New Delhi: As AI chatbots come of age, several top entrepreneurs and AI researchers, including Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, have written an open letter, asking all AI labs to immediately pause training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least 6 months.
Arguing that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, more than 1,100 global AI researchers and executives signed the open letter to pause “all giant AI experiments”.
“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” they wrote.
The open letter comes as reports surfaced that Musk tried to take control of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, in early 2018 but Sam Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal.
Musk, in turn, walked away from the company and reneged on a massive planned donation, according to Semafor. Musk reneged on a promise to supply $1 billion in funding, but contributed only $100 million before he walked away.
The open letter against AI experiments has other big names like Jaan Tallinn, Co-Founder of Skype, Evan Sharp, Co-Founder, Pinterest, and Chris Larsen, Co-Founder, Ripple.
The letter said that advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.
“Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control,” it elaborated.
“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?”
“Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilisation?” asked the letter.
The letter stated that such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects.”
OpenAI’s recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states: “At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.”
Elon Musk pledged Twitter would abide by Europe’s new content rules — but Yevgeniy Golovchenko is not so convinced.
The Ukrainian academic, an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, relies on the social network’s data to track Russian disinformation, including propaganda linked to the ongoing war in Ukraine. But that access, including to reams of tweets analyzing pro-Kremlin messaging, may soon be cut off. Or, even worse for Golovchenko, cost him potentially millions of euros a year.
Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter is shutting down researchers’ free access to its data, though the final decision on when that will happen has yet to be made. Company officials are also offering new pay-to-play access to researchers via deals that start at $42,000 per month and can rocket up to $210,000 per month for the largest amount of data, according to Twitter’s internal presentation to academics that was shared with POLITICO.
Yet this switch — from almost unlimited, free data access to costly monthly subscription fees — falls afoul of the European Union’s new online content rules, the Digital Services Act. Those standards, which kick in over the coming months, require the largest social networking platforms, including Twitter, to provide so-called vetted researchers free access to their data.
It remains unclear how Twitter will meet its obligations under the 27-country bloc’s rules, which impose fines of up to 6 percent of its yearly revenue for infractions.
“If Twitter makes access less accessible to researchers, this will hurt research on things like disinformation and misinformation,” said Golovchenko who — like many academics who spoke with POLITICO — are now in limbo until Twitter publicly decides when, or whether, it will shut down its current free data-access regime.
It also means that “we will have fewer choices,” added the Ukrainian, acknowledging that, until now, Twitter had been more open for outsiders to poke around its data compared with the likes of Facebook or YouTube. “This means will be even more dependent on the goodwill of social media platforms.”
Meeting EU commitments
When POLITICO contacted Twitter for comment, the press email address sent back a poop emoji in response. A company representative did not respond to POLITICO’s questions, though executives met with EU officials and civil society groups Wednesday to discuss how Twitter would comply with Europe’s data-access obligations, according to three people with knowledge of those discussions, who were granted anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations.
Twitter was expected to announce details of its new paid-for data access regime last week, according to the same individuals briefed on those discussions, though no specifics about the plans were yet known. As of Friday night, no details had yet been published.
Still, the ongoing uncertainty comes as EU regulators and policymakers have Musk in their crosshairs as the onetime world’s richest man reshapes Twitter into a free speech-focused social network. The Tesla chief executive has fired almost all of the trust, safety and policy teams in a company-wide cull of employees and has already failed to comply with some of the bloc’s new content rules that require Twitter to detail how it is tackling falsehoods and foreign interference.
Musk has publicly stated the company will comply with the bloc’s content rules.
“Access to platforms’ data is one of the key elements of democratic oversight of the players that control increasingly bigger part of Europe’s information space,” Věra Jourová, the European Commission vice president for values and transparency, told POLITICO in an emailed statement in reference to the EU’s code of practice on disinformation, a voluntary agreement that Twitter signed up to last year. A Commission spokesperson said such access would have to be free to approved researchers.
European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová said “Access to platforms’ data is one of the key elements of democratic oversight” | Olivier Hoslet/EPA-EFE
“If the access to researchers is getting worse, most likely that would go against the spirit of that commitment (under Europe’s new content rules),” Jourová added. “I appeal to Twitter to find the solution and respect its commitments under the code.”
