Benjy Hansen-Bundy

3 weeks ago | blog.dropbox.com | Benjy Hansen-Bundy |Anthony Pellegrino |Patrick Lightbody

Disaster management teams are stretched thin—and looking to AI for help. Could what works for them help the rest of us too? The Swannanoa is a small river just outside Asheville, NC. Normally, it’s about two feet deep. So when a video of a house being carried downstream hit TikTok in late September of last year, people began to grasp just how serious the situation with Hurricane Helene had become.

2 months ago | blog.dropbox.com | Graham Isador |Andrew Zaleski |Benjy Hansen-Bundy

Easing some of the cumbersome documentation and heaps of paperwork is a promising application of AI technologies in a field that’s already prone to worker burnout. Crucially, this shift has allowed care workers to spend less time at a desk and more time in the field. In a West London flat, an outreach social worker sits across from a senior resident, gently guiding the conversation to uncover key details about their daily routine.

Dec 10, 2024 | blog.dropbox.com | Benjy Hansen-Bundy |Andrew Zaleski |Graham Isador |Drew Pearce

It is the bottleneck of all bottlenecks—a bureaucratic morass so behind schedule that it now takes an average of four years for a new clean energy project to get approval. Here's how AI could help bring green power to the grid more quickly—and then keep the lights on. Back in early 2021, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering at UT Dallas named Roshni Anna Jacob was developing a proposal with her advisor to study the resilience of Texas’ power grid.

Oct 9, 2024 | blog.dropbox.com | Benjy Hansen-Bundy |Andrew Zaleski |Tomi Akitunde

AI is automating the most time-intensive aspects of archaeology. With this leg up, can researchers delve into the deeper questions of our past? In the year 79, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii in a pyroclastic surge, killing thousands with more thermal energy than 100,000 atomic bombs, it also dumped twenty meters of hot mud and ash on a nearby town called Herculaneum, which was something like the Malibu of ancient Rome.

Jan 28, 2024 | fastcompanyme.com | Benjy Hansen-Bundy

Two weeks ago, Brittany Pietsch, an account executive at Cloudflare, sat down for a suspicious 10-minute call with HR. Secretly, she set up her phone to record whatever happened next. Two anonymous HR people she had never met before unceremoniously told her she was being let go for performance-related issues. But Pietsch was ready. She had already caught wind that other people on her team were getting a similar explanation.