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Its a Washington axiom that when a power player dies, their influence and secrets do as well. One night this spring, my phone chimed with a text message that showed otherwise. Sally Atwater, the widow of the legendary Republican political operative Lee Atwater, had died. She had been married to the bad boy of the G.O.P. during the Reagan and Bush years until his untimely death, thirty years ago. The Atwaters eldest daughter, Sara Lee, who lives in Brussels and is a Democrat, invited me over to her parents home to read through cartons of papers from her late father, whom I knew well when I covered the Reagan White House. They included seven chapters of Lee Atwaters unpublished draft memoir, which had remained untouched since he succumbed to brain cancer, in 1991, at the age of forty, and at the height of his political career.

The house on a quiet street in Northwest Washington was the kind of tidy, brick place that bespeaks proper family life. The scene inside was something else. Its first-floor rooms were filled with a jumble of cardboard and plastic containers, overflowing with manila folders, crammed with everything from the former Republican Party chairmans elementary-school papers to his dying thoughts, dictated to an assistant during his final days.

Some of the memorabilia was surprising. Despite Atwaters well-deserved reputation for running racist campaigns, there were friendly private notes and photos of him with Al Sharpton and James Brown, whose onstage acrobatics Atwater was famous for trying to mimic in his own blues-guitar performances. There were also personal notes from underground-film stars of the John Waters era. According to his daughter, Atwater was a huge underground-film aficionado. While the Republican Party he chaired trumpeted family values and the Christian right, on the side he helped a friend open a video store in Virginia specializing in pornography, blaxploitation, and his own favorite genre, horror movies. Atwater experienced horror in his own life early. When he was five, his baby brother died of burns from an overturned vat of hot grease in the familys kitchen. Atwaters papers contained no mention of the tragedy, but he said that he heard the sounds of his brothers screams every day of his life.

Atwater died before he could finish his memoir. What remains of it are hunks of yellowing typewritten pages, held together by rusting staples and paper clips. But the seven surviving chapters suggest that, far from dying along with him, the nihilism, cynicism, and scurrilous tactics that Atwater brought into national politics live on. In many ways, his memoir suggests that Atwaters tactics were a bridge between the old Republican Party of the Nixon era, when dirty tricks were considered a scandal, and the new Republican Party of Donald Trump, in which lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost have become normalized. Chapter 5 of Atwaters memoir in particular serves as a Trumpian precursor. In it, Atwater, who worked in the Office of Political Affairs in the Reagan White House, and managed George H. W. Bushs 1988 Presidential campaign before becoming the Republican Partys chairman at the age of thirty-seven, admits outright that he only cared about winning, not governing. Ive always thought running for office is a bunch of bullshit. Being in a office is even more bullshit. It really is bullshit, he wrote. Im proud of the fact that I understand how much BS it is.

In the nineteen-eighties, Atwater became infamous for his effective use of smears. Probably his best-known one was tying Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Bushs Democratic Presidential opponent in 1988, to Willie Horton, a Black convict who went on a crime spree after getting paroled in the state. A menacing ad featuring Horton was a blatant attempt to stir fear among white voters that Dukakis would be soft on crime. At the very end of his life, Atwater publicly apologized to Dukakis for it. But Atwaters draft memoir makes clear that he had already mastered the dark political arts as a teen-ager. In fact, it seems that practically everything Atwater learned about politics he learned in high school. Its easy to see the future of the Republican Party in the anti-intellectual dirty tricks of his school days.