Show me the data access
For researchers based in the United States — who don’t fall under the EU’s new content regime — the future is even bleaker.
Megan Brown, a senior research engineer at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics, which relies heavily on Twitter’s existing access, said half of her team’s 40 projects currently use the company’s data. Under Twitter’s proposed price hikes, the researchers would have to scrap their reliance on the social network via existing paid-for access through the company’s so-called Decahose API for large-scale data access, which is expected to be shut off by the end of May.
NYU’s work via Twitter data has looked at everything from how automated bots skew conversations on social media to potential foreign interference via social media during elections. Such projects, Brown added, will not be possible when Twitter shuts down academic access to those unwilling to pay the new prices.
“We cannot pay that amount of money,” said Brown. “I don’t know of a research center or university that can or would pay that amount of money.”
For Rebekah Tromble, chairperson of the working group on platform-to-researcher data access at the European Digital Media Observatory, a Commission-funded group overseeing which researchers can access social media companies’ data under the bloc’s new rules, any rollback of Twitter’s data-access allowances would be against their existing commitments to give researchers greater access to its treasure trove of data.
“If Twitter makes the choice to begin charging researchers for access, it will clearly be in violation of its commitments under the code of practice [on disinformation],” she said.
This article has been updated.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
“This could be a concern if those levels were sustained over the long term,” said Weihsueh Chiu, a professor of veterinary physiology and pharmacology at Texas A&M University, which conducted the analysis of EPA data collected between Feb. 4 and this past Tuesday.
The findings, which the school posted on Twitter on Friday, come after weeks of rising anger among residents skeptical of the government’s assurances that they faced no health risks. Some local residents have complained about unusual ailments such as bloody noses and dizziness.
“It’s hard to trust anybody right now, for everything that we’ve been through,” resident Courtney Newman said at a town hall hosted by CNN on Wednesday evening. Newman said her son has had daily bloody noses and that she developed “skin issues” since returning home after evacuating because of the chemicals.
Chiu acknowledged that it’s difficult to determine from this initial data that the concentrations are responsible for any residents’ specific ailment, partly because EPA’s data averages levels over multiple hours, which may not reflect brief spikes.
An independent research team from Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon University — which is located in Pittsburgh, about an hour from the crash site — are collecting their own data with a mobile monitoring van that could reflect short-term bursts, though it will likely be a week or two before that analysis is complete.
EPA, which has had workers on the scene since hours after the Feb. 3 crash, reiterated in a statement that it has not detected levels dangerous in the short-term.
“EPA’s 24/7 air monitoring data continues to show that exposure levels of the 79 monitored chemicals are below levels of concern for adverse health impacts from short-term exposures,” the agency said. “The long-term risks referenced by this analysis assume a lifetime of exposure, which is constant exposure over approximately 70 years. EPA does not anticipate levels of these chemicals will stay high for anywhere near that long.”
Chiu agreed the levels should drop as the cleanup continues but said East Palestine residents should keep an eye on air quality data over the coming weeks to be sure.
“We weren’t trying to be alarmist,” he said. “It was just that nobody had done any interpretation of these levels, to our knowledge.”
The analysis found high levels of acrolein, which in liquid form is used as a component in the manufacturing of other chemicals or as a pesticide. It wasn’t carried in that form on the train, according to Norfolk Southern’s inventory, but can be formed as a byproduct of burning petrochemicals or via cigarettes or vaping.
“These levels are not because people are vaping right outside of the monitor,” Chiu said. “I’m not sure of the source but because it’s a combustion product, maybe it’s possibly from when they burned the material.”
Acrolein is an irritant in the respiratory tract, and research has found it can cause nasal lesions in animals after long-term exposure, Chiu said. It may also cause cancer with chronic exposure, but additional research is needed to determine that.
The median concentration of acrolein picked up around East Palestine was 0.14 micrograms per cubic meter of air. That comes with a hazard quotient — a measurement of chemicals’ non-cancer health risk — of 7, according to Texas A&M’s analysis; quotients over 1 are of concern. An EPA survey in 2014 found that Columbiana County, where East Palestine is located, had a quotient of 0.83, slightly below the average U.S. county quotient of 0.89, according to the Texas A&M researchers.
The highest sampling this month in East Palestine showed concentrations of 0.8 micrograms, with a quotient of 40.
