February 6, 2020
BALLS IN THE AIR
Life can really feel like a juggling act sometimes, can’t it? What with work, family, bills to pay and errands to run. Matti Lehtonen keeps all the usual balls in the air, but somewhere along the way, he added a few more: literal balls. Or sometimes clubs. As the leader of GE Healthcare’s Anesthesia and Respiratory Care unit in Helsinki, Finland, Lehtonen took up the ancient art of juggling in his 30s after seeing a friend doing it. An unlikely juggler — given that he’s blind in one eye, owing to a childhood accident — Lehtonen nonetheless became a devotee and an evangelist, who shares his love of juggling with GE colleagues worldwide.
Balancing act: This week, Lehtonen offered an early morning juggling class at his unit’s annual global leadership meeting in Budapest. He says it’s a creative way for the executives who run one of the world’s largest anesthesia and ventilator business to acquire new skills and have fun doing it. ”In business, we often talk about having many balls in the air and avoiding dropping the ball and all that,” Lehtonen said. “But once you start juggling, you realize there are so many different juggling patterns; there’s whole mathematics behind it, which is very interesting. It’s all about creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.”
During Helsinki’s summer season, you can spot Lehtonen juggling while riding a penny-farthing — a classic bicycle with a large front wheel and tiny back wheel. Learn more here.
POWER PLANTS
Just a decade ago, Japan’s electrical grid was dominated by fossil fuels and nuclear power — but today the country is in the midst of a major energy makeover. Authorities shut down the country’s 11 nuclear reactors in 2011, and Japan has also committed to growing up to 24% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2031. That commitment includes the usual suspects, like wind and solar, as well as a fuel source that’s older than our species: biomass, or woody plants and crops. Burning any organic material emits carbon dioxide, of course — but unlike coal, plants and shrubs absorb carbon throughout their lifetimes. That means that before they’re burned, they’ve already offset their own emissions.
It all adds up: “Do the math and the equations, and you end up with a near-carbon-neutral process that also generates kilowatt-hours of electricity,” said Sacha Parneix, chief commercial officer for GE Steam Power, which signed a deal with Hitachi Zosen Corporation to design, manufacture and supply parts for a power plant on Japan’s east coast. Using plant-derived biomass, the plant will produce 50 megawatts of electricity for the country’s grid. Turns out the method for extracting energy from biomass is a lot like extracting it from coal — it involves using the fuel to create steam that spins a turbine. That’s a method in which GE has a bit of experience. “We have been at the leading edge of steam power technology for over a century,” Parneix said. “The fuel in the boiler may be different, and even carbon neutral, but the process is the same.”
Lower carbon isn’t the only environmental benefit biomass is offering in Japan. Learn more here.
HUMAN TOUCH
Of all the tasks artificial intelligence is learning to undertake, one particularly thorny one is reading facial expressions. On one hand, detecting the emotions of others by looking at their faces is something that humans understand how to do early on, and training AI to gain such capabilities would be a technological breakthrough. On the other hand, writes University of Colorado Boulder computer scientist Christoffer Heckman in The Conversation, it’s raising concerns about inaccuracy and bias. That’s why, in its annual report, the AI Now Institute has called for a ban on some affect recognition technology, as it’s called, in situations where it might “impact people’s lives and access to opportunities.”
Look into my eyes: Part of the challenge for AI is that simply reading facial expressions misses a key element that humans rely on for judging emotions — namely, context. What else is going on in a given situation? Algorithms can also unintentionally reflect racial bias, and these problems, Heckman writes, “can’t be solved exclusively at the technological level.” If humans want to enlist help from the awesome power of AI, they’ll need to provide an element that only people can offer: wisdom. Heckman writes, “We as a society need to carefully consider these systems’ fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics both during design and application, always keeping a human as the final decision-maker.”
Read more of Heckman’s article here, and check out past GE Reports stories about efforts to make AI both humble and curious.
— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —
Anna Grimaldi is a paralympic gold medalist from New Zealand who uses a groundbreaking 3D-printed prosthetic to heighten her game.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“You know what you need to learn, but you also know that you are not going to learn it overnight. If you want to learn to juggle five balls, you start with one.”
— Matti Lehtonen, general manager of GE Healthcare’s Anesthesia and Respiratory Care business
Quote: GE Reports. Image: Matti Lehtonen for GE Reports.
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