Born in Atlanta, Atwater grew up in a middle-class white family in South Carolina. His father worked in insurance, and his mother was a teacher. But from the start, Atwater was an ambitious and charismatic rebel, or, as he put it, a hell-raiser. While secretly gorging on history and literatureUpton Sinclairs The Jungle was one of his favorite bookshe went out of his way to seem unstudious at school. He sneered at the top grade-getters and student-government leaders. His aim, he wrote, was to be seen as too smart and too cool to care. In high school, the only office he sought was to be voted the wittiest. To that end, he tried every day to do something funny. If it wasnt funny, it at least screwed somebody up. Every damn day, Id screw people up. And thats fun and funny. And I pulled a lot of shit. Over time, he organized a group of about a hundred students to disrupt the school at his command. When speakers came to assembly, Atwater would signal his followers to rise in unison and turn their backs for a few seconds, or cross their legs in synchronized motions, or break out in wild applause. But Atwater was cunning. He writes that there was a secret to screwing everything up successfully. He always understood the line that he needed to stay within in order not to get caught. The No. 1 lesson was to be so subtle that they cant nab you for anything.

Atwater could be amusing. As he rose in American politics, candidates and reporters alike were drawn to his subversive sense of humor, despite themselves. But throughout his life he displayed more than a tinge of amorality. In his memoir, Atwater describes, without remorse, falsely accusing another student of instigating a fight that he had started, and remaining silent after the student was paddled twenty-five times. I didnt tell the truth worth a shit, he admits. He describes organizing six hundred and fifty students to spew spit wads at a female official who, he writes, hadnt been screwed in 20 years. The best moment, in his view, was when a fellow-student threw a glass of ice at her, and it really hurt her which was the funny part.

The first presidential campaign that Atwater managed was a bid to get a friend of his elected as student-body presidentagainst the friends wishes. He created a list of false accomplishments and devised a fake rating system that ranked his friend first. He plastered the school with posters declaring his friends platform of false promises of Free Beer on Tap in the CafeteriaFree DatesFree Girls. The campaign took a darker turn when Atwaters sidekicks stomped on the bare feet of a hippie-like student until his feet bled profusely. Afterward, the group threatened to do the same to younger students unless they voted for Atwaters candidate. Atwater recalls that he privately revelled in the tactics, and was proud that he could participate in intimidating his fellow-students. But publicly he feigned concern, or, as he writes, I was acting like Eddie Haskell saying, My gosh young people, you could be next. His candidate won an upset victory, but the school declared it void owing to a technicality. I learned a lot, he writes. I learned how to organize... and I learned how to polarize.

Although Atwaters adult professional rise was meteoric, toward the end of his life his double game of paying homage to Black cultural leaders while milking racism for political gain caught up with him. His appointment to the board of trustees at Howard University, in Washington, shortly after Bush won the White House, provoked an uproar on campus. The student newspaper at the prestigious and historically Black university denounced him, and the students occupied an administration building in protest. In his papers, Atwater complains that Jesse Jackson duped him, writing, If theres anybody on the political scene whos done me dirty, its Jesse Jackson. Atwater writes that Jackson talked him into resigning from Howards board with a promise to lionize Atwater for doing so. Instead, the day after Atwater agreed to resign, Jackson went to Howard and just kicked my guts out. Sara Lee Atwater, who loved her father but not his politics, finds it somewhat fitting that as racial politics evolved, The trickster got tricked.

Originally posted here:
The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized - The New Yorker

In May 1981, at a conference center housed in a chateau-style mansion outside Boston, a few dozen physicists and computer scientists gathered for a three-day meeting. The assembled brainpower was formidable: One attendee, Caltechs Richard Feynman, was already a Nobel laureate and would earn a widespread reputation for genius when his 1985 memoir Surely Youre Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character became a bestseller. Numerous others, such as Paul Benioff, Arthur Burks, Freeman Dyson, Edward Fredkin, Rolf Landauer, John Wheeler, and Konrad Zuse, were among the most accomplished figures in their respective research areas.

The conference they were attending, The Physics of Computation, was held from May 6 to 8 and cohosted by IBM and MITs Laboratory for Computer Science. It would come to be regarded as a seminal moment in the history of quantum computingnot that anyone present grasped that as it was happening.

Its hard to put yourself back in time, says Charlie Bennett, a distinguished physicist and information theorist who was part of the IBM Research contingent at the event. If youd said quantum computing, nobody would have understood what you were talking about.