EPA said the levels of acrolein being detected are within levels typically found in the air as defined by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Eight other chemicals showed higher-than-normal concentrations, though none surpassed a quotient of 1. However, chemicals can add up cumulatively to cause concern.
Vinyl chloride, a chemical that was burned off by Norfolk Southern days after the crash to prevent an explosion, is one of the substances showing higher than normal concentrations in some parts of East Palestine.
Some of the other chemicals may have come from the burning of crude oil or are being emitted by evaporating petrochemicals that soaked into the ground after the crash. Among them are benzene and naphthalene, both of which can cause cancer or — through chronic exposure — non-cancer ailments such as blood disorders, cataracts, respiratory issues and reproductive effects, according to EPA’s website.
The team from Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon is gathering independent data on about 80 chemicals in the air via its mobile monitoring van. Chiu said they plan to conduct a detailed analysis and release more information in a week or two.
The partnership was formed to study air pollution in the wake of Superfund disasters and is funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, Chiu said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“It’s a lot harder than getting a man to the moon,” Gilbert Welch, an internist and senior investigator at the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said of curing cancer. “It’s a very complex set of diseases. You need to think of it as a family of diseases. The moon is just one thing. Just gotta get there. This is hundreds of different things.”
Biden wants to press ahead on a bipartisan initiative. He has called on Congress to maintain funding for the 2016 law that launched the moonshot, the 21st Century Cures Act. He pledged to cut cancer death rates by 50 percent in the next 25 years and to turn fatal cancers into treatable diseases.
Biden also has asked Congress to reauthorize the National Cancer Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Reauthorization would help the National Cancer Institute support researchers around the country by building clinical trial networks and more robust data systems, according to Danielle Carnival, the White House’s moonshot coordinator.
But some experts, such as Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former White House adviser, said there’s plenty of money devoted to cancer research. The National Cancer Institute had a nearly $6.4 billion budget for cancer research in 2021 and its annual spend has been growing since 2015. Cancer non-profits like the American Cancer Institute also raise hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Additionally, the pharmaceutical industry is incentivized to put money behind increasingly lucrative cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. Research shows that from 2010 to 2019 revenue generated from cancer medicines increased 70 percent among the top 10 pharmaceutical companies to reach $95 billion.
And not everyone thinks more funding is a good thing. “There’s so much money sloshing around,” Welch said of the cancer industry, adding, “Both academic and biotech or industry are excessively enthusiastic and just trying to put out as many products as they can.”
We’ve overinvested in cancer, according to Welch, especially in expensive cancer drugs with modest or unproven benefit for patients and in screenings — Welch’s research area. He’s particularly opposed to the Medicare Multi-Cancer Early Detection Screening Coverage Act, sponsored by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), which would require Medicare to cover cancer blood tests if they’re approved by the FDA. From Welch’s vantage point, benefits from screenings have been exaggerated, while its harms have been minimized.
Other critics, such as Keith Humphreys, a public health professor at Stanford University who has published academic articles on the link between alcohol use and cancer, see cancer prevention as a more immediate way to save lives.
Managing disease and curing it
The president’s agenda goes beyond money, Carnival told POLITICO, emphasizing prevention efforts, such as improving nutrition for kids, discouraging smoking, and decreasing environmental risks.
“We’re going to have to reach more people with the tools we already have and those we develop along the way,” Carnival said. “The purview is much broader than research. I don’t think anyone would say we have all of the research advancements and knowledge and treatments that we need today to end cancer as we know it.”
Those closely involved in developing cutting-edge cancer therapeutics said the field has shifted dramatically in recent years. It’s gone from treating cancer as a chronic disease, to trying to cure patients.
During his medical fellowship in the early 2000s, improving patient survival by months or years was the goal, explained Marco Davila, a physician-scientist at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, N.Y., who helped pioneer some of the first CAR-T cell therapies for patients with blood cancer.
Since then, treatment breakthroughs for some previously incurable cancer have upended the cancer-as-chronic-disease philosophy. Now, doctors and researchers believe cancer-curing therapies are within reach. “It’s changed the nature of how we manage patients. There’s that option there. It’s on the table,” Davila said.
For Davila, moonshot funds earmarked for cancer research and therapies created a new pool of money for his work. It doesn’t fix the problem of underfunded science as a whole, he said, but it makes his work as a cancer researcher a priority.
