Latest news with #MichaelBlum
Japan Today
28-05-2025
- Politics
- Japan Today
Thousands rally in Israel for Gaza hostages on 600th day of war
Relatives and supporters of hostages held in Gaza since October 7 hold their portraits during a protest at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv By Sharon Aronowicz and Michael Blum Thousands gathered in Tel Aviv on Wednesday to support hostages still held in Gaza on the 600th day since the war began, urging a ceasefire to secure their release. Signs reading "The people with the hostages" were held aloft the packed crowd in the plaza dubbed Hostages Square after darkness fell over the Israeli coastal city. The meeting point has held regular rallies for the release of hostages since they were seized during Hamas's attack on Israel that triggered the war on October 7, 2023. "It's been more than 100 days since I was forced to leave my brother behind. As long as Eitan and the other hostages are not back, I am still in captivity," said Yair Horn, who was freed in February but whose brother is still held in Gaza. "You brought me home, do it again, end this war and bring back the 58 hostages," he added in a plea to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government ended the truce in mid-March and has escalated the military offensive in Gaza vowing to destroy Hamas and free the hostages. Hundreds of people gathered at intersections and on the main highway running through Tel Aviv at 6:29 am, the exact time the unprecedented October 7 attack began. Signs bearing the number 600 were placed along roads and demonstrations were held throughout the day. Several hundred people gathered at kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel, where nearly a quarter of residents were killed or taken hostage. "During the first days of captivity, I was convinced that (the army) and the State of Israel would do everything to bring us back in a few hours, at most a few days," said Karina Engel-Bart, whose husband was killed in the Hamas attack and is still in Gaza. "But I was wrong... there are still 58 of them in Gaza and they must be released now," she added. Engel-Bart was herself held hostage with her two daughters before all three were released during the first truce in the war at the end of November 2023. Situated near the border with Gaza, Nir Oz still has 14 of its residents held in the Palestinian territory, three of whom are believed to be alive. On the lawn of the kibbutz, former hostages, relatives of captives and residents mingled with people from across the country. While there were no placards, the yellow ribbons now associated with the hostages were seen on T-shirts and on the stage where speakers took turns addressing the crowd. Out of 251 hostages seized during the Hamas attack, 57 remain in Gaza including 34 the Israeli military says are dead. Hamas also holds the body of a soldier taken captive in a 2014 war. © 2025 AFP
Business Wire
27-05-2025
- Health
- Business Wire
BeeKeeperAI Enables Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Morehouse School of Medicine to Test the Performance of Healthcare AI Models in Their Environments
AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BeeKeeperAI®, Inc., a pioneer in privacy-enhancing, multi-party collaboration software for AI development and deployment, today announced that Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai will utilize BeeKeeperAI's EscrowAI® platform to rapidly test AI models on their real-world, multi-modal data in chronic heart failure (CHF). This milestone represents the first operational deployment certified under the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI)'s assurance service provider certification process, setting a precedent for how AI models can be responsibly tested and brought to market faster across institutions and populations. 'As we advance our mission to enable responsible, evidence-based AI, this is just the first of many collaborations where CHAI-certified service providers and health institutions will work together to ensure AI serves all patients,' said Dr. Brian Anderson, CEO of CHAI. 