Latest news with #JohnWells
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Called to the Bar – judge takes historic role bringing city and courts together
A RESPECTED crown court judge has been celebrated for taking on a historic role – in a short ceremony held above a temporary bar. Judge Adam Feest KC was proclaimed as the honorary recorder of Salisbury on Saturday, July 19 in Guildhall square. The space is currently hosting Fayre on the Square, featuring street food, crazy croquet and a bar and stage. Judge Feest, who presides over cases at Winchester and Salisbury's crown courts, was appointed to the role by city councillors on May 12. The title dates back hundreds of years and represents the relationship between the judiciary and the city. The judge was joined on the stage on Saturday by the city's 764th mayor, John Wells, and mayoress Josephine Wells. Judge Feest said: 'It is a great privilege and honour to be appointed as the honorary recorder of this city. 'Being trusted with such a prestigious and historic role in a city which is rich in heritage – legal and otherwise with the Magna Carta – is a great pleasure. 'As part of my role, I'm committed to upholding the values which the courts and the city hold so dear and maintaining the integrity of the legal system.' He invited the public to attend court to see staff's work to 'uphold the rule of law, keep you safe and hold everybody accountable for their actions'. Members of the public are entitled to attend most criminal cases heard in Salisbury at the law courts on Wilton Road. Salisbury Law Courts on Wilton Road (Image: Spencer Mulholland) Read more Coroner calls for action after New Forest teenager died from carbon monoxide leak Councillors again oppose plans for 220 homes after developer submits proposal Cllr Wells said: 'On behalf of the city council and the people of Salisbury, I am delighted to formally proclaim His Honour Judge Adam Feest KC as the honorary recorder of Salisbury. 'The role of honorary recorder symbolises not only legal tradition but also the shared values of fairness, justice and public service we all uphold. 'Judge Feest brings a wealth of experience from a distinguished career in criminal law, having served both King's Counsel and now as the circuit judge for the western circuit. 'He has worked on some of the most serious and complex cases in the country and is widely respected for his integrity and professionalism. 'His dedication to justice has been recognised at the highest level, and we are privileged to welcome him into his honorary civic role. 'I hope this appointment will help bridge the gap between the judiciary and the people of Salisbury, making justice feel more accessible, more human and more connected to the lives we lead here in our great city.' Judge Timothy Mousley KC was Salisbury's previous honorary recorder. He was appointed in November 2023 but stepped down when he retired.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
4DMT Announces Presentations at 43rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Society of Retina Specialists
EMERYVILLE, Calif., July 24, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 4D Molecular Therapeutics (Nasdaq: FDMT, 4DMT or the Company), a leading late-stage biotechnology company advancing durable and disease-targeted therapeutics with potential to transform treatment paradigms and provide unprecedented benefits to patients, today announced podium presentations at the 43rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Society of Retina Specialists (ASRS) being held in Long Beach, CA, from July 30 – August 2, 2025. ASRS 2025 Presentation Details: Title: Interim Results from the SPECTRA Phase 2a Clinical Trial Evaluating Intravitreal 4D-150 in Adults with Diabetic Macular Edema* Date/Time: Thursday, July 31, 2025 (11:35 – 11:38 a.m. PT) Presenter: David Almeida, MD, MBA, PhD, DABO, FRCSC, FASRS, Erie Retina Research, PA *Includes 52-week primary endpoint analysis and 60-week analysis (all patients have reached 60 weeks as of the data cutoff date of May 2, 2025) Title: PRISM Phase 2b Clinical Trial Evaluating Intravitreal 4D-150 in Adults with Neovascular Age-related Macular Degeneration: 52-week Results Date/Time: Friday, August 1, 2025 (11:24 – 11:27 a.m. PT) Presenter: John A. Wells, MD, FACS, Palmetto Retina Center, SC The presentations will also be available on the 4DMT website: About 4DMT 4DMT is a leading late-stage biotechnology company advancing durable and disease-targeted therapeutics with potential to transform treatment paradigms and provide unprecedented benefits to patients. The Company's lead product candidate 4D-150 is designed to be a backbone therapy forming the foundation of treatment of blinding retinal vascular diseases by providing multi-year sustained delivery of anti-VEGF (aflibercept and anti-VEGF-C) with a single, safe, intravitreal injection, which substantially reduces the treatment burden associated with current bolus injections. The Company's lead indication for 4D-150 is wet age-related macular degeneration, which is currently in Phase 3 development, and second indication is diabetic macular edema. The Company's second product candidate is 4D-710, which is the first known genetic medicine to demonstrate successful delivery and expression of the CFTR transgene in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis after aerosol delivery. 4D Molecular Therapeutics™, 4DMT™, Therapeutic Vector Evolution™, and the 4DMT logo are trademarks of 4DMT. All of the Company's product candidates are in clinical or preclinical development and have not yet been approved for marketing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or any other regulatory authority. No representation is made as to the safety or effectiveness of the Company's product candidates for the therapeutic uses for which they are being studied. Learn more at and follow us on LinkedIn. Contacts: Media: Jenn Gordondna CommunicationsMedia@ Investors: Julian PeiHead of Investor Relations and Corporate in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Forbes
