Sommaire pour Nov/Dec 2019 de WIRED UK

Ines Alpha turns Instagram and Snapchat filters into pieces of fine art. Iridescent flowers bloom out of people’s heads, sequins glint over glossy skin, faces are etched in delicate lines of gold, and fins grow out of flesh. The 34-year-old Parisian collaborates with models, artists and fashion directors to create what she calls the “make-up of the future”. Her work plays with augmented reality (AR), and often enhances the make-up people wear in real life – adding sequinned eyebrows for an extra layer of glamour above bold purple eyeshadow, for instance. When Snapchat opened up its AR software in December 2017, allowing people to make their own filters, Alpha become one of its official lens creators. She also successfully applied for access to Instagram’s Spark AR Studio software, which allows…

In Philip Pullman’s books, every character has a “daemon”, a sentient creature who represents their conscience. For the 2007 adaptation The Golden Compass, actors had to pretend inanimate objects were walking talking co-stars. But the new BBC-HBO production uses elaborate puppetry to bring the daemons to life. WIRED talks to team members about transporting fantasy from page to screen. Daemon design Both production designer Joel Collins and visual effects supervisor Russell Dodgson had deep conversations on the nature of the daemons: “Do they eat? Do they sleep?” says Dodgson. “Where do they sit on the spectrum between animal and human?” Puppet practicalities For scenes where daemons were held, they turned to dynamic reference puppetry: an upgrade on the tennis ball on a stick usually used as a CGI reference point.…

Farmed salmon are surprisingly picky eaters. Feed made from protein-rich milled black soldier fly larvae (fed on supermarket food waste) is better for the environment than the estimated 215,385 tonnes of fishmeal consumed annually by Scottish salmon – but the fish find the carcass remains hard to digest, says Fotis Fotiadis, co-founder and CTO of Cambridge-based startup Entomics. He claims the current process is also wasteful – like cooking and drying an entire cow to make a single protein shake. To break down the nutrients and produce a more digestible feed, Entomics has patented a post-processing technique using microbial fermentation, dubbed Metamorphosis. The boiled larvae are processed automatically: first, separators winnow out chitin, a fibrous substance making up the insects’ body wall; another machine isolates the proteins and fats for…

Bruce Pannaman CTO, StorkCard “I’m loving Better, Faster, Happier, which discusses agile innovation ideas for customer and employee happiness. It helps me drive the StorkCard team’s goals of quickly and efficiently providing value for new parents. If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right.” Riya Grover CEO, Feedr “I love listening to other founder stories, like Recode Decode’s recent interview with Jonathan Neman, co-founder of Sweetgreen. His vision of food e-commerce, personalisation and nutritional transparency aligns closely with our vision at Feedr.” Adam Dodds CEO, Freetrade “Michael Lewis’s podcast, Against the Rules, is about the ways we perceive regulation and fairness. ‘The Magic Shoebox’, on the lack of transparency and unethical practices in high-frequency trading, was a particularly powerful episode.”…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) began the decade as little more than a boardroom buzzword – something to throw out there if asked about your innovation strategy. Ten years on, AI algorithms are being deployed across many industries, from financial services and retail to sports and medicine. 2019 marks the tenth anniversary of QuantumBlack. We have spent the last decade deploying advanced analytics to drive performance with the world’s most forward-thinking companies, and this has meant that we’ve had a front-row seat as the AI revolution has shaped sectors around the world. The most significant change is the marked growth in the ambition of organisations wielding AI. Machines are no longer undertaking mere routine tasks – they are now guiding decisions with major influence on our lives, from loan applications to drug…

Selling a company – or better yet, having a buyer make an attractive offer – is the end goal for many startups. According to a recent survey by Silicon Valley Bank, half of British startups expect to be acquired at some point. Selling a controlling interest can also help founders take their business to a new level, thanks to a fresh injection of capital. Nine in ten founders say they think the mergers and acquisitions market would grow or stay the same size in 2019, regardless of Brexit uncertainty. WIRED asked those who have been on different sides of deals to highlight the pitfalls a savvy startup founder should avoid, and what they’d have done differently, if they had a second chance… THE M & A EXPERT MICHAL BERKNER, COOLEY…

