The Sunshine Coast has been recognised as one of the Top7 Intelligent Communities of 2019, sharing the global spotlight with communities from Canada, Taiwan and the United States including Chicago.

The announcement made overnight by the Intelligent Community Forum in Quebec, Canada, acknowledges those communities which exemplify best practices in broadband deployment and use, workforce development, innovation, digital inclusion, sustainability and advocacy.

In and of itself, the evolv1 office building is an impressive feat of engineering. Aptly situated in the “Idea Quarter” of the City of Waterloo, the evolv1 became Canada’s first project to receive a carbon-zero building certificate. So what better place to grow and develop the region’s burgeoning green industry?

That’s the intent with the official launch this week of evolvGREEN. A collaborative project to put the Region of Waterloo at the forefront of sustainable business and technology, evolvGREEN will operate from the green open office spaces of the evolv1 building, sending an important message in the process.

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The 2019 Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival will take place on Feb. 16 and Feb. 19, New Taipei City’s Tourism and Travel Department (TTD) said on Tuesday.

New Taipei City mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) said that the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival has evolved into a powerful tourist magnet over the years, and last year alone 6.98 million tourists visited Pingxi.

This year’s sky lantern festival will take place at Pingxi Junior High School from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 16, and at the Shifen Sky Lantern Square from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 19, when Taiwan celebrates the Lantern Festival.

Maddie Mitton never dreamed that she’d be serving coffee and meals to strangers.

“I had a lot of problems with insecurity so looking people in the eye was really hard,” Mitton said on Monday.

Mitton lives with a host of mental health challenges such as anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder.

A lab-produced chicken product created by a small startup company in downtown Edmonton is expected to be ready to serve within five years.

Future Fields, a three-person company that launched a year and a half ago, is hoping to break through in the growing cultured meat industry by producing chicken products in a lab rather than the traditional farm in order to meet the growing demand for protein.

The urban built environment isn't always accommodating to those who have nowhere else to go after the sun sets and temperatures plummet. Increasingly, urban design can be downright hostile to those sleeping on the streets.

This winter, however, the Swedish capital of Stockholm is offering a brilliant and big-hearted antidote to a sweep of anti-homeless "defensive design" tactics popping up in both European and American cities. To be clear, Stockholm isn't making special accommodations to those who find themselves hunkering down on park benches and on sidewalks — rough sleepers, as they're often referred. But it is transforming another ubiquitous street-side fixture, the digital billboard, into a helpful tool for getting city's homeless population indoors in frigid weather.

Mustamäe, one of the 8 administrative districts of Tallinn, has already a robot delivery service. At the moment the robots are working on an area of just few square kilometers because the robots move at the same pace as pedestrians, but the goal is to soon cover the entire city and later on the entire country as well. The robots can carry up to 10 kilograms, enough for a few bags of shopping. The delivery fee is 1.5 Euros per delivery.

A sculpture made of abstract glass pieces glows on a platform at the entrance of The Forge, the name the smart-tech startup Pillar uses for its space on the edge of Downtown.

“We ask people to say what it is. What do you see?” said Bob Myers, who is managing director of Pillar, an Accenture Industry X.0 company. “There are no wrong answers.”

The sculpture is supposed to activate left-brain thinking, spurring creative and innovative ideas on projects completed at the smart-tech hub, he said.

“When people come into The Forge, we want a no-constraints frame of mind. It doesn’t mean that there’s not restraints. Let’s just not start there,” Myers said.