Qatar Rail wins CIHT 2025 Decarbonisation Award
Reinforcing its global leadership in sustainable innovation, Qatar Railways Company (Qatar Rail) won the prestigious CIHT Decarbonisation Award 2025, presented by the UK-based Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT), for its pioneering project 'Regenerative Propulsion in the Doha Metro: Kinetic Energy to Electrical Energy'. This achievement further cemented Qatar Rail's position as a leader in environmental innovation and sustainability within the public transportation sector. The award was announced during the CIHT Annual Awards Ceremony, held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, and attended by over 480 international leaders and experts in transport. (QNA) page 2
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Qatar Tribune
21 hours ago
- Qatar Tribune
Europe seeks ‘digital sovereignty' as US tech firms embrace Trump
Agencies At a market stall in Berlin run by charity Topio, volunteers help people who want to purge their phones of the influence of US tech firms. Since Donald Trump's inauguration, the queue for their services has grown. Interest in European-based digital services has jumped in recent months, data from digital market intelligence company Similarweb shows. More people are looking for e-mail, messaging and even search providers outside the United States. The first months of Trump's second presidency have shaken some Europeans' confidence in their long-time ally, after he signaled his country would step back from its role in Europe's security and then launched a trade war. 'It's about the concentration of power in US firms,' said Topio's founder Michael Wirths, as his colleague installed on a customer's phone a version of the Android operating system without hooks into the Google ecosystem. Wirths said the type of people coming to the stall had changed: 'Before, it was people who knew a lot about data privacy. Now it's people who are politically aware and feel exposed.' Tesla chief Elon Musk, who also owns social media company X, was a leading adviser to the US president before the two fell out, while the bosses of Amazon, Meta and Google-owner Alphabet took prominent spots at Trump's inauguration in January. Days before Trump took office, outgoing president Joe Biden had warned of an oligarchic 'tech industrial complex' threatening democracy. Berlin-based search engine Ecosia says it has benefited from some customers' desire to avoid US counterparts like Microsoft's Bing or Google, which dominates web searches and is also the world's biggest email provider. 'The worse it gets, the better it is for us,' founder Christian Kroll said of Ecosia, whose sales pitch is that it spends its profits on environmental projects. Similarweb data shows the number of queries directed to Ecosia from the European Union has risen 27 percent year-on-year and the company says it has 1 percent of the German search engine market. But its 122 million visits from the 27 EU countries in February were dwarfed by 10.3 billion visits to Google, whose parent Alphabet made revenues of about $100 billion from Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2024 - nearly a third of its $350 billion global turnover. Non-profit Ecosia earned 3.2 million euros ($3.65 million) in April, of which 770,000 euros was spent on planting 1.1 million trees. Google declined to comment for this story. Reuters could not determine whether major US tech companies have lost any market share to local rivals in Europe. The search for alternative providers accompanies a debate in Europe about 'digital sovereignty' - the idea that reliance on companies from an increasingly isolationist United States is a threat to Europe's economy and security. 'Ordinary people, the kind of people who would never have thought it was important they were using an American service are saying, 'hang on!',' said UK-based internet regulation expert Maria Farrell. 'My hairdresser was asking me what she should switch to.' Use in Europe of Swiss-based ProtonMail rose 11.7 percent year-on-year to March compared to a year ago, according to Similarweb, while use of Alphabet's Gmail, which has some 70 percent of the global email market, slipped 1.9 percent. ProtonMail, which offers both free and paid-for services, said it had seen an increase in users from Europe since Trump's re-election, though it declined to give a number. 'My household is definitely disengaging,' said British software engineer Ken Tindell, citing weak US data privacy protections as one factor. Trump's vice president JD Vance shocked European leaders in February by accusing them - at a conference usually known for displays of transatlantic unity - of censoring free speech and failing to control immigration. In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened visa bans for people who 'censor' speech by Americans, including on social media, and suggested the policy could target foreign officials regulating US tech companies. US social media companies like Facebook and Instagram parent Meta have said the European Union's Digital Services Act amounts to censorship of their platforms. EU officials say the Act will make the online environment safer by compelling tech giants to tackle illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material. Greg Nojeim, director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said Europeans' concerns about the US government accessing their data, whether stored on devices or in the cloud, were justified. Not only does US law permit the government to search devices of anyone entering the country, it can compel disclosure of data that Europeans outside the US store or transmit through US communications service providers, Nojeim said. Germany's new government is itself making efforts to reduce exposure to US tech, committing in its coalition agreement to make more use of open-source data formats and locally-based cloud infrastructure. Regional governments have gone further - in conservative-run Schleswig-Holstein, on the Danish border, all IT used by the public administration must run on open-source software. Berlin has also paid for Ukraine to access a satellite-internet network operated by France's Eutelsat instead of Musk's Starlink. But with modern life driven by technology, 'completely divorcing US tech in a very fundamental way is, I would say, possibly not possible,' said Bill Budington of US digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Everything from push notifications to the content delivery networks powering many websites and how internet traffic is routed relies largely on US companies and infrastructure, Budington noted. Both Ecosia and French-based search engine Qwant depend in part on search results provided by Google and Microsoft's Bing, while Ecosia runs on cloud platforms, some hosted by the very same tech giants it promises an escape from. Nevertheless, a group on messaging board Reddit called BuyFromEU has 211,000 members. 'Just cancelled my Dropbox and will switch to Proton Drive,' read one post. Mastodon, a decentralized social media service developed by German programmer Eugen Rochko, enjoyed a rush of new users two years ago when Musk bought Twitter, later renamed X. But it remains a niche service.
