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March 2, 2020
How do you solve a problem like Nokia?
That'll soon be a question for Pekka Lundmark, the company's new chief executive and president. Once known as a handset maker, Nokia's major business is now networking equipment — and it's struggling to keep up with Huawei in the 5G race, even amid concerns that the Chinese tech giant's systems might be vulnerable to state surveillance.
Nokia announced Monday that longtime CEO Rajeev Suri will step down, making room for Lundmark, a former 1990s-era Nokia executive who has been running Finnish state-owned energy corporation Fortum since 2015. Lundmark will take over this September.
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He's stepping into a lot of work: The company's shares have lost roughly a third of their value over the past year, and just last week its future was cast into doubt after Bloomberg reported that it was considering selling off assets or even a merger.
"Nokia is really playing from behind right now," Mark Cash, a Morningstar equity analyst, told Protocol. "But the opportunity ahead of them is 5G, and they're trying to hit it with a fresh face."
So just who is Pekka Lundmark, and what could his leadership mean for Nokia?
A company man returns
Lundmark is a Finnish native with an engineering master's from Helsinki University of Technology and a history at Nokia. Throughout the 1990s, he served in a variety of roles at the company, including vice president of strategy and business development at Nokia Networks, according to a company press release.
His return will reunite him with the current vice chair of Nokia's board, and incoming chair, Sari Baldauf. She's another executive from Lundmark's first tenure at the company, who said she looks "forward to working closely with him" to create a Nokia "positioned for the future."
The two have already been working closely together in recent years: Baldauf served as Fortum's board chair between 2011 and 2018, during which the company hired Lundmark. In fact, according to Bloomberg, Baldauf recruited Lundmark for the top spot at Fortum.
The state connection
Lundmark's five years at the top of a Finnish-state owned corporation, including managing a complex regulatory process in a contentious takeover of German rival Uniper, likely taught him how to navigate the nuances of mixing business with government,
And that's a skill he'll need to keep flexing at Nokia, where Finnish state investment firm Solidium is the single largest shareholder with a 3.85% stake of the business. After Nokia slashed profit expectations in the fall, citing the costs of competing for 5G, Solidium chief executive Antti Makinen even went public with his frustrations.
"They have communicated their development to investors rather poorly, and we gave them some feisty feedback for it," Makinen told Reuters in January.
The global view
Although Fortum is a Finnish-state backed company, it operates around the world: as a major clean energy provider in Europe and with solar investments in India. So between his tenure there and previous stint on networking inside Nokia, Lundmark has experience navigating sometimes tense global dynamics.
And nowhere are things more geopolitically sensitive in tech right now than the business that defines Nokia's future. Although the company is struggling to keep up in 5G, security concerns about major competitor Huawei could leave an opening for Nokia and other networking tech providers, if they play their cards right.
"Some of the geography-centric bans on Huawei are definitely benefiting Nokia," as well as fellow Nordic competitor Ericsson, Cash said. "But they can be more aggressive in pursuing those opportunities," he added.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr even recently suggested that the American government invest in an alternative like Nokia, although experts, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow and Vice President Mike Pence all shot down that idea.
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In Europe, regulators have also raised security flags about 5G networks, but more discreetly. For example, last month The European Commission endorsed a joint "toolbox" with advice for mitigating risk across the new systems, including avoiding dependency on a single supplier — but without directly mentioning Huawei.
New leadership with a strong background working within bureaucracy could help Nokia capitalize on such openings. In fact, it might be the only way that Lundmark succeeds.
Andrea Peterson
Andrea Peterson ( @kansasalps) is an independent journalist with extensive experience reporting on technology policy. Peterson was a staff writer for The Washington Post from 2013 through the end of 2016. Her byline has also been published by POLITICO, Ars Technica, The Daily Beast, Slate and other outlets.
Protocol | Fintech
Jack Dorsey is so money: What Tidal and banking do for Square
Teaming up with Jay-Z's music streaming service may seem like a move done for flash, but it's ultimately all about the money (and Cash).
Jay-Z performs at the Tidal-X concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn in 2017.
Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images
March 4, 2021
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
March 4, 2021
It was a big week for Jack Dorsey, who started by turning heads in Wall Street, and then went Hollywood with an unexpected music-streaming deal.
