The future of transportation is electric, and that reality is impacting everything from where and how automakers are recruiting talent to the types of stakeholders taking charge of pipeline development.

Higher education, of course, has a major role to play in preparing the workforce for electrification, and not just through course development and arranging internship opportunities—but through extracurriculars. Take Formula SAE: The collegiate engineering competition, in which teams design and build cars, has had an all-electric competition since 2013, and it draws students to a racetrack in Michigan each year to put their work to the test.

“In this club, I’ve learned way more than I’ll learn in college, to be frank with you,” UC Riverside mechanical engineering student Grayson Young said.

Highlander Racing, UC Riverside’s Formula SAE team, first started developing electric vehicles in 2019, according to Young, the team’s president. At that time, Highlander Racing was still creating internal combustion vehicles in parallel, but Young said the team has since transitioned to a 100% EV focus.

“It directly aligns with what the market is doing,” Young explained. “We want to do that as a student team, and really help these new engineers come into the market and be able to directly transfer all the knowledge that they’ve learned in Highlander Racing directly to what the market wants, so that they can get jobs much easier that way.”

Keep reading here.—MA

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These engines can run on heavy fuels or zero-carbon fuels like hydrogen. That means LiquidPiston can support military heavy-fuel needs while also pioneering a clean energy solution.

They already have $30m+ in government contracts. And their latest engine, XTS-210™, is ready to be commercialized.

Add some torque to your portfolio and become a LiquidPiston investor today.

Booz Allen Hamilton’s VP of artificial intelligence knows building a future-ready workforce isn’t just about hiring data scientists and engineers.

“I think everyone is realizing [AI is] going to be an entire workforce question; it’s not just this sub-population of mathematicians and computer engineers and whatnot,” Joe Rohner told Tech Brew.

Today, the firm has more than 4,000 employees in its AI and data practices, Rohner said. But those roles are changing.

“What I’m seeing evolve—and we’re doing this within our own job taxonomy now—is we’re acknowledging that there’s a technical side to AI but there’s actually a much larger side on AI workforce, AI adoption, AI consultant, for lack of a better term,” Rohner said, pointing to a set of employees focused on adoption, responsible AI, and change management.

“Those two populations have to work together,” he said. “They both have to understand each other because AI is not just a mathematical model that we run in a protected environment—it’s going to be something that’s out there.”

Keep reading here.—MA

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I help make the internet a safer place. More specifically, I help businesses keep apps and websites free from online fraud by uncovering new methods and patterns of fraud and designing detection/enforcement systems to combat fraud and abuse at scale.

What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?

A big part of my role at Sift is researching new and emerging types of fraud attacks and scams so we can inform the businesses we work with about how to protect proactively against new types of fraud and abuse. In 2021, I started looking into scams impacting dating apps and realized that there was an increase in scammers targeting this new type of scheme that tapped into the rise in crypto investing called pig butchering. I ended up going “undercover” to understand the mechanics of the scam and made myself the bait—or, rather, the “pig” up for the slaughter—to understand how fraudsters were wiping out the savings of victims they identified on the apps.

I wanted to go deeper into the scam because I was seeing it on dating apps myself and, from a professional perspective, we want to make sure that our customers are protected, since we have customers in both the dating app space and the crypto space. After going undercover on this, or working to identify new patterns or trends in fraud more generally, I take whatever my team and I learn to make sure our products and technology are effective. We also scour the deep and dark web just to understand what’s going on in the fraud networks—there’s always more to learn!

Keep reading here.

By participating in The Anthem Awards, you put your team in a position to stand alongside inspiring advocates, movement leaders, and impact-driven companies. The Anthem Awards has honored a vast range of incredible individuals, teams, and companies—including REI, The Daily Show, R/GA, Sesame Workshop, Havas, Bombas, Mischief @ No Fixed Address, Dove, Barbie, and Chobani.

Don’t miss your last chance to enter by the Final Entry Deadline on Friday, Sept. 15!

Stat: 10%. That’s how much of Meta’s overall business comes from the EU, the New York Times reported, citing April comments from Meta CFO Susan Li. The newspaper reported that the company may allow Facebook and Instagram users in the bloc to pay a subscription fee to avoid ads in the wake of rulings that restrict data-collection practices.

Quote: “One of our biggest concerns more recently is that Meta has clearly started to backslide on some of their policies around the upcoming 2024 election…They have a history of letting these right-wing organizations and figures flout their policies.”—Kayla Gogarty, research director at Media Matters for America, to Wired in a story about Facebook’s political ads policy

Read: Behind the AI boom, an army of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’ (the Washington Post)

Links we love: In a fast-moving industry like tech, you don’t have time to re-read your emails 10 times. Learn how to structure sentences to get what you need with our Business Writing sprint. Register now.

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