Qatar Tribune
4 days ago
- Qatar Tribune
Beyond the internet: AI learning from 15th-century texts
Agencies Everything ever said on the internet was just the start of teaching artificial intelligence about humanity. Tech companies are now tapping into an older repository of knowledge: the library stacks. Nearly one million books published as early as the 15th century — and in 254 languages — are part of a Harvard University collection being released to AI researchers Thursday. Also coming soon are troves of old newspapers and government documents held by Boston's public library. Cracking open the vaults to centuries-old tomes could be a data bonanza for tech companies battling lawsuits from living novelists, visual artistsand others whose creative works have been scooped up without their consent to train AI chatbots. 'It is a prudent decision to start with public domain data because that's less controversial right now than content that's still under copyright,' said Burton Davis, a deputy general counsel at Microsoft. Davis said libraries also hold 'significant amounts of interesting cultural, historical and language data' that's missing from the past few decades of online commentary that AI chatbots have mostly learned from. Supported by 'unrestricted gifts' from Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the Harvard-based Institutional Data Initiative is working with libraries around the world on how to make their historic collections AI-ready in a way that also benefits libraries and the communities they serve. 'We're trying to move some of the power from this current AI moment back to these institutions,' said Aristana Scourtas, who manages research at Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab. 'Librarians have always been the stewards of data and the stewards of information.' Harvard's newly released dataset, Institutional Books 1.0, contains more than 394 million scanned pages of paper. One of the earlier works is from the 1400s — a Korean painter's handwritten thoughts about cultivating flowers and trees. The largest concentration of works is from the 19th century, on subjects such as literature, philosophy, law and agriculture, all of it meticulously preserved and organized by generations of librarians. It promises to be a boon for AI developers trying to improve the accuracy and reliability of their systems. 'A lot of the data that's been used in AI training has not come from original sources,' said the data initiative's executive director, Greg Leppert, who is also chief technologist at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. This book collection goes 'all the way back to the physical copy that was scanned by the institutions that actually collected those items,' he said. Before ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI frenzy, most AI researchers didn't think much about the provenance of the passages of text they pulled from Wikipedia, from social media forums like Reddit and sometimes from deep repositories of pirated books. They just needed lots of what computer scientists call tokens — units of data, each of which can represent a piece of a word. Harvard's new AI training collection has an estimated 242 billion tokens, an amount that's hard for humans to fathom but it's still just a drop of what's being fed into the most advanced AI systems. Facebook parent company Meta, for instance, has said the latest version of its AI large language model was trained on more than 30 trillion tokens pulled from text, images and videos. Meta is also battling a lawsuit from comedian Sarah Silverman and other published authors who accuse the company of stealing their books from 'shadow libraries' of pirated works. Now, with some reservations, the real libraries are standing up. OpenAI, which is also fighting a string of copyright lawsuits, donated $50 million this year to a group of research institutions including Oxford University's 400-year-old Bodleian Library, which is digitizing rare texts and using AI to help transcribe them. When the company first reached out to the Boston Public Library, one of the biggest in the U.S., the library made clear that any information it digitized would be for everyone, said Jessica Chapel, its chief of digital and online services. 'OpenAI had this interest in massive amounts of training data. We have an interest in massive amounts of digital objects. So this is kind of just a case that things are aligning,' Chapel said. Digitization is expensive. It's been painstaking work, for instance, for Boston's library to scan and curate dozens of New England's French-language newspapers that were widely read in the late 19th and early 20th century by Canadian immigrant communities from Quebec. Now that such text is of use as training data, it helps bankroll projects that librarians want to do anyway. 'We've been very clear that, 'Hey, we're a public library,'' Chapel said. 'Our collections are held for public use, and anything we digitized as part of this project will be made public.' Harvard's collection was already digitized starting in 2006 for another tech giant, Google, in its controversial project to create a searchable online library of more than 20 million books. Google spent years beating back legal challenges from authors to its online book library, which included many newer and copyrighted works. It was finally settled in 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings that rejected copyright infringement claims. Now, for the first time, Google has worked with Harvard to retrieve public domain volumes from Google Books and clear the way for their release to AI developers. Copyright protections in the U.S. typically last for 95 years, and longer for sound recordings. How useful all of this will be for the next generation of AI tools remains to be seen as the data gets shared Thursday on the Hugging Face platform, which hosts datasets and open-source AI models that anyone can download. The book collection is more linguistically diverse than typical AI data sources. Fewer than half the volumes are in English, though European languages still dominate, particularly German, French, Italian, Spanish and Latin. A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be 'immensely critical' for the tech industry's efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said. 'At a university, you have a lot of pedagogy around what it means to reason,' Leppert said. 'You have a lot of scientific information about how to run processes and how to run analyses.' At the same time, there's also plenty of outdated data, from debunked scientific and medical theories to racist narratives. 'When you're dealing with such a large data set, there are some tricky issues around harmful content and language,' said Kristi Mukk, a coordinator at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab who said the initiative is trying to provide guidance about mitigating the risks of using the data, to 'help them make their own informed decisions and use AI responsibly.'