Dorsey's payments company, Square, announced Monday that it now has an actual bank, Square Financial Services, which just got a charter approved. On Thursday, Dorsey announced Square was taking a majority stake in Tidal, the music-streaming service backed by Jay-Z, for $297 million.
<p>If there's a theme around the moves, it's control. Having its own bank gives Square more purchase in the financial world. And if Square does something with Tidal, which promised to give artists a bigger cut of the money produced by streaming, it will likely be about giving musicians more control over the revenue streams they create. </p><p>It also suggests Dorsey wants to diversify Square far beyond its original smartphone-swipe business. Already, he talks about Register and Cash App as two distinct businesses within Square. (Caviar was another, until Square sold it to DoorDash.) Now Tidal joins the portfolio.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"Dorsey is flexing his muscles and expanding his tentacles into banking, crypto, and now the Jay-Z Tidal deal," Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives told Protocol. Ives compared Dorsey to Tesla's Elon Musk in the boldness of his ambitions.</p><p>Some disagreed: There was chatter that the deal was about Dorsey's habit of hobnobbing with celebrities. He was famously photographed with Beyoncé, who is married to Jay-Z, last year. Square plans to name Jay-Z, a.k.a. Shawn Carter, to its board.</p><p>But Square's push into banking is not about "white pillars in front of buildings and marble," as Matt Harris, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, put it. Financial services are becoming a "lifestyle choice" for a new generation of consumers, he said.</p><p>It helps, then, that Cash App is part of the cultural lexicon of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-venmo-iggy-azalea-cash-app-rules-rap-11565191206" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hip-hop</a>. "One of the things Square has captured is the consumer business for a long time," Harris said. "Their customer acquisition strategy for a long time has been urban. And Tidal is just a further step. A somewhat radical further step."</p><p>Veteran tech analyst Michael Dortch of DortchOnIT saw the deal as more straightforward: Square can offer valuable services to musicians and artists in what has become a more complex entertainment market, and let them avoid "exploitation and bad treatment" from the major labels, he said.</p><p>Artists often don't get paid for three to six months after a song is streamed, because they have to wait for their label to get paid first. Square has experience, but it's not the only one that could address this problem.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>"Maybe there's an argument that Square will get in the middle of that to simplify payments so creators get paid more quickly," said David Pakman, partner at Venrock. "That's interesting and a bunch of people have tried to do that. But Spotify could do that on their own."</p><p>Square's bet on Tidal is unlikely to shake up the streaming world in the short term. Tidal has not released any subscriber numbers for some time, but data shared by digital music wholesaler CD Baby suggests that the service is little more than an also-ran. CD Baby, which distributed the music of 800,000 independent artists, received 40% of its digital revenue from Spotify, with Apple Music accounting for 18%. Tidal, Deezer, Napster and other third-tier services together made up just 8% of CD Baby's digital revenue.</p><p>Dorsey and Jay-Z both said Thursday that the Tidal link-up went well beyond streaming.</p><p>"Square created ecosystems of tools for sellers and individuals, and we'll do the same for artists," Dorsey wrote in a <a href="https://twitter.com/jack/status/1367460921937817602" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweet thread</a>. "We'll work on entirely new listening experiences to bring fans closer together, simple integrations for merch sales, modern collaboration tools, and new complementary revenue streams."</p><p>"I said from the beginning that Tidal was about more than just streaming music … Artists deserve better tools to assist them in their creative journey," Jay-Z <a href="https://twitter.com/sc/status/1367461494821171202" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a>.</p><p>Focusing on services over streams is a smart bet, music industry analyst Mark Mulligan from <a href="https://www.midiaresearch.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIDiA Research</a> said. "Streaming is fundamentally a terrible margin business," he said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/m/waterandmusic" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Water & Music</a> author Cherie Hu agreed. "The business of music streaming is not sustainable in and of itself," Hu said, pointing to the fact that Tidal <a href="https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/01/13/tidal-2019-earnings-report/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">lost $52 million</a> on subscription revenues of just $166 million in 2019. "Tidal is not a profitable business," she said.</p><p>A bigger focus on creator services could change that. "It is the only big bet at the moment," Mulligan said. And while pundits have focused on Tidal's star power, creator services could actually help Tidal and Square monetize the long tail of music: part-time creators looking to make a few extra bucks, musicians who haven't given up on their day job. "It monetizes hobbies," Mulligan said.</p><p>Square could build out credit or other products or tools for artists. "Even though Tidal has been declining as a streaming service, they have a strong brand and access to artists," said Laura Chau, partner at Canaan. "With Square buying Tidal, they essentially are buying access to those artists and circumventing the creator acquisition challenge that many emerging companies will have."