The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is starting up a new nonprofit group that will focus on providing small-scale farmers in developing countries with the tools and innovations they’ll need to deal with the effects of climate change.
Tag: Philanthropy
Amazon says it’s completed the first of two relief flights to the Bahamas, delivering tons of supplies earmarked for the victims of Hurricane Dorian.
The first Amazon Air cargo plane arrived in Nassau on Sept. 16 with about 19,300 items on board, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reported in a tweet. The cargo weight amounted to 72,728 pounds.
“Huge thanks to the teams across Amazon who made this happen,” Bezos wrote.
Amazon and its customers have donated cash and more than 300,000 relief items, with a combined worth of $1 million, to Hurricane Dorian relief efforts in the Bahamas and the United States, the company said today in a posting to its Day One blog. Donated items include personal hygiene products, food, water, clothing, tarps, generators and solar lanterns.
Five months after the death of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the billionaire’s sister is taking steps to put her own stamp on a family foundation thought to hold at least $750 million in assets.
Sources tell GeekWire that Jody Allen, co-founder of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, is bringing fresh blood to the charitable organization. Among the names being mentioned as potential additions to the foundation’s board or to an advisory panel are former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nancy Peretsman, managing director of the New York investment bank Allen & Co.
Three sources discussed the transition on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. No principals in the process — ranging from representatives of the foundation and the Allen family’s holding company, Vulcan Inc., to representatives of Ballmer and Peretsman — were willing to provide comment.
One of the legacies left behind by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who passed away last October, is a drone development program aimed at providing aerial intelligence for Africa’s anti-poaching efforts.
The program takes a share of the spotlight in a behind-the-scenes report about Allen’s philanthropic operation at Vulcan Inc., published last week by Inside Philanthropy.
Vulcan has been working for years on a surveillance program for elephants and other African species, including the use of autonomous aerial vehicles to patrol protected areas. Allen’s team sought a regulatory exemption from the Federal Aviation Administration three years ago to test drones such as the DJI Phantom 3and the UASUSA Tempest for conservation purposes.
The in-house drone program has advanced significantly since then. Inside Philanthropy reports Vulcan is adapting off-the-shelf equipment to create affordable drones that are optimized for anti-poaching surveillance.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person and the founder of Amazon as well as the Blue Origin space venture, defended his billion-dollar-a-year expense on space travel here in front of a receptive, star-studded crowd.
The occasion was the 16th annual Living Legends of Aviation awards ceremony, held on Jan. 18 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel with John Travolta as host and Harrison Ford as one of the celebrity presenters. The event, produced as a fundraiser for the Kiddie Hawk Air Academy, honors those who have made significant contributions to aviation.
Bezos got a triple dose of recognition, thanks to his induction into the Living Legends lineup plus his acceptance of the Kenn Ricci Lifetime Aviation Entrepreneur Award and a newly created honor called the Jeff Bezos Freedom’s Wings Award.
After receiving the Freedom’s Wings trophy from Airbus CEO Tom Enders, Bezos sat down for one of his traditional fireside chats. At one point, Bezos was asked why he should spend money on space exploration rather than on earthly issues that need fixing.
Google today unveiled a $25 million initiative called the Google AI Impact Challenge, aimed at soliciting and supporting projects that make use of artificial intelligence to solve some of the world’s greatest social, humanitarian and environmental problems.
The global challenge is open to nonprofit organizations and public charities — and to for-profit businesses as well, as long as their projects have a charitable purpose.
Google’s call to humanitarian action is part of its broader “AI for Social Good” campaign, and comes just weeks after Google Cloud decided not to bid on the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI cloud computing project due to ethical concerns.
Microsoft, which is bidding on the contract, announced its own $40 million “AI for Humanitarian Action” initiative last month. And in the weeks before his death, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen set up a new organization called the Vulcan Machine Learning Center for Impact to support the use of machine learning for philanthropic projects.
While Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates spends billions of dollars a year on global health, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is spending $1 billion on his Blue Origin space venture — and some folks have a problem with that.
The issue is coming to the fore in the wake of Bezos’ comments last week that Blue Origin represents “the most important work that I’m doing,” and is funded with billions of dollars of his personal wealth.
Bezos sees his share of Amazon’s success as the equivalent of “lottery winnings” that currently translate to an estimated net worth of $130 billion, making him the world’s richest individual.
“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” Bezos said last week during an Axel Springer award ceremony in Berlin. “That is basically it. Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune. I am liquidating about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin. And I plan to continue to do that for a long time.”
That sentiment is in line with Bezos’ long-held passion to pioneer the space frontier by making it possible for millions of people to live and work in space. He’s gotten used to acknowledging that the main reason for starting up Amazon was to get the money to fund space development.
But as last week’s comments became widely distributed, they attracted pushback from folks who pointed out concerns closer to home.
SAN FRANCISCO — Can artificial intelligence help battle malaria and other infectious diseases? Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold says it’s time for his company’s AI-enabled microscope to join the fray.
“We’ve gotten to the stage where the machine learning system is better than humans,” Myhrvold said last weekend here at the World Conference of Science Journalists.
He said Intellectual Ventures will announce a partnership with a Chinese company later this month to commercialize the Autoscope technology, which has been under development for years at IV’s lab in Bellevue, Wash.
Myhrvold declined to name the company or provide details about the deal, but he held it up as an example of how technology can further the cause of global health and development.
Two months after he asked the Twitterverse to suggest short-term options for future philanthropy, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos passed along his appreciation for the tens of thousands of responses that were sent in.
“I’m really glad I asked – the responses have been very helpful and have already changes my thinking about how to approach this,” said Bezos, who currently ranks as the world’s third-richest person.
He said there’d be “more to come.”
The multibillion-dollar Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced its first acquisition today: a startup called Meta that is developing an artificial intelligence program for searching through scientific studies.
“We will be working to make Meta even more powerful and useful to the scientific community, and are committed to offering these tools and features for free to all researchers,” the initiative’s president of science, Cori Bargmann, and chief technology officer Brian Pinkerton said in a Facebook posting.
The acquisition is subject to shareholder and court approval.