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Posts published in “Technology”

UNCF Teams with Fund II Foundation to Offer New $48 Million Scholarship Program for African Americans in STEM Fields

By goodblacknews on March 26, 2016

Now the Fund II Foundation has teamed up with the United Negro College Fund to establish a new scholarship program to help African American students seeking careers in STEM fields. Over the next five years, The Fund II Foundation UNCF STEM Scholars Program will identify 500 African American high school students who are determined to pursue careers in STEM fields. These students will receive scholarships, internships, mentoring, and other tools to help them reach their goals. The Fund II Foundation is contributing $48 million for the STEM Scholars Program.

Microsoft Donates $1Million to New Museum of African American History & Culture

By goodblacknews on March 24, 2016

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National Museum of African American History and Culture (photo via http://cdn.archinect.net)

article via eurweb.com
Microsoft Corp. has donated $1 million to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opens this fall after five years of construction.
“The stories, art and culture of African Americans are vibrant and important narratives in our nation’s history,” said Fred Humphries, corporate vice president of U.S. government affairs for Microsoft. “Microsoft is proud to support the museum and bring these perspectives to life in a powerful and enriching experience.”
Other recent donations include $1 million from the Alfred Street Baptist Church, a $10 million gift from David Rubenstein, $1 million from MGM Resorts International and $1 million from Altria Group.
The Museum of African American and History and Culture will be the Smithsonian’s 19th museum.  It will open to the public Sept. 24 with 11 inaugural exhibitions covering major periods of African American history, including the slave trade, segregation, the civil rights movement, the Harlem Renaissance and the election of the nation’s first African American president.
To read more, go to: http://www.eurweb.com/2016/03/microsoft-donates-1m-to-new-museum-of-african-american-history-culture/

Obama Announces ConnectALL Initiative to Close the Technology “Homework Gap”

By goodblacknews on March 12, 2016
President Barack Obama (photo via newsone.com)
President Barack Obama (photo via newsone.com)

article by Nigel Roberts via newsone.com

Teachers increasingly give assignments that require online access, a task that’s becoming ever more difficult for scores of students from low-income families.

How big is this problem? The Pew Research Center estimated last year that about 5 million households with school-age children can’t afford Internet service. Not having broadband at home creates a so-called “homework gap,” which the researchers say disproportionately affects Black and Latino children.
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama announced ConnectALL, an initiative to enable all Americans to afford broadband. It seeks to eliminated the digital divide—an ongoing problem that captures the public’s attention from time-to-time.
In a recent article, the New York Times shined a spotlight on the issue. The paper told the story of a sister and brother—Isabella and Tony Ruiz—who routinely stand outside an elementary school near their home to use its wireless hot spot.
With their parents struggling to make ends meet, Isabella, 11, and her 12-year-old brother don’t have Internet service at home. By standing outside the school building, Isabella was able to watch her teacher’s math guide on the family’s mobile phone.
The article drew a Facebook comment from President Obama:
“All of America’s students should be able to get online, no matter where they live or how much their parents make.”

Teacher Ruth Mesfun Creates Website to Showcase People of Color Working in Tech

By goodblacknews on March 10, 2016

article by Mariella Moon via engadget.com

One way to address the lack of diversity in tech is to expose kids to computer science as early as possible. That’s exactly what Ruth Mesfun is doing. She studied how to teach Computer Science, so she could conjure up a curriculum and launch a new class for the Excellence Girls Middle Academy, an all-girls, majority-black middle school in Brooklyn.
She has also created a website called “People of Color in Tech” (POCIT) with her developer friend Michael Berhane, so her kids can find role models to look up to. The website features interviews of engineers, designers and other people of color in the industry, and Mesfun and Berhane hope to to add two more profiles every week.

The tireless teacher told TechCrunch that the website’s main goal is to demonstrate that there are “so many [people of color] who want to support each other” in a world that’s mostly made up of white guys. It might take a while before the industry becomes more diverse, but at least more people are making an effort to change things now. One of them’s NYC’s local government, which eventually wants all public schools in the city to offer computer science courses.

