The corporation said it has about 20 workers who live in Taoyuan, the epicenter of the recent cluster of infections stemming from the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport. The 300-employees company is headquartered in Taipei and specializes in software and application development.

The employees began working remotely Wednesday (Jan. 12), according to Mitake, which has rushed to put in place equipment to facilitate remote work, CNA reported.

Last May, when the country saw a surge in local infections, Mitake had implemented a three-month distance working restriction for all of its workforce. The company noted that stricter epidemic prevention measures have been taken and alert levels increased.

The new Omicron COVID-19 cluster had involved 40 cases in Taoyuan as of Friday.

Taiwan on Friday reported 11 local cases and 57 imported cases, bringing its total to 17,692. Of the 1,837 passengers who have arrived on long-haul flights since Jan. 11, 139 have tested positive for COVID at the airport, a 7.59% positive rate, according to the Central Epidemic Command Center.

In the past year, Mindspace launched new branches in London, Tel Aviv, Philadelphia and a new hub and spoke location outside Tel Aviv, at Yakum. Mindspace serves a wide variety of companies; about 41% are large enterprises and corporations and 38% are small and medium-sized companies. The leading industry types of its customer base are technology companies, financial companies and service providers. Past and present customers include Microsoft, Samsung, Playtika, Taboola, Yahoo!, Expedia, GoPro, and more.

While most of the commercial real estate industry took a hit as a result of COVID, the flex market continued to grow. All forecasts predict the accelerated growth of the flex industry to reach a market share of more than 30% by 2030; the current market share of flex as part of commercial real estate is 5%. According to a recent study by CBRE, in two years 43% of occupiers will have 10-50% of their portfolio dedicated to flex. In addition, 17% of occupiers will have more than 50% of their portfolio dedicated to flex. Zakai said:

“Mindspace is experiencing an impressive growth momentum and high demand in all its locations,” says Dan Zakai, CEO and Co-founder of Mindspace. “We successfully faced the many challenges of COVID. Today, our locations are almost at full occupancy and the current investment led by Harel Insurance and More Provident Funds is intended to fulfill the rising demand in the market and to launch new locations in partnership with landlords worldwide. Mindspace isn’t just another real estate company that rents out offices, but rather offers a strong, strategic partnership to its customers and to landlords. When choosing their office environment, we found that our customers put a great emphasis on their experience: central location, unique design and service of the highest standard. We expect a continued accelerated growth in 2022, while creating a great added value for our many customers.”

Mindspace provides well designed offices, fully equipped kitchens and meeting rooms. Mindspace allows for flexibility, shorter term commitments and lower financial risk, which is a suitable solution in times of economic slowdown.

Mercury NLP software is an out-of-the-box solution at half the cost per byte of the competitor products. While Mercury NLP users will find its built-in features suit all processing solutions, it can be customized for clients with specific data warehousing objectives. The new product will negate the need for manual data extraction from unstructured medical texts.

Mercury NLP software provides accurate, real-time extraction of text data around diagnoses, prescribed medications, tests, lab results, discharge plans and more. The technology can also be applied in the analysis of social determinants of health data to improve public health. Frank Manion, PhD, Vice President for Innovation at Melax Tech, said:

“We are confident Mercury NLP will foster important breakthroughs in medical research. NLP technology is a largely untapped tool, and we want to change this by showcasing the benefits that it can provide in healthcare and other biomedical domains, where as much as 80% of data is housed in unstructured text notes.”

The Melax Tech suite of NLP software includes a COVID-19 symptom extractor based on their flagship software, CLAMP.

During the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SAR) in 2003, Kwok-Yung Yuen, Joseph Sriyal Malik Peiris and their team treated the first patients in Hong Kong and isolated SARS-CoV-1 from their clinical specimens, which was critical to the design of diagnostic tests and disease characterization. Kwok-Yung Yuen’s continued studies on SARS-like viruses in wild bats greatly increased the knowledge of zoonotic reservoirs, barriers to cross-species transmission, pathogenesis, and clinical diagnosis of these viruses. The bat coronavirus HKU4/5 was found to be closely related to MERS-CoV that caused the epidemic Middle East respiratory syndrome.

2021 Future Science Prize – Physical Science Prize

Dr. Jie Zhang is a pioneer in developing methods for efficient generation of controlled, high-intensity fast electrons (~100 keV to 10 MeV) through tera- to peta-Watt laser beams. Leading a strong team of collaborators, Zhang has made a series of major breakthroughs with fast electron beams, including efficient generation of nonthermal electrons, tuning the electron beam energy with lasers, a realization of highly directional electron emission, and world records on the temporal resolution of electron beam imaging.