01-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Disney, Walmart, And Carnival UK Share Lessons In AI For Customer Experience
Brand leaders are using AI to turn data into winning customer experiences When it comes to implementing AI for customer experience (CX), the gap between technology promises and enterprise deployment reality can be vast. During the NiCE Interactions conference, customer experience executives from three major companies—Disney, Walmart, and Carnival UK—shared how their companies navigated these challenges with different approaches, offering a glimpse into what works when deploying AI at scale. The companies' collective experience reveals that successful AI implementation requires more than a focus on finding the right technology solution. Instead, CX success demands strategic partnerships, effective organizational change management, and a fundamental shift in how companies approach customer service operations. Carnival UK: The Knowledge Management Imperative When John Wells inherited customer service operations at Carnival UK, he faced a familiar enterprise challenge: 1.25 million annual guest interactions flowing through disconnected legacy systems that couldn't even link a customer's phone call to their email inquiry. "We had siloed systems," Wells, the company's Contact Center Director, explained. "If guests would phone us or they'd email us, we wouldn't know one interaction to the next." The cruise line's transformation over 18 months represented a desire to reimagine the experience. "This wasn't a technology change program," Wells emphasized. "This was a business change program underpinned by a technology change." Carnival UK understood that data quality was key to delivering a successful customer experience. The company spent six months consolidating scattered knowledge from multiple systems, recognizing that AI success depends entirely on information architecture. "Knowledge management and structuring your knowledge is as important to your success as AI management," Wells discovered. "Getting the data and the knowledge in the right place, structured in the right way, enables you to be able to be successful in your development of the AI." AI guardrails are mechanisms and strategies designed to ensure that AI systems, especially generative AI, operate within safe, ethical, and legal boundaries. Carnival UK's methodical approach to knowledge management enables it to create guardrails that ensure AI responses align with company policies while maintaining the premium service experience that luxury cruise customers expect. Carnival UK's Key Lesson: Treat AI like a new employee. "You wouldn't just put a new team member in place and just let them get on with it," Wells explained. "You have to train and coach them. You have to work with them every day, tweak (the process), and point them in the right direction." Disney: Leadership and Security First as a Foundation for Customer Experience Arun Chandra, SVP for Customer Experience at Disney, shared Disney's vision to build the best CX program globally, serving over 150 million customers in 100 geographies. Disney's approach uses three foundational principles that address the organizational dynamics often overlooked in AI implementations. First, Disney insists on direct senior leadership involvement, recognizing that executives must work alongside their teams to separate genuine AI capabilities from marketing hype. This hands-on approach ensures that AI initiatives align with business objectives rather than getting caught up in technological possibilities. Second, Disney places extraordinary emphasis on data privacy, legal requirements, and security challenges. The company focuses on critical questions are data use and management. For example, what data trained the AI models and was it proprietary Disney company data? It also has to evaluare the implications of using models trained on external and potentially inaccurate data sources. Disney understands that AI implementations can create new security vulnerabilities if not properly managed. Data governance isn't just a compliance issue for a company handling millions of customer interactions across theme parks, streaming services, and merchandise operations. It's essential for securing data and delivering a seamless experience. Third, Disney views change management as the cornerstone of successful AI implementation. The company recognizes that AI transformation affects not just customer-facing agents but the entire organizational workforce. "AI impacts everyone across the organization, as everyone ultimately contributes to serving customers and stakeholders," according to Chandra. Disney's Key Lesson: AI implementation requires comprehensive organizational change rather than isolated departmental deployments. Success depends on addressing security concerns upfront and ensuring executive leadership remains actively involved throughout the process. Walmart: Consolidation and Strategic Partnership For Scaling Customer Experience Walmart's journey offers a distinct perspective on enterprise AI adoption, emphasizing the crucial distinction between products and strategic partnerships. Anderson Wilkins from Walmart explains the company's rationale: "We selected NiCE as that one (contact center) platform, not because it was perfect, but because we found a strategic partner. We created a shared vision to co-innovate together, to scale with a microservice architecture and auto-scaling for on-demand capacity." This approach proved crucial for handling Walmart's massive scale challenges. "When everybody calls us on Black Friday, many of our brands are unified under one Walmart contact center platform." Walmart shared how it collected stakeholder feedback to manage organizational resistance to change. The key to its success was transparency about the transformation roadmap: "We shared the roadmap of how we would reduce costs, streamline our tech, eliminate friction, and give them a platform where we could deliver changes faster.", said Wilkins. Walmart's Key Lesson: Enterprise AI success depends not just on technical capabilities but on organizational acceptance across diverse business units with different priorities