Engineer Stephanie Lampkin Launches App to Curb Discrimination in Hiring

By goodblacknews on March 9, 2016

(Forbes)
Blendor creator Stephanie Lampkin (photo via thegrio.com)

article via thegrio.com; forbes.com
Stephanie Lampkin, a black female engineer, has seen her share of workplace discrimination. Despite the fact that she was a full-stack web developer by the age of 15 and then went on to get her education at Stanford and then MIT, she often had a hard time getting her foot in the door to get into the tech industry, which has long been dominated by white men.
But Lampkin has developed an app that would help to curb discrimination in hiring by eliminating even unconscious bias from the hiring process.
The app, called Blendoor, uploads resumes without a name or a picture so that candidates are judged solely on their merits and their technical abilities.
“My company resonates more with white men when I position it as, ‘hey, I want to help you find the best talent. Your unconscious mind isn’t racist, sexist — it’s totally natural, and we’re trying to help you circumvent it,’” she told Forbes.
Already, Lampkin has 19 large tech firms signed up to use the app, which will also collect job data to see how those who are seeking jobs are matching up with positions they would be qualified for.
To read more, go to: http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2016/03/03/black-woman-engineer-launches-blind-job-match-app-to-take-bias-out-of-tech-hiring/#e3c5a05601c4

Dr. Alec Gallimore Named Dean of Engineering at the University of Michigan

By goodblacknews on March 5, 2016

Professor Alec Gallimore (photo via pathwaytoscience.org)
Professor Alec Gallimore (photo via pathwaytoscience.org)

article via jbhe.com
Alec Gallimore was named the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering at the University of Michigan, effective July 1. He is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Professor of Engineering. He also is serving as associate dean for academic affairs.
Professor Gallimore joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1992 as an assistant professor of aerospace engineering. He was promoted to full professor in 2004. Dr. Gallimore is the founder of the university’s Plasmadynamics and Electric Propulsion Laboratory. Also, he is the director of the Michigan Space Grant Consortium, funded by NASA and the director of the Michigan/Air Force Center of Excellence in Electric Propulsion.
To read more, go to: https://www.jbhe.com/2016/02/alec-gallimore-named-dean-of-engineering-at-the-university-of-michigan/

FEATURE: African Ancestry Co-Founder and University of Arizona Professor Rick Kittles Breaks New Ground in Genetics

By goodblacknews on February 28, 2016

Rick Kittles
UA researcher Rick Kittles is a national leader on health disparities and the role of genes and environment in disease. (Photo: Bob Demers/UANews)

article by Nick Prevenas via uanews.arizona.edu
Ever since he can remember, Rick Kittles always wanted to know where he came from.
Born in Sylvania, Georgia, and raised near Long Island, New York, a great deal of his academic interest was sparked by the desire to trace his ancestral lineage as far back as it could go. This proved to be exceedingly difficult, for a number of reasons.
“There simply wasn’t a strong database in place or any kind of access to information on African genetics,” Kittles said. “Records were either inaccurate or nonexistent, so there were a number of hurdles in place for African-Americans to try to figure out their ancestry.”
An aptitude for biology, coupled with a deep exploration of Alex Haley’s novel, “Roots,” led Kittles on a path that eventually would help thousands of people like him clear these hurdles. He is the director of the Division of Population Genetics at the University of Arizona, which he joined in July 2014.
Developing and implementing a comprehensive African genealogy database seemed daunting at first, but during his graduate studies at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and, later, though his work at Howard University’s College of Medicine in the late 1990s, Kittles met the historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and fellow geneticists who could help turn this dream into a reality.
“I was looking at my own DNA profile, analyzing my Y-chromosome lineage, and I noticed my Nigerian lineage didn’t track with the other Y-chromosome samples from West Africa,” Kittles said.

Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative Receives $1,000,000 Grant from Google

By goodblacknews on February 27, 2016
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Bryan Stevenson at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Feb. 26, 2016. (photo via theroot.com)
article by Angela Bronner Helm via theroot.com
Tech giant Google announced on Friday that its philanthropic arm would be donating $1 million to Bryan Stevenson’s Alabama-based non-profit, Equal Justice Initiative.
The Harvard-educated Stevenson is a lawyer who has for decades fought the good fight—winning major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent prisoners on death row, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill and aiding children prosecuted as adults in a deeply flawed American criminal justice system.
EJI has also created the nation’s first lynching memorial and fastidiously marked lynching sites throughout the South.
Justin Steele, a principal with Google.org and the Bay Area and racial justice giving lead told USA Today, “I think what’s exciting about what EJI is doing is that at a national level it is really trying to tell the untold history around race in this country and help people develop a deeper understanding for the narrative around race and how we have gotten to where we are.”
Google.org made the announcement during a Black History Month celebration at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters where Stevenson gave a speech on how the Google grant will help further his work.
USA Today reports that the racial justice grants were born out of a growing consensus inside Google that it must respond to the police slayings of African Americans and the fatal shooting of nine black citizens inside a Charleston, S.C., church last summer.
In November, Google.org made its first racial justice grants, giving $2.35 million to community organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. This week, Google.org made four more grants, totaling $3 million.
Keeping in line with the activist mantra of organizing locally and thinking globally, the Equal Justice Initiative grant was the only grant gifted to a national non-profit—all other money was given to local organizations in the Bay Area working to eliminate racial disparities in education.
To see video of Bryan Stevenson’s Google talk, click here.
Read more at USA Today.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Reprimands Employees For Crossing Out Black Lives Matter Signs

By goodblacknews on February 25, 2016
facebook chalk wall
wall at Facebook (photo via money.cnn.com)

article by Hope King via money.cnn.com
Mark Zuckerberg has always encouraged Facebook employees to think for themselves, but one issue is trying his patience.
People have been crossing out “black lives matter” on the walls of Facebook‘s headquarters and writing “all lives matter.”
The founder and CEO addressed the issue at a company-wide Q&A session last week. But it didn’t stop. Zuckerberg wrote a strongly worded memo to employees earlier this week about “several recent instances.”
In his note, the Facebook (FB, Tech30) CEO seemed frustrated by the fact that the act has continued, despite making it clear in the past that it was “unacceptable.”
“I was already very disappointed by this disrespectful behavior before,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But after my communication I now consider this malicious as well …This has been a deeply hurtful and tiresome experience for the black community and really the entire Facebook community.”
#BlackLivesMatter sprung to life as a hashtag in 2012 after the death of Trayvon Martin. The phrase went viral on social media, drawing people into a conversation about police brutality and inequality, and unifying thousands across the country on these issues. Some people pushed back with the slogan “all lives matter.”
“But when someone says ALL lives matter, it can sound like that person is dismissing the specific pain behind the slogan,” CNN’s Donna Brazile wrote last year. “Those who are experiencing the pain and trauma of the black experience in this country don’t want their rallying cry to be watered down with a generic feel-good catchphrase.”
Zuckerberg gave his own interpretation of the movement: “‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t — it’s simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve.”
Some walls of Facebook’s offices are covered in whiteboards in chalkboards. Usually adorned with signs reading, “write something,” they’re covered in layers of messages, doodles and signatures from employees and visitors.
“Crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s,” Zuckerberg admonished.
A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed that the memo had been sent but would not tell CNNMoney if those responsible for the acts had been identified or disciplined.
Here’s the full text of the memo, obtained by Gizmodo:
“There have been several recent instances of people crossing out ‘black lives matter’ and writing ‘all lives matter’ on the walls at MPK.
Despite my clear communication at Q&A last week that this was unacceptable, and messages from several other leaders from across the company, this has happened again. I was already very disappointed by this disrespectful behavior before, but after my communication I now consider this malicious as well.
There are specific issues affecting the black community in the United States, coming from a history of oppression and racism. ‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t — it’s simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve.
We’ve never had rules around what people can write on our walls — we expect everybody to treat each other with respect. Regardless of the content or location, crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s. Facebook should be a service and a community where everyone is treated with respect.
This has been a deeply hurtful and tiresome experience for the black community and really the entire Facebook community, and we are now investigating the current incidents.
I hope and encourage people to participate in the Black@ town hall on 3/4 to educate themselves about what the Black Lives Matter movement is about.”
To read more, go to: http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/25/technology/mark-zuckerberg-black-lives-matter/

