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Buildots, a construction digital twin company, garnered a $30 million series B round led by Lightspeed Ventures, bringing its total investment to $46 million. Buildots will use the new funds to double the size of its global team, focusing on sales and R&D to expand its digital twins efforts, which use process mining techniques to improve outcomes as construction trades go digital.

The new funding will support our ambitious growth plans for 2021-2022, including extending our existing sales team and opening new territories, Buildots cofounder and CEO Roy Danon told VentureBeat.

It will also support additional enhancements to the product, such as supporting more project workflows, integrations with other ecosystem players, and [fine-tuning] our AI to provide more critical insights to our clients, he continued.

Buildots has early customers in 13 different countries, including Build Group in California and Washington state, MBN in Germany, Gammon in Hong Kong, and Wates in the U.K. Previous investors include TLV Partners, Future Energy Ventures, and Tidhar Construction Group.

While other companies focus on the design or presentation of 3D construction data, Buildots specializes in operationalizing it. Buildots has concentrated on the gap between existing tools for design, scheduling, document management, and process controls that provide visibility into whats happening on construction sites. The company focuses on higher-frequency updates and greater detail.

Founded in 2018, Buildots aims to improve the user experience for workers and managers. Its special sauce lies in streamlining and automating the reality capture process using hardhat-mounted 360-degree cameras.

The Buildots tools bring process mining techniques to construction projects. The software is able to track the exact process by which construction projects are built for the first time, Danon said. Connecting these process models with the original design and schedule information is intended to help managers learn more about bottlenecks in their existing processes and how to get them right the first time.

In the background, Buildots AI algorithm double-checks new work against the plan, tracks progress, and updates an as-built digital twin model. The granularity of information in Buildots enables teams to drill down on any issue found on-site and take immediate actions to keep the project on budget and on schedule.

A projects current state is captured on an ongoing basis through cameras while teams make incremental changes. Proprietary AI and computer vision algorithms fuse this data with the latest design and scheduling plans and update the platforms internal digital twin.

For example, one European company using Buildots discovered that its concrete finishing team was proceeding much more slowly than the partition building team. This created a bottleneck for the construction of new floors.

The Buildots application alerted managers to the problem. Then it helped them formulate a new plan that diverted workers away from building partitions to finishing the concrete, which reduced delays for everyone.

The platform can also identify quality gaps between the plan and what was actually built. It is common for humans to miss some elements when manually comparing building documents to what they see.

Manual tracking processes tend to be infrequent; have low granularity; and rely on peoples objectivity, skill, and attention to detail. Once such processes are automated, teams capture details more frequently, which reduces the delays in resolving problems. It is also possible to drill down into construction progress at the level of an individual socket and its different stages of installation.

For example, the two images below show a 3D model of the plan on the right and a white outline where the application detected a missing outlet.

While this isnt a huge deal for any given outlet, on the average project, we spot a missing element for every 50 to 100 square meters, Danon said. Averting hundreds of those issues can lead to a substantial efficiency improvement.

Above: Here, software detected an overlooked power outlet requirement.

Image Credit: Buildots

The focus on updating and auditing the data trail across the lifecycle of a project is another key feature. Existing market solutions such as PlanGrid, Procore, and others have already paved the way for construction teams now using mobile apps on the construction site. Todays engineers and managers are generally comfortable using iPads or web applications in their day-to-day work.

But all these tools require someone to enter data manually. In contrast, Buildotsapproach to digital twins automates this process and connects the data to an audit trail woven into AI models. This transparency allows construction teams to understand how conclusions about a particular project scheduling problem were reached.

We have built our platform with the principle of transparent AI, meaning that every conclusion the system makes can be drilled down into so that construction managers can develop trust with their new virtual team members, Danon said.

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Buildots boosts digital twin process mining with $30M - VentureBeat

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INTZ - Market Data & News

Intrusion Inc (NASDAQ: INTZ) fell to close at $4.30 Tuesday after losing $0.19 (4.23%) on volume of 626,103 shares. The stock ranged from a high of $4.60 to a low of $4.18 while Intrusions market cap now stands at $75,766,026.

