Team members Boonrit Boonmarueng, Watcharit Boonying and Thitiya Trithipkaiwanpon emerged victorious amid stiff competition between the finalist 10 teams. The Smart Hive project is an

Internet of thing (IoT) beehive management device that monitors and detects problems inside beehives to solve the mystery behind the mechanism of colony collapse disorder (CCD).

CCD is a global phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind a queen, dooming the beehive’s future productivity. The students’ solution could potentially increase the production of the agricultural product significantly.

After settling on the idea of the Smart Hive, they built an IoT device to help beekeepers manage the beehives more efficiently. The device uses cognitive technology to analyse the pattern of buzzing sound inside the hive, detect irregularities, and alert the beekeepers through the dashboard and in-app IM.

BeeConnex team member Boonrit said that bees have a great impact on the natural ecosystem and studies have indicated that without them, the entire ecosystem could collapse. They are also important to the economy, as they are used commercially for large-scale pollination.

“However, beekeepers are currently facing a major threat known as the CCD and this encouraged us to learn more about bee-related issues,” said Boonrit. “People have been studying the disorder for a long time, but technology has never been fully utilised to address this issue.

“We discovered from our installed sensor device that bees send countless patterns of signals with different meanings, called a ‘Bee Dance’. The device later sent the information to cloud computing, Microsoft Azure. It made me realise that this wasn’t only an idea for a competition, but was also a smart way of studying the countless and complicated bee patterns in a short time that could never been done through human hearing.”

With the ability to analyse and anticipate problems, Microsoft Azure can also prevent colony collapse disorder by providing live notifications once bees begin to exhibit abnormal behaviours, said Boonrit.

“We are honoured to see our idea become something tangible that can contribute to preserving the natural ecosystem in terms of food production from the effective pollination,” said Boonrit. This year’s competition was supported by key partners, Unicef and SiriVenures, who sponsored two special recognition awards that reflected the awareness of integrating technology to support youth education in every sector, said event organisers. Education on the Cloud was sponsored by Unicef, and Smart Living on the Cloud by SiriVentures.

The winner of the Education on the Cloud award is team Bot Therapist, a group of students from King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi who proposed the idea of “Bliss”, a robot designed to be a companion to help autistic kids learn and grow. And inSpectra, a group of students from King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi won the Smart Living on the Cloud award with a system to detect gas leak and various substances based on multi-spectral imaging and image fusion.

Team BeeConnex will receive a Royal trophy from HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn and on April 4 represent Thailand together with inSpectra, the team that won the Smart Living on the Cloud award by SiriVentures in the 2018 Imagine Cup Southeast Asia in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

They will compete with teams from nine countries for a chance to win a trip to the World Finals in Seattle in June this year. The best and brightest teams from across the globe will compete for the title of World Champion, a $100,000 (Bt3.11 million) cash prize and the chance to take home the Imagine Cup.

The 2016 memo published by news website Buzzfeed was written by veteran Facebook executive Andrew Bozworth, considered part of chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle.

“The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is ‘de facto’ good,” the memo read.

The memo pointed out that connecting people can lead to good outcomes, such as finding love or preventing suicide.

It could also have negative consequences, Bozworth reasoned.

“Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies,” the memo read.

“Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”

Bozworth is known to be an outspoken defender of Facebook, and unabashed in expressing his views.

“I don’t agree with the post today and I didn’t agree with it even when I wrote it,” Bozworth said in a statement to AFP.

“The purpose of this post, like many others I have written internally, was to bring to the surface issues I felt deserved more discussion with the broader company.”

In response to an AFP inquiry, Zuckerberg referred to Bozworth as a talented leader who says provocative things, the leaked memo among them.

“This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly,” Zuckerberg said.

“We’ve never believed the ends justify the means. We recognize that connecting people isn’t enough by itself. We also need to work to bring people closer together.”

Even if the Bozworth memo was meant solely to get colleagues to grapple with tough issues, it hints that Facebook executives were aware of risks associated with connecting and sharing on the social network.

The leak of the memo came as Facebook continued to be battered by a data breach involving Britain-based Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm linked to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Facebook faces probes on both sides of the Atlantic over the hijacking of 50 million users’ personal data by the firm.

The firestorm has raised new awareness on how personal data is stored and shared by internet platforms and marketers.

Facebook has begun to produce documents and wants to be “cooperative” with a New York investigation into the Cambridge Analytica data breach, state attorney general Eric Schneiderman said Thursday.

On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission, a US consumer protection agency, said it had opened an inquiry into Facebook’s privacy practices, including whether the company violated an earlier agreement with the FTC on how it handles user data.

Facebook signed a consent decree with the consumer agency in 2011 settling charges that it deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then allowing it to be shared and made public.

Even while demonstrating an experiment used in a recent study at Vienna’s University of Veterinary Medicine, they’re having too much fun.

It involves them running to a touchscreen with one round and one square shape. Every time they hit the round shape with their noses, they’re rewarded with a treat.

The results gathered after hundreds of dogs took part in the study suggest that older dogs benefit from similar games, just as Sudoku and other brain exercises can help their owners stay mentally agile.

“Sometimes with older dogs we might feel that we can just let them retire to the couch and let them sleep all day and that’s fine,” Lisa Wallis, one of the authors of the report, told AFP.

“But you’re not really doing them a kindness,” she said.

Even if owners keep giving their dogs physical exercise, this won’t improve their mental agility, says Professor Ludwig Huber, one of the lead authors.

“The brain needs more stimulation and also problems to solve,” he says.

‘Unlimited number of stimuli’

In contrast to most toys which can soon become repetitive, Huber says a touchscreen can be used to present an “unlimited number of stimuli” and the games could get gradually more complex.

Other games used in the study involved having to touch a moving shape or being trained to distinguish between “good” and “bad” images and then choose them accordingly.

The younger dogs and dogs who were already used to playing similar games fared best but even with the older dogs, performance improved with practice.

The results follow a study conducted among humans last year in the United States that suggested older participants who regularly played computer brain games may have cut their chances of dementia, although experts cautioned further research was necessary in that case.

The authors of the Vienna study admit that although the dogs and their owners appeared to have enjoyed taking part in the study, it would be difficult to replicate at home.

Wallis says that short of installing a similar screen at home – as she has done for her own dogs – or at vet’s surgeries and dog daycare centres, the need of the hour is for new technologies.

The team at the university is working on software that could be used more commonly, ideally paired with tablets or other devices adapted for dogs.

“Wet noses will always be a problem,” Wallis admits.

But even if touchscreens for dogs are a little way off, Huber says using touchscreens with different species could open up a whole new vista for scientists and researchers.

“It can also be used with wolves, which is a very important one in scientific terms.”

The fact that species with different levels of dexterity can use the equipment means a very similar apparatus can even be used with reptiles and even birds, which touch the screens with their beaks, he adds.