Why was the conference so significant? According to numerous latter-day accounts, Feynman electrified the gathering by calling for the creation of a quantum computer. But I dont think he quite put it that way, contends Bennett, who took Feynmans comments less as a call to action than a provocative observation. He just said the world is quantum, Bennett remembers. So if you really wanted to build a computer to simulate physics, that should probably be a quantum computer.

For a guide to whos who in this 1981 Physics of Computation photo, click here. [Photo: courtesy of Charlie Bennett, who isnt in itbecause he took it]Even if Feynman wasnt trying to kick off a moonshot-style effort to build a quantum computer, his talkand The Physics of Computation conference in generalproved influential in focusing research resources. Quantum computing was nobodys day job before this conference, says Bennett. And then some people began considering it important enough to work on.

It turned out to be such a rewarding area for study that Bennett is still working on it in 2021and hes still at IBM Research, where hes been, aside from the occasional academic sabbatical, since 1972. His contributions have been so significant that hes not only won numerous awards but also had one named after him. (On Thursday, he was among the participants in an online conference on quantum computings past, present, and future that IBM held to mark the 40th anniversary of the original meeting.)

Charlie Bennett [Photo: courtesy of IBM]These days, Bennett has plenty of company. In recent years, quantum computing has become one of IBMs biggest bets, as it strives to get the technology to the point where its capable of performing useful work at scale, particularly for the large organizations that have long been IBMs core customer base. Quantum computing is also a major area of research focus at other tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Intel, and Honeywell, as well as a bevy of startups.

According to IBM senior VP and director of research Dario Gil, the 1981 Physics of Computation conference played an epoch-shifting role in getting the computing community excited about quantum physicss possible benefits. Before then, in the context of computing, it was seen as a source of noiselike a bothersome problem that when dealing with tiny devices, they became less reliable than larger devices, he says. People understood that this was driven by quantum effects, but it was a bug, not a feature.

Making progress in quantum computing has continued to require setting aside much of what we know about computers in their classical form. From early room-sized mainframe monsters to the smartphone in your pocket, computing has always boiled down to performing math with bits set either to one or zero. But instead of depending on bits, quantum computers leverage quantum mechanics through a basic building block called a quantum bit, or qubit. It can represent a one, a zero, orin a radical departure from classical computingboth at once.

Dario Gil [Photo: courtesy of IBM]Qubits give quantum computers the potential to rapidly perform calculations that might be impossibly slow on even the fastest classical computers. That could have transformative benefits for applications ranging from drug discovery to cryptography to financial modeling. But it requires mastering an array of new challenges, including cooling superconducting qubits to a temperature only slightly above abolute zero, or -459.67 Farenheit.

Four decades after the 1981 conference, quantum computing remains a research project in progress, albeit one thats lately come tantalizingly close to fruition. Bennett says that timetable isnt surprising or disappointing. For a truly transformative idea, 40 years just isnt that much time: Charles Babbage began working on his Analytical Engine in the 1830s, more than a century before technological progress reached the point where early computers such as IBMs own Automated Sequence Controlled Calculator could implement his concepts in a workable fashion. And even those machines came nowhere near fulfilling the vision scientists had already developed for computing, including some things that [computers] failed at miserably for decades, like language translation, says Bennett.

I think was the first time ever somebody said the phrase quantum information theory.

In 1970, as a Harvard PhD candidate, Bennett was brainstorming with fellow physics researcher Stephen Wiesner, a friend from his undergraduate days at Brandeis. Wiesner speculated that quantum physics would make it possible to send, through a channel with a nominal capacity of one bit, two bits of information; subject however to the constraint that whichever bit the receiver choose to read, the other bit is destroyed, as Bennett jotted in notes whichfortunately for computing historyhe preserved.

Charlie Bennetts 1970 notes on Stephen Wiesners musings about quantum physics and computing (click to expand). [Photo: courtesy of Charlie Bennett]I think was the first time ever somebody said the phrase quantum information theory,' says Bennett. The idea that you could do things of not just a physics nature, but an information processing nature with quantum effects that you couldnt do with ordinary data processing.

