Tag Archives: Ukraine

21 November 2023
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AI, Devices, Security

Technology in the War in Ukraine

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The war in Ukraine is a stark reminder of the potential for technology to be used for both good and evil. On the one hand, technology is being used to help people in a variety of ways, such as providing humanitarian assistance, connecting loved ones, and documenting war crimes. On the other hand, technology is also being used to harm people, such as carrying out airstrikes, delivering supplies to Russian forces, and spreading disinformation.

How technology is harming people

  • Drones: Drones are being used to carry out airstrikes on civilian targets, killing and injuring innocent people. For example, in March 2022, a Russian drone strike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol killed three people, including a pregnant woman and her child.
  • Robots: Robots are being used to clear minefields, defuse explosives, and evacuate civilians. However, there have been reports of robots being used to carry out attacks on civilians. For example, in April 2022, a Russian robot was reported to have opened fire on a group of civilians in Bucha.
  • Cyberwarfare: Cyberwarfare tactics are being used to disrupt communications, steal data, and launch denial-of-service attacks. These attacks can have a devastating impact on civilians, disrupting access to essential services and causing widespread economic damage. For example, in February 2022, a Russian cyberattack on Ukraine’s banking system caused widespread outages.

How technology is helping people

  • Humanitarian assistance: Technology is being used to provide humanitarian assistance to people affected by the war. For example, the World Food Programme is using drones to deliver food and other essential supplies to people in besieged areas.
  • Connecting loved ones: Technology is helping people to connect with loved ones who have been separated by the war. For example, the Red Cross is providing free phone calls and video chats to people who have been displaced by the conflict.
  • Documenting war crimes: Technology is being used to document war crimes and human rights abuses. For example, the Bellingcat investigative group is using social media footage and other open-source information to identify and track Russian war criminals.

Where tech in this war is heading

The war in Ukraine is driving technological innovation, as both sides are developing new weapons and tactics. For example, Russia is developing new types of drones, including kamikaze drones that can fly into targets and explode. Ukraine is developing new ways to counter Russian drones, such as using electronic warfare systems to disable them.

What tech will look like for future wars?

The war in Ukraine is a glimpse into the future of warfare, where technology will play an increasingly important role. In future wars, we can expect to see more use of drones, robots, and cyberwarfare. We may also see the development of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence-powered weapons that can make their own decisions about who to kill.

Other related news

Social media platforms are being used to spread disinformation and propaganda on both sides of the war in Ukraine. Russian and Ukrainian government agencies, as well as independent media outlets and individuals, are using social media to share information about the war. However, some of this information is inaccurate or misleading.

For example, Russian officials have used social media to spread false claims that the Ukrainian government is committing genocide against Russian speakers in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have also used social media to spread false claims that the Russian military is using chemical weapons in Ukraine.

Both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries are using facial recognition technology to track and identify their opponents. Facial recognition technology can be used to identify individuals in photos and videos, even if they are wearing masks or other disguises.

For example, the Russian military is using facial recognition technology to identify Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who have been captured. The Ukrainian military is using facial recognition technology to identify Russian soldiers who have committed war crimes.

Conclusion

The war in Ukraine is a reminder of the potential for technology to be used for both good and evil. It is important to be aware of how technology is being used in the war, both to harm and to help people. We must also be prepared for the future of warfare, where technology will play an increasingly important role.

https://ecfr.eu/publication/star-tech-enterprise-emerging-technologies-in-russias-war-on-ukraine/

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/09/27/drones-and-robots-how-the-ukraine-war-is-driving-technological-innovation

https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/10/29/trenches-and-tech-on-ukraines-southern-front

https://therecord.media/ukraine-russia-ministry-of-digital-transformation-brave1-interview-bornyakov

https://www.ft.com/content/1d2f0389-6e05-48e1-bf6a-51fb65a28d03

Engine used: Google Bard

I prompted Google Bard by asking it firstly about current events. The wars taking place are very prevalent issues and many articles highlight the technology used. It didn’t take long before this AI engine was able to produce information about the wars and different perspectives on the destructive technologies.

