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Merit Network Inc. Receives USDA Grant to expand high-speed internet access for rural Michigan.

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ANN ARBOR, Mich., Feb. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Merit Network is the recipient of a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant for $997,000 to develop a connectivity and digital equity strategy to promote the expansion of high-speed internet in underserved rural Michigan communities.

According to the USDA website, “Under the Broadband Technical Assistance Program, USDA is providing $9.7 million to help 24 organizations deliver or receive technical assistance to expand high-speed internet access for people in rural and Tribal communities across 17 states. This funding will also develop and expand broadband cooperatives in rural areas.” Merit Network is proud to be a recipient and to be able to serve more rural communities in need in Michigan.

“This grant provides a wonderful opportunity to help Michigan communities get on the right track to achieving broadband internet service and digital inclusion that improves quality of life and allows people to live, work, play and stay in the places they call home,” said Roger Blake President and CEO, Merit Network.

This project leverages the Digital Opportunities Compass framework to develop a community driven digital equity plan inclusive of infrastructure planning. This project includes several communities across eight rural communities of Michigan. Merit targeted communities that aligned with the funding opportunity best and also represented a need for additional resources targeted towards broadband expansion and digital equity planning.

The Compass was developed by academic researchers from the Quello Center at Michigan State University, Merit Network, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, and the Digital Equity Research Center. The work supported through USDA can include survey activities, educational programs, community planning facilitation, digital skills programming, and infrastructure planning and funding activities. This is an opportunity to expand previously piloted works following the launch of the Digital Opportunities Compass last year, an effort driven by the research division at Merit Network.

According to Charlotte Bewersdorff, Merit VP of Community Engagement, “This compass framework acts as a vehicle for community engagement and planning that results in knowledgeable local resources poised to take action with the backing of leadership, community organizations and others. The teams that support this work are both DE experts, researchers and practitioners of broadband expansion efforts. Our goal is to serve as an unbiased resource in facilitating multi-stakeholder digital equity planning at the local level.” This strategic approach aligns with the long-term goals of the Michigan Moonshot program, which aims to ensure sustainable and comprehensive digital equity across Michigan.

ABOUT MERIT NETWORK
Merit Network, Inc. is an independent nonprofit corporation governed by Michigan’s public universities. Merit owns and operates America’s longest-running regional research and education network. In 1966, Michigan’s public universities created Merit as a shared resource to help meet their common need for networking assistance. Since its formation, Merit Network has remained at the forefront of research and education networking expertise and services. Merit provides high-performance networking, IT, Security, and community engagement solutions to Michigan’s public universities, colleges, K-12 organizations, libraries, state government, healthcare, and other non-profit organizations. Merit Network aims to continue its efforts to promote digital equity and infrastructure expansion in rural communities within the state through the Michigan Moonshot initiative, which has been providing programs and services to facilitate broadband expansion and capacity building within local governments since 2018. For more information: www.merit.edu.

MEDIA CONTACT
Barnaby Pung
bjpung@merit.edu

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SOURCE Merit Network

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Closing Digital Literacy Gap Could Unlock Trillions of Dollars in Global GDP Growth

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 New report, authored by GSMA Intelligence in partnership with Huawei, released at UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week

PARIS, Sept. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — More than one in three (38%) people remains offline despite being covered by mobile broadband – and a lack of digital literacy skills is often to blame, according to new research published yesterday.

The new report, “Bridging the Divide: Enhancing Digital Literacy in the AI Era,” authored by GSMA Intelligence and produced in collaboration with Huawei, identifies a digital divide impacting 3.1 billion people caused by a shortage of digital skills, user trust and AI literacy.

AI raises both access and risk

Existing industry projections suggest closing the capability gap could add around $3.5 trillion to global GDP by 2030, with more than 90% of those gains flowing to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Physical mobile broadband coverage currently reaches 96% of people worldwide.

The report, unveiled at UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week, suggests artificial intelligence could act as both a bridge and a barrier for underserved communities. AI-powered voice assistants and applications that work with images, audio and video can all help low-literacy users bypass the need to input text. At the same time, they raise the security and critical-thinking standards required to participate safely. However, the study warns that users must now be able to understand data privacy and identify risks such as fraud and deepfakes.

The research cites World Bank statistics that GenAI literacy represents the highest-value skill category, with wage premiums up to 36%, far exceeding returns for both digital and traditional AI skills.

Without targeted interventions in basic digital training, the authors warn, rapid AI adoption risks entrenching existing inequalities even in areas with full network coverage.

Mobile classrooms build skills in remote areas

Digital inclusion initiatives typically target those most at risk of digital exclusion, including rural and remote communities, children and teachers in rural schools, older people, and women and girls.

The report emphasizes the need for community-based delivery models, citing Huawei’s Skills on Wheels initiative as a field-tested example — particularly its solar-powered DigiTruck mobile classrooms, which bring hardware, rural connectivity and hands-on training, including AI literacy, to off-grid regions.

Since 2019, training courses delivered by Skills on Wheels projects have reached more than 130,000 people across 21 countries, with more people benefiting indirectly. DigiTruck trainers encourage trainees to share their new skills, which is shown to occur in practice. A report on DigiTruck by Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and Digital Economy shows that 79% of DigiTruck trainees surveyed had passed on their newly acquired digital skills to family members and peers.