</p><p>The flip side is that there are already a plethora of creator services companies out there, helping bands with everything from playlist sharing to merchandise sales. Those companies include Spotify, which has been looking to offer musicians more tools after acquiring artistry services startups SoundBetter and Soundtrap. "It's super crowded right now," Hu said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>The one major differentiator for Square could be its financial services business, freshly strengthened with its own chartered bank. "That is one of the growth areas," Mulligan said. The company could offer artists advances, royalty processing and more, effectively taking over some of the roles traditionally held by record labels.</p><p>It's a space that is long overdue for change. In the age of TikTok, artists can see huge streaming spikes practically overnight when one of their songs goes viral. Most of them won't see the resulting royalties for months, Hu said: "The financial innovation has not caught up to general technological innovation." </p><p>If the Tidal bet pays off, Dorsey's reputation as a daring strategic thinker will only grow.</p><p>"He deserves a lot of credit for long-term vision," Eric Sager, Plaid's chief operating officer who was once head of sales at Square, told Protocol in January. "A lot of the things that have made Square the amazing company it is today are things that he was talking about years and years and years ago when it wasn't clear at all that those things would be successful."</p>
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Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
Sponsored Content
The future of computing at the edge: an interview with Intel’s Tom Lantzsch
An interview with Tom Lantzsch, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Group at Intel
February 28, 2021
Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
February 27, 2021
An interview with Tom Lantzsch
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corporation
Edge computing had been on the rise in the last 18 months – and accelerated amid the need for new applications to solve challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tom Lantzsch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corp., thinks there are more innovations to come – and wants technology leaders to think equally about data and the algorithms as critical differentiators.
In his role at Intel, Lantzsch leads the worldwide group of solutions architects across IoT market segments, including retail, banking, hospitality, education, industrial, transportation, smart cities and healthcare. And he's seen first-hand how artificial intelligence run at the edge can have a big impact on customers' success.
Protocol sat down with Lantzsch to talk about the challenges faced by companies seeking to move from the cloud to the edge; some of the surprising ways that Intel has found to help customers and the next big breakthrough in this space.
What are the biggest trends you are seeing with edge computing and IoT?
A few years ago, there was a notion that the edge was going to be a simplistic model, where we were going to have everything connected up into the cloud and all the compute was going to happen in the cloud. At Intel, we had a bit of a contrarian view. We thought much of the interesting compute was going to happen closer to where data was created. And we believed, at that time, that camera technology was going to be the driving force – that just the sheer amount of content that was created would be overwhelming to ship to the cloud – so we'd have to do compute at the edge. A few years later – that hypothesis is in action and we're seeing edge compute happen in a big way.
<p>The last 18 months have been a wild time to be in technology. We've seen edge compute come to life to help businesses adapt during the pandemic. At the same time, we are also seeing how 5G is going to drive up interest, especially from a networking perspective, rather than a use-case perspective. We also see lot of people that are focused on their data, but the <em>algorithms</em> that companies train with the data are going to be their critical assets. It doesn't matter what company or what industry; <em>this</em> will really become the differentiator for many companies.</p><p>And particularly amid the backdrop of the pandemic, we've seen how companies are using technology to either bring workers back in safely or <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-sensormatic-article.html" target="_blank">serve their customers in new ways</a>, <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/customer-spotlight/stories/brentwood-academy-customer-spotlight.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">educate children in new ways</a> -- all things that have accelerated the digital transformation that had been underway. I recently read a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">McKinsey survey</a> that reported on the "speedup in creating digital or digitally enhanced offerings. Across regions, the results suggest a seven-year increase, on average, in the rate at which companies are developing these products and services."</p><p>And based on what we're seeing at Intel, those are lifesaving and industry saving investments happening today – completely re-designing the way that <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-mic-article.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">patients are treated</a>, and businesses operate.</p><h4>What are you particularly expecting to see this year?</h4><p>What I find most interesting is the work that combines IoT with networking capabilities – and I think this is going to be a year of expansive exploration and working with our customers to put these two things together to solve real business challenges.</p><p>When we first started the integration of networking technology and operational technology capabilities and layered that across the industry verticals, we could count the amount of interested customers and opportunities on one hand. Last year, it was five times that many and this year we see that number increasing significantly already. So, we're excited to see the industry continue to build excitement to scale those types of deployments.</p><h4>What role does AI play at the edge and in what way is Intel involved?</h4><p>An AI use case recently grabbed my attention: employees in a restaurant being screened by a device that checks temperature while the employees are washing their hands – and provides a determination on whether they'd done it adequately before they report to work. I have seen other applications using similar technology in the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/offering/a5b3b000000TiMSAA0/using-ai-to-make-construction-site-safer?