IO’s week: How Gerard & Anton came home

By Bart Brouwers

In our Sunday newsletter, we, as editors, reflect on the past seven days. We do this on the initiative of our cartoonist, Albert Jan Rasker. He chooses a subject, draws a picture, and we take it from there.

For Albert Jan, a new story about how a neuroprosthetic helps a paralyzed man walk again was last week’s highlight. For a good reason, these implants, partly developed at the Swiss technology institute EFPL, relay brain signals across the injured area and onto the patient’s limbs. It really feels like magic, but it is the result of years of work by a group of scientists who – step by step – are coming closer to solving a huge medical problem.

While the researchers are based in Lausanne, the business part of the initiative lies with Eindhoven-based ONWARD Medical. In 2016, this start-up won the Innovation Origins’ Gerard & Anton Award. And talking about Gerard & Anton also brings us to last week’s Gerard & Anton High Tech Peak Awards. In a festive event at the Philips Museum, the 9 prizes were awarded to the people who stood out in the innovative high-tech ecosystem. The award was named after the two brothers who founded Philips in 1891, so in a way, Gerard and Anton came home.

100% automated journalism

For those who speak Dutch, it’s interesting to read what Villamedia wrote about our initiative to create a 100% automated journalism platform. Led by colleague Merien ten Houten, we are taking bold steps. To be honest, we’re still far from where we want to be, but with The Illustrated Artificial Intelligence (dgki) and with the English-language H2Files, we are showing some of the possibilities. Of course, we are not the only ones in the world tinkering with Large Language Models, but our ambition to use our journalistic heart to connect technological possibilities to social causes sets us apart from most other initiatives.