Category: Top News

MIT Donates the $850,000 Received from Epstein and Suspends Prof. Seth Lloyd

IBL News | New York

Six months after the MIT Lab – Epstein scandal emerged, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it will donate the $850,000 received from the convicted financier between 2002 and 2017.

Four nonprofits supporting survivors of sexual abuse – the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC), the EVA Center, My Life My Choice, and the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts – will receive the money.

Professor Leslie Kolodziejski, Chair of MIT’s Committee on Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response, told The Tech that those organizations “address the original intent of the institution’s donation to support victims of sexual assault by offering support services and addressing sex trafficking”.

Gina Scaramella, Executive Director at BARCC, said that “although the donation does not right Epstein’s crimes or change MIT’s past actions in relation to Epstein, it will have an impact in providing vital support to survivors.”

MIT Suspends Professor Seth Lloyd’s Secondary Appointment

Also related to the Epstein links with MIT, the Physics Department suspended Mechanical Engineering professor Seth Lloyd’s secondary appointment in Physics.

Lloyd was placed on administrative leave by President L. Rafael Reif on January 10, after Goodwin Procter‘s report indicated that Lloyd “purposefully failed to inform MIT that Epstein was the source of two $60,000 donations and knowingly facilitated Epstein’s plan to circumvent any possible MIT vetting process.”

Professor Peter Fisher, Physics Department Head, wrote in a recent email that Lloyd “will no longer be able to supervise new graduate students, attend Departmental events or serve on Departmental committees.” However, Lloyd will “continue to supervise students currently assigned to him [until] MechE, Physics and MIT reach a decision about his final state.”

On January 16, Lloyd wrote in a Medium post that the accusation that he hid Epstein’s identity from MIT was “completely false.”

Some of MIT’s student groups claim that there are more professors not suspended who visited Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island where sexual crimes were committed.

February 17, 2020
Coursera Introduces an Annual Subscription Plan for Learners Similar to Its Business and Campus Offering
IBL News | New York

This week, Coursera started to pilot a new annual subscription program for individual learners at $399 per year. This offering, called Coursera Plus, resembles the existing subscription plans of Coursera for Business and Coursera for Campus – although these ones include analytics and other integration services.

Coursera’s plan follows the trend towards the subscription pricing model, increasingly executed among MOOC platforms and initiatives at scale such as Pluralsight or A Cloud Guru.

Essentially, Coursera Plus allows to access 90% of the courses, Specializations and Professional Certificates on its catalog – over 3,000 classes. There is no limit to the courses that the learner can enroll in or the certificates that can be earned, as long as those petitions fall into that program.

However, some popular courses, such as those of co-founder and AI-guru Andrew Ng e.g. “Machine Learning”, or professional certificate courses from IBM, AWS, and Stanford University, are not available.

The Coursera organization lets its partners decide whether or not to make their content part of the Plus initiative.

In addition, existing subscriptions to Coursera specializations will not be automatically canceled. Users must cancel their existing subscriptions to avoid being charged for both Coursera Plus and single Specialization subscriptions.

Anubhav Chopra, Lead Product Manager at the educational company, explained in a promotional blog post: “Coursera Plus is one of many enrollment options available on Coursera including the ability to audit a course, take a course for free, apply for financial aid, or pay for a course, Specialization, or Professional Certificate individually.”

Coursera encouraged students to explore the following examples:
- Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python) (University of Michigan)
- The Science of Well-Being (Yale)
- Learning How to Learn (McMaster University, UC San Diego)
- Algorithms, Part I (Princeton)
- Data Science Specialization (Johns Hopkins University)
- Improve Your English Communication Skills Specialization (Georgia Institute of Technology)
- Google IT Support Professional Certificate (Google)
February 16, 2020
Thoma Bravo Raises Its Offer for Instructure to $49 Per Share, but Investors Might Demand a Higher Price

IBL News | New York

The messy take-private deal of Instructure, home of the leading LMS Canvas, goes on.

