Month: May 2022

Chasing Answers

NEW NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SERIES CHASING ANSWERS SPOTLIGHTS KAUST’S EMERGENCE AS A GLOBAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH HUB

Four-part documentary delves into groundbreaking work conducted by teams of staff and students

THUWAL, Saudi Arabia, May 25, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — National Geographic is shining the spotlight on Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Chasing Answers, a new four-part series that explores the emergence of the Thuwal-based institution as a hub for groundbreaking scientific research and development in the region and the world. The documentary, produced by National Geographic, will premiere on National Geographic (English) and National Geographic Abu Dhabi (Arabic) on Wednesday, June 1st at 9pm KSA.

Home to elite scientists from all over the world, KAUST focuses on research that applies science and technology to areas of global concern. The series delves into three areas in particular – human need, social advancement and environmental sustainability – highlighting important projects with significant impact on both nature and mankind.

Episodes include Powering the Future, which will take a look at a team of KAUST researchers, as they spend countless hours tackling climate change and testing alternative energy solutions. Red Sea Explored is a deep dive into projects that include underwater internet and coral spawning.

Chasing Answers

NEW NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SERIES CHASING ANSWERS SPOTLIGHTS KAUST’S EMERGENCE AS A GLOBAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH HUB

The episode (Feeding) The 10 Billion Challenge shows the inroads being made by the KAUST team in answering the ever-daunting question of how to feed the world’s growing population. We Are Doers focuses on a group of problem-solvers as they look for ways to use technology to help overcome issues ranging from the global microchip shortage to filling knowledge gaps in our understanding of the past and our ambitions for the future.

Chasing Answers will air at 9pm KSA time each Wednesday for four weeks starting June 1st.

About King Abdullah University of Science & Technology 

Established in 2009, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is a graduate research university devoted to finding solutions for some of the world’s most pressing scientific and technological challenges in the areas of food and health, water, energy, environment and the digital domain. KAUST is a curiosity-driven, interdisciplinary problem-solving environment, with state-of-the-art labs, distinguished faculty talent, and 20 research areas related to these themes.

KAUST brings together the best minds from around the world to advance research. More than 100 different nationalities live, work and study on campus. KAUST is a catalyst for innovation, economic development and social prosperity in Saudi Arabia and the world, with research resulting in novel patents and products, enterprising startup businesses, collaborative regional and global initiatives, and original published papers.

To learn more visit kaust.edu.sa.

For more information, please contact global.pr@kaust.edu.sa

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at
https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9353a626-6d54-4841-a1e8-52956bd1b5d7
https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/8c88619e-5dd6-4684-9134-a08379b51659

A video accompanying this announcement is available at
https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4304d1e8-8ce2-45c6-9a8a-6b4babe0a0c6

Top Projects Address Mental Health, Refugee Support, Detecting Organized Crime, Fighting Global Misinformation, and More

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 25, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — TigerGraph, provider of a leading graph analytics platform, today unveiled the winners of the Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge — awarding $1 million in cash to game-changing, graph-powered projects that analyze and address many of today’s biggest global social, economic, health, and climate-related concerns. The winning projects, announced at this week’s Graph + AI Summit, were hand-selected by the global judging committee from more than 1,500 registrations from 100+ countries. Mental Health Hero claimed the $250k Grand Prize for creating an application to help provide greater access and personalization to mental health treatment.

“From addressing mental health issues to supporting Ukrainian refugees to predicting how supply shocks will spread through the world economy, the submissions we received tackle real-world concerns and demonstrate innovative approaches to resolving them with graph technology,” said Dr. Yu Xu, founder and CEO of TigerGraph. “We wanted to create a challenge that produced new and innovative applications of graph technology and the global community did just that. The overwhelming focus on global issues in this challenge shows that regardless of geography, we all share many of the same concerns and challenges, and that graph technology can help address them.”

Graph For All Million Dollar Challenge Winners
After extensive review by the global judging committee, consisting of 32 experts from industry, academia, and TigerGraph, the following are the 15 award-winning projects.

Graph For All Million Dollar Challenge Grand Prize Winner
Grand Prize, $250,000: Mental Health Hero – Mental Health Hero is a graph-based approach to solving one of the largest public health epidemics today: the prevalence of untreated mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. According to the CDC, 400 million people globally are not receiving essential treatment for their mental health disorders [1]. Additionally, only 40% of adults with mental illness are estimated to receive treatment for it [2].

Graph For All Million Dollar Challenge Top Awards
Most Impactful 1st place, $100,000: UAWelcome – The global refugee crisis reached a new level of awareness with the war in Ukraine. In response, UAWelcome created a platform that uses graph technology to connect individual refugees and their needs with a fast-growing community of volunteers and the limited and scattered resources. Their application is already in use connecting volunteers and scattered resources with Ukrainian refugees and helping refugees seek asylum in the U.S.

Most Innovative 1st place, $100,000: Universe Planner – A multiverse-metaverse planning app that allows users to solve complex problems by tapping into and leveraging social knowledge. It also socially connects users to others working on the same or similar mission, plan, or task.

