If you joined us for the first Tuesday of our September virtual conference, then you know that The Game Has Changed: 2020 already represents the contrasting thinking of 2020 itself. When one speaker declared, “COVID is over”, the chat erupted with a chorus of disagreement. TTI/V prides itself on being anything but an echo chamber, and our speakers and members vigorously proved that point. If you missed the first three talks, the videos, PPTs, and Highlights are posted in our archive. If anyone needs help accessing their User ID or password, Claudia is ready to help.

Remember that we’ll skip this coming Tuesday (Happy Labor Day to our U.S. community members) and will resume on Tuesday, September 15th. Please join us! 

Some of the most robust discussions on Tuesday came occurred after the sessions. A spirited discussion around - what else - the future of covid-19 included plenty of opinions and plenty of facts. Some of the links mentioned included the below. (Thanks to Dan Gould for sharing!)
Paul Romer: Roadmap to Responsibly Repen America
Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience
Covid-19 Risk Among Airline Passengers: Should the Middle Seat Remain Empty?

Mathematician Ott-Heinrich Keller famously posed a problem about edge sharing when covering spaces with identical tiles. For 90 years, the answer has challenged researchers tackling spaces of various dimensionalities. Recently, 40 computers—along with a creative combination of human and machine intelligence—yielded the answer for the lone dimensionality for which the problem remained unresolved. Unfortunately—at least for human understanding—the proof for seven dimensions lacks clear explainability. (David Gunning, Brooklyn, Jun 2018; Eric Mueller, Austin, Feb 2016)
www.quantamagazine.org/computer-search-settles-90-year-old-math-problem-20200819/ 

There is still time to register for our September virtual conference, The Game Has Changed: 2020, and, looking ahead, our October virtual field trip to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where longtime TTIV-er David Bader will be our host.

Good news on the medical front #1: During this week’s virtual field trip to Stanley Black & Decker (the video and PowerPoint slides will be available to members shortly in the TTI/Vanguard archive) we heard a lot about protective face masks. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a quick-and-accessible DIY method to decontaminate 3M N95 masks. All you need is a rice cooker or multicooker: Just “cook” the mask at 212F for 50 minutes, without pressure, and it’s ready for reuse, with no compromise to its filtration efficacy. It is recommended, however, to dedicate a cooker for this purpose, rather than cooking dinner in it directly afterward.
www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/mask-n95-multicooker-covid/2020/08/14/94544304-dd8d-11ea-809e-b8be57ba616e_story.html

Good news on the medical front #2: A longitudinal study has led to the development of a noninvasive blood test that detects cancer markers years before other diagnostics indicate the presence of the disease. The so-called PanSeer test can detect stomach, esophageal, colorectal, lung, and liver cancers. (Melissa Lechner, San Diego, Feb 2015)
https://eml.iiconferences.com/e/81142/s-releases-release-sfe-id-3086/5ncls7/610335870?h=vlwYZrP9xGKvV_l1s1fNHXUlbFyAqSxiVTnmm9kX0yA

Note from Lisa Yao: The members of this community are our raison d'etre. The collective wisdom in the room (even if it’s the Zoom room these days!) is treasured and irreplaceable. And we intend to keep this community together—virtual, physical, any way that we can. It is doable; we’ve weathered storms before. But this particular storm is going to require a whole new level of commitment, creativity, and sheer chutzpah from all our stakeholders. We can do it, but we have to do it together. Our organization will only endure with our beloved members.

Speaking of our organization, have you registered for our September meeting yet?

Enterra Solutions’ Stephen DeAngelis (Washington, D.C., Sep 2015; Regional Meetings, e.g., Chicago, Oct 2014) has summarized the challenges and potential advances laid out by McKinsey Global Institute when implementing an AI strategy. His advice: “Cognitive technologies can have a powerful impact on the success of a business. Often, however, taking a ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach is the best way to approach digital transformation.” 
www.linkedin.com/pulse/digital-transformation-often-begins-small-slow-stephen-deangelis/

To continue our series of virtual field trips (Long Now Foundation, this past May; Stanley Black & Decker, in August), TTI/Vanguard is excited to announce a virtual visit to the New Jersey Institute of Technology on Tuesday, October 27, to be hosted by friend of TTI/V David Bader (previously of Georgia Tech). At NJIT, he is the founding director of the Institute for Data Science, which serves as an umbrella for this public research university’s centers on big data, medical informatics, cybersecurity, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. The tour of will naturally focus on data and computer science, featuring work conducted on massive-scale analytics, social aspects of data science (disinformation and cyberpsychology), advances in homomorphic encryption, and human-in-the-loop optimization, while also stepping afield to explore traumatic brain injuries and biosensors to detect weaponization of the novel coronavirus. Learn more about this event and register here.

There is a saying amidst epidemiologists, “If you’ve seen one pandemic, you’ve seen … one pandemic”. Unless you are our upcoming September speaker, Adam Kucharski who has made a career of discovering disparate patterns amidst all things contagious—from disease to information to even our own behavior. Adam will speak at our September digital meeting and our members will receive his best-selling book, “The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread—and Why They Stop.”
www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/25/the-rules-of-contagion-by-adam-kucharski-review-outbreaks-of-all-kindsTo continue our series of virtual field trips (Long Now Foundation, this past May; Stanley Black & Decker, in August), TTI/Vanguard is excited to announce a virtual visit to the New Jersey Institute of Technology on Tuesday, October 27, to be hosted by friend of TTI/V David Bader (previously of Georgia Tech). At NJIT, he is the founding director of the Institute for Data Science, which serves as an umbrella for this public research university’s centers on big data, medical informatics, cybersecurity, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. The tour of will naturally focus on data and computer science, featuring work conducted on massive-scale analytics, social aspects of data science (disinformation and cyberpsychology), advances in homomorphic encryption, and human-in-the-loop optimization, while also stepping afield to explore traumatic brain injuries and biosensors to detect weaponization of the novel coronavirus. Learn more about this event and register here.

There is a saying amidst epidemiologists, “If you’ve seen one pandemic, you’ve seen … one pandemic”. Unless you are our upcoming September speaker, Adam Kucharski who has made a career of discovering disparate patterns amidst all things contagious—from disease to information to even our own behavior. Adam will speak at our September digital meeting and our members will receive his best-selling book, “The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread—and Why They Stop.”
www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/25/the-rules-of-contagion-by-adam-kucharski-review-outbreaks-of-all-kinds