Qatar Tribune
6 days ago
- Qatar Tribune
Nippon Steel deal: Trump gains Veto power and board control over US steel
Agencies President Donald Trump would have unique influence over the operations of U.S. Steel under the terms of what the White House calls an 'investment' being made by Japan-based Nippon Steel in the iconic American steelmaker. Administration officials over the past few days provided additional insight into the 'golden share' arrangement that the federal government made as a condition for supporting the deal. The Pittsburgh-based steel maker and Nippon Steel plan $11 billion in new investments by 2028 after indicating that they plan to move forward with the deal under the terms of a national security agreement that has the White House's approval. The White House has described the deal as a 'partnership' and an 'investment' by Nippon Steel in U.S. Steel, although Nippon Steel has never backed off its stated intention of buying and controlling U.S. Steel as a wholly owned subsidiary in a nearly $15 billion offer it originally made in late 2023. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted on social media on Saturday how the 'golden share' to be held by the president would operate, revealing that the White House is willing to insert itself aggressively into a private company's affairs even as it has simultaneously pledged to strip away government regulations so businesses can expand. Under the government's terms, it would be impossible without Trump's consent to relocate U.S. Steel's headquarters from Pittsburgh, change the name of the company, 'transfer production or jobs outside the United States,' shutter factories, or reincorporate the business overseas, among other powers held by the president. Lutnick also said it would require presidential approval to reduce or delay $14 billion in planned investments. 'The Golden Share held by the United States in U.S. Steel has powerful terms that directly benefit and protect America, Pennsylvania, the great steelworkers of U.S. Steel, and U.S. manufacturers that will have massively expanded access to domestically produced steel,' Lutnick posted on X. That $14 billion figure is higher than what the companies disclosed on Friday when Trump created a pathway for the investment with an executive order based on the terms of the national security agreement being accepted. Lawmakers from Pennsylvania say the higher figure includes the cost of an electric arc furnace — a more modern steel mill that melts down scrap — that Nippon Steel wants to build in the U.S., bringing the value of the deal to at least $28 billion. The president has the authority to name one of the corporate board's independent three directors and veto power over the other two choices, according to a person familiar with the terms of the agreement who insisted on anonymity to discuss them. The details of the board structure were first reported by The New York Times. Details of the agreement emerged as Trump was traveling to Alberta in Canada for the Group of Seven summit. Still, the full terms remain somewhat unclear. The companies have not made public the full terms of Nippon Steel's acquisition of U.S. Steel or the national security agreement with the federal government. On Sunday, the United Steelworkers, the labor union representing U.S. Steel employees, posted a letter raising questions about the deal forged by Trump, who during his run for the presidency had pledged to block Nippon Steel's acquisition of U.S. Steel. The union said it was 'disappointed' that Trump 'has reversed course' and raised basic questions about the ownership structure of U.S. Steel. 'Neither the government nor the companies have publicly identified what all the terms of the proposed transaction are,' the letter said. 'Our labor agreement expires next year, on September 1, 2026, and the USW and its members are prepared to engage the new owners' of U.S. Steel 'to obtain a fair contract.' If Trump has as much control of U.S. Steel as he has claimed, that could put him in the delicate position of negotiating the salary and benefits of unionized steelworkers going into midterm elections. As president, Joe Biden used his authority to block Nippon Steel's acquisition of U.S. Steel on his way out of the White House after a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. After he was elected, Trump expressed openness to working out an arrangement and ordered another review by the committee. That's when the idea of the 'golden share' emerged as a way to resolve national security concerns and protect American interests in domestic steel production. As it sought to win over American officials, Nippon Steel made a series of commitments. It gradually increased the amount of money it was pledging to invest in U.S. Steel, promised to maintain U.S. Steel's headquarters in Pittsburgh, put U.S. Steel under a board with a majority of American citizens and keep plants operating. It also said it would protect the interests of U.S. Steel in trade matters and it wouldn't import steel slabs that would compete with U.S. Steel's blast furnaces in Pennsylvania and Indiana.