Like many technological advances of historic proportionsAI is another examplequantum computing didnt progress from idea to reality in an altogether predictable and efficient way. It took 11 years from Wiesners observation until enough people took the topic seriously enough to inspire the Physics of Computation conference. Bennett and the University of Montreals Gilles Brassard published important research on quantum cryptography in 1984; in the 1990s, scientists realized that quantum computers had the potential to be exponentially faster than their classical forebears.

All along, IBM had small teams investigating the technology. According to Gil, however, it wasnt until around 2010 that the company had made enough progress that it began to see quantum computing not just as an intriguing research area but as a powerful business opportunity. What weve seen since then is this dramatic progress over the last decade, in terms of scale, effort, and investment, he says.

IBMs superconducting qubits need to be kept chilled in a super fridge. [Photo: courtesy of IBM]As IBM made that progress, it shared it publicly so that interested parties could begin to get their heads around quantum computing at the earliest opportunity. Starting in May 2016, for instance, the company made quantum computing available as a cloud service, allowing outsiders to tinker with the technology in a very early form.

It is really important that when you put something out, you have a path to deliver.

One of the things that road maps provide is clarity, he says, allowing that road maps without execution are hallucinations, so it is really important that when you put something out, you have a path to deliver.

Scaling up quantum computing into a form that can trounce classical computers at ambitious jobs requires increasing the number of reliable qubits that a quantum computer has to work with. When IBM published its quantum hardware road map last September, it had recently deployed the 65-qubit IBM Quantum Hummingbird processor, a considerable advance on its previous 5- and 27-qubit predecessors. This year, the company plans to complete the 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle. And by 2023, it expects to have a 1,000-qubit machine, the IBM Quantum Condor. Its this machine, IBM believes, that may have the muscle to achieve quantum advantage by solving certain real-world problems faster the worlds best supercomputers.

Essential though it is to crank up the supply of qubits, the software side of quantum computings future is also under construction, and IBM published a separate road map devoted to the topic in February. Gil says that the company is striving to create a frictionless environment in which coders dont have to understand how quantum computing works any more than they currently think about a classical computers transistors. An IBM software layer will handle the intricacies (and meld quantum resources with classical ones, which will remain indispensable for many tasks).

You dont need to know quantum mechanics, you dont need to know a special programming language, and youre not going to need to know how to do these gate operations and all that stuff, he explains. Youre just going to program with your favorite language, say, Python. And behind the scenes, there will be the equivalent of libraries that call on these quantum circuits, and then they get delivered to you on demand.

IBM is still working on making quantum computing ready for everyday reality, but its already worked with designers to make it look good. [Photo: courtesy of IBM]In this vision, we think that at the end of this decade, there may be as many as a trillion quantum circuits that are running behind the scene, making software run better, Gil says.

Even if IBM clearly understands the road ahead, theres plenty left to do. Charlie Bennett says that quantum researchers will overcome remaining challenges in much the same way that he and others confronted past ones. Its hard to look very far ahead, but the right approach is to maintain a high level of expertise and keep chipping away at the little problems that are causing a thing not to work as well as it could, he says. And then when you solve that one, there will be another one, which you wont be able to understand until you solve the first one.

As for Bennetts own current work, he says hes particularly interested in the intersection betweeninformation theory and cosmologynot so much because I think I can learn enough about it to make an original research contribution, but just because its so much fun to do. Hes also been making explainer videos about quantum computing, a topic whose reputation for being weird and mysterious he blames on inadequate explanation by others.

Unfortunately, the majority of science journalists dont understand it, he laments. And they say confusing things about itpainfully, for me, confusing things.

For IBM Research, Bennett is both a living link to its past and an inspiration for its future. Hes had such a massive impact on the people we have here, so many of our top talent, says Gil. In my view, weve accrued the most talented group of people in the world, in terms of doing quantum computing. So many of them trace it back to the influence of Charlie. Impressive though Bennetts 49-year tenure at the company is, the fact that hes seen and made so much quantum computing historyincluding attending the 1981 conferenceand is here to talk about it is a reminder of how young the field still is.