NTRUSION, Inc. is a global provider of entity identification, high speed data mining, cybercrime and advanced persistent threat detection solutions. INTRUSIONs family of solutions includes Shield, a combination of plug-n-play hardware, software, global data, and real-time Artificial Intelligence (AI) services that provide organizations with the most robust cybersecurity defense possible, TraceCop for identity discovery and disclosure, and Savant for network data mining and advanced persistent threat detection. INTRUSIONs solutions help protect critical information assets by quickly detecting, protecting, analyzing and reporting attacks or misuse of classified, private and regulated information for government and enterprise networks.

Visit Intrusion Incs profile for more information.

The Nasdaq Stock Market is a global leader in trading data and services, and equities and options listing. Nasdaq is the world's leading exchange for options volume and is home to the five largest US companies - Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook.

To get more information on Intrusion Inc and to follow the companys latest updates, you can visit the companys profile page here: Intrusion Incs Profile. For more news on the financial markets be sure to visit Equities News. Also, dont forget to sign-up for the Daily Fix to receive the best stories to your inbox 5 days a week.

Sources: Chart is provided by TradingView based on 15-minute-delayed prices. All other data is provided by IEX Cloud as of 8:05 pm ET on the day of publication.

DISCLOSURE:The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors, and do not represent the views of equities.com. Readers should not consider statements made by the author as formal recommendations and should consult their financial advisor before making any investment decisions. To read our full disclosure, please go to: http://www.equities.com/disclaimer

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Intrusion (INTZ) falls 4.23% in Light Trading on August 3 - Equities.com

Eight members of the editorial board of a scientific journal have resigned after it published a slew of controversial papers that critics fear could be used for DNA profiling and persecution of ethnic minorities in China.

The journal, Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, is the latest to be caught up in controversy involving ethically fraught research. Emails obtained by The Intercept show that the journals editor-in-chief has been slow to respond to queries about the papers, which involve research on Tibetans and Uyghurs, among other ethnic groups, and were first brought to her attention in March. The journal is published by Wiley, a multinational company based in New Jersey that is one of the worlds premier scientific publishers.

Studies involving DNA profiling, facial recognition, and organ transplantation have sparked controversy at other journals, but this is the first time that so many members of a journals editorial board eight of 25 have resigned in response to such issues.

Yves Moreau is seen at the Thermodynamics Instituteat the University of Leuven in Leuven, Belgium, on Feb. 4, 2020.

Photo: Lies Willaert

The papers were flagged by Yves Moreau, a bioinformatician at the University of Leuven in Belgium who over the past few years has waged a tireless campaign to get journals to retract troubling or unethical papers.

Moreaus quest began in 2015, when Kuwait announced plans for compulsory collection of DNA from all citizens, residents, and visitors. He helped spearhead an international campaign against the law and won an early victory when it was overturned the following year. He became convinced that if left unchecked, science and artificial intelligence would be used to further authoritarianism. In technology, we have this nice comfortable geek image, he said. But when you really look at the history of technology, you see that it has been a nexus of power forever for at least 2,000 years. While many geneticists have worked for decades to overturn the idea that race is a scientific concept, Moreausaw that authorities around the worldcould exploit new technologies like readily available DNA testing for political gain.

Moreau later turned his attention to DNA profiling in China, particularly in Xinjiang, where an estimated1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been interned in camps or forced into labor. Authorities there have alsocollected DNA samples from residents. Moreau periodically runs an automated search for papers on ethically charged topics. Earlier this year, that search turned up 18 papers at Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine.

Some of the papers describe genetic differences between ethnic groups. Police can use such research for DNA profiling, to better match crime suspects with DNA samples from the broader population. Other papers relied on samples that Moreau suspected were taken without proper consent. The Chinese government has been collecting DNA from men of all ethnicities, with the aim of building out genetic information for all 700 million males in China. Chinese police also forcibly collect DNA from certain groups, including migrant workers and political dissidents.

While Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine isnt a leading outlet for genetic research, it has an impact factor of 2.183, meaning that its papers are cited and read by other scientists. The Wiley name lends it an imprimatur of respectability.

