Grene Robotics, an innovation-led technology company that delivers Robots as a Service (RaaS), has been selected from India to compete with global companies/organisations and teams in the final round of the XPRIZE Rainforest Competition. XPRIZE is a global leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity's challenges and started the Rainforest Competition to improve the understanding of the rainforest ecosystem. The five-year XPRIZE Rainforest Competition is a call-to-action initiative to help save rainforests through the development of transformative, scalable, and affordable technology to autonomously survey and monitor biodiversity in near real-time leading to insights that communicate the health, well-being, and value of standing tropical rainforests while ensuring that competing teams co-design and co-create solutions with indigenous people and local communities as key stakeholders. The idea is also to create a business model that can be a beacon in bringing in the technology in conservation. The competing teams will leverage the existing and emerging technologies such as robotics, drone (SWARM and TETHERED), nano drones with sensors (auditory, ultraviolet thermal, air samples), drones designed for sample collection (barks, water, soil, litter, leaves, fecal matter, moths, insects, etc), remote sensing, data analysis, artificial intelligence, DNA sample collection, Genome sequencing, and machine learning to develop new rainforest biodiversity survey tools that will deliver information more quickly, affordably and in unprecedented detail without physical human intrusion into the rainforest.

What hits a visitor to India first, quite literally, is the traffic. The combination of inadequate road infrastructure, increasing vehicle population, and poor driver training and discipline makes for a chaotic and often deadly mix. The result is a high rate of road accidents, with the estimate of fatalities ranging from one every four minutesa to over 238,000 each year.b There is much ongoing work in academia, industry, and startups on using artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to improve the situation. The general goal is to have affordable technologies that work with humans through effective monitoring and feedback, rather than replacing humans through full autonomy.

This blog was coauthored by Maiya Moncino, a research associate in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. Just as the mobile phone and solar energy have allowed developing nations to leap-frog into more advanced stages of technology, advances in medical technology can provide easy access to maternal and women's healthcare in poor and rural areas around the world, particularly in developing countries. Every day, 830 women die from complications resulting from pregnancy or child birth (based on 2015 data). The vast majority of these deaths are preventable, and occur in regions that lack access to basic resources. Maternal mortality rates are significantly higher in African countries, South and Southeast Asia, and parts of Latin America.