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">construction industry</a>, where an AI algorithm scans to see if employees have their helmet, goggles, vest and other safety equipment on properly to determine if they are ready to work. And the best part is – that the employer can see aggregate data on these interactions to determine if more training on handwashing or helmet wearing is needed.</p><p>At Intel, in addition to providing the fundamental base technology to enable these applications, we work with a lot of third-party developers to create these applications. And we help the developers scale them across multiple industries with our salesforce. So, we may not make the scan technology that determines if you have the right gear on, but we orchestrate that coordination across our ecosystem with all of our partners to effectively put it into a <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">catalog</a> so that if customers are interested in that sort of application, we can provide them with different parties to make that happen.</p><h4>Is there a problem with fragmentation in the market and how can that be solved?</h4><p>It's very fragmented. I gave just two examples of totally different workers coming to work in different industries and I can give you five more that are different again. Although the base technology that Intel creates to enable this type of innovation is very horizontal in nature, the reality is that bringing those to life must be very "vertically-centered" and very "use-case centered" – and must take into account, geography. The two employee use cases I cited look very different if you are talking about employees in North America, India or Germany. So, all in all, this is a holistic ecosystem challenge – and an ecosystem solution.</p><p>At Intel, we're in a unique situation to orchestrate these solutions. </p><p><cite class="pull-quote">People tend to think of Intel as providing the technical footprint that enables edge computing – but we also have the developer reach – and we can use our ecosystem and scale to help our end customers get access to the best solutions.</cite></p><h4>What sort of challenges do customers face when they're attempting to adopt edge computing?</h4><p>There are two common challenges. One is the technical question of 'Who can I work with?' A customer may have a chip focus but actually, it's a more complex question than a chip. We like that complexity, because we can be an adviser to them and <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bring to the table partners</a> that they can work with to solve that complexity leveraging our technical knowledge and ecosystem network. </p><p>The second thing that companies struggle with is the challenge of how to fund getting into this space – even if the business case warrants the investment. The world has changed. Companies don't want to write a big capital check for these types of investments – they want a pay-as-you-go model, like you see with the cloud. We've been working with customers to find a way to make that happen – and I think that is going to be a bigger part of the conversation moving forward.</p><p>You can see it across almost every aspect of technology now. We rent compute more than we buy compute. Evidenced by the success of AWS, companies can rent compute from Amazon instead of building their own data center – and there are many benefits to that approach. In the old world, even for this video conference that we're having today we would have installed capital to do this. Now it's just a service. And I think that edge as a service is right around the corner.</p><h4>Do you have an example of that?</h4><p>A customer in Mexico wanted to deploy outdoor WiFi and add security features into it. So, it was an edge-based computing issue that was part connectivity. But there was actually way more to it than just installing it. We not only helped to solved the technological challenge creatively and coordinated the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ecosystem of providers</a> to solve this, but we also found a way so that the customer could get into this market with a service-based model without needing to outlay a lot of capital.</p><p>Other semiconductor companies would have a difficult time partnering on both sides of that challenge, but Intel can do it because we have the scale.</p><h4>How do businesses identify which functions they do want to perform at the edge versus in the cloud?</h4><p>It really comes down to a question of what you're trying to do and how you do it at the lowest cost, highest quality and standard in computability.</p><p>If you have an application and it can perform what you need it to do in the cloud, you'll probably run it there. The cloud is a great thing - there's infinite compute and lots of choice in a well-understood developer environment.</p><p>But there are many things you can't or shouldn't do in the cloud for certain reasons. Take the camera example from earlier. Say you have eight high-density cameras, and you want an action on them immediately. You may not be able to afford the latency that comes with going up into the cloud. Or it may be a financial challenge – that its actually more expensive to send that data to the cloud over and over again, and it makes sense to invest in compute at the edge. There are nuances in the decision-making. It really comes down to what you want the application to do, how quickly and how much it should cost.</p><h4>How does Intel help developers to learn, to build and then test their solutions at the edge?</h4><p>To enable what we know to be interesting and challenging use cases at the edge, required us to change our focus on who these developers are and what they care about. We learned that they <em>really</em> don't care about what hardware they're running on. The modern developers are fairly well extracted from the hardware – they just assume the compute is going to be available for them to do their work.