“It’s great for us, because that’s our field. It’s also great for patients, because cancer is still going to be one of the most common causes of people’s death in the United States,” Davila said. (In the U.S., it’s second behind heart disease, taking more than 600,000 lives in 2020, the most recent year for which there are statistics.)
Indeed, since the late 1980s, scientists have developed effective treatments for lung cancer, breast cancer and Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There are caveats, of course. They don’t work for all patients.
“It’s maybe 20 percent, 30 percent,” Davila said. The goal now is to keep improving those cure rates over time — to 50 percent or 60 percent, for example.
“Will it get to 100 percent in your lifetime? I don’t know,” he said.
What Davila does know is that each 10 percent cure-rate increase means saving tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of lives.
‘Prevention takes action’
But some cancer experts said there’s a downside to the shift toward precision medicine and individualized treatments. Attempting to test everyone or characterize every tumor more precisely is a bit of magical thinking, according to Welch.
“The more you subset people, the more difficult it is to know whether your treatments help. It’s too small of a group,” Welch said. “It used to be just lung cancer. Now we’ve got eight genetic variants we’re testing in adenocarcinomas of the lung,” he added.
“Ironically, the more precise we get, the more types of cancer there are, as we genetically signature each cancer, all of a sudden we don’t really know what to do with any one of them.”
Others think there needs to be a fundamental shift away from screening and treatment and toward preventing cancer in the first place.
“It’s terrific when we develop new treatments for cancer, but it certainly is always better to prevent something than to treat it,” said Humphreys, who served as a drug policy adviser under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“Very high-end, complicated treatments are never going to be accessible to the whole population,” he added. “Congress could definitely do more.”
Tobacco taxation is widely considered one of the most effective practices in preventing people from starting to smoke in the first place, leading existing smokers to quit, and reducing deaths from tobacco-related cancers. Humphreys said Congress could take the same taxation approach to the alcohol industry. “We have very good evidence that when we raise the federal alcohol tax that fewer people die,” he said.
While broad blood-based cancer screening may not be a cost-effective strategy for stopping cancer early, targeted cancer screening for colorectal, breast, cervical, prostate, and lung cancers could be. Rules could stoke participation or ensure that patients on Medicaid, who are more likely to be at risk of cancer, are getting regular screenings.
“It’s important to acknowledge that our biggest success in cancer really reflects prevention,” Welch said. “It’s nothing fancy. It’s discouraging cigarette smoking.”
Following a surgeon general warning in the 1960s about the health risk of smoking, and subsequent anti-smoking campaigns, tobacco use — and later lung cancer rates — plummeted.
The White House touts prevention in its moonshot agenda. In 2022, the first year of the reignited moonshot, the FDA proposed rules to prohibit menthol cigarettes. Among other agenda items, the moonshot program plans to increase cancer screenings in at-risk communities and facilitate donations of sunscreen to schools and youth organizations.
But prevention is a trickier cancer-prevention mechanism than treatment. It could mean cleaning up Superfund sites or removing lead pipes to reduce environmental cancer risk. It often requires people to change their behavior — to drink less alcohol and exercise more or stop smoking — a more challenging mission at the population level than directing patients to take a pill or offering them a diagnostic test.
“It’s not necessarily clear how one spends money on prevention,” Welch acknowledged. “It’s much easier to sell a test or a drug. It’s a concrete thing. Prevention takes action on the part of individuals,” he said. “You gotta say, that’s harder.”
More funding wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem, according to Emanuel.
There’s a lot of money already in the system. It just needs to be redirected and allocated differently, Emanuel explained.
Who is spending that money also matters. The government sponsors roughly one-third of clinical cancer research, according to Emanuel. Industry accounts for the remaining two-thirds of funding. “It’s good that they’ve got a lot of drugs that they’re testing. What’s bad is having industry shape the clinical research agenda, because industry has a bias.”
Emanuel’s solution: stronger government leadership and more non-industry sponsors.
“The NCI [National Cancer Institute] is the biggest NIH institute,” Emanuel said. “It’s not exactly like they’re starving.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he promised an era of openness for the social media platform. Yet that transparency will soon come at a price.