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26 October 2022
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HOW DRONES BECAME AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE WAR

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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned aircraft systems well known to us as “drones”. These generally small devices are basically flying machines remotely controlled by people or programmed robots to fly autonomously using software in its embedded systems connected  with onboard sensors and a global positioning system (GPS). They are most often associated with industries such as defence, Military Warfare and in many others related to war. At the beginning they were mostly used for intelligence gathering, anti-aircraft target practice and as weapons platforms. These days drones are both valuable to civilians and military units and their popularity is increasing because of their utility, fast production  and growing affordability which is very relevant in hostilities.

Imaginative and smart use of drones by Ukraine

Using of drones has considerably  changed defence and counterinsurgency operations around the world. For a long time drones are delivered for wars, for example Turkish drones had extremely important impact on war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2020.It’s important to mention that these drones were powerful, massive, expensive and not that easy to produce. Contrary to them,  the Ukrainian army focused on the production of cheap, plastic, equipped airplanes with devices that can drop objects such as grenades and bombs. Most of these drones were manufactured in workshops throughout Ukraine by people with their own hands. This process wasn’t very demanding and certainly provides enormous advantages. Despite having powerful military drones, majority of bulk of its drone fleet consists of these drones intended for smaller activities such us spoting artillery targets or dropping anti-tank munitions. It created posibility to overcome Russia’s advantage in artillery and tanks.

Russia’s ‘kamikaze’ drone attacking Ukraine

Russia was first suspected by Ukraine of using a drone well known as the Iranian-made Shahed-136 in order to attack civilians. It’s really dangerous machine constructed to follow the target until it is instructed to attack and it’s hard to detect. These drones have been spotted in many places in Ukraine. They are significantly cheaper than cruise missiles, which makes them profitable. Ukrainian armies have managed to intercept a large part of these drones, but they are  difficult to intercept and are more difficult to defeat by air defense.

How drones are being used and who is supplying them?

CURIOSITIES AND FACTS REFERING TO THE VIDEO :

  • Russia is buying shahed military drones from Iran
  • Us Is supplying drones to Ukraine
  • Elon Musk ‘SpaceX is providing starlink satellite communication system to Ukraine
  • DJI has now stopped its supply of drones to Russia and Ukraine
  • Global drones academy was training the troops

Summing up…

In summary, the development of drone-related technology is extremely important these days and provides great opportunities, whether in a war or in everyday life. Certainly, companies specializing in this field will have a significant impact on the functioning of our world .Hopefully in the right direction..

What do you think?

Sources:

1.https://www.bbc.com/news/world-62225830

2.https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/10/world/europe/ukraine-drones.html

3.https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62048403

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25 March 2022
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Devices, Software

Elon Musk’s Starlink arrives in Ukraine but what next?

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Starlink – Pierwsze opinie o satelitarnym internecie Elona Muska | VideoTesty.pl

Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov confirmed that the lorry with the Starling dishes has arrived in Ukraine to help the country to fight with Russian aggression.

Stepan Veselovskyi, chief executive of Lviv IT Cluster says that currently internet services in most Ukrainian cities are working well but it will be important for businesses to have a contingency plan if networks fail.

Alp Toker of NetBlocks cautioned against seeing Starlink as a substitute for phone networks and broadband: “Starlink can provide connectivity by creating a personal hotspot for people who are in the vicinity of the device. So this is very useful for journalists, for resistance groups or the elected government.”

From my point of view, Starlink is a future for Ukraine and Ukrainians. People could experience something new and it will help a lot in stopping the aggression from the Russian side. Thank you, Elon Musk!

References:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk

https://twitter.com/FedorovMykhailo

https://twitter.com/netblocks

https://www.starlink.com/

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16 January 2022
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Grammarly – a helping hand at improving your English grammar

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by Lev Hladush

Grammarly is both the name of San-Francisco based company and their main product – a communication assistant that helps correct grammar and typos in word processing to any internet user.

What is especially exciting about Grammarly is that the work of their assistant relies heavily on Artificial Intelligence. Thus making it a particular object of interest for us, students of Management and Artificial Intelligence program. Grammarly uses AI to help millions of people worldwide make their communication clear, effective and error-free. Everyone knows that communication is key to both personal and professional success and the mission of the company to improve lives by improving communication. The big vision behind it is to help people articulate their thoughts in a way that’s clear and effective, in a way that makes them understood as intended.

