Technology

Why is there traffic This eternal question haunts civic planners, fluid dynamics professors, and car manufacturers alike. But just counting the cars on the road won&t give you a sufficient answer: you need to look at the data behind the data. In this case, CMU researchers show that electricity usage may be key to understanding movement around the city.

The idea that traffic and electricity use might be related makes sense: when you turn the lights and stereo on and off indicates when you&re home to stay, when you&re sleeping, when you&re likely to leave for work or return, and so on.

&Our results show that morning peak congestion times are clearly related to particular types of electricity-use patterns,& explained Sean Qian, who led the study.

They looked at electricity usage from 322 households over 79 days, training a machine learning model on that usage and the patterns within it. The model learned to associate certain patterns with increases in traffic — so for instance, when a large number of households has a dip in power use earlier than usual, it might mean that the next day will see more traffic when all those early-to-bed people are also early to rise.

The researchers report that their predictions of morning traffic patterns were more accurate using this model than predictions using actual traffic data.

Notably, all thatneeded is the electricity usage, Qian said, nothing like demographics: &It requires no personally identifiable information from households. All we need to know is when and how much someone uses electricity.&

Interestingly, the correlation goes the other way as well, and traffic patterns could be used to predict electricity demand. A few less brownouts would be welcome during a heat wave like this summer&s, so I say the more data the better.

There are many factors like this that indicate the dynamics of a living city — not just electricity use but water use, mobile phone connections, the response to different kinds of weather, and more. Traffic is only one result of a city struggling to operate at maximum capacity, and all these data feed into each other.

The current study was limited to a single electricity provider and apparently other providers are loath to share their data — so therestill a lot of room to grow here as the value of that data becomes more apparent.

Qian et al published their research in the journal Transportation Research.

Verizon has rolled out a new product called Safe Wi-Fi, a VPN that provides a security stop gap for its mobile customers logging onto a public network. Italso being marketed as a way to block ads.

SoWTF is a VPNand why does it matter A VPN is a virtual private network. It sitsbetween a device in front of you and a server in a data center. Think of it as a tunnel that cloaks or hides your internet traffic from other folks on your local network. That open Wi-Fi at your local coffee shop can give advertisers and more nefarious types the ability to track your IP address. A VPN provides a secure connection between you and the server, and hides the IP address from prying eyes.

Safe Wi-Fi (check out the video below) costs $3.99 a month per account and is available to Verizon customers on Android and iOS. Safe Wi-Fi covers up to 10 devices on a single account.

Verizon customers can sign into My Verizon and go to theProducts - Appspage, scroll toSafe Wi-Fi and then click &get it now& to subscribe. The Safe Wi-Fi feature is then added to their account. Customers can download theSafe Wi-Fi app from theGoogle Play StoreorApple App Storeon their device and then follow the onscreen instruction to sign up with a one-month free promotion.

Users can turn on the &Ad Tracker Blocker& within the Safe Wi-Fi settings. The Ad Tracker Blocker prevents customers from ad network tracking while browsing the internet, and from ads generated from the devicedownloaded apps, according to VerizonFAQ page on the feature. In some cases,ads will be blocked entirely to prevent ad trackers from working. A gray image will replace the ad on the screen, Verizon says.

Websites that require ad trackers may be blocked, according to the company.

Itimportant to remember that a VPN doesn&t eliminate the risk entirely. As TechCrunch reporter Romain Dillet notes, the risk just moves down the VPN tunnel. The person operating the server can see all unencrypted traffic. VPN companies might examine a customerbrowsing habit and sell them to advertisers, for example.

Disclosure: Verizon owns TechCrunch parent company Oath.

Technology investors, tasting an opportunity to capitalize on the triple threat of malnutrition, resource scarcity and pollution brought on by the increasing globalization and industrialization of food, are investing billions into startup companies pitching alternative sources of sustenance.

In the past five years, venture capitalists and corporations have invested over $9.5 billion into 2,100 deals around the world — all with the aim of replacing or supplementing traditional methods of growing, manufacturing, processing and distributing the worldfood, according to data from CB Insights.

The Not Company, with its headquarters twenty-two minutes from downtown Santiago in the southeastern corner of the city, may seem like an unlikely rising contender in this multi-billion dollar business of food replacement; but itfrom there that chief executive Matias Muchnick and his two co-founders are plotting to bring the potential benefits of this food revolution to Latin America — and eventually the world.

For Muchnick, a serial entrepreneur, The Not Company represents his second foray into food. The chief executive previously launched Eggless, a company selling plant-based dressings and a plant-based mayonnaise.

That first taste of the food business revealed to Muchnick a few things… including how basic and inefficient the research and development process was in the food industry.

Initially, that was the problem that Muchnick was hoping to tackle when he set out to the University of California, Berkeley to research the industry.

&Iwent to Berkeley and decided to go to the biochemistry department and really try to understand the data and the science,& Muchnick says. &Pharma is doing things way better than we are. So I decided to grab a lot of knowledge and things that were being done right in the pharma industry and explore this in the food industry.&

From Berkeley, Muchnick went to Harvard where he recruited Karim Pichara, an astrophysicist who was using data science and machine learning to explore the inner workings of stars. With the data scientist in tow, Muchnick added a third co-founder, Pablo Zamora, who had been doing research at the University of California, Davis on plant genomics.