On Thursday, the social-networking giant will shut down free and unfettered access to reams of data on the company’s millions of users. As part of that overhaul, researchers worldwide who track misinformation and hate speech will also have their access shut down — unless they stump up the cash to keep the data tap on.
The move is part of Musk’s efforts to make Twitter profitable amid declining advertising revenue, sluggish user growth and cut-throat competition from the likes of TikTok and Instagram.
But the shift has riled academics, infuriated lawmakers and potentially put Twitter at odds with new content-moderation rules in the European Union that require such data access to independent researchers.
“Shutting down or requiring paid access to the researcher API will be devastating,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who has spent years relying on Twitter’s API to track potentially harmful material online.
“There are inequities in resources for researchers around the world. Scholars at Ivy League institutions in the United States could probably afford to pay,” she added. “But there are scholars all around the world who simply will not have the resources to pay anything for access to this.”
The change would cut free access to Twitter’s so-called application program interface (API), which allowed outsiders to track what happened on the platform on a large scale. The API essentially gave outsiders direct access to the company’s data streams and was kept open to allow researchers to monitor users, including to spot harmful, fake or misleading content.
A team at New York University, for instance, published a report last month on how far wide-reaching Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election had been by directly tapping into Twitter’s API system. Without that access, the level of Kremlin meddling would have been lost to history, according to Joshua Tucker, co-director at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.
Twitter did not respond to repeated requests to comment on whether this week’s change would affect academics and other independent researchers. The move still may not happen at all, depending on how Twitter tweaks its policies. The company’s development team said via a post on the social network last week it was committed to allowing others to access the platform via some form of API.
“We’ll be back with more details on what you can expect next week,” they said.
Yet the lack of details about who will be affected — and how much the data access will cost from February 9 — has left academics and other researchers scrambling for any details. Meanwhile, many of Twitter’s employees working on trust and safety issues have either been fired or have left the company since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October.
In Europe’s crosshairs
The timing of the change comes as the European Commission on Thursday will publish its first reports from social media companies, including Twitter, about how they are complying with the EU’s so-called code of practice on disinformation, a voluntary agreement between EU legislators and Big Tech firms in which these companies agree to uphold a set of principles to clamp down on such material. The code of practice includes pledges to “empower researchers” by improving their ability to access companies’ data to track online content.
Thierry Breton, Europe’s internal market commissioner, talked to Musk last week to remind him about his obligations regarding the bloc’s content rules, though neither discussed the upcoming shutdown of free data access to the social network.
“We cannot rely only on the assessment of the platforms themselves. If the access to researchers is getting worse, most likely that would go against the spirit of that commitment,” Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, told POLITICO.
“It’s worrying to see a reversal of the trend on Twitter,” she added in reference to the likely cutback in outsiders’ access to the company’s data.
While the bloc’s disinformation standards are not mandatory, separate content rules from Brussels, known as the Digital Services Act, also directly require social media companies to provide data access to so-called vetted researchers. By complying with the code of practice on disinformation, tech giants can ease some of their compliance obligations under those separate content-moderation rules and avoid fines of up to 6 percent of their revenues if they fall afoul of the standards.
Yet even Twitter’s inclusion in the voluntary standards on disinformation is on shaky ground.
The company submitted its initial report that will be published Wednesday and Musk said he was committed to complying with the rules. But Camino Rojo — who served as head of public policy for Spain and was the main person at Twitter involved in the daily work on the code since November’s mass layoffs — is no longer working at the tech giant as of last week, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions within Twitter. Rojo did not respond to a request for comment.
American lawmakers are also trying to pass legislation that would improve researcher access to social media companies following a series of scandals. The companies’ role in fostering the January 6 Capitol Hill riots has triggered calls for tougher scrutiny, as did the so-called Facebook Files revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, which highlighted how difficult it remains for outsiders to understand what is happening on these platforms.
“Twitter should be making it easier to study what’s happening on its platform, not harder,” U.S. Representative Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement in reference to the upcoming change to data access. “This is the latest in a series of bad moves from Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership.”
Rebecca Kern contributed reporting from Washington.
This article has been updated to reflect a change in when the European Commission is expected to publish reports under the code of practice on disinformation.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Mumbai: Pakistani actor Adnan Siddiqui has slammed ‘Mission Majnu’ starring Sidharth Malhotra for ‘misrepresentation’ of Pakistanis in the movie, which he tagged as ‘distasteful’ and ‘factually incorrect’ and slammed it for ‘poor story, poorer execution, poorest research’.