Dr. Zhang’s research on fast electron beams was initially driven by the prospect of inertial confinement fusion (ICF), a process, if realized, could provide unlimited energy supply for the human kind. The new electron source provides a crucial tool for ICF with fast ignition, a concept pioneered by Dr. Zhang. The fast ignition approach disentangles fuel ignition from compression, allowing optimization of these two processes independently while avoiding instabilities.

2021 Future Science Prize – Mathematics and Computer Science Prize

Prof. Simon Sze has made pioneering contributions to inter-metal/semiconductor carrier transports for semiconductor devices, including both analytical and experimental investigations to Ohmic and Schottky contact behaviors over extensive doping (1014-1020/cm3) and operating temperature ranges (Si: 77K-373K; GaAs: 50K-500K) by simultaneously addressing effects of quantum mechanical tunneling, thermionic emission, image-force lowering and two-dimensional statistical impurity variations across the metal/semiconductor interface barriers.

He co-discovered the effect of floating gate memory with Dr. Dawon Kahng in the US in 1967, which is the key invention of non-volatile memories including the flash memory. He conducted this awarded research work on Ohmic and Schottky contacts at the Chiao Tung University (Today’s Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) during 1968-1969.

He has also authored a legendary research monograph “Physics of Semiconductor Devices” graduate school faculty/students, and engineers across the entire electronic and photonic industry.

Future Science Prize is a privately-funded scientific award in China. It was established in 2016 to award those scientists whose original research, conducted mostly in Mainland China , Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, has made a significant impact on the international science community, and has passed the test of time, regardless of their nationality, gender, or age.

The nomination and selection process of the Prize was established in according with the Nobel Prize system: the Science Committee of the Future Science Prize invites international experts as nominators.

The cash award for the Future Science Prize in each category is 1 million US dollars (approximately 6.5 million Chinese Yuan), each donated by four individual philanthropists. The donors for the Life Science Prize are James Ding, Robin Li, Neil Shen and Lei Zhang. The donors for the Physical Science Prize are Feng Deng, Yajun Wu, Ying Wu and Bob Xu. The donors for Mathematics and Computer Science Prize are William Ding, Jason Jiang, Pony Ma and Victor Wang.

• Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences was awarded to Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and Jeffery W. Kelly.
• Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics was awarded to Takuro Mochizuki.
• Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to Hidetoshi Katori
• Jun Ye. Six New Horizons Prizes were awarded for Early-Career Achievements in Physics and Math.
• Three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes were awarded to Women Mathematicians for Early-Career Achievements.

The scientific and medical response to Covid-19 has been unprecedented, and two of this year’s prizes are for breakthroughs that played a significant role in that response. The innovative vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that have proven effective against the virus rely on decades of work by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. Convinced of the promise of mRNA therapies despite widespread skepticism, they created a technology that is not only vital in the fight against the coronavirus today, but holds vast promise for future vaccines and treatments for a wide range of diseases including HIV, cancer, autoimmune and genetic diseases.

Meanwhile, the almost immediate identification and characterization of the virus, rapid development of vaccines, and real-time monitoring of new genetic variants would have been impossible without the next generation sequencing technologies invented by Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer. Before their inventions, re-sequencing a full human genome could take many months and cost millions of dollars; today, it can be done within a day at the cost of around $600. This resulted in a revolution in biology, enabling the revelation of unsuspected genetic diversity with major implications from cell and microbiome biology to ecology, forensics and personalized medicine.

The struggle against neurodegenerative diseases is an ever-present emergency. Jeffery W. Kelly has made a difference in the lives of people suffering from amyloid diseases that affect the heart and nervous system. He showed the mechanism by which a protein, transthyretin, unravels and agglomerates into clusters that kill cells, tissues and ultimately patients. He then conceived a molecular approach to stabilizing the protein, and after he synthesized a thousand candidate molecules, one of the designed molecules had the right structure to achieve this stabilization. He then helped develop it into an effective drug, named tafamidis, that significantly slows the progression of these diseases. In the process, he provided evidence for the notion that protein aggregation causes neurodegeneration, which has relevance for other neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease.

Hidetoshi Katori and Jun Ye, working independently, have improved the precision of time measurement by 3 orders of magnitude. Their techniques – tabletop in scale – for using lasers to trap, cool and probe atoms, produce quantum clocks so accurate that they would lose less than a second if operated for 15 billion years. These optical lattice clocks have potential technological applications from quantum computing to using the effects of Einstein’s relativity for seismology; and in fundamental research they can be used to check theories like relativity, as well as to hunt for gravitational waves and new physics such as dark matter.