TECH: Urbangeekz and Atlanta Tech Village Partner for Women and Minority Entrepreneur Contest

By goodblacknews on February 24, 2016
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Christian Ross, VP/Managing Broker, Village Realty at Atlanta Tech Village (photo credit: Kunbi Tinuoye)
UrbanGeekz has joined forces with Atlanta Tech Village to offer women and underrepresented minorities the chance to be part of a thriving technology innovation hub in the heart of Atlanta.
We have teamed up to offer an exciting opportunity for a talented tech entrepreneur to gain around the clock access to Atlanta Tech Village’s flourishing startup community in the Buckhead district. 40aba8ae1838d185c69dee7563b62134_400x400
To help foster inclusion and engagement of underserved communities in the technology space, we are launching a competition where one lucky winner will win six months of free co-working space at Atlanta Tech Village’s state-of-the-art facility. The competition is open to women of any background and underrepresented minorities.
This is an amazing chance for one fortunate entrepreneur to kick-start their startup without having to worry about the cost of office space. It is also an invaluable opportunity to network, exchange ideas, access curated mentors, and much-needed resources.
To participate applicants should apply here and submit a video up to 60 seconds introducing themselves and their startup. Each submission will be judged based on the mission, viability, and the long-term impact of the company.
“UrbanGeekz is less than a year old and in a short time we have had a lot of success, including partnerships with the likes of AT&T and 20th Century Fox,” says Kunbi Tinuoye, founder and CEO of UrbanGeekz, whose editorial team is based at Atlanta Tech Village (the Village). “But this collaboration is by far the most rewarding on both a personal and professional level. We’re thrilled to partner with Tech Village to support an ambitious entrepreneur.”
“Being an entrepreneur isn’t for the faint-hearted, “she adds. “You need a huge amount of faith, self-belief, and dogged determination. Having access to a supportive community, resources, mentorship, business coaching, and guidance on raising capital in a space like Tech Village can give entrepreneurs a tremendous boost to scale their startup.”
Atlanta Tech Village, a thriving ecosystem for tech firms, is the Southeast’s largest co-working and office environment for emerging technology companies and tech startups. There are nearly 300 companies and 900 plus members based in the Village. As one of the fastest-growing technology startup centers, the Village is dedicated to fostering innovation, encouraging collaboration, and driving economic development in Atlanta community and beyond.
“Atlanta Tech Village is proud to partner with UrbanGeekz to support entrepreneurship and empower women and minorities on their quest to change the world through technology,” says Karen Houghton, director of Atlanta Tech Village. “We are a community of innovators that becomes greater with ever increasing diversity. We understand that startups are hard, and having a community of positive, supportive people around you can be inspiring.”
“The Village offers an abundance of resources from work space to meet-ups and networking events, to mentors and advisors for advice. We look forward to growing our community and supporting entrepreneurs on their startup journey.”
Atlanta Tech Village is an incredible place for new startups to land. It’s so much more than an office space,” says Aliceson Y. King, whose company Center for Excellence in Drug Safety and Pharmacovigilance (CEDSPV) is based at the Village. “It is a community that provides amazingly talented colleagues in a diverse array of areas and super knowledgeable mentors who can assist in guiding you and your business to success from the start. Being at ATV for the last year has made all the difference in moving my startup to the next level.”
Since its inception in 2013, the Village has been home to some of the most successful startups in Atlanta, such as Yik Yak, BitPay, and Insightpool. Three years in, it is one of the top 10 tech hubs in the U.S. The technology hub also boasts a competitive accelerator, Atlanta Ventures, where startups receive mentor support and up to $120,000 in investment capital.
Applicants must…
– Submit a video (up to 60 seconds) introducing themselves and their startup.
– Be over 18 years old.
– Be a woman (any demographic) or male/female underrepresented minority.
We will consider entrepreneurs from any field but our focus is on tech startups and technology related companies. The application deadline is March 13th at 11:59 pm EST.

Read more at: http://urbangeekz.com/2016/02/atlanta-tech-village-and-urbangeekz-partner-for-women-and-minority-entrepreneur-contest/#sthash.fg2HNIUd.dpuf