See more here:
IBM and MIT kickstarted the age of quantum computing in 1981 - Fast Company

With an ability to analyze and rapidly process extremely large datasets, quantum computing promises to enable transformational advances in everything from the rapid discovery of new drugs and vaccines to secure storage and transmission of personal information. The key to the speed of quantum computers lies in qubits, the basic units of information that can exist in multiple states, a phenomenon that provides far more processing power than the binary bits of classical computers.

Quantum computers are difficult to engineer, build and program, however, because highly sensitive qubits are easily affected by environmental disturbance, referred to as noise, such as temperature fluctuations and vibrations. Most qubits also need to be cooled to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius) to be usable. One potential solution being explored by researchers at UC Santa Barbara involves photonics, the science of using and controlling photons, which is the smallest unit of light. Photonic circuits can transfer data faster than traditional electronic circuits, and today power data centers and make the internet possible.

Photons have several potential advantages for quantum computing, most notably room-temperature operation, said Galan Moody, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE). They also dont interact strongly with their environment, so they retain their quantum states for really long periods of time.

According to Moody, integrated photonics the design and fabrication of photonic devices in which all of the components, ranging from lasers to optical interconnects, are contained on one chip is especially promising. Its a field in which UCSB researchers have established themselves as world leaders.

Integrated photonics offer additional advantages, including the ability to leverage the national photonic infrastructure already developed and the high density of components that can be integrated onto a single photonic chip, said Moody. This will help with reliability, stability, and most importantly, scalability.

In support of his effort to develop a new quantum photonic platform that allows for chip-scale quantum information processing with light, Moody has received an Early CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a prestigious honor that comes with $500,000 in research funding over five years.

Its an incredible honor, and its a testament to the dedication and hard work of my students and postdocs, especially with the challenges everyone has faced this past year, said Moody. I couldnt be prouder of my group, who really made it possible for me to receive this award. It validates the vision weve been developing over the past couple of years, and it provides support for us to help drive the field of quantum photonics into exciting new directions over the next five years and beyond.

Moody says the award is a direct result of the tremendous mentoring he has received from the college and his department, as well as rewarding collaborations most notably with John Bowers, a distinguished professor of materials and ECE and the director of UCSBs Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE).

We congratulate Professor Galan Moody on this great recognition of his work and the tremendous potential of his research on quantum photonics, said Rod Alferness, dean of the College of Engineering. We are tremendously proud to see junior faculty, like Professor Moody, rewarded for pushing the boundaries of science and technology to benefit society. I look forward to the research and mentorship this support will enable.

Conventional integrated photonic devices utilize silicon waveguides surrounded by an insulator, such as silicon dioxide, to guide light around a photonic chip. Moodys plan is to replace silicon with the III-V semiconductor alloy aluminum gallium arsenide (AlGaAs).

We expect several new important capabilities and better performance than we get from silicon, including more efficient quantum light sources, a reduced need for laser power to pump the sources, better electrical efficiency and significantly less optical loss in order to preserve the photons quantum state, said Moody.

The first stage of his project is to develop all of the necessary components to carry out certain quantum computations on a chip. These include improvements to his groups existing entangled-photon pair sources, and developing methods to convert quantum states throughout the visible and telecommunications wavelengths.

Once we fabricate, test and benchmark these components, we hope to find significant performance advantages compared to other approaches, such as silicon, Moody said.

The next phase is to design optical processor architectures and carry out some of the basic quantum operations on photons that are needed for a functional quantum computer. Lastly, they will begin to scale up their designs with the goal of demonstrating a practical and useful quantum computer using light.

While a quantum computer that can perform complex computations is a long-term goal, we expect to answer many important fundamental and practical questions in the short term, such as how can we make the most efficient quantum light source and what are the materials challenges we need to address to do this, said Moody. Our research may also lead to innovations in areas other than computing, including faster and more secure optical networks and satellite-based quantum communications.