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo sweetened its offer to $49 per share in cash, from an earlier proposal of $47.60, Instructure said in a filing to the SEC this Friday.

This bid is “our best and final offer,” stated Thoma Bravo.

Instructure’s Board of Directors approved yesterday the revised deal agreement and recommended opposing investors to vote in favor of the transaction. The shareholder vote was postponed until February 25.

Yesterday, the stock market in New York trading pushed Instructure (NYSE: INST) shares up 3.61% to $47.66, almost recovering Thursday’s loss.

Thoma Bravo decided to acquire Instructure in December in a deal worth $2 billion. However, several investors rejected the original price and accused the company of running a rigged sales process, as well as paying a low price per share.

The latest terms of $49 per share may still not appease investors, according to Bloomberg.

At least four of Instructure’s sizable shareholders reached Thursday presumably said that they would only consider potential acquisitions for Instructure at the mid-to-high $50-a-share range, arguing its Canvas business is extremely valuable.

However, other sources told IBL News that “Bloomberg’s assessment that shareholders aren’t happy is speculative”.

The waiting game will conclude with the Special Meeting on Feb 25.

February 15, 2020
Instructure’s Shares Fell 3% Amid Concerns that the $2 Billion Takeover from Thoma Bravo Will Fail

IBL News | New York

Instructure (NYSE: INST) yesterday adjourned the Special Meeting of stockholders called to vote on the $2 billion takeover proposal (or $47.60 per share) from equity firm Thoma Bravo, LLC. to February 14, 2020. Information regarding the adjournment was disclosed in a document filed yesterday at the SEC.

The stock market didn’t take the announcement and press stories around discrepancies among stakeholders well. As a result, it brought down the price of the stock 3% to $45.92 per share in New York trading. The market capitalization decreased to $1.2 Billion.

The dominant speculation in the market pointed out that Thoma Bravo might fail today to win investors’ majority support for its offer.

However, IBL News exclusively knew that Instructure and Thoma Bravo will make today a new offer price of $49 per share.

The only other edtech company that I’ve seen lose favor of its community this rapidly, through self-infliction, is Blackboard. https://t.co/LmUWr3Y3Ye

— George Siemens (@gsiemens) February 13, 2020

February 13, 2020
The World’s Largest Smartphone Conference Canceled Due to Coronavirus Concerns

IBL News | Barcelona, Spain

The world’s largest smartphone technology annual conference, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, was canceled yesterday over worries about the Coronavirus outbreak from China. It was another demonstration of the ripple effect the virus is having on businesses globally.

GSMA, the conference organizer announced that was pulling the plug. The decision was taken after almost all of the big-name corporate participants – from Nvidia and Intel to Amazon and Facebook – backed out amid fear about the safety of their employees.

“The global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event,” the group’s CEO, John Hoffman, said in a statement.

The event, scheduled to kick off on Feb. 24, typically attracts more than 100,000 attendees each year, generating over $600 million in revenues. Since the first edition in Barcelona in 2006, the GSMA convened the industry, governments, ministers, policymakers, operators and industry leaders who attend the show to check out the latest in smartphone technology.

According to local media reports, the GSMA was heavily pressuring Catalonian officials to declare a health emergency. That would have allowed the GSMA to cancel the event and collect on insurance to cover its losses. However, the government declined, saying there was no reason to make such a declaration. The GSMA still decided to cancel, so it’s probably taking a serious financial hit.

Trade Shows, Events, and Flights Affected by the Outbreak

Other trade fairs and business events have also been affected by the spread of the Coronavirus. More than two dozen large industry conferences in Asia have been postponed, shuttering events where billions of dollars worth of deals have been signed-in the past.

Coronavirus’ death toll surpassed 1,100 on Wednesday, and more than 45,000 cases have been reported globally, most of them contained to mainland China.

Companies continue to watch and wait to see how long the outbreak lasts and affects China’s economy, with thousands of factories and shops closed.