When his son was diagnosed with a form of high-functioning autism, Dirk Müller-Remus envisaged the kind of future he would have in the workplace, and didn’t like what he saw: the global unemployment rate for people on the autism spectrum remains at around 80 per cent. So, the German entrepreneur decided to build a company that would create long-term employment opportunities for adults who, like his son, have extraordinary cognitive abilities, but often lack the social skills needed to find a job and retain it. In 2011, Müller-Remus founded Auticon, a for-profit social enterprise that hires individuals on the autism spectrum as IT consultants and matches their skills to a specific client project. The Berlin-based company’s clients include Glaxo Smith Kline, KPMG and the Virgin Group. Auticon is now managed…

NETFLIX IS UNDER SIEGE. TWO decades after it was founded, and almost ten years since it moved into streaming, its competitors have woken up – though Netflix’s position as the streaming king won’t be seriously challenged for most of the next decade. The firm has built up a critical mass of 150 million subscribers, streams in almost every country in the world, and since 2012, has been making its own Netflix Originals programming. In 2013, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, said the company was racing against HBO to create the future of television. “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us,” he said. Netflix arguably achieved this in 2018, when it earned more Emmy nominations than HBO for the first time, while in the same…

This is the hidden impact of technology. For decades, David Maisel has photographed places where humans are changing the environment so dramatically, the impact can be seen from the sky. In his latest project, Desolation Desert, the San Francisco-based visual artist spent two weeks in a plane over the Atacama desert, where our insatiable demand for copper, lithium and rare-earth metals – to fuel the consumer electronics and electric vehicle industries – is reshaping a fragile ecosystem. The Atacama, in northern Chile, is one of the driest and least populated places on Earth, but water-intensive extraction is scarring pristine salt flats. Maisel – who still shoots on film – documented some of the biggest mining sites. The work isn’t intended to single out an industry, Maisel says – in fact,…

Photographer Liam Sharp expected to be photographing high-powered executives at a swish Kenyan nature reserve for our profile of ethical businessman Jochen Zeitz. However, he found that Zeitz and his foundation are as invested in the local community as they are in building sustainable billion-dollar firms. “The Zeitz foundation supports Kenyan businesses – and also makes education more accessible. One of the schools it built is in a village that borders the Segera Retreat, so I asked if I could photograph there. I was ready for disappointment when the headmaster said that all the students were taking an exam – but to my surprise, she suggested that I pop into the classrooms and shoot them anyway. I remember how stressful tests are, so I kept it fast, and hopefully I…

You might not have heard of the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), but the non-profit research group based in the Swedish Capital is responsible for one of the most important concepts of the modern age. In 2009, the SRC convened a number of environmental scientists and other academics to identify the planetary life support systems that are essential for human life – and the impact of humans upon them. They identified nine Earth system processes so fundamental that, should a threshold be crossed, it could affect the planet’s ability to sustain life. These are: ocean acidification; stratospheric ozone depletion; biodiversity loss and extinction; chemical pollution; climate change; the global hydrological cycle (the functioning and distribution of fresh water); land system change (such as the loss of forests to agriculture); nitrogen and phosphorous…

A prison in Finland has become a testing ground for a new smart-prison project. Laptops and tablets are appearing in cells and libraries, allowing prisoners to read the news, practise arithmetic – and take a course in artificial intelligence. The module was originally designed at the University of Helsinki as a more accessible version of an Introduction to AI curriculum for computer science students. The initial aim of the project, backed by the Finnish government, was to get at least one per cent of the country’s population informed about the basics of AI. After taking the course, Pia Puolakka, a project manager at the Criminal Sanctions Agency – the department in charge of Finland’s prison system – wondered if it could be rolled out in correctional facilities. Puolakka wrote a…

At 22, Ghana-born Iddris Sandu has worked for some of the world’s biggest technology companies and collaborated with Kanye West. But the entrepreneur owes his big break to Steve Jobs – and a chance meeting at a public library. As a child growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Sandu was always interested in technology. “I remember my mum getting mad because I would always break remote controls up, and rewire them to make other things that I could play with,” he says. Then, when he was 11, the first iPhone was released, and the youngster was captivated from the moment Jobs walked out on stage wielding the era-defining smartphone. After that, Sandu spent his summers at the Torrance Public Library near Compton, where he taught himself how to code…

Terah Lyons’s job is making sure that AI works for everyone. In October 2017, Lyons, a former White House advisor on technology and machine intelligence, started her tenure as an executive director at The Partnership on AI. Launched the previous year by a group of tech titans – Amazon, Facebook, Google, DeepMind, Microsoft and IBM – by 2017 the organisation had already grown to include about 50 members, including non-profits, charities and universities. (As of September 2019, the partnership had grown to encompass 89 stakeholders from 13 countries.) The partnership’s main aim was to develop a rulebook for the conscientious use of artificial intelligence, and Lyons had taken the helm exactly at the time when a vast chunk of the public had become convinced that thrashing out some rules to…