The timing of the NSF CAREER award worked out perfectly for Moody. His research lab moved into Henley Hall, a state-of-the-art facility that opened in fall 2020. Moody also recently received the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) award from the Department of Defense to build the instrumentation needed to test the quantum photonic chips that his group will design and fabricate as part of the NSF CAREER award.

These experiments require a high level of temperature and vibrational stability, which is possible with the new lab space in Henley Hall, said Moody. This combination of state-of-the-art lab space and well-maintained shared facilities on campus, like the Nanofabrication Facility, make UCSB a really unique and exciting environment, and as a relatively new faculty member, Im fortunate to be a part of it.

The NSF funding also will jumpstart ambitious teaching and outreach programs that Moodys group has been developing, including a remote quantum teaching lab that will be accessible to online users beginning with a joint pilot program with Santa Barbara City College. They also plan to bring regional high school students from underrepresented communities to campus for an interactive quantum learning experience with the Media Arts and Technology Program, and to launch an outreach program for K-8 students and their families to learn about quantum science and engineering.

Read more:
Lighting the Way to Quantum Computers | The UCSB Current - The UCSB Current

Editors note:LimeLightis a new feature from WRAL TechWire offering another means of publishing noteworthy news. Be sure to check out moreLimeLight worthy news at this link.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK IBMannounced Friday it has extended its IBM Global University Program with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to 40 schools.

IBM is now working with the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education (AABHE), 100 Black Men of America, Inc., Advancing Minorities Interest in Engineering (AMIE) and the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to better prepare HBCU students for in-demand jobs in the digital economy.

In parallel, the IBM Institute for Business Value released a newreportwith broad-ranging recommendations on how businesses can cultivate more diverse, inclusive workforces by establishing similar programs and deepening engagement with HBCUs.

IBMs HBCU program momentum has been strong in an environment where only 43% of leaders across industry and academia believe higher education prepares students with necessary workforce skills.* InSeptember 2020,IBM announcedthe investment of$100 millionin assets, technology and resources to HBCUs acrossthe United States. Through IBM Global University Programs, which include the continuously enhanced IBM Academic Initiative and IBM Skills Academy, IBM has now:

Building on this work, IBM and key HBCU ecosystem partners are now collaborating to expedite faculty and student access and use of IBMs industry resources.

In its new report,Investing in Black Technical Talent: The Power of Partnering with HBCUs,IBM describes how HBCUs succeed in realizing their mission and innovate to produce an exceptional talent pipeline, despite serious funding challenges. IBM explains its approach to broad-based HBCU collaboration with a series of best-practices for industry organizations.

IBMs series of best practices include:

To download the full report, please visit:LINK.

HBCU students continue to engage with IBM on a wide range of opportunities. These include students taking artificial intelligence, cybersecurity or cloud e-learning courses and receiving a foundational industry badge certificate in four hours. Many also attend IBMs virtual student Wednesday seminars with leading experts, such as IBM neuroscientists who discuss the implications of ethics in neurotechnology.

Statements from CollaboratorsHBCUs typically deliver a high return on investment. They have less money in their endowments, faculty is responsible for teaching a larger volume of classes per term and they receive less revenue per student than non-HBCUs. Yet, HBCUs produce almost a third of all African-American STEM graduates,** saidValinda Kennedy, HBCU Program Manager, IBM Global University Programs and co-author ofInvesting in Black Technical Talent: The Power of Partnering with HBCUs.It is both a racial equity and an economic imperative for U.S. industry competitiveness to develop the most in-demand skills and jobs for all students and seek out HBCU students who are typically underrepresented in many of the most high-demand areas.

100 Black Men of America, Inc. is proud to collaboratewith IBM to deliver these exceptional and needed resources to the HBCU community and students attending these institutions. The 100 has long supported and sought to identify mechanisms that aid in the sustainability of historically black colleges and universities. This collaboration and the access and opportunities provided by IBM will make great strides in advancing that goal, stated100 Black Men of America ChairmanThomas W. Dortch, Jr.