</p><p>To make sure we can deliver on that, we typically target developers by specific capability. The most advanced case that we've been studying on the edge recently is focused video and specifically, video inferencing and AI inferencing. We created a tool called <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a>, which was developed in a way that developers didn't have to care about the hardware it runs on. It's a model optimization technology that enables them to easily scale out to different hardware platforms. That's proven to be an interesting value proposition to these developers.</p><p>Our goal with <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> is democratize AI activity and inference at the edge. We want to make it simple -- to put these tools in the hands of non-data scientists and make it work. As a part of that process, we're also creating an environment where they can develop anyplace, anytime, anywhere they want to be. We're so proud of our <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> community and are constantly working to grow the community and release new features and capabilities to edge developers.</p><h4>What's the possible next breakthrough that you see for Intel in edge computing and the IoT space?</h4><p>I'm looking forward to the big breakthrough when we show integrated 5G, Virtual Private Network and the edge workloads all in one unit. More to come.</p>
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Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
Protocol | Policy
She exposed tech’s impact on people of color. Now, she’s on Biden’s team.
As the country's first deputy director for science and society, Alondra Nelson will scrutinize tech's impact on society.
Alondra Nelson will focus on the sociological impact of emerging technologies and scientific projects.
Photo: Angela Weiss/Getty Images
March 4, 2021
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
February 1, 2021
Alondra Nelson knows what it's like to be let down by Facebook.
The renowned social scientist was just named as President Biden's first deputy director for science and society, a position that will focus on the sociological effects of emerging technologies and scientific projects.
<p>But three years ago, she was picked by a group of foundations to help lead Social Science One, an ambitious research project that aimed to give academics access to troves of Facebook data in order to examine the platform's impact on democracy. The project came at a sensitive time, on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and it was a big deal: If the group pulled it off, they could open up vital lines of communication between social science and Big Tech. Nelson was the president of the Social Science Research Council, a nonprofit that was tasked with giving out Social Science One grants to researchers. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>But by 2019, the effort was floundering. Nelson had promised money to researchers to explore data that Facebook wasn't willing to give because of <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/privacy-concerns-could-derail-unprecedented-plan-use-facebook-data-study-elections" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">privacy concerns</a>. The groups involved — including Social Science One, a pool of wealthy funders and the Council — were all at loggerheads over how to move forward.</p><p>"The privacy issues turned out to be way harder than anybody understood when we started, so we weren't able to get the data to the researchers," Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, told Protocol. "[Nelson] was pushing for clarity — like, 'We're on the line here.'" Nelson said the groups should shut down the project quickly if Facebook wasn't going to give up the data soon. </p><p>Ultimately, the Council chose to <a href="https://www.ssrc.org/fellowships/view/social-media-and-democracy-research-grants/update-from-ssrc-president-alondra-nelson/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">cut ties with the project</a>. A version of the dataset was released <a href="https://www.protocol.com/facebook-data-sharing-researchers" target="_self">early last year</a> after two years of struggle.</p><p>Even though the Council opted out of the Social Science One project, danah boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and founder of Data & Society, said Nelson's work prompted the Council to start focusing on technology as an area of study. "It was a win even when Facebook never unlocked the data," boyd, who was on the Council's board at the time, said.</p><p>It started a broad conversation within academia about the most effective ways to partner with large corporations. Before this project, the Council had never attempted to use corporate data, focusing mainly on public datasets like the Census, boyd said: "It creates openings for new possibilities down the line when there is more of this kind of data."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p> And now, Nelson is bringing that expertise to the White House. </p><p>Over the course of his campaign, President Biden promised to bring a civil rights lens to all of his administration's policies, including tech policy. Nelson, whose research has focused on the intersection of race and technology, is in many ways the embodiment of that promise. </p><p>Nelson did not respond to requests for comment and the Office of Science and Technology Policy declined to comment, but Nelson's inclusion was met with widespread support from the community of AI ethicists, tech critics and civil rights advocates who say it's past time for the government to address the civil rights and social justice issues that technological innovations are raising.</p><p>"When we provide inputs to the algorithm, when we program the device, when we design, test and research, we are making human choices — choices that bring our social world to bear in a new and powerful way," Nelson said during her acceptance <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/biden-picks-alondra-nelson-deputy-science-policy-chief-75299191" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">speech</a> this month. "That's why in my career, I've always sought to understand the perspective of people and communities who are not usually in the room when the inputs are made, but who live with the outputs."