The Irish Tech News Podcast

Jillian Godsil talks with Dr David Koepsell, CEO and founder of EncrypGen, a blockchain platform that allows people save, share and even sell their DNA. Currently big companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry provide DNA services; people use them to find out where they come from but as they are purchasing the service, they are asked will they agree to permit their data be shared for science. An innocuous enough question except that the tests are loss leaders and in turn these platforms sell on the DNA data for hundreds and thousands of dollars. In an unregulated market, is it right for corporates to make money off people’s personal data? It's a complex area but David and EncrypGen are looking to make it safer, more transparent and even allow people make money directly from their data. Check out https://encrypgen.com/ for more information. Your data, your DNA and your money. More on David: In 2017 David launched EncrypGen  and went live in 2018. The platform is a marketplace for people to record their DNA and sell it to pharmaceutical companies. The reason he set it up was as an antheses to a billion dollar business that had sprung up around DNA since the human genome was first mapped at the turn of this century. Commercial companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com are huge multimillion-dollar businesses that provide genome sequencing for individuals at a very low cost. Indeed, the cost of obtaining your genome is around $90 which is a loss leader. In an industry that is pretty much unregulated, it is estimated that this data is sold at least 200 times over. The industry on the consumer side is termed recreational, but each person is asked at time of purchase will they allow their data to be ‘used for science’. It is understood that some 80% of people comply. This then allows the testing companies to sell the data for commerce. It is mostly sold to pharmaceutical companies which in turn use it for science but this middle section is pure commerce and the space which EncrypGen wishes to disrupt. “There is no transparency as to the path the data sets take after being purchased. This has other implications for use which is why we want to offer a marketplace that uses blockchain to track the transactions – and returns control to the people who submit the data as well as monetary rewards.” More on Jillian - Jillian is an award winning journalist, broadcaster and author. She is passionate about blockchain. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08NS1LXG8

A business and technology hybrid, XJ is building AI-powered tools to make venture capital faster, better and equitable. Her mission is to raise more money for female founders and founders of color, as well as help investors make better investments faster. She also mentors and invests in startups. She is a management major and worked as a consultant. XJ's toolset includes rainmaking, business and data analytics, mixed-method research, front-end programming and writing verses she calls poetry.

We chat with Marisa Porges about her varied and impressive career, which has now lead to her aiming to inspire the next generation of young girls learning how to make their way and express their opinions in a confident and forthright way. We review her book here also. Marisa Porges, PhD, author of What Girls Need: How to Raise Bold, Courageous, and Resilient Women, is the eighth Head of School at The Baldwin School, a 130-year-old all-girls school outside of Philadelphia renowned for academic excellence and for preparing girls to be leaders and change-makers. Dr. Porges served as senior advisor in the Obama White House; was a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and the Council on Foreign Relations, where her research focused on counterterrorism; and served in the U.S. Navy as one of eight female aviators in an air wing of about two hundred. She lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, with her family. Known for her work on leadership, education, and national security, Porges combines lessons she learned throughout her career with the practices she is developing at The Baldwin School, to help today's girls cultivate the skills they need to become tomorrow's leading women. The ways we define leadership are changing, and the women now stepping into leadership roles are mapping new paths to inhabiting traits such as grit, resilience, audacity, and self-confidence. The lessons Porges shares in WHAT GIRLS NEED prepares the next generation to confidently hold their own later in life in whatever fields they enter and no matter what challenges they face. WHAT GIRLS NEED demonstrates how to celebrate and own the traits which might have been undervalued in the past but which are more critical than ever today and will make the biggest difference in decades to come – including empathy, collaboration, and adaptability. Given the added pressure now placed on children because of school closures and the unfolding public health crisis, there is no better time to ensure parents know the most effective strategies for nurturing their daughters’ courage and resilience.

In our podcast today Melanie Boylan and Xavier Gomez sat down to chat about Digitalisation, AI, ML and they even covered ethics in both.  COVID19 has sped up innovation and he goes into some detail as to what he sees coming up in the next year. Xavier Gomez is founder & COO of INVYO, INVYO is a pan-European platform that combines semantic analysis and machine learning to enable all company sizes to create value leveraging their internal and external data. They leverage the power of data contextualization by using advanced technologies to process and classify millions of unstructured data coming from both video and text documents. He earned a Master from ISC – Institut Supérieur du Commerce (Master Graduate School Management – Finance) in 2000. He also holds a certification from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) specialization Fintech (2016) and is a graduate of HEC Paris in Private Equity (Leadership Executive program in Private Equity in partnership with France Invest (ex-AFIC) - French Association of Investors for Growth) in 2017. In 2000, he started his career at Credit Suisse (private banking) in Paris as a portfolio management consultant (2000-2004), selling structured products in Zurich, Switzerland (2005-2007), assistant vice president If you would like to contact him, find him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/Xbond49

How do you get the best from a professional shoot? And how camera phones are coming into their own. Ronan talks to Emeka Ikechi. Entrepreneur, Marketer, Company Director at Vanity Studios and a top photographer. Emeka talks about what they do at Vanity studios, their YouTube tutorials they started during the pandemic, and their work with influencers. Emeka also talks about camera phones and tips on how to get the best from a professional shoot.