The American Association of Blacks in Higher Education is proud to collaborate with IBM, saidDereck Rovaris, President, AABHE. Our mission to be the premier organization to drive leadership development, access and vital issues concerning Blacks in higher education works perfectly with IBMs mission to lead in the creation, development and manufacture of the industrys most advanced information technologies.Togetherthis collaboration will enhance both organizations and the many people we serve.

IBM is a strong AMIE partnerwhose role is strategic and support is significant in developing a diverse engineering workforce through AMIE and our HBCU community.IBMs presence on AMIEs Board of Directors provides leadership for AMIEs strategies,key initiatives and programsto achieve our goal of a diverse engineering workforce, saidVeronica Nelson, Executive Director, AMIE.IBM programslike the IBM Academic Initiative and the IBM Skills Academyprovideaccess, assets and opportunities for our HBCU faculty and students to gain high-demand skills in areas like AI, cybersecurity, blockchain, quantum computing and cloud computing. IBM is a key sponsor of the annual AMIE Design Challenge introducing students to new and emerging technologies through industry collaborations and providing experiential activities like IBM Enterprise Design Thinking, which is the foundational platform for the Design Challenge. The IBM Masters and PhD Fellowship Awards program supports our HBCU students with mentoring, collaboration opportunities on disruptive technologies as well as a financial award. The IBM Blue Movement HBCU Coding Boot Camp enables and recognizes programming competencies. IBM also sponsors scholarships for the students at the 15 HBCU Schools of Engineering to support their educational pursuits. IBM continues to evolve its engagement with AMIE and the HBCU Schools of Engineering.

The IBM Skills Academy is timely in providing resources that support the creativity of my students in the Dual Degree Engineering Program atClark Atlanta University, saidDr.Olugbemiga A. Olatidoye, Professor, Dual Degree Engineering and Director, Visualization, Stimulation and Design Laboratory,Clark Atlanta University. It also allows my students to be skillful in their design thinking process, which resulted in an IBM digital badge certificate and a stackable credential for their future endeavors.

We truly value the IBM skills programs and have benefitted from the Academic Initiative, Skills Academy and Global University Awards across all five campuses, saidDr.Derrick Warren, Interim Associate Dean and MBA Director,Southern University. Over 24 faculty and staff have received instructor training and more than 300 students now have micro-certifications in AI, cloud, cybersecurity, data science, design thinking, Internet of Things, quantum computing and other offerings.

At UNCF, we have a history of supporting HBCUs as they amplify their outsized impact on the Black community, and our work would not be possible without transformational partnerships with organizations like IBM and their IBM Global University Programs, saidEd Smith-Lewis, Executive Director of UNCFs Institute for Capacity Building. We are excited to bring the resources of IBM to HBCUs, their faculty, and their students.

IBM Skills Academy is an ideal platform for faculty to teach their students the latest in computing and internet technologies, saidDr. Sridhar Malkaram, WestVirginia State University. It helped the students in my Applied Data Mining course experience the state of the art in data science methods and analysis tools. The course completion badge/certificate has been an additional and useful incentive for students, which promoted their interest. The Skills Academy courses can be advantageously adapted by faculty, either as stand-alone courses or as part of existing courses.

Read more:
IBM expands its Global University Program to 40 HBCUs - WRAL Tech Wire

The electoral campaign for the April 25 elections in Albania brought to light one of the biggest political scandals the country has experienced in recent years.

Investigative reporting by online media outlet Lapsi.al revealed that the ruling Socialist Party, led by Prime Minister Edi Rama, has created a database containing all the personal data of the citizens of the Republic of Albania, using data from state institutions, mainly from e-Albania, a website and smartphone application used to facilitate document requests, and more recently used by almost everyone to obtain permission to go out for various reasons (either work or personal) during the pandemic lockdown.