and concerns. Common Ground In Customer Experience Transformations Despite their different strategic approaches, Disney, Walmart, and Carnival UK encountered remarkably similar obstacles that reveal the universal challenges of enterprise AI implementation in customer experience such as legacy system integration, organizational resistance and data quality and governance concerns. The most pervasive issue was legacy system integration. Each organization discovered that their existing infrastructure created barriers to seamless customer experiences. Carnival UK's siloed systems prevented agents from connecting a customer's phone call to their previous email inquiry, while Disney's complex multi-platform operations spanning theme parks, streaming services, and retail required coordination of multiple data source. Similarly, Walmart's diverse brand portfolio and large number of stores demanded integration strategies that could unify multiple business units under a single contact center platform without sacrificing each brand's unique requirements. Organizational resistance emerged as another significant hurdle across all three implementations. Each company faced internal pushback when introducing AI-enabled contact center systems, as employees worried about job security and changing workflows. The companies learned that success required more than technical deployment—it demanded proactive change management, transparent communication about transformation goals, and concrete demonstrations of how AI would benefit rather than replace human workers. Scale requirements presented unique challenges that tested each organization's infrastructure decisions. Whether managing cruise guest inquiries during peak booking seasons, handling Disney's massive theme park operations during holidays, or supporting Walmart's Black Friday shopping surges, all three companies needed AI solutions capable of dynamic scaling without manual intervention. This requirement influenced their architectural choices and partnership strategies, as they sought platforms that could automatically adjust capacity based on demand rather than requiring constant human oversight. Data governance concerns proved equally critical across all implementations. Each organization recognized that AI success fundamentally depends on clean, well-structured data and robust security protocols. This wasn't merely a technical checkbox but a business imperative that affected everything from customer trust to competitive positioning. The companies discovered that poor data quality could undermine even the most sophisticated AI capabilities, while strong data governance created the foundation for sustained AI success. The common thread across all three implementations is patience and methodology. Rather than rushing to deploy the latest AI features, successful companies invest time in organizational preparation, data quality, and strategic partnerships. For enterprise leaders embarking on AI initiatives, one lesson is clear. Getting the technology right is only half the battle at most. The real challenge lies in organizational transformation, data governance, and creating the cultural conditions for AI customer experience success. Companies that master these fundamentals position themselves not just for immediate AI benefits, but for long-term competitive advantage in an increasingly AI-driven marketplace.
CBS News
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Production underway on Season 2 of "The Pitt"
The second season of "The Pitt," a popular Pittsburgh-set medical drama starring Noah Wyle, has started production. The streaming service Max confirmed that work is underway on Season 2, posting behind-the-scenes photos of Wyle on Instagram, writing "Paging Dr. Robby." The show, which stars Wyle as Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch, has been lauded for its medical accuracy as well as its gripping real-time format, with 15 hour-long episodes covering a 15-hour ER shift. "This medical drama series offers a realistic look at the challenges healthcare workers face, as seen through the experiences of the frontline heroes at a Pittsburgh hospital," the description on Max reads. While most of the first season was filmed on a set in Burbank, California, that looked like Allegheny General Hospital, the show spent three days filming in Pittsburgh last September. The crew shot drone footage above the hospital and around the city, and some scenes were shot on the hospital's helipad. The show is expected to shoot some of the second season in Pittsburgh again, the Post-Gazette reports. "The Pitt" is produced by R. Scott Gemmill, John Wells and Michael Hissrich, all of whom have previously worked with Wyle on "ER." Wells and Hissrich are both Carnegie Mellon University graduates, giving the show even more of a Pittsburgh connection. The second season of "The Pitt" is slated for a January 2026 premiere, according to Variety. The current plan is for Season 2 to take place about ten months after the events of Season 1.
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Noah Wyle begins production on 'The Pitt' Season 2
June 16 (UPI) -- Max announced Monday that The Pitt has begun production on Season 2. Production is commencing on the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, Calif. with some Pittsburgh, Pa., exteriors. A photo shows Noah Wyle and Ken Kirby walking through the hospital, followed by a camera. Wyle plays Dr. Robinavitch, who presides over a team of doctors and nurses in a Pittsburgh hospital. The first season followed one shift with each hour representing an hour of real time. Kirby played a doctor introduced at 6 p.m. or episode 12. Tracy Ifeachor, Patrick Ball, Katherine LaNasa, Fiona Dourif and Isa Briones also star. Wyle reunites with his ER producer John Wells and also executive produces. R. Scott Gemmill created The Pitt. Max renewed The Pitt for Season 2 in February. The Season 1 finale aired April 10. Wyle discussed plans for the new season in May on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Season 2 will stream in January, by which time Max will revert its name back to HBO Max.