As its title suggests, the journal was founded to focus on genetics research with medical applications. Many of the editorial board members study how genetics can help doctors treat patients or help scientists cure disease. But in 2019, the journal started publishing papers by authors in China on forensic genetics, a field that involves close collaboration with police. Forensic genetics has long been controversial in the United States. It is even more problematic in China, where DNA collection is part of a sustained effort to persecute ethnic minorities and other groups.

The title of one paper published by the journal is Forensic characteristics and genetic affinity analyses of Xinjiang Mongolian group using a novel six fluorescent dye-labeled typing system including 41-Y-STRs and 3 Y-InDels. Another maps genetic differences between branches of Chinas majority ethnic group, Han Chinese, and other groups, including Tibetans and Hui Muslims. Several of the papers list co-authors or funding from institutions affiliated with Chinese police. One lists a co-author from the Public Security Bureau in Tibet, the police agency in the region.

A graphic published in the journalMolecular Genetics & Genomic Medicinepurports to represent the genetic distance between various ethnic groups, including Uyghur groups.

Credit: onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Hart replied the next day. I am looking into this matter and will respond shortly, she wrote. Moreau sent several follow-up emails. But months passed without an update, he told The Intercept.

On Tuesday, in response to questions from The Intercept, the Wiley public affairs office emailed a statement from Hart. We are actively investigating and driving toward a timely, transparent resolution, Hart said. We take the concerns expressed extremely seriously and regret that delayed communications may have indicated otherwise.

In June, Moreau took the issue to the entire editorial board. In a lengthy email, he listed the suspect papers and explained how police in China use forensic genetics.

Other board members echoed his calls for an investigation. Several said they were not actively involved in the journals work and had no idea that the papers had even been published. The journals editorial board positions are honorary; scientists often sit on multiple boards at once.

In emails obtained by The Intercept, Hart wrote to the board that same day, explaining that she had experienced adeath in her familyand had drafted a message to Moreau that ended up trapped in her outbox. I will send a message soon outlining our decision on how to address this issue, she wrote.

A few weeks later, when she had not provided any further explanation to the board or to Moreau, board members started resigning.

I would have wanted to hear much more quickly from the editorial staff, said Ophir Klein, a pediatric medical geneticist at the University of California San Francisco and one of the board members who quit. The lack of communication made me really concerned, he added.

The lack of communication made me really concerned.

Another board member, Joris Veltman, told The Intercept that he has remained on the board so that he can push for scrutiny of the papers. On July 7, Veltman, who is the dean of the Biosciences Institute at Newcastle University Medical School in the United Kingdom, escalated the issue by emailing Wileys management. The publishers director of research integrity, Chris Graf, responded that Wiley would begin an investigation immediately. Veltman asked why Wiley hadwaited so long.

In a statement, a Wiley spokesperson wrote that the companys Integrity in Publishing Group was overseeing the matter. We have completed the first step of the investigation, which is to assess concerns vis--vis our publishing standards, the statement read. We are now proceeding to connect with the authors and the institutional review boards associated with the papers to clarify the consent procedures for the research undertaken. The spokesperson said that the company could not provide a timeline for the investigation, beyond to say that it would likely continue into September.

Moreau said the focus on consent is too narrow. The larger question, he said, is whether the journal should be publishing research on vulnerable minorities, some of which directly involves the authorities persecuting them. Klein, the board member, said that if the research is determined to be unethical, at a minimum it should be retracted.

Moreau is not holding his breath. He has previously secured retractions from IEEE and Springer Nature, two other major scientific publishers, but Wiley has declined to retract a paper on ethnicity and facial recognition that he and others flagged in 2019. In September 2020, the journal, WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, issued an expression of concern. The note focuses only on possible misrepresentation of a data set and figure in the article, not broader ethical issues.

Last month, The Guardian reported that the editor of another Wiley journal, Annals of Human Genetics, resigned in September 2020 after Wileydeclined to publish a letter he co-authored with Moreau and others proposing that his and other journals boycott papers from China. In turning down the letter, Wiley senior managers said that publishing it could cause problems for its China office, he told the paper.