Adnan took to Instagram to share his thought. The actor, who has worked in the Hindi film ‘Mom’ starring late actress Sridevi, wrote: “How much misrepresentation is too much misrepresentation? Bollywood has the answer. I mean come on, yaar with all the money you have, hire some good researchers to do homework on us. Or allow me to help.”
He shared Pakistanis “don’t wear skull caps, surma and tawiz”, which Sidharth was seen donning to play his character Tariq in the film directed by Shantanu Bagchi.
Siddiqui wrote: “Make sure to take notes – no, we don’t wear skull caps, surma, tawiz; no, we don’t ask janab about their mijaz; no, we don’t go around throwing adaab.”
He added: “There’s so much in #MissionMajnu that’s distasteful & factually incorrect. The hero’s saviour complex would’ve accentuated more if the villain was shown at par. A weak antagonist embellishes even weaker protagonist.”
He said “Poor story, poorer execution, poorest research. Next time, come and visit us. We are good hosts. Will show you how we look like, dress up and live.”
The film, which released on Netflix, follows Amandeep Singh IPS, a RAW field operative who heads to Pakistan on an undercover mission to investigate about Pakistan’s involvement in creating nuclear weapons.
Houston: Ganesh Thakur, an Indian-origin professor in the US, has been appointed as the vice president of the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology (TAMEST), an organisation that brings the state’s top scientists and researchers to advance research, innovation and business in Texas.
The TAMEST board of directors on Tuesday appointed Thakur, a distinguished Professor of Petroleum Engineering at the University of Houston (UH), vice president alongside Brendan Lee, who will serve as the president.
Originally from Jharkhand, Thakur is the first UH faculty member to lead TAMEST.
During his two-year term as vice president, he will help coordinate and guide the board of directors with strategic planning, programmes and communication.
He will eventually be named the president of the organisation in 2025.
“Texas is home to some of the most brilliant minds in the world, and I’m honoured and excited by this opportunity to strengthen collaboration and advance innovation across the state in fields critical to our continued growth and development,” said Thakur, who has been a member of the organisation since 2016, most recently serving as treasurer.
“TAMEST is a scientific and biomedical intellectual engine for the state, and I am passionate about its mission to benefit public good and business,” he added.
A member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors, Thakur is a globally recognised pioneer in Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS). His patent on forecasting the performance of water injection and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) using a hybrid analytical-empirical methodology provided a much faster approach that served as an alternative to more time-consuming reservoir simulation.
In a USD 5 million partnership with Oil India Limited, Thakur’s team helped capture carbon dioxide from petrochemical plants to boost oil recovery in several fields in Assam. The project is targeted to help reduce India’s carbon footprint and increase its ability to fulfil its energy needs.
“Dr Thakur’s leadership, passion and cutting-edge research have been instrumental in positioning the University as a strategic partner to the energy industry,” said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, UH vice president of energy and innovation.
“His extensive knowledge and expertise will be of great benefit to TAMEST and the state of Texas. I sincerely congratulate him on this well-deserved appointment,” he added.
“We fully support Dr Thakur’s involvement in this key leadership position which is critical to advancing innovation across our state. He has an incredible passion for teaching and collaboration which will be a great asset to the TAMEST,” said Joseph W. Tedesco, Elizabeth D. Rockwell Dean of the Cullen College of Engineering.
Thakur joined UH in 2016 with a grant from the Texas Governor’s University Research Initiative (GURI). He joined as director of UH Energy Industry Partnerships after almost four decades working in the industry at Chevron, where he served in several leadership roles, including vice president of reservoir management.
He earned his doctorate in petroleum and natural gas engineering (PNGE) from Pennsylvania State University in 1973, after earning his master’s degrees in mathematics and PNGE there. He also has an MBA from Houston Baptist University and received his bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering from IIT (ISM) Dhanbad in India.
TAMEST membership includes all Texas-based members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the state’s nine Nobel laureates and 18 member institutions, including the University of Houston. It brings together the state’s “best and brightest” scientists and researchers to foster collaboration and advance research, innovation and business in Texas, according to the TAMEST website.