'We're proud to see Morehouse School of Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine, and BeeKeeperAI leading the way in developing trusted AI solutions.' MSM, Icahn School of Medicine, and BeeKeeperAI are all members of CHAI and have adopted its scorecard model for algorithm developers seeking to demonstrate real-world performance to the broader market. Their shared goal is to accelerate the responsible development, validation, and market adoption of AI that improves clinical decision-making, reduces hospital readmissions, and ensures needs-based outcomes—particularly for patients with lower resource availability who face disproportionate risk from chronic heart failure. 'To bring healthcare AI to market, speed matters—but so does trust,' said Dr. Michael Blum, MD, Co-founder and CEO of BeeKeeperAI. 'With EscrowAI, Icahn School of Medicine and Morehouse School of Medicine can enable AI developers to securely test their models on high-value, real-world data in days—not months—while preserving patient privacy and model IP. This is how we unlock faster, scalable, and equitable innovation in healthcare.' The curated datasets, based on shared specifications, include clinical, demographic, and social determinants of health data—offering a rare opportunity to assess algorithm performance across institutions serving predominantly resource-limited populations. 'Morehouse School of Medicine is committed to ensuring all patients have the opportunity to achieve optimal outcomes from treatment for chronic heart failure,' said Muhammed Y. Idris, PhD, Assistant Professor, Medicine and Co-Director, Center for the Validation of Digital Health Technologies and Clinical Algorithms at Morehouse School of Medicine. 'By enabling AI developers to securely compute on our data, we're creating the foundation for algorithms that can reduce readmissions and mortality for those most at risk.' 'AI has the potential to transform clinical care delivery, but only if models are proven to be accurate, safe, and effective in real-world and diverse settings,' said Tanvir Kahlon, MD, MBA, Assistant Professor, Advanced Heart Failure and Transplant, Interventional Cardiology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. 'Our work with BeeKeeperAI and Morehouse makes that assurance possible—without compromising privacy or integrity.' Accelerating Trustworthy & Responsible AI with Privacy-Enhancing Technology BeeKeeperAI's EscrowAI platform allows AI model testing inside a data steward's secure environment using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) with confidential computing—ensuring data privacy, regulatory compliance, and protection of IP throughout the process. As a recently certified CHAI Assurance Service Provider, BeeKeeperAI meets the highest standards for ethical and secure AI validation. EscrowAI replaces lengthy data access and contracting delays with push-button, compliant testing workflows —compressing timelines and accelerating time-to-value for algorithm developers. Developers can test and prove model performance on real-world, regulated data in a SOC 2-compliant environment aligned with CHAI's data integrity and scorecard framework. The resulting performance reports are immutable, transparent, and reproducible—creating a fast, scalable path to market evaluation and adoption. CHAI Assurance: A Market-Based Model for Responsible AI This collaboration reflects a broader shift in healthcare AI—from evaluations too often based on marketing presentations to more evidence-based, transparent assurance. CHAI's conflict-of-interest and ethics policies ensure independent oversight, while BeeKeeperAI's infrastructure delivers privacy-protected reproducibility, regulatory-grade audit trails, and speed-to-deployment. Together, they support faster validation and value-based procurement for AI solutions that work, including in populations that need them most. As part of this initiative, Icahn School of Medicine and Morehouse School of Medicine will be publishing data catalogs, enabling independent AI testing and validation to support the new benchmark for healthcare AI transparency and efficiency. About BeeKeeperAI BeeKeeperAI is the pioneer in privacy-enhancing technologies, integrating Trusted Execution Environments with confidential computing to accelerate AI validation and deployment in regulated sectors, including healthcare and government. BeeKeeperAI enables real-world data to be used safely and securely, without ever exposing it—empowering institutions to bring trusted AI to market faster. Learn more at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is an investor in BeeKeeperAI.