While experimentalists probe the physical world with ever-increasing precision, mathematicians explore the frontiers of mindbending abstract spaces. Takuro Mochizuki works at the interface of algebraic geometry – where solutions to systems of equations appear as geometric objects – and differential geometry – where smooth surfaces unfold in multiple complex dimensions. Mochizuki overcame immense technical and conceptual challenges to extend the boundaries of knowledge deep into new terrain, extending the understanding of objects called holonomic D-modules to include varieties with singularities – points where the equations under study no longer make sense. In the process, he has given a complete foundation to the field, solving all basic long-standing conjectures.

Beyond the main prizes, six New Horizons Prizes, each of $100,000, were distributed between 13 early-career scientists and mathematicians who have already made a substantial impact on their fields. In addition, three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes were awarded to early-career women mathematicians.

Including the New Horizons and New Frontiers prizes for early-career achievements, a total of $15.75 million is conferred this year, bringing the total amount awarded to pioneering scientists and mathematicians throughout the decade of the Prize’s existence to $276.5 million.

“Improving attendance is one of the most fundamental ways to support learning recovery and get students back on track academically. This is clearly critical during COVID, but frankly, is an issue we all must address during ‘normal times’ as well. EveryDay Labs plays an instrumental role in this strategy for us.”

According to “Present Danger: Solving the Deepening Student Absenteeism Crisis” a recent report from Georgetown University, COVID led to lower rates of attendance for students in under-resourced communities, even as attendance rates for more affluent students increased. EveryDay Labs CEO, Emily Bailard added:

“This funding is an important step in meeting the needs of district leaders serving millions of K–12 students and families, so that all students have the opportunity to learn every day. It’s about generating new insights into a pervasive problem, and investing in tools that reflect the aspirations of school district leaders and students alike.”

Even before the pandemic, a growing number of U.S. school districts were tapping the potential of behavioral and data science to tailor interventions and supports to realworld needs, and engage families to improve attendance and student outcomes. On average, districts that partner with EveryDay Labs see a 10–15% reduction in chronic absenteeism.

This investment round, which includes participation from Reach Capital, Gary Community Ventures, City Light Capital, RedHouse Education, Edovate Capital Bonsal Capital, and Copper Wire Ventures will also support EveryDay Labs’ efforts to scale its research-based communication tools to help district leaders tackle other critical priorities, such as learning recovery, enrollment, and connecting vulnerable students and families to resources.

Education market researchers HolonIQ reported that edtech companies received $16.1 billion in venture capital in 2020. A recent survey from Brighteye Ventures, Europe’s biggest edtech VC firm, said that European edtech funding is set to surge from $711 million in 2020 to $1.8 billion in 2021.

As part of Tech.eu’s Crossing Borders series on international expansion, we spoke to three European edtech startups about their scale-up stories, how they weathered the pandemic year, and how it has shaped expansion plans looking ahead.

How to game the education landscape

Poland-based learning platform Brainly, for one, has seen its monthly user base surge to 350 million today, from 150 million in 2019. Brainly, which enables students and their parents to get help on study assignments, is available to people from 35 global markets, including the U.S., India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Russia.

Felix Ohswald, cofounder and CEO of GoStudent, said the pandemic was a mixed bag at the start. He said:

“On the teacher side, from one day to another we had 4 times more applications simply because a lot of young people were looking for remote jobs … and providing online teaching is a pretty attractive opportunity.”

However, on the parent side, the team saw a decrease in search volume for tutoring services because there was less pressure in school and fewer regular exams, which in the end made it more expensive for the company to acquire new customers.

Post-pandemic edtech crunch

Vienna, Austria-headquartered GoStudent became Europe’s first edtech unicorn in June 2021, after raising a €205 million ($242.5 million) round that valued the company at €1.4 billion ($1.65 billion). The company is present in more than 15 countries and about to add Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and Canada in the coming months, as part of its stated ambition to become the world’s No. 1 online school.

Building edtech into the curriculum

As a campus-based business, Ironhack expanded based on factors like the cost of renting teaching space, cost of living in the city, ease of hiring teachers and program managers, and the number of competitors. The competition and astronomical cost of space and living ruled out London, Baqués says.

The Ironhack playbook for assessing potential new markets includes analysis of demand for the types of job positions their graduates are being trained for, including projections on how many web developers, UX designers, and data analysts different cities will likely need in the coming years.

They knew many IT specialists and cyber-security experts would be on leave, enjoying a long weekend off work. Before long, more than 1,000 companies in the US, and at least 17 other countries, were under attack from hackers. Many firms were forced into a costly downtime period as a result. Among those targeted during the incident was a well-known software provider, Kaseya.