Dan Lydiate has been lucky. “I’ve only probably had three or four concussions,” says the rugby union star (right), who plays as a flanker for Welsh team Ospreys, and for Wales. “But at the time, you just think it’s a bump to the head.” Concussions have become a growing issue in contact sports since 2006, when autopsies of former US NFL players found signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain condition that also afflicts some former boxers, footballers and rugby players, inducing symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s disease. Returning to play too quickly after a blow to the head can also exacerbate both the short-term symptoms and the long-term consequences; but pitch-side doctors rely on honesty from players who just want to get back on the field. A new product…

Katharina Volz is on a mission to crack one of medicine’s most intractable problems – a cure for Parkinson’s disease – by making a map. The founder and CEO of medical startup Occamz-Razor hopes artificial intelligence can plot everything we know about this neurodegenerative disorder, fill in the gaps, and home in on potential cures. In 2015 she had just finished her PhD in stem cell biology at Stanford University, in California, when a close relative was diagnosed with the disease. “I was completely devastated,” she says. “I stayed at home for two days and cried.” Then she got to work. “I made this resolution that I was going to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease.” But first she had to work out what was already known, by mining tens…

Cassie Kozyrkov is much more than a data scientist – she is Google’s chief decision scientist, a title that is as much mission statement as job description. For Kozyrkov, artificial intelligence and big data analytics are far removed from the dystopian visions of science fiction movies. She sees them as just a few new tools used by humans. To make these tools work better, she brings together data and behavioural science with human decision-making. Born in South Africa, Kozyrkov’s fascination with data began when she was a child, entering information about her gemstone collection into Excel while her friends played outside. After moving to the US as a teen, she got a degree in economics at the University of Chicago – where she “realised what incredible possibilities lie in data”.…

‘The 720S is about drama and theatre – but it’s also about engagement and fun’Dan Parry-Williams, Director of Engineering Design, McLaren Automotive Supercar design typically begins with an inky flourish, a scribble on the back of a napkin, or an abstract shape that evolves into much larger, more complex final image. But McLaren approaches everything it does differently. The 720S, a supercar that’s capable of dispatching the 0-100kph sprint in under three seconds, was designed from the ground up to unashamedly flaunt its functional side. There is no crease, intake or sweeping line on the vehicle that doesn’t serve a purpose. In an exclusive video with WIRED, McLaren’s chief designer explains why the 720S embodies everything his company strives to achieve – from aerodynamic efficiency to pioneering advanced composite materials…

Hermès Veo boots £970 uk.hermes.com Hermès makes a convincing case for details with the Veo, a luxury take on the classic jodhpur boot. Crafted from smooth calfskin leather with a sturdy rubber sole, the boots are finished with the brand’s quintessential buckle in matte lacquered metal. Beats by Dre Powerbeats Pro earphones £219.95 apple.com The definition of tiny but mighty, the Powerbeats Pro pack a punch. With features including noise isolation, autoplay, “Hey Siri” capability and Apple’s H1 chip, these sweat- and water-resistant earphones are an ideal workout-cum-everyday audio option. Sonos Beam TV smart soundbar £399 sonos.com Simple in design, complex in ability, the Beam packs in Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, while enhancing your TV viewing with HD sound with five Class-D digital amps and four full-range woofers. Ball…

IN A motorcycle dealership in downtown San Francisco, on an autumn evening in 2011, a group of automotive engineers and market researchers stood staring at several unusual-looking black-and-silver motorbikes. The mystery vehicles were about to be put to the test by a dozen motorcycle enthusiasts. The bikes had no markings to show who had manufactured them. More remarkably, they did not have standard petrol engines but electric motors, with panels where the cylinders should be. This design element was a contentious choice for the manufacturer, as the proximity of the rider to a loud petrol engine is generally regarded as part of a motorbike’s appeal. A researcher explained that these were new electric vehicles, designed for an authentic riding experience and not just a short-hop urban commute. They invited each…