Core to this mission has been the work in natural language processing (NLP). They rely on their team’s deep expertise in NLP, machine learning (ML) and AI. The way it works is something like this:

Broadly speaking, an artificial intelligence system mimics the way a human would perform a task. AI systems achieve this through different techniques. Machine learning, for example, is a particular methodology of AI that involves teaching an algorithm to perform tasks by showing it lots of examples rather than by providing a series of rigidly predefined steps.

Grammarly’s AI system combines machine learning with a variety of natural language processing approaches. Human language has many levels at which it can be analyzed and processed: from characters and individual words through grammatical structures and sentences, even paragraphs or full texts. Natural language processing is a branch of AI that involves teaching machines to understand and process human language (English, for instance) and perform useful tasks, such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, essay scoring, and, in our case, writing enhancement.

An important part of building an AI system is training it. AIs are kind of like children in that way. Kids learn how to behave by watching the people around them and by positive or negative reinforcement. As with kids, if you want your AI system to grow up to be helpful and functional, you need to be careful about what you expose it to and how you intervene when it gets things wrong.

The first step is choosing high-quality training data for your system to learn from. In Grammarly’s case, that data may take the form of a text corpus—a huge collection of sentences that human researchers have organized and labeled in a way that AI algorithms can understand. If you want your AI to learn the patterns of proper comma usage, for example, you need to show it sentences with incorrect commas, so it can learn what a comma mistake looks like. And you need to show it sentences with good comma usage, so it learns how to fix comma mistakes when it finds them.

AI systems also need feedback from humans. When lots of users hit “ignore” on a particular suggestion, for example, Grammarly’s computational linguists and researchers make adjustments to the algorithms behind that suggestion to make it more accurate and helpful.

Just like people, AI does sometimes make errors. It’s especially possible when an AI is facing a situation it doesn’t have much experience with. Grammarly is trained on naturally written text, so it’s good at spotting issues that occur naturally when people write. It’s less good at handling sentences where mistakes have been deliberately inserted because they often don’t resemble naturally occurring mistakes.

Sources: Grammarly.com

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24 November 2021
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Unit.City and the future of technoparks

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by Lev Hladush

Logo is very simple, yet practical

Unit.City is the first innovation park(also known as technoparks, science parks or technopoles) in Ukraine. As description from the official website says:

UNIT.City is a prototype for the city of the future. An ecosystem that promotes innovative entrepreneurship and research. As well as the creation of companies successful in the global market.

Advanced technologies of urban infrastructure are tested and implemented here, in particular in such areas as transport and micromobility, unmanned logistics, energy efficiency, automated security, telecommunications, landscaping, and the like. By collaborating with promising startups, we create an innovative environment where the best ideas about comfort and functionality are brought to life.

The key difference from the most of technoparks around the world(which, because of strong bonds with governments and universites, are rarely interested in actual demands of market) is that Unit.City is completely private initiative created by Vasyl Khmelnytsky – a Ukrainian businessman and founder of holding company UFuture. Unit.City is specifically targeting two types of customers: Firstly, ambitious start-ups made by young entrepreneurs with the prospects of their development and possible future profits, thus improving the economical situation in the country and preventing “brain drain”. Secondly, the people who work in such compaines themselves. The idea is to create a space, where they can learn and work, create and invent, interact witch each other, spend spare time and live life to the fullest without the need to leave the technopark.

The architectural concept of UNIT.City was developed by the Polish company Wojciechowski Architekci in collaboration with the Dutch landscape architect Hiroki Matsuura.

Examples of companies

The two examples of companies, which are already using the services of Unit.City are Sensorama and FabLab Fabricator.

Sensorama specializes in creating virtual and augmented reality applications. They are working on a educational solutions for industrial firms to help their employers be more effective and involved in a working process. The company is able to provide online trainings with new equipment to make sure that workers know how to deal with it before letting them to use real analogues and much more.

FabLab Fabricator is a lab of rapid prototyping and R&D. They develop and produce prototypes, mainly for small start-ups, with technologies such as 3D printing, laser cutting, textile lab and CNC milling. The terms are short, the price is relatively cheap, and the scale of production can be really small, which is important if your company is not financially big enough to manufacture prototypes in large quantities.