REvil used Kaseya as a conduit to spread its ransomware – a malware that can scramble and steal an organisation’s computer data – through other corporate and cloud-based networks that use the software.
REvil took credit for the incident and claimed to have encrypted more than one million systems.

The group then demanded a ransom of $70m (£50.5m) in Bitcoin for the release of a universal decryption tool that would allow those affected to recover their crucial files.

Hacking experts warn that such attacks are likely to become more frequent, and suggest businesses cannot afford to underestimate the hidden impact the pandemic has had on their vulnerability.

‘Climate of uncertainty’

Experts also warn of a significant growth in the number of coronavirus-themed phishing emails targeting employees, being reported by several companies around the world.

During the height of the pandemic in 2020, network security firm Barracuda Networks said it had seen a 667% increase in malicious phishing emails. Google also reported, at the time, that it was blocking over 100 million phishing emails daily. Casey Ellis, founder of security platform, BugCrowd, tells the BBC:

“Social engineering and phishing work best when there’s a climate of uncertainty. As an attacker in that scenario, I’ve got a base of fear to work off of.”

Mr Ellis says for example, one method hackers may use in a post-pandemic world could be an email that lures victims in with the promise of appointments for those who are currently unvaccinated against the virus. He adds:

“You’ve got an entire population wanting the pandemic to end. They’re more likely to click on that. I think that companies should proactively consider that it’s a really good time to invest in training to work through these kinds of scenarios.”

The consequences of such phishing attacks can often be dire. While global multinationals may be able to recover from substantial losses, cyber-attacks can be catastrophic for both small businesses and individuals.

Voice cloning of growing interest to actors and cybercriminals

The app that lets you pay to control another person’s life

In November 2020, a Sydney-based hedge fund collapsed after a senior executive clicked on a fraudulent Zoom invitation. The company, Levitas Capital,  reportedly lost $8.7m to the cyber-attack and was forced to close.

Scratch was already a popular option. It’s been around since 2007 as a way to make animations and simple video games by combining Lego-like icons representing different coding functions. But in the 12 months beginning in March 2020—as schools across the country went remote for health reasons—usage spiked, and the number of projects shared on the service rose to 23 million, roughly double the amount from the previous year.

Meanwhile the service has been going through some big changes behind the scenes. Starting in 2019, leaders have been moving the project out of the Media Lab to spin it off as its own nonprofit, called the Scratch Foundation, with new digs just across the Charles River in Boston. And there’s a new focus on supporting better teaching practices around using Scratch rather than just doing software updates. (A new refresh of the Scratch system had just been released in January 2019.)

As part of that push, the group is holding its first online conference for educators next week. In the past, Scratch had held events at the Media Lab for teachers, but those were always limited to a few hundred participants and required a registration fee. This year the event is free, and there’s no cap on attendees—already more than 4,000 people from about 120 countries have signed up.

EdSurge connected this week with the MIT professor whose research group developed Scratch, Mitch Resnick, to hear what’s next for the coding tool and what he learned from remote learning during the pandemic. The interview has been lightly edited for grammar and readability.

OS Data Hub provides developers with the organisation’s renowned open and premium mapping data through a suite of APIs.

8,326 developers are now signed up for the OS Data Hub, an increase of more than 600 percent over the same period last year. Between July 2020 and June 2021, the total number of API transactions have exceeded 1.24 billion.

Over the past year, there’s been a 50 percent increase in like-for-like OS Open Data downloads since the hub went live.

Both the public and private sectors have adopted the OS Data Hub for their work.

In the public sector, the NHS and London Ambulance Service used the data provided through Ordnance Survey’s platform to support their critical work during the pandemic.

The London Ambulance Service used the OS Places API to help call handlers filter out the unprecedented volumes of 999 calls that it received from outside its area. The use of the API prevented the need to download huge files and worked immediately.

NHS Digital, meanwhile, used the same API to more efficiently capture the addresses of people requesting COVID-19 home testing kits. Charley Glynn, OS API Product Manager, said:

“We have had some really nice feedback, especially from the public sector. The OS Data Hub has extended our strong and trusted relationship with users across the public sector and helped to grow the use of OS data and the value it delivers.”

In the private sector, data integration platform Iventis used the OS Vector Tile API to use 3D mapping and extruded building heights to seamlessly integrate its own 3D model into the map.

SearchLand, a startup enabling the instant assessment of historic and current market values for all property types in England, used the OS Maps API to create a map-based property and planning data tool for developers, planners, architects, and investors.

Ordnance Survey plans to evolve the OS Data Hub to meet future customer demands. In October, the organisation will release its Downloads API for premium data.