Erik Solheim is a well known global leader on environment and development as well as an experienced peace negotiator. He served as Norwegian minister of Environment and International Development from 2005-12. During that period he initiated the global program for conservation of rainforests and brought through game changing National legislation - among them the Biodiversity Act and legislation to protect Oslo city forests. He brought Norwegian development assistance to 1%, the highest in the world. Erik has been chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (the main body of world donors) as well as Executive Director of UN Environment. He  led the peace efforts in Sri Lanka as the main negotiator of the peace process and played a vital role in peace efforts in Nepal , Myanmar and Sudan. Currently he is senior adviser at World Resource Institute and Convener of the Global Coalition for Green Belt and Road and serves as the CEO of the Plastic REVolution Foundation. The latter is a newly founded initiative that aims to eliminate plastic waste and pollution, beginning in Accra, Ghana. Erik is also adviser to Singapore based April/RGE and cochair of Treelion a Singapore green blockchain company. People may contact him via erik.solheim@plasticrevolution.earth

During the current COVID-19 pandemic, one of the casualties has been the education and training sector. Sorcha Finucane is the founder of trainedIn an online Irish platform that allows training and consultancy providers, coaches and mentors to showcase what they do and connect with customers. Ronan talks to Sorcha about how she came up with the idea of traindin.ie, what traindin.ie does, helping leaving cert students by offering maths grinds, and her future plans for the platform.

A fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with Wade Davis, we cover his latest book about the Magdalena River in Colombia, his anthropological career, and his fondness for Irish storytelling, Canada, cultures across the world, and the serious state of affairs in the US today.  See our review of hi book here and his own website here. Wade Davis BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk Professor of Anthropology University of British Columbia MORE ABOUT WADE Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland. An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture. His other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Shadows in the Sun (1993), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), One River (1996), which was nominated for the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction, The Clouded Leopard (1998), Rainforest (1998), Light at the Edge of the World (2001), The Lost Amazon (2004), Grand Canyon (2008), Book of Peoples of the World (ed. 2008), The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, the 2009 Massey lectures, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest (2011), The Sacred Headwaters: The Fight to Save the Stikine, Skeena and Nass (2011) and River Notes: A Natural and Human History of the Colorado (2012). His books have been translated into sixteen languages, including French, Italian, German, Norwegian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Basque, Macedonian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Korean, Bulgarian, Japanese and Malay, and have sold many copies worldwide.

We recently reviewed Jane's latest book and her work in helping to create a future path for Wales towards greater sustainability. Jane Davidson is the author of #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country, the story of why Wales was the first country in the world to introduce legislation to protect future generations. #futuregen is published by Chelsea Green. See more on her website here. She is Pro Vice-Chancellor Emeritus at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. From 2000 - 2011, Jane was Minister for Education, then Minister for Environment, Sustainability in the Welsh Government, where she proposed legislation to make sustainability the central organising principle; the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act came into law in 2015. She introduced the first plastic bag charge in the UK, and her recycling regulations took Wales to third best in the world.  She created a Climate Change Commission for Wales, the post of Sustainable Futures Commissioner, and the Wales Coast Path. In education, she piloted major curriculum changes, the Foundation Phase for early years, the Welsh Baccalaureate and integrated Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship into the Welsh Curriculum. Jane is a patron of the Chartered Institute for Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM) and Tools for Self Reliance Wales (TFSR Cymru).  She holds honorary fellowships from IEMA (Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment), WWF, CIWM (Chartered Institution of Wastes Management), CIWEM (Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Glamorgan. She contributes regularly to international expert events. She is a RSA Fellow and in 2017 was guest faculty in the Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership programme at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She lives on a smallholding in west Wales where she aims to live lightly on the land. As a Welsh learner, Jane welcomes messages in Welsh.

We speak with Rob Hopkins, The founder of the international Transition Towns movement, who asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it’s more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it. All of which he explores in his latest book 'From what if to what next', published by Chelsea Green Publishers. More about Rob Hopkins, Outreach Manager, Transition Network I just launched a new podcast series, 'From What If to What Next'. Subscribe here, and be part of the journey with me. My latest book, 'From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want', is now out, and will be published in French as 'Et Si' on June 3rd. Follow my blog here or follow me on Twitter as @robintransition. More about the book In these times of deep division and deeper despair, if there is a consensus about anything in the world, it is that the future is going to be awful. There is an epidemic of loneliness, an epidemic of anxiety, a mental health crisis of vast proportions, especially among young people. There’s a rise in extremist movements and governments. Catastrophic climate change. Biodiversity loss. Food insecurity. The fracturing of ecosystems and communities beyond, it seems, repair. The future—to say nothing of the present—looks grim. But as Transition movement cofounder Rob Hopkins tells us, there is plenty of evidence that things can change, and cultures can change, rapidly, dramatically, and unexpectedly—for the better. He has seen it happen around the world and in his own town of Totnes, England, where the community is becoming its own housing developer, energy company, enterprise incubator, and local food network—with cascading benefits to the community that extend far beyond the projects themselves. We do have the capability to effect dramatic change, Hopkins argues, but we’re failing because we’ve largely allowed our most critical tool to languish: human imagination. As defined by social reformer John Dewey, imagination is the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise. The ability, that is, to ask What if? And if there was ever a time when we needed that ability, it is now. Imagination is central to empathy, to creating better lives, to envisioning and then enacting a positive future. Yet imagination is also demonstrably in decline at precisely the moment when we need it most. In this passionate exploration, Hopkins asks why imagination is in decline, and what we must do to revive and reclaim it. Once we do, there is no end to what we might accomplish. From What Is to What If is a call to action to reclaim and unleash our collective imagination, told through the stories of individuals and communities around the world who are doing it now, as we speak, and witnessing often rapid and dramatic change for the better.