So the dream team of The Not Company was formed.

The Not Company co-founders Karim Pichara, Matias Muchnick and Pablo Zamora

At the heart of The Not Companywork, like its incredibly well-funded, once-troubled US-based competitor Just (which was formerly known as Hampton Creek) is a machine learning technology that maps the similarities between the genetic properties of plants and their corollaries in animals.

&If we can map the genome of a lentil or whatever bean there is,& says Muchnick, &you could easily understand and predict whether that bean could emulate an animal-based protein.&

Although the three founders all came together in the US, they decided to return to their home country of Chile to start the business. For Muchnick, being based in Santiago was cheaper and the talent pool for researchers was just as strong. And the distance from Silicon Valley became a draw for some recruits.

&We became these exotic guys,& he said.

But the base in Santiago also plays into The Not Companyfirst strategic objective, which is to dominate the Latin American market and bring healthier foods to consumers who desperately need them.

The changing shape of malnutrition

Part of Muchnickdrive to stay close to home is to fight the spread of the high calorie, low cost foods that are flooding Latin America — and transforming what it means to be undernourished in countries around the world.

To understand how problems of malnutrition play out in emerging markets, it helps to look at the changing fortunes of companies like Nestle, General Mills, Pepsico and fast food purveyors like McDonalds and Yum Brands (the owners of KFC).

Already nearly ubiquitous in the US and Europe, large multinational food companies are turning to emerging markets for growth, and pitching products and business models designed to appeal to low income consumers.

These products are cheap, but they&re also mostly emptied of their nutritional value, so while people won&t starve, they&ll develop other health problems.

&The prevailing story is that this is the best of all possible worlds — cheap food, widely available. If you don&t think about it too hard, it makes sense,& Anthony Winson, a professor of food economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario told The New York Times. The reality of the situation is much different, said Winson. &To put it in stark terms: The diet is killing us.&

Research data bears that out. According to a 2017 study fromThe New England Journal of Medicine, roughly 10% of the worldpopulation is now obese. Thataround 604 million adults and 108 million children, and these obesity rates are rising most quickly in emerging markets.

Malnutrition is only one side-effect of the penetration of industrial food businesses into different geographies. As theTimes notes, these companies also encourage the industrialization of their suppliers — creating incentives for large scale farming which destroys forest land.

These problems aren&t confined to snack makers like Nestle or General Mills. Demand for meat for the fast food industry in these countries is leading to factory farming, which is a huge contributor to global warming.

Itthese problems that companies like Muchnickare trying to solve — with a low cost alternative that purports to have a much lower environmental impact as well.

The Not products

Muchnick and his team have been developing an array of products ever since their launch in 2015. Initially, the company set out to be a research and development and licensing arm for food companies, offering them healthy alternatives to existing products.

&We are a tech company, not a food company. We want to capitalize ourselves by developing products for other companies,& Muchnick told Reuters in 2016.

That was when the company began feverishly experimenting with all sorts of different food products, Muchnick said.

&We made mayonnaise, we made chocolate, we made milks, and meat replacements as well…Sausages and burgers, and churrasco (which is a kind of a roast beef, but worse),& says Muchnick of the early years of the companyfeverish experimentation. Finally, following in the footsteps of Hampton Creek, The Not Company decided to start with mayonnaise.

Chile actually represents the third largest market for mayonnaise in the world, Muchnick said, so it made sense for the company to start there. Italso easier to manufacture than some of the more ambitious products that the company has on its road map.

Already, Muchnick says that hemanaged to capture 10% of the (admittedly small) Chilean market for mayonnaise in just 8 months in stores. The next product on the roadmap is a milk replacement that should launch in September, with NotYogurt and Not Ice Cream coming in 2019.

By 2020, The Not Company will be introducing sausages and ground meat replacements, he said.

Behind all of those products is &Giuseppe&, the machine learning software that Pichara and Zamora developed to find the links between different animal and plant proteins.

&We have mapped 7000 plants and we don&t think we need more than that,& says Muchnick. &We mapped them for their amino acetic structures… that looked like animal-based proteins.&

Giuseppe actually works across seven different databases with seven different approaches, Muchnick explained. Theremolecular data that describes the food and ingredients, spectral imaging for the food and ingredients, and then an array of data collected by the companyin-house taste testers for things like palate, texture, aftertaste, tanginess, and acidity. &We have a lot of parameters,& says Muchnick.

Now, with a product roadmap established, the company has also raised additional capital to roll out across the market — not just in Chile, but across Latin America.

The Not Company recently raised $3 million from Kaszek Ventures and SOS Ventures to build out its manufacturing capacity.

Ita pivot to go directly to the market that the company explicitly rejected only two years ago. &We want to become a brand company,& says Muchnick now. &NotCo today has a social currency.&

To do that, it needs to develop its supply chain. Already the company can produce 64 tons per month of mayonnaise, but it needs to continue to expand its production facilities as it looks to get into milk, yogurt, ice cream, and eventually meat.

&We&re deciding to build local processing plants,& says Muchnick. &We will begin distributing our product in Brazil and Argentina through exports. Once we have 5% or 8% of the marketshare… Then we will expand with a processing plant locally.&