</p><p>Under former President Obama, the White House OSTP was filled with techno-optimists and scientists who hoped to infuse all levels of government with technological innovation and expertise. But Nelson will likely serve as a more critical voice in the room to discuss how emerging technologies interact with race, class and gender. As a researcher, she focused on how African Americans "have been the most damaged by science and technology," but have also "been the most innovative with it, despite these countervailing forces," as she put it in an <a href="https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-alondra-nelson/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">interview last year</a>. Her book "<a href="http://www.alondranelson.com/books/the-social-life-of-dna-race-reparations-and-reconciliation-after-the-genome" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Social Life of DNA</a>" delves into the fraught relationship between genetic testing and Black communities, and the anthology she helped compile, titled "<a href="http://www.alondranelson.com/books/technicolor-race-technology-and-everyday-life" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life</a>," explores the ways in which people of color use technology day-to-day. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Last year, she helped launch <a href="https://twitter.com/ssrc_org/status/1272613653615910914?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Just Tech</a>, a network of scholars focused on creating an equitable tech industry. And her latest research focused on how under Obama, the White House OSTP — her new employer — <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iop4Lynz3-w" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">incorporated ethics</a> into its work. </p><p>"It's certainly not the shallow 'open data will solve all policy programs' refrain that we've seen from some folks in some previous administrations," said Meredith Whittaker, faculty director of the AI Now Institute and a leader in the <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/15/meredith-whittaker-ai-researcher-and-an-organizer-of-last-years-google-walkout-is-leaving-the-company/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tech labor organizing movement</a>. </p><p>Whittaker said Nelson's <a href="http://www.alondranelson.com/books/body-and-soul-the-black-panther-party-and-the-fight-against-medical-discrimination" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">research on the Black Panther party's grassroots medical activism</a> helped inspire her own work because of the way it illuminated the power of political organizing. </p><p>"I'm really optimistic to have somebody at the helm of OSTP who thinks that broadly and understands the capacity for organized communities and the people who are living the effects of these technologies," Whittaker said. </p><p>Nelson's new role is particularly pivotal as the new administration grapples with the tradeoffs between surveillance and privacy, particularly in the context of COVID-19, which has disproportionately harmed Black and minority communities. The OSTP, which has an amorphous role that is typically shaped by the personalities within it, will likely advise the president on issues including <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=contact+tracing+protocol.com&oq=contact+tracing+protocol.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i22i30l2j0i22i30i395l5.3049j1j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">contact tracing</a> and machine-enabled <a href="https://www.protocol.com/u/issielapowsky" target="_self">vaccine deployment</a>, as well as topics like algorithmic bias and data privacy. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"She'll critically engage that idea of: Who can be harmed by this technology?" said Simone Browne, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who says her work on anti-Blackness and surveillance was influenced by Nelson's research. </p><p>"Her appointment certainly appears to be an indication that some of the topics of her research — which get into race and class and equity, and the shape of our society — will become more the focus of OSTP's work," said Jen Pahlka, who previously served as Obama's deputy chief technology officer.</p><p>While activists like Whittaker are excited about Nelson's appointment, that excitement is tempered by a deep skepticism as the Biden administration taps <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/22/biden-silicon-valley-hires-461196" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Silicon Valley insiders</a> to shape policy within the administration. His attorney general is <a href="https://prospect.org/cabinet-watch/merrick-garland-wants-former-facebook-lawyer-to-top-antitrust-division-susan-davies/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reportedly mulling</a> tapping a former Facebook lawyer to run the DOJ's antitrust division. </p><p>Whittaker said she's concerned that Biden is bringing in critical leaders like Nelson alongside tech industry officials who have shaped the unequal industry she has scrutinized. </p><p>The OSTP is still setting up shop. There are many positions within the office that Biden has not yet filled, including chief technology officer, and the office is still in the process of assembling its portfolio. Ultimately, Nelson will only be one voice among many shaping the trajectory of science and technology policy. But her appointment is an early signal that tech policy will look fundamentally different under President Biden. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>"If Alondra does at OSTP what she does everywhere else, she'll open so many doors for people who would have never had access to any of this before," boyd said. "And that's important if we're actually trying to [create] a more inclusive government." </p>
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Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/img.jpg?width=980" id="c81c9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3967636652192acfdaad341861263bc8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/img.png?width=980" id="b0bd3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="11d8002d92c0cd6ef39b12fc7b8dccf8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
People
Google wants ties to HBCUs. Their leaders want respect.