This database includes information about voters' employment history, their religious beliefs, tax returns, telephone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, sexual orientation and medical records, as well as comments such as: this voter recently asked if his sister or wife can be employed in a state institution; is a friend of; doesnt have a good relationship with It even tracks their comments and likes on Facebook.

More importantly, it was made clear to the public that every single Albanian citizen was under the patronage of a trusted Socialist Party member, who apparently were called patronagists, and whose primary duty was to scrutinise and keep an eye on the people they had under their patronage.

Rama initially ignored the news, then admitted that this patronage system was designed by the Socialist Party to collect information on its supporters. After the election, when it became clear that the party he leads had won, Rama said the Patronagists have done a very good job and invited them to come to Skenderbej Square to celebrate the partys victory, ending all doubts as to whether the government was monitoring the social and political life of the citizens.

The theft of personal data for political reasons has sparked outrage from citizens who feel violated by the state. In a democratic system, citizens receive security and support from state institutions.

"I am scared it is terrible that someone owns all my information, I had never imagined that I was under observation and monitoring, Erinda, a 30-year-old resident of Tirana, told bne IntelliNews.

When the government steals my data, to whom should I turn as a citizen? Where should I file a complaint? In court or in the prosecutor's office? These are also state institutions. We have returned to communism, said Eva, a 21-year-old student at the Faculty of Economics in Elbasan.

The existence of this database containing so much data is a political crime. In Albania, memories of the communist regime are still fresh. State security monitored all citizens, seeking information about their relationships with family, cousins, colleagues and residents of the area where they lived. State security did such a good job that citizens were afraid to express their opinions. It seems like we are in the same situation today, when you are not free to express your opinion because the person who patronises you keeps you under surveillance and is informed about everything that happens to you. All this information will one day enable the government to decide whether to help you or not help here meaning anything from being employed in an institution to getting a license for something. Now Albanians fear all these decisions will depend on their behaviour or whether they have expressed any dissatisfaction with the state.

The owner of a travel agency, Erion Mane, went public on the issue, saying he has been repeatedly and unjustly fined. He asked for help with his problem from one of the relevant directorates at the Ministry of Transport and staff initially promised to help him. Then one of the directors of the ministry sent the businessman a screenshot of a post he had made on Facebook several months earlier, where he had shared a photo of the chairwoman of an opposition party. A press release issued jointly by Mane and President Ilir Meta a strong critic and political opponent of the Socialist Party argued that Mane did not receive any help from the state because he was patronised to monitor his political orientation and keep him under control. This is one of many cases of a business that does not support the government being financially penalised and pushed towards bankruptcy.

For Albanians, it is scary to think that someone out there has been asking, investigating, following, eavesdropping, both in real life and on social media, for years, about you. The patronagist, in addition to knowing where you live, with whom you live, what you do in your free time, who your friends are, who your partner is etc, also checks your social networks like Facebook and Instagram, where he or she screenshots your posts or messages to keep a record of your thoughts and actions.

This scandal reminds me of my grandfather's story about the centralisation of socio-political life under the party-state, where everyone knew everything about everyone, and you could be fired or imprisoned for political reasons. Nowadays the state fines you, tries to make you close your business and in general makes life very very hard for you for political reasons.

Having no institutions to complain to, many citizens have denounced the phenomenon of patronage on their social networks and some of them have even invited their patronagists (who often are acquaintances or neighbours) to meet in order to get to know the person who has been stalking them for years. The theft of personal data from the state cannot be left only to denunciations on social networks when the government accepts and publicly thanks the patronagists for a job well done.

The existence of this database will negatively affect the Albanian accession process to the European Union. Lacking trust in local institutions, citizens and various organisations have sought help from various institutions located in Tirana, such as the offices of the European Union, OSCE-OHDIR and the US embassy, hoping that these will hold the Albanian government to account and ask the government to delete this database.

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OPINION: Patronagists scandal brings back memories of the communist era in Albania - bne IntelliNews