The United States Parcel Service suspended shipments to China and Hong Kong, as major airlines have suspended flights to the region.

The outbreak also raised fears for the global economy overall, with Boeing saying yesterday that the virus was a drag on its first-quarter deliveries.

“The immediate and most significant economic impact is in China but will reverberate globally, given the importance of China in global growth as well as in global company revenue,” said Jessica Gladstone, an associate director at Moody’s.

February 13, 2020
The Annual Jupyter Conference Is Back – It Will Take Place on August 10-14 in Berlin, Germany

IBL News | New York

The annual reunion of Jupyter developers and practitioners is back after one year of absence – in December 2018, O’Reilly Media announced that it would no longer organize this conference.

JupyterCon 2020 will be held on August 10-14, 2020 in Berlin, Germany.

GW’s Professor Lorena A. Barba, a leader in the educational open-source community and a known advocate of open education, will be the General Chair.

In addition, the Organizing Committee includes Sylvain Corlay, Jason Grout, Reshama Shaikh, Paco Nathan, Rosie Pongracz, Paige Bailey, Joshua Patterson, Tania Allard, Gerard Gorman, Chair Safia Abdalla, Kirstie Whitaker, Jeremy Tuloup, Wolf Vollprecht, Liaison Laura Norén, Amanda Casari, Jim Weiss (NumFOCUS), and Carol Willing.

JupyterCon 2020 will be produced in partnership with Project Jupyter and NumFOCUS. The call for proposals (tutorials, talks, sprints) will open soon.

“In JupyterCon, we celebrate the distributed nature of our community, face-to-face,” Lorena Barba wrote in a blog post. “We enhance the year-long remote collaborations with in-person interactions for just a few days. This helps sustain a community, building and strengthening relationships among Jupyter aficionados and developers, newbies and veterans. JupyerCon inspires a keen appreciation for the collective labor that creates high-quality technology for anyone in the world to use freely.”

#JupyterCon2020 is a go!
And it will be in Berlin, Germany.
Save the date: 10–13 August, 2020 https://t.co/lDBmyTZdR5

— JupyterCon (@JupyterCon) February 7, 2020

• JupyterCon 2020 Sponsorship Prospectus

February 12, 2020
A Visual Tool That Enhances Vocabulary Instruction Was Awarded at the LearnLaunch Competition

IBL News | Boston

A web-based visual vocabulary tool startup called InferCabulary won the LearnLaunch Conference Pitch Competition, which took place last week in Boston, Massachusetts. InferCabulary was awarded $25,000 in Google credit, and access to a network of industry mentors.

The company helps K-12 students to develop critical thinking skills, rather than relying on rote memorization. The tool uses images to help students learn words in a variety of contexts using kid-friendly definitions. The program supplements the current curriculum by integrating explicit vocabulary instruction. Teachers, speech-language pathologists, and tutors can hand-select words based on grade level, literature, or their own vocabulary lists, and can search for words according to grade level, standards, or a book in which they appear. [Demo]

”With 40-60% of incoming freshman at 4-year colleges now requiring remedial help (Center for American Progress), most students benefit from avidly reading, and high-quality, in-depth vocabulary instruction, reading comprehension, and written language,” Beth Lawrence, CEO and Co-Founder of InferCabulary [in the picture above], told IBL News.

In addition, she said, “giving all children the opportunity to improve their skills through engaging learning puts them on the path to achieving lifelong success.”

Last spring, Beth Lawrence elaborated on her view on a TEDx talk. InferCabulary’s approach, called Semantic Reasoning, is explained in the infographics below.

Infographics: Nigelhawtin.com

February 11, 2020
Founder of Udacity Attracts Silicon Valley Investors to His AI-Based Call-Center Startup

IBL News | New York

Founder of Udacity Sebastian Thrun has attracted investors’ interest in his new venture, Cresta.

So far, venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners said this month that they have invested $21 million in Cresta, an AI-based call-center technology startup. Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Mark Leslie, and Vivi Nevo are also investors in Cresta.