Five HBCU presidents will meet with Google executives Friday to discuss company culture.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai will meet with five HBCU presidents to discuss instances of discrimination at Google.
Photo: AaronP/Getty Images
January 29, 2021
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
Penelope Blackwell is a reporting fellow at Protocol covering edtech. She reports on the developments in tech that are shaping the future of learning. Previously, she interned at The Baltimore Sun covering emerging news and produced content for Carnegie-Knight's News21 documenting hate and bias incidents in the U.S. She is also a recent graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and Morgan State University.
January 29, 2021
Google's Sundar Pichai will meet with the leaders of five historically Black colleges and universities on Friday afternoon to discuss company culture in response to the still-simmering outrage over Google's firing of leading AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru and other alleged instances of racial discrimination.
"We would like to know more about the atmosphere that we're sending our students into and want to ensure that students coming from Morgan are going into an environment that is going to prompt them to flourish," said Morgan State University President David Wilson. "We want to get [Pichai's] assessment on what we've been hearing publicly, and we want to make sure that we are getting feedback from him about if Google is looking at their internal environment, and I'd like for him to share about it."
<p>Along with Morgan State, the leaders of North Carolina A&T, Prairie View A&M, Howard University and Florida A&M will attend the meeting, which was <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/business/google-sundar-pichai-hbcus/index.html" target="_blank">coordinated</a> by the president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Over the last year, tech companies like Google and Apple and industry donors such as MacKenzie Scott and Michael Bloomberg have made public investments and commitments to HBCUs, mostly as part of their racial justice efforts in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Though commitments have been unusually well-publicized this year, many HBCUs have had relationships (to varying degrees) with a range of tech companies over the past several years. Several HBCU leaders told Protocol they are also seeing new interest in further investments and partnerships in the coming year. </p><p>More than money or recruiting goals, the nation's largest producer of Black engineering graduates wants tech companies, and Google in particular, to treat it and its students with respect. North Carolina A&T wants to be considered for the merits of its programs and its students, not lumped into a conversation about all HBCUs (of which there are more than 100 nationwide). </p><p>For Robin Coger, the dean of engineering at North Carolina A&T, the university's relationship with Google grew productive when the company saw A&T as a partner, rather than a means to meet recruitment goals or burnish reputation. "While Google's perspective may be we want to expose students to Google for recruiting goals, our point of view has always been that Google needs to understand the quality of our students," Coger said.</p><p>"When you work with Stanford, you work with Stanford. When you work with North Carolina A&T, you work with us. The one-size-fits-all mentality is the opposite of collaboration," she added.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The early years of North Carolina A&T's partnership with Google were a bit rocky. "It was through quite a bit of discussion and conversation and time that ultimately we began to work together. But it required so much effort, on our side, really, because it really is up to the institution to define for the company whether or not this is acceptable," Coger said. Now, the school's computer science department has hosted a Google engineer-in-residence for the last three semesters, in what she called a mutually-beneficial learning relationship.</p><p>Morgan State's partnership with Google began about five years ago, after Wilson attended a meeting with tech execs in Silicon Valley that focused on diversifying the industry. Wilson also takes a positive view of the partnerships, and he's even hoping that the school will be able to add another person-in-residence and a Google-sponsored innovation lab. </p><p>But before that can happen, Wilson and the other HBCU leaders need to address the controversies swirling around Google. "We're not meeting to question any personnel decisions. But there were public comments made involving our institution and our students. And we just want to talk about the culture within Google," he said.</p><p>Google did not respond to request for comment about the meeting.</p>
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
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