Business Insider
24-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Solar Stocks Bounce Back as Senate Disagrees with Clean Energy Cuts
Solar stocks like Sunrun (RUN), SolarEdge Technologies (SEDG), and Enphase Energy (ENPH) bounced back on Friday after taking a big hit the day before, which happened after the House passed President Trump's tax and spending bill. This is because analysts say that the bill could severely damage the U.S. residential solar industry. Indeed, Wells Fargo, led by five-star analyst Michael Blum, noted that the House bill is especially bad for Sunrun, Enphase, and SolarEdge, as it changes which tax credits apply to leased solar systems. Confident Investing Starts Here: Easily unpack a company's performance with TipRanks' new KPI Data for smart investment decisions Receive undervalued, market resilient stocks right to your inbox with TipRanks' Smart Value Newsletter Instead of using the 48E credit that runs through 2028, leased systems would now use the shorter 25D credit, which ends in 2025. As a result, this would hurt Sunrun's cash flow and increase costs for customers, which would make solar leases less attractive. While Array (ARRY) and Nextracker (NXT) would also be impacted, demand for utility-scale solar remains strong. In addition, First Solar (FSLR) is less affected since the bill keeps 45X credits, but some tax benefits tied to domestic panel use may disappear. Nevertheless, the Senate will now review the bill, and some Republican senators said that they want to change the deep cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act. The bill ends rooftop solar tax credits this year and shortens credits for larger solar and wind projects to 2028, unless 5% of the total cost is spent within 60 days. Interestingly, Guggenheim's five-star analyst, Joseph Osha, estimates that about 70% of the residential solar market relies on leasing or financing. It is also worth noting that the bill blocks most clean energy tax credits from being transferred, which could make it harder for manufacturers to raise money. Which Solar Stock Is the Better Buy Turning to Wall Street, out of the six stocks mentioned above, analysts think that RUN stock has the most room to rally. In fact, RUN's average price target of $11.46 per share implies more than 65% upside potential. On the other hand, analysts expect the least from SEDG stock, as its average price target of $14.57 equates to a loss of 13%.
Business Wire
15-05-2025
- Health
- Business Wire
BeeKeeperAI and cStructure Collaborate to Advance Causal AI for Scientific Advancement and Healthcare Innovation
AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- BeeKeeperAI ®, Inc., a pioneer in privacy-enhancing, multi-party collaboration software for AI development and deployment, and cStructure, a leading innovator in collaborative causal inference, today announced a collaboration for advancing causal AI to speed up the ability of scientists, health data stewards and AI algorithm developers to build and train AI models that can be trusted for scientific advancement and healthcare innovation. Causal AI is one of the next big frontiers for GenAI to be successful and more widely trusted in the healthcare and scientific fields − going far beyond just identifying patterns as traditional AI is known to do. The two companies are pioneering a novel, causal AI-centric approach that preserves patient data privacy, while enabling transparency, at scale, to better understand and model cause-and-effect relationships within health-related data, including data from large populations. The rigorous data analysis is captured in causal graphs that can be reliably used in high-quality, regulatory-grade life science. Ultimately, causal AI makes GenAI more trustworthy and compliant with regulatory-based best practices. To kick off this collaboration, BeeKeeperAI and cStructure are launching the ' Covid Causal Diagram DREAM Challenge,' a crowd-sourcing initiative that opens up access for scientists to analyze real-world COVID data from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a privacy-enhancing environment for the purpose of accelerating the determination of the causal relationships between treatment and patient outcomes. Causal AI is one of the next big frontiers for GenAI to be successful and more widely trusted in the healthcare and scientific fields − going far beyond just identifying patterns as traditional AI is known to do. Causal AI is an answer to the struggles of GenAI to consistently deliver the best possible factual information. Causal AI is designed to explain why something happened and what will happen. It is also a key to speeding up how regulatory bodies, such as the FDA, evaluate clinical studies that use AI. Critical to the advancement of causal AI are transparency, data privacy, efficiency and global access to real-world data. 'Our collaboration with cStructure is a perfect match to leverage GenAI for innovation at the speed of industry, combining BeeKeeperAI's privacy-preserving EscrowAI data platform and cStructure's causal diagram tech to accelerate the adoption of causal AI for improving human health,' said Dr. Michael Blum, MD, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at BeeKeeperAI. 