Moreau said he will persist. At this point, you cannot stay silent, he told the Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine editorial board in one email. This situation is creating a shameful embarrassment that reflects poorly on all medical genetics journals and on the entire medical genetics community. Public trust in human genetics depends on our communitys ability to transparently abide by its moral duty.

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Journal Board Members Resign After Controversial Papers - The Intercept - First Look Media

Accurately segment the tumor region of MRI images is important for brain tumor diagnosis and radiotherapy planning. At present, manual segmentation is wildly adopted in clinical and there is a strong need for an automatic and objective system to alleviate the workload of radiologists.We propose a parallel multi-scale feature fusing architecture to generate rich feature representation for accurate brain tumor segmentation. It comprises two parts: (1) Feature Extraction Network (FEN) for brain tumor feature extraction at different levels and (2) Multi-scale Feature Fusing Network (MSFFN) for merge all different scale features in a parallel manner. In addition, we use two hybrid loss functions to optimize the proposed network for the class imbalance issue.We validate our method on BRATS 2015, with 0.86, 0.73 and 0.61 in Dice for the three tumor regions (complete, core and enhancing), and the model parameter size is only 6.3MB. Without any post-processing operations, our method still outperforms published state-of-the-arts methods on the segmentation results of complete tumor regions and obtains competitive performance in another two regions.The proposed parallel structure can effectively fuse multi-level features to generate rich feature representation for high-resolution results. Moreover, the hybrid loss functions can alleviate the class imbalance issue and guide the training process. The proposed method can be used in other medical segmentation tasks. 2021. The Author(s).

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Learning rich features with hybrid loss for brain tumor segmentation. - Physician's Weekly

Two technicians work at a bitcoin mining facility in Quebec.

lars Hagbarg | AFP | Getty Images

For years, bitcoin critics have maligned the world's biggest cryptocurrency for polluting the planet. But new data from Cambridge University shows that the geography of mining has drastically changed over the last six months, and experts tell CNBC this will improve bitcoin's carbon footprint.

China's big crypto crackdown this spring set off a chain reaction in the mining world.

For one, it took half the world's bitcoin miners offline practically overnight. Fewer people mining has meant less machines running and less power being consumed overall, which slashed bitcoin's environmental impact.

Beijing's new crypto rules also permanently took a lot of older and more inefficient gear offline.

And crucially, China shutting its doors to crypto mining has set off a massive migration. Miners are now heading to the cheapest sources of energy on the planet, which more often than not are renewable.

"The bitcoin network is ruthless in its drive for the lowest cost," said Mike Colyer, CEO of digital currency company Foundry. "Miners around the world are looking for stranded power that is renewable. That will always be your lowest cost. Net-net this will be a big win for bitcoin's carbon footprint."

China has long been the mecca of the crypto mining world, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all bitcoin miners at its peak, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. But after Beijing decided to expel its miners in May, more than 50% of the hashrate the collective computing power of miners worldwide dropped off the network.

Today, bitcoin draws roughly 70 terawatt hours of energy per year, or 0.33% of the world's total electricity production. That is almost half of what it was in May and is roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of countries like Bangladesh and Chile.

The exodus from China also means that a lot of older mining equipment that was probably long-past due for retirement will never be turned back on.

"It took off, likely forever, a large amount of the most energy inefficient rigs," explained Alex Brammer of Luxor Mining, a cryptocurrency pool built for advanced miners.

Colyer says the overall bitcoin network will now be mostly made up of more efficient rigs that get about double the hashpower for the same amount of electricity. "This continues to significantly improve the security-to-energy ratio of the bitcoin network," he said.

But not all of China's miners are going dark. Many have begun to patriate elsewhere, gravitating to the world's cheapest sources of power.

"The cool thing about bitcoin that is under appreciated by a lot of the naysayers is that it's...like a portable market; you can bring it right to the source of energy," explained Steve Barbour, founder of Upstream Data, a company that manufactures and supplies portable mining solutions for oil and gas facilities.

Because miners at scale compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy, they are incentivized to migrate to the world's cheapest sources of power.