London’s new skyscraper may only be the second tallest in the UK (after The Shard), but its 278 metres are the height of technology. The 62 storeys of 22 Bishopsgate, due to open in autumn 2019, build in a host of innovations, including a bespoke app for the 12,000 workers. “We want it to be a portal into the building, and a technological environment to interact with the building,” says Danny Hall, of Lipton Rogers Developments. Adding a tower to a complex skyline can cause the air to move in mysterious ways, so PLP Architecture – which designed the building – worked with engineers from Formula 1 to create large-scale canopies, similar to those on the back of a car, to tamp down wind flow. The delivery management system was…

Writing in black-marker is scrawled over the glass walls of the office of startup Captain AI. “Close your eyes, that’s intellectual property,” says Gerard Kruisheer, a co-founder of the Dutch company. Its HQ is tucked away inside RDM, a sprawling, high-ceilinged hall with steel beams, cutting across the former wharf in what was once the world’s busiest port. Now, it’s a hub for innovation in Rotterdam – the port that wants to be the world’s “smartest”. Those scribbles are strings of the code Captain AI wants to use to create autonomous ships. It is currently training self-sailing software with navigation data, testing various scenarios in a sea simulator. “It’s the extreme cases you want to test. You want your ship to be able to sail autonomously in all conditions,” says…

Ismail Ahmed knows all about the channels that migrants use to send funds back home – at one point he was a refugee from Africa doing just that. Nearly a decade on, the London-based startup has almost four million customers, who send money from 50 countries to more than 150. With nearly $375 million in funding, the company is soon expected to reach a billion-dollar valuation. Ahmed is now the co-founder of online money transfer service WorldRemit. But in 1988, during a brutal civil war in his homeland, he fled Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, smuggled out in a tipper truck. He made it to Britain and, while studying, took on casual work such as strawberry picking to send money to his family – who were by then in a…

HEADING OUTDOORS Besides scaling its internal climbing wall, IBM researcher Svenja Mauthe leads trips into the mountains: “It helps you reassess problems and find new solutions.” ENCOURAGING PLAYTIME Eilish O’Hagan works at Wilmington PLC, a publishing firm in London, which gave out bubble-blowing kits. “We ended up using them as a kind of fun team activity.” SPACES THAT INSPIRE Slava Polonski, a UX researcher in Google’s Zurich office, likes to hold meetings while playing pool: “We can also jam with musical instruments and play in rooms full of LEGO.” PET THERAPY To beat stress, James Williams, celebrity producer at GQ, takes his dog to work: “he makes me smile and realise that what I’m stressing over isn’t the be-all and end-all.” GETTING HANDS-ON American PR giant Edelman offers all its…

Whether it’s recording notes from a conference, sharing a meeting memo with colleagues, or typing up audio from an extended interview, transcription is the enemy of productivity. Automated dictation apps and transcription services offer a potential solution, but issues around accuracy, cost and turnaround abound. Sam Liang, a former Google platform architect, realised It’s just the kind of problem that artificial intelligence eats up – so he developed Otter AI, a freemium note-taking app that uses AI to transcribe, remember, search and share voice conversations. It’s free for 600 minutes a month, with premium services at up to $12.50 (£10) extra. Users record audio using a smartphone running the Otter app, and the software automatically turns it into text in near real time. (Dictaphone recordings can be uploaded via Otter’s…

THE EVENING BEFORE HE DIED, HOGAN TEEM STAYED IN. IT WAS DECEMBER 12, 2012, AND THE teenager played cards with his mother at their home in Clayton, North Carolina. His girlfriend spent Wednesdays with her family, and card games had become a weekly tradition for the Teems. They settled down to a session of Phase 10. Hogan beat his mother, closing the gap in their running rivalry to 13-11. At 9.30pm he went to bed; the following day was a busy day of high school, ending with baseball practice. There was no indication that it would be his last. Hogan was physically fit, spending long summer days mowing lawns in the North Carolina heat. He played American football, basketball, baseball and golf. He loved swimming, hiking and fishing. He went…

1978 The year the first spam email was sent by Gary Thuerk to several hundred users on ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) to drum up interest for a presentation on the DECSYSTEM-20 computer 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 Potential configurations of a standard Rubik’s Cube – but they can always be solved in no more than 20 moves 1889 The year Nintendo was founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi, on September 23, initially as a playing-card company 46% The number of women who reported that they had experienced discrimination while working in the European technology sector. In the UK and Ireland, 50 per cent of respondents said they’d experienced it Over 3.8 billion Number of people who use the internet today, about 40 per cent of the world’s population. By 2030, it will be…