'We're excited about our first project with cStructure to address the challenges of AI in health-centric applications. Through the DREAM Challenge, biomedical scientists will be able to compute on NIH data in our privacy-enhancing EscrowAI environment and have teams collaborate to build causal graphs. The results have the potential to change the way that the community thinks about causal relationships and transparency of AI in healthcare.' Erick R. Scott, MD, Founder of cStructure, said, 'We have made significant progress at cStructure in establishing a collaborative interface for developing causal diagrams that visually represent treatment effects, confounders, and outcomes. A necessary complement is a secure collaboration environment where AI models can compute on sensitive data while preserving privacy and protecting the intellectual property of the model. BeeKeeperAI delivers a privacy-preserving platform that automates the use of confidential computing, which provides the highest level of security for AI. We're proud to partner with BeeKeeperAI on the Covid Causal Diagram DREAM Challenge and on the opportunity to make causal AI mainstream for science and healthcare.' The DREAM Challenge Covid Causal Diagram DREAM Challenge asks participants to develop Structural Causal Models (SCMs) with the assistance of Large Language Models (LLMs). This causal diagram challenge focuses on the effect of glucocorticoids on 28-day survival rates in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The challenge opens May 15, 2025. The cStructure platform provides a collaborative causal graph interface that participants will use to develop models specifying relationships between patient characteristics, treatments, and outcomes. An integrated large language model assistant offers domain expertise and support. Challenge participants will have access to real-world data collected in NYC during the early stages of the global pandemic to train their SCMs. At the end of the challenge, submitted models will be securely evaluated within the remote EscrowAI enclave using data collected during a fit-for-purpose cohort study to simulate federated learning. 'We at DREAM Challenges are thrilled to work with cStructure and BeeKeeperAI on the Covid Causal Diagram DREAM Challenge — a groundbreaking effort and bold step toward harnessing causal AI to answer critical questions in medicine. By combining privacy-preserving technology with global scientific collaboration, we are advancing a future where AI not only predicts but explains, driving real breakthroughs for patient care,' said Gustavo Stolovitzky, PhD, Founder, Chair Emeritus and Director of DREAM Challenges. Models will be assessed on the following criteria: comparison with high-quality randomized controlled trial (RCT) results; proper adjustment for confounding; and plausibility of causal relationships in the submitted model. About cStructure cStructure transforms how teams understand cause and effect in complex data. Our intuitive platform merges generative AI capabilities with robust causal reasoning, enabling researchers to discover meaningful relationships without specialized statistical expertise. By visualizing causal relationships in an accessible collaborative environment, we help organizations across healthcare, academia, and industry extract trustworthy insights that drive innovation. Our collaborative approach embodies our core belief: Causality. Simplified. For more information, visit About BeeKeeperAI BeeKeeperAI is the pioneer in privacy-enhancing technologies, leveraging Trusted Execution Environments with confidential computing for the development and deployment of AI in regulated data industries, including healthcare and government. BeeKeeperAI is accelerating the broader availability of AI-powered solutions that will help to redefine the future of healthcare, commerce and government. For more information, go to
Business Insider
12-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Wells Fargo Keeps Their Hold Rating on Plains All American (PAA)
In a report released on May 9, Michael Blum from Wells Fargo maintained a Hold rating on Plains All American (PAA – Research Report), with a price target of $19.00. The company's shares closed last Friday at $16.44. Protect Your Portfolio Against Market Uncertainty Discover companies with rock-solid fundamentals in TipRanks' Smart Value Newsletter. Receive undervalued stocks, resilient to market uncertainty, delivered straight to your inbox. Blum covers the Energy sector, focusing on stocks such as Venture Global, Inc. Class A, Genesis Energy, and Kinder Morgan. According to TipRanks, Blum has an average return of 9.1% and a 62.15% success rate on recommended stocks. In addition to Wells Fargo, Plains All American also received a Hold from Morgan Stanley's Robert Kad in a report issued on May 9. However, on May 3, Seaport Global maintained a Buy rating on Plains All American (NASDAQ: PAA). Based on Plains All American's latest earnings release for the quarter ending December 31, the company reported a quarterly revenue of $12.4 billion and a net profit of $36 million. In comparison, last year the company earned a revenue of $12.71 billion and had a net profit of $312 million
