The Download: online safety's future and climate tech's big pivot Plus: SpaceX has filed for an IPO expected to be the largest ever. For months, the Trump administration has been going after researchers who study and try to counter hate speech, harassment, propaganda, and disinformation online. Now, some of those researchers are fighting back. In a new lawsuit, they're seeking to strike down a visa restriction policy against "foreign officials and other persons" announced last year by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They say the policy violates the speech and due process rights of foreign-born workers whose "work supports greater moderation of content on the [tech] platforms. Find out how the case could impact online safety and free speech .

This paper presents a machine learning framework for electricity demand forecasting across diverse geographical regions using the gradient boosting algorithm XGBoost. The model integrates historical electricity demand and comprehensive weather and socioeconomic variables to predict normalized electricity demand profiles. To enable robust training and evaluation, we developed a large-scale dataset spanning multiple years and countries, applying a temporal data-splitting strategy that ensures benchmarking of out-of-sample performance. Our approach delivers accurate and scalable demand forecasts, providing valuable insights for energy system planners and policymakers as they navigate the challenges of the global energy transition.

Techno-optimism – the belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity – is in vogue once more. In 2022, a clutch of pseudonymous San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) scenesters published a Substack post entitled "Effective Accelerationism", which argued for maximum acceleration of technological advancement. The 10-point manifesto, which proclaimed that "the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness" was imminent, quickly went viral, as did follow-up posts. Effective accelerationism, or "e/acc", exploded from being a fringe movement dedicated to pushing back against AI extinction-fearing "doomers" to being namechecked by major Silicon Valley CEOs such as Garry Tan, the CEO of start-up accelerator Y Combinator; Sam Altman, head of OpenAI; Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer; and Elon Musk. In 2023, Andreessen issued his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, expanding beyond the e/acc's focus on AI to encompass all questions of technological progress.

Minerva CQ, a startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is making customer service calls quicker and more efficient for both agents and customers, with a focus on those in the energy sector. The NVIDIA Inception member's name is a mashup of the Roman goddess of wisdom and knowledge -- and collaborative intelligence (CQ), or the combination of human and artificial intelligence. The Minerva CQ platform coaches contact-center agents to drive customer conversations -- whether in voice or web-based chat -- toward the most effective resolutions by offering real-time dialogue suggestions, sentiment analysis and optimal journey flows based on the customer's intent. It also surfaces relevant context, articles, forms and more. Powered by the NVIDIA Riva software development kit, Minerva CQ has best-in-class automatic speech recognition (ASR) capabilities in English, Spanish and Italian.

"We call it single bottom-line sustainability, where I look at the single bottom line of all those elements, and I start attaching sustainability to it," Glickman says. "And I start looking at changes of value and then I can build a business case for change." As companies set sustainability goals--to be carbon neutral by 2050, for example--they're tackling complex challenges: regulations change, supply chains are complicated, especially during the current pandemic, and integrating new technologies into legacy systems is almost always a hurdle, technologically and culturally. Glickman suggests an incremental approach--he calls it micro change, embracing the fact that sustainability isn't a one-and-done paradigm shift. "These are things that can be done in a six-week period, eight-week period, that have tangible proof of concepts that can be measured, that can be done at different levels." Looking at current infrastructure investments, particularly in North America and Europe, as well as the increasing interest of stakeholders, the sustainability bar is expected to rise. "For the next three years you will see a lot of investment. You will see countries or businesses that want to be leading because they see an advantage," says Glickman. "Then you will see others have to move along in that direction also." This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with Infosys. Laurel: From MIT Technology Review, I'm Laurel Ruma, and this is Business Lab. The show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace. Our topic today is sustainability, but on a global scale, from factories to supply chains to sustainable development goals for all the countries in the world. It's possible to design for sustainability, get a return on investment, and help fight climate change. My guest is Corey Glickman, who is the vice president and head of the sustainability and design business at Infosys. Corey is an expert in strategic design, digital transformation, customer experience strategy, and the use of visualization applied to the development of innovative products, processes, and services.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will play a key role in intertwining the power, transport, industry and building sectors while helping to decentralize the power industry as energy systems across the world move toward decarbonization, according to a new report by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with BloombergNEF and Deutsche Energie-Agentur (dena). The report says AI has the potential to accelerate a reliable and low-cost energy transition, including integrating renewable energy resources into the power grid, supporting proactive and autonomous electricity distribution systems as well as opening revenue streams for demand-side flexibility. The technology can also help accelerate new clean energy and storage uses. AI can simplify the management and cost of energy sources for organizations while managing a large amount of data and increasing the efficiency of those sources. This new report highlights ways to implement the technology in a way to standardize a renewed energy production.

Going Green sits down with Dr. Austin Sendek, Founder & CEO of Aionics, Inc. to discuss his path to building an artificial intelligence platform to help with R&D in decarbonizing materials. I am the CEO and Founder at Aionics, Inc. I am the CEO/Founder at Aionics, a company commercializing A.I. software for accelerating the pace of R&D in decarbonization materials. I founded Aionics after graduating with my Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford in 2018. At the time, I had offers to join several materials companies at the executive or VP-level, but ultimately decided I could have a broader impact on global carbon emissions if I built an R&D platform that could be licensed across multiple companies in multiple industries.

Analytica Advisors is a boutique consulting firm engaged in building global capital markets for sustainability leaders among both long-term investors and companies. It focuses on financial and technical innovation for its clients the world over. Development of natural language processing and machine learning tools to analyze structured and unstructured datasets in high and low carbon sectors using company annual reports. COVID19 has accelerated shifts in global energy market such that energy companies and banks may be impacted in the medium to long term. For investors and policy makers it is important to understand the scope and scale of potential change/consolidation from the point of view of individual companies.

This week in Vienna kicks off an incredibly important global discussion happening at Electrify Europe; energy, electricity, and the transformation of our entire power structure. Have you thought about how we will power 100 billion connected things, as well as, support all the electric vehicles set to disrupt the combustion engine automotive industry? In an electricity sector undergoing rapid change and transition, it's vital for us to wrap our minds around the implications on the industry as a whole. Most of us are keenly aware of the conversations happening around Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, etc,, but I find it interesting that what powers our future is energy and I'm not hearing much discussion at the global events I have been keynoting this year on what's going to keep the lights on. That's when I found, Electrify Europe, a conference dedicated to bringing together thousands of innovators and thought leaders to discuss how the latest technologies will affect us, and how we can all benefit from evolving our businesses to position them for success in the future.