Most Ambitious 1st place, $100,000: ShockNet – Allows users to adjust assumptions, investigate the predicted chains of shocks through the world economy, and identify ways to avoid economic crises by gaining visibility into how and why shocks spread. ShockNet includes an app that allows policymakers to visualize and adjust the model to better understand how to offset or avoid a future crisis.

Most Applicable 1st place, $100,000: BioDex – BioDex combines our natural curiosity with the motivation of gaming. By gamifying the experience of connecting to nature, players can snap images of nature, identify its species, and display its properties in real time while striving to identify as many species as possible and contributing biodiversity information to research.

Women Who Graph, $30,000: Diagnosx – After seeing first hand in the ER the dual struggles of patients not understanding their health conditions and doctors trying to draw pictures to help explain conditions, Bree Day knew there had to be a better way. Her idea to get 3D models to illustrate breadth and depth of a patient’s diagnosis into all patients’ hands is realized in Diagnosx. The application presents a 3D model of a patient’s diagnosis and medical history to better illustrate the findings and diagnosis, and decrease disparities in doctor/patient communication.

Most Popular, $20,000: Multimodality Cancer Graph – Many diseases are related to each other, and complications from a certain disease could cause another. Through the power of graphs and machine learning, this project aims to uncover new disease links and help researchers better prepare for future pandemics or emerging diseases.

Additional Winners
Most Impactful

• 2nd place, $50,000: Fact-Checker: Fighting Misinformation at Scale – A multi-platform, multi-lingual, real-time fact-checking system powered by machine learning and graph technology.
• 3rd place, $25,000: Project Athena – An automatic, generic knowledge graph framework that builds itself from textual unstructured data and uses natural language to query and apply data.

Most Innovative

• 2nd place, $50,000: RepoLinks – A graph that shows the dense, complex interconnections between software developers, programming languages, and software projects, to better understand factors such as skill sets, productivity, and technology evolution within organizations.
• 3rd place, $25,000: Gemini – An eclectic news search engine that cuts through the noise and allows readers to dig deep into a specific topic or explore multiple facets of the news they are most interested in.

Most Ambitious

• 2nd place, $50,000: Finding Drug Interactions in Silico with Graph – Identifies drug interactions and potential side effects using graph machine learning during the pharmaceutical development process.
• 3rd place, $25,000: Candoor – A social networking site for people seeking to connect with others for candid conversations on anything from professional industry advice to tips for pursuing a hobby.

Most Applicable

• 2nd place, $50,000: TigerGraph for United Nations (UN) Data – Makes UN data, the most robust dataset in the world, easily accessible to anyone by harnessing the power of graph technology.
• 3rd place, $25,000: BiasCheck – A cool new Google Chrome extension that fosters critical thinking by identifying bias/accuracy of all news sources. The technology also allows users to explore specific topics with differing viewpoints that challenge the status quo.

The Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge judging committee was comprised of the world’s brightest and most recognizable data scientists, professors, PhDs, distinguished engineers, and founders of global companies focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, knowledge graph, and other industry experts with deep knowledge of graph technology, graph use cases, and graph deployments. The judging committee included eight PhDs, three academics from top universities, an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, a marine geoscientist, and a 2x Kaggle Grand Master. TigerGraph engineers and product experts also joined the panel as employee judges.

“Wow! The creative use of graph and data in these solutions really shows how a graph approach with the right data can address so many global issues,” said Juan Sequeda, principal scientist, data.world and Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge judge. “What is truly exciting is that most of these projects can be expanded and applied in many different situations and use cases in the future. The projects serve as templates that can be adjusted, augmented, and adapted for other situations, helping make life better for even more people. Like the project created to help Ukrainian refugees, while it is excellent for refugee situations, that same application could be used to help people impacted by natural disasters throughout the world.”

Helpful Links

• Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge
• Graph + AI Summit
• Get TigerGraph
• TigerGraph Cloud
• TigerGraph Website
• TigerGraph Blog
• TigerGraph on Twitter
• TigerGraph on LinkedIn

About TigerGraph                                                                                           
TigerGraph is a platform for advanced analytics and machine learning on connected data. Based on the industry’s first and only distributed native graph database, TigerGraph’s proven technology supports advanced analytics and machine learning applications such as fraud detection, anti-money laundering (AML), entity resolution, customer 360, recommendations, knowledge graph, cybersecurity, supply chain, IoT, and network analysis. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, California, USA. Start free with tigergraph.com/cloud.

