency of the tech used to detect them.
“How can we reduce overall response time?” she asked the room. “Edge computing.”
Edge computing is computational analyses that are done near the source of the data. SpireNeural was designed as an edge computing software solution that hopes to eliminate issues with wasteful computations, slow response times and power restrictions, instead making informed decisions at the edge.
For example, edge computing software could evaluate and make decisions about how to combat a forest fire at the site of the sensor rather than relaying that information to a central hub, waiting for it to be processed alongside other data and then relaying it to first responders.
The presentations were followed by a brief panel discussion on “Supporting Diversity in industry through investment,” where industry leaders from various venture capitalist firms discussed how the tech industry can work to be more inclusive.
Andria Moore
Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.
Coronavirus Updates: Disneyland Closes, MLS Games and Spring Training Suspended
02:24 PM | March 12, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic's emergence has changed the world around us. Conferences have been cancelled, travel has been severely restricted, and working from home has become the norm. But less clear is the scale of the economic impact and how companies should be reacting. Here are the latest headlines regarding how the novel coronavirus is impacting the Los Angeles startup and tech communities. Sign up for our newsletter and follow dot.LA on Twitter for the latest updates.
1:39 p.m: Disneyland Will Close Due to Covid-19
Disneyland will close its doors indefinitely, according to a statement from the park:
"While there have been no reported cases of COVID-19 at Disneyland Resort, after carefully reviewing the guidelines of the Governor of California's executive order and in the best interest of our guests and employees, we are proceeding with the closure of Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure, beginning the morning of March 14 through the end of the month. The Hotels of Disneyland Resort will remain open until Monday, March 16 to give guests the ability to make necessary travel arrangements; Downtown Disney will remain open. We will monitor the ongoing situation and follow the advice and guidance of federal and state officials and health agencies. Disney will continue to pay cast members during this time."
The closure comes as California Governor Gavin Newsom has called for all nonessential events of more than 250 people to be cancelled and issued a health directive aimed at getting Californians to be vigilant about contracting the virus.
Startup Aims to Produce 10,000 COVID-19 Testing Kits a Day at L.A. Lab
"We thought the big testing labs would have it under control, but it became apparent to us that there wasn't enough testing."
With that thought, Fred Turner, the head of a Bay Area startup known as Curative Inc., headed to Los Angeles to launch a production facility to produce coronavirus testing kits. "We can now do 50 a day, by Monday 150, and the end of the week 1,000 a day." The goal: 10,000 coronavirus testing kits to be deployed to drive-thru testing centers across the United States.
10:51a.m.: Major League Baseball Suspends Spring Training, Delays Season
Major League Baseball suspended all spring training in Arizona and Florida to confront the coronavirus pandemic, and delayed the start of the regular season by at least two weeks. The NCAA Tournament set for March also called off games.
10:37 a.m.: Major League Soccer Suspends Play
Major League Soccer is following in the footsteps of the NBA and suspending its season for 30 days due to the coronavirus COVID-19, the league announced Thursday. The Los Angeles Galaxy, which are currently ranked fifth in the western conference, tweeted "at the appropriate time, the league and clubs will communicate plans for the continuation of the 2020 season."
9:47 a.m.: eSports Takes a Hit
William D'UrsoPlans for the Overwatch League to grow attendance in 2020 have stalled as organizers have shut it down amid growing coronavirus fears. The blockbuster title had big plans this year for its dedicated eSports league, rolling out a home game schedule aimed to foment regional enthusiasm. Read More >>
1:00 a.m.: UCLA Anderson Revises Its Economic Outlook for 2020
cdn.pixabay.comUniversity of California, Los Angeles economists tore up their quarterly March 2020 economic outlook as COVID-19 anxiety took hold of the American public and the novel virus spread through dozens of states.
The updated 104-page UCLA Anderson Forecast, released early Thursday, revised their earlier forecast of 2% for real GDP growth to a low 1.5% on a fourth-quarter-to-fourth-quarter basis, as they took a "midpoint between coronavirus having a very minimal effect to it causing a full-blown recession." Read more >>
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Joe Bel Bruno
Joe Bel Bruno is dot.LA's editor in chief, overseeing newsroom operations and the organization's editorial team. He joins after serving as managing editor of Variety magazine and as senior leadership in spots at the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press. He's a veteran journalist that loves breaking big stories, living back in L.A., a good burrito and his dog Gladys — not necessarily in that order.
CrowdStrike CEO Says He Regrets Not Firing People Quicker
03:10 PM | March 04, 2020
Ben Bergman/dot.LA
George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of the cloud-native endpoint security platform CrowdStrike, says executives should be obsessed with culture. Everyone below him must be fanatical about customer success and outcome and if they aren't fitting in, they need to go quickly. It's one of the biggest lessons he's learned as CEO.
"Not one time have I regretted firing someone too fast," Kurtz told a lunchtime crowd at the first day of the Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica. "It's that I waited too long."
Kurtz founded the company in Sunnyvale, CA, in 2011 and it went public last year. He was joined on a panel by John Chambers, the former executive chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, who said he bought 180 companies during his tenure. But he did not acquire a company that was not a very close cultural fit.
"I walked on one of the bigger acquisitions we were going to do," Chambers said. "Culture is as important as strategy and vision and I did not understand that when I was a young CEO."
Chambers said he was proud of Cisco's 95% employee retention rate when he was CEO, which is well above the industry average. He oversaw a rigorous hiring process to make sure candidates were right.
"If you're not interviewing through 10 people, you're not doing the screening process properly," Chambers said.
If an executive wanted to jump to a competitor, he would try to find out what was at the root of someone's unhappiness. The number one factor: Dissatisfaction with their immediate supervisor.
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Ben Bergman
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
https://twitter.com/thebenbergman
ben@dot.la
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