How Unit.City will affect the concept of technoparks?

The experience of Unit.City shows us that technoparks serve as great opportunity both as business project to make money and as strategically vital element of developing country’s prosperity. It also boosts the commitment of youth, encouraging them to either becoming entrepreneurs or creators – scientists, engineers, programmers etc. Sooner or later the case of first ukrainian technopark will be noticed by other nations, and similar facilities will be established. The perfect outcome would be international cooperation of such institutions. If this happens, I can not even imagine the resulting growth in technology and overall prosperity of humanity, but I am sure it would be very impressive.

“It’s not that we use technology, we live technology.” – Godfrey Reggio

What can go wrong?

Despite all it’s sweet promises, there are some possible drawbacks for Unit.City.

Foremost, it is the country – Ukraine. The political and economical situation in Ukraine is quite unstable. This can scare off potential foreign investors, and even kill the desire of local businessmen to finance such projects, because instead of risking of all your funds they can relocate their assets to more stable countries in western world.

But even the idea of commercial technopark might not be as promising as in theory. The success of the whole concept relies heavily on the large number of participating companies and the good relationships between them. And this is not something you can be entirely sure of.

So, all in all, there is more positive than negative in Unit.City, but will it be triumph or failure – only future will show.

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29 December 2016
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5 Ukrainian startups that are about to break through

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How many Ukrainian startups do you know?  At best – Looksery (purchased by Snapchat), Grammarly and Jooble.

Too bad. Theres far more to learn about.

Here are 5 hottest startups of 2016 that are about to break through. Whether you are a tech-lover, startuper, or an investor – have a look at the list and learn where the real deal is.

Ain.ua online portal, devoted to startups and entrepreneurship, has conducted a study among business angels, investors, and entrepreneurs, who were asked to point out startups, which developed and achieved something in the past year.

1st place – Sixa

Sixa – a personal computer in the cloud

“Sixa is a full computer that operates right from the cloud via a client app. It supports various devices and is capable of running the most demanding applications. With Sixa users can easily deploy a cloud computer optimized for different tasks and access a powerful virtual computer without hardware upgrades” (www.sixa.io). This app not only allows you to have a powerful computer without actually having it, but also save the costs of utility bills and free you from buying expensive hardware. In 2016 Sixa has received the investments from legendary Y Combinator, receive $300,000 from the venture fund TMT Investments, and finally received $3,5 mln from Californian fund Tandem Capital, abd Ukrainian Digital Future and Horizon capital.
Currently, they launched beta-version of the service, that everybody can try for free.

2nd place – Mobalytics

Mobalytics – Personal performance analytics for competitive gamers

The platform measures players’ performance, helps them define their strengths and weaknesses and provides personalized advice, based on Gamer Performance Index, on how to improve your skills. The app was first introduced during TechCruch Disrupt in San Francisco, where it victoriously took the 1st prize. Shortly after the big triumph the startup received $2,6 mln investments from Almaz Capital, Founders Fund, General Catalyst and GGV Capital.

3d place – People.ai

People.ai – sales productivity platform powered by AI

The app analyzes sales managers’ performance and displays the statistics to the employer, helping to identify who works best and who underperforms. Startup received the investments from the Y Combinator, as well as many funds from business angels.

4th place – Hideez Technologies Inc.

Hideez – hardware cybersecurity project

In 2016 Hideez launched their first product – Hideez Key, which stores all the digital keys and certificates on one device, allowing unblock smartphones, laptops, open RFID-locks or authorize mobile payments. It also works as a anti-thief sensor for the thongs like wallet or keys, as it distances from the smartphone it is connected to, the app will notify the user of the loss.

And finally last but not least – SolarGaps

SolarGaps – world`s first solar smart blinds.

SolarGaps is all-in-one energy solution. With the help of solar panels on the blinds, which generate electricity from solar energy, you can supply yourself with own electricity and save on your electricity bills.
This great invention has received a support from the investors of $1 mln over this summer. So, we are definitely going to hear about them soon.

 

References

http://ain.ua/top-10-ukrainskix-startapov-2016

 

People.ai is using machine learning to rewrite the sales ops playbook

 

 

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