Media Contacts:

North America
Tanya Carlsson
Offleash PR
tanya@offleashpr.com
+1 (707) 529-6139

EMEA
Anne Harding
The Message Machine
anne@themessagemachine.com
+44 7887 682943

APAC
Rasheed Abu Bakar
Sandpiper
rasheed.abubakar@sandpipercomms.com
+65 9112 6504

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¹ References
[1] https://futuresrecoveryhealthcare.com/blog/barriers-to-mental-health-treatment/
[2] https://towardsdatascience.com/data-science-in-mental-health-ccd09ba2148a

Includes asymptomatic testing at community-based facilities to prevent widespread transmissions

Regular testing for COVID-19, flu, RSV crucial for staying safe as anti-virus restrictions are eased

PCR tests will be priced affordably, made possible through Seegene’s 20 years of expertise

“Full support for countries that join Seegene’s campaign to ensure safe return to normalcy”

SEOUL, South Korea, May 25, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Seegene Inc. (KQ096530), South Korea’s leading molecular diagnostics (MDx) company, today unveiled a global initiative for preemptive and routine PCR testing to help individuals stay safe and healthy while living in the COVID-19 era. Dr. Jong-Yoon Chun, CEO of Seegene, says the initiative is designed to help people safely return to normalcy and contribute to global efforts to terminate COVID-19 and prevent future outbreaks.

There have been reports of an uptick in influenza and everyday colds which had been absent during the two-year pandemic, as countries worldwide ease social distancing restrictions and lift mask mandates. Experts have also warned that potentially dangerous mutations could go unnoticed due to scaled down PCR testing with governments no longer providing them for free. Individuals are now required to monitor their health at their own expense to stay safe.

Seegene’s initiative dubbed ‘In-life PCR,’ entails 1) asymptomatic testing for early virus detection 2) syndromic respiratory testing as anti-virus restrictions are eased and 3) boosting PCR test accessibility through affordable pricing.

• Preemptive asymptomatic testing. PCR tests can identify infected people with mild or even no symptoms. A study by the U.S. CDC found that asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals are responsible for around 60% of all COVID-19 transmission. Regular asymptomatic testing, even without doctor’s prescription, is expected to help curb widespread infections at community facilities, such as schools, churches, or nursing homes and ensure safe return to normal life.
• Syndromic respiratory testing. Syndromic testing is crucial for determining which virus is responsible for a person’s symptoms and what treatment makes sense. Seegene will provide Allplex™ SARS-CoV-2 FluA/FluB/RSV Assay, which can simultaneously detect SARS-CoV-2 (via the N, RdRP and S gene), influenza A and B, and RSV (A/B). The WHO recommends the screening of at least two target genes for SARS-CoV-2. Seegene’s assay identifies three to maintain detection accuracy if new COVID-19 variants emerge. The six-target assay also includes two internal controls for added accuracy.
• Increased PCR test accessibility and affordability. PCR testing has generally been acknowledged as very expensive. Seegene will work with hospitals and labs so that a test can cost around US$12 to boost accessibility and encourage routine testing. High multiplex technologies that build upon the company’s 20+ years of expertise in molecular diagnostics have enabled Seegene to lower the barrier to access.

“The ‘$12 PCR testing’ campaign is expected to help Seegene deliver its commitment to making molecular diagnostics accessible to anyone,” said Dr. Chun. “I’m certain that routine PCR testing will be the best solution to help end the COVID-19 pandemic. Seegene will provide full support for cities or countries that join hands with us to better track and curb the outbreak.”

Logo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1357790/Seegene_logo_Logo.jpg

Joint effort will expand access to vision care and deliver free eye care and services

DALLAS, May 24, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — The Vision Impact Institute (VII) is pleased to join a partnership that brings eye care services to vulnerable populations in Panama. The partnership includes Lions Club Penonome, Panama, Universidad Especializada de las Americas (UDELAS) Panama, The School of Optometry at Inter American University of Puerto Rico, Vision for Life – Essilor, Optometry Giving Sight and VOSH International.  Together these groups will conduct comprehensive eye exams, provide glasses, diagnose vision problems, gather data, and create awareness of vision health for approximately 1,500 people in Panama City’s Guna Nega community.

The native groups represent 12% of Panama’s population.  The Guna Nega make up 20% of this population and have limited access to and awareness of vision care services.

“Panama has an estimated 570,000 people with correctable vision loss. This creates a social and economic impact on all populations, including those that are vulnerable,” says Judith Williams, Program Manager, The Americas, VII. “The goal of this collaboration of NGOs, academics, and philanthropists – reaching those who may have no other opportunity to see well – speaks volumes to our commitment to creating a world that prioritizes good vision for all. The VII is thrilled to be a part of this change.”

“In addition to providing humanitarian services, the data obtained will allow us to determine the characteristics of refractive errors and visual health of this community,” say Drs. Héctor Santiago and Damaris Pagán, coordinators of the seven-day visit that includes faculty and students from the School of Optometry of the Inter American University of Puerto Rico.

Eng. Mario Him, District D-1 past Governor of the Lions of Panama, agrees: “This is an extraordinary opportunity for the Lions, together with other collaborators, to serve the visual health needs of the most vulnerable communities in Panama.”

The project will run through the end of 2022.

About the Vision Impact Institute
The Vision Impact Institute’s mission is to raise awareness of the importance of vision correction and protection to make good vision a global priority. The Vision Impact Institute is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which receives support from the Vision for Life Fund from Essilor, the world leader in ophthalmic optics.

Contact:
Andrea Kirsten-Coleman
Global Communications Manager
andrea.kirsten@visionimpactinstitute.org

Logo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/832635/Vision_Impact_Institute_Logo.jpg