"They need to constantly reduce their electricity costs, which is their number one expense, in order to be competitive," said Ria Bhutoria, former director of research for Fidelity Digital Assets.

The data shows that a whole lot of these miners are headed for cheaper pastures in the U.S.

The United States has fast become the new hotspot for the world's global crypto miners. In the last six months, the country has jumped from fifth to second place and now accounts for nearly 17% of all global bitcoin miners. Although China was still solidly in first place as of April, with 46% share, America's share of the market is likely a lot higher now since the Chinese government booted miners in May.

U.S.-based bitcoin mining operators have seen a huge uptick in business. Whit Gibbs, CEO and founder of Compass, a bitcoin mining service provider, says that retail hardware and hosting sales have increased nearly 300% since mid-June.

Darin Feinstein, founder of Blockcap and Core Scientific, says he's seen a rapid rise in mining operations looking to relocate in North America, mostly in the U.S., and Fred Thiel of Marathon Digital, another major player in the U.S. mining industry, tells CNBC that if the roughly 500,000 formerly Chinese miner rigs looking for homes in the U.S. are deployed, this would mean that North America would account for close to 40% of the global hashrate by the end of 2022.

Long-term, this is good news for bitcoin's carbon footprint.

Energy consumption is not equivalent to carbon emissions. While it is relatively easy to determine the amount of energy that is consumed by the bitcoin network, it is much harder to determine its carbon footprint.

An accurate read of bitcoin's carbon emissions would require exact knowledge of the energy mix used to generate electricity used by each bitcoin mining operation. One unit of hydropower, for example, does not have the same environmental impact as the equivalent amount of power sourced from coal. And China's bitcoin mining operations were known for both.

But on the whole, the market is pushing North American energy sources to get greener.

Each year, investment bank Lazard releases a breakdown of energy costs by source. Its 2020 report shows that many of the most common renewable energy sources are either equal to or less expensive than conventional energy sources like coal and gas. And the cost of renewable power keeps going down.

Thiel says that most miners new to North America will be powered by renewables, or gas offset by renewable energy credits. Gibbs estimates that bitcoin mining in the U.S. is more than 50% powered by renewables.

Miners migrating to North America are also preparing for a future in which their energy usage is questioned by putative investors -- and possibly regulated.

Brammer has been helping Chinese clients find new homes. He says that most are aware of the political and normative winds in North America and want to hedge themselves against regulatory risks in the future by establishing new facilities in primarily renewable-powered locations.

"The largest of them are also looking at the potential of going public or are looking for investors to help them grow," Brammer told CNBC. "They realize that public markets nowadays have no appetite for proof of work mining that is powered by non-renewable [energy sources]. I have yet to even have a discussion about a deal involving coal power, which is heartening to us."

Bitcoin mining engineerBrandon Arvanaghi tells CNBC that in the long run, the migration to the U.S., where innovation around bitcoin and renewables is already underway, will be an overwhelming positive for bitcoin's energy mix.

"Places like Texas have cheap electricity, in large part because of subsidies toward wind power," according to Arvanaghi.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has also popularized the idea of mining bitcoin with nuclear power in Florida.

"And all this is largely voluntary the federal and state governments haven't even gotten involved to require any renewable mix," continued Arvanaghi.

Not all miners, however, are headed to renewable destinations.

Kazakhstan is now just behind the U.S. in terms of its share of the global bitcoin mining market, with about 8% of all crypto mining. It's home to coal mines that provide a cheap and abundant supply of energy but also ample carbon dioxide emissions.

However, several mining experts tell CNBC they think that Kazakhstan, which neighbors China, is just a temporary stopover on a longer migration west.

Brammer sees large miners going there in the short-term with older-generation equipment. "But as older-generation machines reach the end of their service lives, those companies will likely deploy new machines into more stable and energy efficient and renewable jurisdictions," he said.

Also likely to put a damper on Kazakhstan's popularity is a law newly signed by the president that will introduce extra taxes for crypto miners starting in 2022.

"This will significantly change the incentives for people to deploy capital in Kazakhstan," said Brammer.

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Bitcoin mining isnt nearly as bad for the environment as it used to be, new data shows - CNBC