This San Francisco-based company, in which Sebastian Thrun is Chairman, with no daily operational role, provides real-time prompts to help guide agents in order to close deals.

The idea of Cresta was started by Co-Founder and CEO Zayd Enam with his Ph.D. project that involved applying breakthroughs in computers to understand language and create automated answers.

According to Fortune, Sebastian Thrun, who was Enam’s Ph.D. advisor at Stanford University, suggested that the project should be focused on more specific tasks that could be more applicable to business problems like sales.

With a staff of only 30 employees, Cresta underscores recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) that have led to a number of companies applying the software to corporate call centers.

Cresta wants to use AI to school customer service workers and salespeople on how to close the deal – wrote Lucas Matney on TechCrunch.

[Capture from Cresta.com site]

February 10, 2020
A Powerful Tool to Author OER for Building Lessons, Modules, and Assignments

IBL News | New York

OER Commons, an organization focused on creating open educational resources (OER), has developed a new editing tool named Open Author.

This software allows building standalone learning modules, lessons, assignments, assessments, and activities.

As a “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” editor, this authoring tool has the option to copy and paste from Word and Excel, include images (with alt text and captions), along with imports from Google and Microsoft OneDrive; and download PDF, SCORM, and other files.

In addition, users have the ability to review and remix the resources and use them with other materials.

February 9, 2020
Has 2U Turned the Corner? Quarterly Reports Show Improved Revenue and the Stock Surges 11%

IBL News | New York

The 2U (NASDAQ: TWOU) stock saw this Friday a surge of 11.39% to $25.33 per share, as the investors were surprised with the educational company quarterly reports, which registered a loss of $0.18 per share versus the Zacks Consensus Estimate of a loss of $0.22.

2U posted revenues of $163.18 million for the quarter ended December 2019, surpassing the year-ago revenues of $115.10 million. The company expects to generate sales between $170 million and $180 million in the current quarter and between $725 million and $750 million for the full year 2020; consensus expectations are for $172.45 million and $729 million, respectively.

So far, 2U has underperformed the market, with the shares losing 8.8% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500’s gain of 3.2%.

In the last year, shares have lost more than half their value. They were hit by an August announcement that the company was lowering its near-term growth expectations prompted investors to question whether 2U was a long-term growth stock.

Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for the 2U stock price is mixed. In its forecast for 2020, the education company said it expects full-year adjusted EBITDA to range from a loss of $5 million to a gain of $10 million.

During the Q4 Earnings Call [Transcript here], Christopher “Chip” Paucek, Co-Founder and CEO at 2U, was bullish.

“2U is starting 2020 with tremendous momentum. We had a strong finish in 2019 and we are excited to see what’s happening. Universities are launching more with us. Our degree business is turning the corner. Our short course business is sliding new courses and enrolling students in record numbers and our boot camp business is starting to deliver on the strategic value of our acquisition. As we move through 2020, we will improve our operational efficiency with continued realignment and short corporate hygiene.”

“Looking to the future, university demand for our full investment revenue share model is strong and we are managing our launch cadence to optimize growth, cash flow and profitability. Add all this up and we are expecting double-digit revenue growth and increasing segment profitability in 2020,” added the CEO.

2U launched 15 new degree programs in the quarter, claiming that it achieved an 82% student retention rate in the segment.

“In conclusion, 2019 was challenging. But last year we took actions to deliver long-term value for all of our stakeholders. Our grad business is turning for the better. We added a product line that opens a significant new segment of the market. We more than doubled our client base and currently have a portfolio of over 400 product offering. We delivered strong second half results and we believe we turned the corner going into 2020. 2U expects to maintain industry-leading growth, while delivering margin improvement over the course of 2020 and driving toward positive free cash flow, all with a relentless focus on quality and outcomes,” said Christopher “Chip” Paucek.

Regarding the sale rumors spread by activist investors, 2U’s management declined to comment.

February 8, 2020