Policymakers urged to treat AI literacy as core infrastructure

To bridge the usage gap, the report urges policymakers, telecom operators and technology vendors to work together and focus on four priorities:

Treating practical AI awareness, online safety and information verification as a baseline national qualification.Adopting multilingual voice and conversational interfaces across public services to minimise user-side technical hurdles.Scaling up mobile learning units through cross-sector partnerships that combine operator connectivity, vendor technology and local NGO networks.Measuring performance by independent task completion and fraud resilience rather than trainee numbers.

“Digital literacy can no longer be defined by static thresholds,” said Tim Hatt, head of research and consultancy at GSMA Intelligence. “Connectivity alone is insufficient — capabilities, system design and trust must evolve together. To capture this multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, stakeholders must integrate layered AI literacy directly into daily livelihoods through trusted community channels.”

“Mobile classrooms have demonstrated immense value in helping underserved populations break through physical and psychological barriers to technology,” said Gavin Allen, Executive Editor-in-Chief at Huawei. “We will continue working alongside local governments and industry partners to drive digital literacy, ensuring that no one is left behind as we transition into the AI economy.”

A new DigiTruck program will launch in France this autumn, covering several cities in the Île-de-France region and targeting low-income and underserved communities with digital skills training.

The full report is available on the GSMA Intelligence research portal:

https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/research/research-file-download?reportId=83651&assetId=83691

SOURCE Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd

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BRAHMA AI Wins 2026 Technology & Engineering Emmy®

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Emmy Award recognises the foundational technology behind BRAHMA AI’s high-fidelity AI content platform

LONDON, Sept. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — BRAHMA AI has been named a recipient of a 2026 Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award for AI-Based Face Replacement and Performance-Preserving Post-Production Transformation. The award recognises BRAHMA AI’s Neural Performance technology.

The award honours systems that change a performer’s appearance while preserving natural expression, movement, lighting and scene realism, maintaining continuity across a sequence and adapting to changes in pose, lighting and occlusion.

BRAHMA AI is recognised alongside Disney Research, Rising Sun Pictures and Digital Domain, and is the only AI-native company among the four recipients.

“This Emmy® recognises technology that has been proven where the bar is highest: feature films, television and live production, in front of performers, directors and global audiences,” said Jo Plaete, Chief Technology Officer of BRAHMA AI. “Human creativity amplified by AI, with the performer and the authenticity of the performance kept at the centre, is the foundation of everything we build at BRAHMA AI. Being recognised at this level confirms that approach is dependable enough for the most demanding work in the industry.”

Human facial performance is one of the hardest problems in generative media. Small losses in timing, gaze or expression change the performance. BRAHMA AI’s Neural Performance technology was built to hold those qualities fixed while enabling controlled changes of age, likeness and identity.

The technology was proven at feature-film scale on Robert Zemeckis’s Here. Younger versions of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright were visualised on set in near real time, and the system delivered approximately one hour of final 4K transformation for the finished film. It has since been used across feature films, television, live performance and multilingual content, most recently on Ramayana, where BRAHMA AI’s technology delivers performance-preserving English-language lip-sync for the film’s international release.

The core methods are protected by US Patent No. 12,322,018, ‘Latent Space Editing and Neural Animation to Generate Hyperreal Synthetic Faces.’ The same research now underpins ATMAN, BRAHMA AI’s digital-human technology, and the wider BRAHMA AI platform for creating, localising and governing enterprise audiovisual content.

The 2026 Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards are presented by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and will be held on 14 October 2026 at the Television Academy’s Saban Media Center in North Hollywood, California, in a joint ceremony with the Television Academy’s Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy® Awards. The official recipients are listed at televisionacademy.com.

About BRAHMA AI

BRAHMA AI is the AI-native operating system for enterprise content. It enables organisations to understand, organise, create, localise and govern audiovisual content at scale. 

Built on its Mind² philosophy, BRAHMA AI combines human creativity with machine intelligence to deliver high-fidelity content, faster workflows and trusted global distribution. Born in media, sports and entertainment, BRAHMA AI brings production-proven AI to organisations across entertainment, advertising, healthcare and financial services.

Visit www.brahma.io.

 

 

 

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Tata Elxsi Invests in KAVIA AI to Scale AI-Driven Software Engineering for Products and Enterprises

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BENGALURU, India, Sept. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Tata Elxsi, a global leader in design and technology services, today announced a strategic investment in KAVIA AI, a Silicon Valley-based enterprise AI platform company. The investment strengthens the collaboration between the two companies to help enterprises manage, modernise, and transform complex software environments at scale.

As a global leader in AI and GenAI-driven product and software engineering, Tata Elxsi enables enterprises to implement the AI Development Lifecycle (AIDLC), accelerating architecture design, brownfield refactoring, software development, quality assurance, deployment, continuous monitoring and debugging across the product and software lifecycle.

The collaboration brings together Tata Elxsi’s expertise in domain-led engineering with KAVIA AI’s knowledge graph and workflow intelligence platform. Over the past one year, the companies have worked together to deploy the platform for enterprise engineering use cases, addressing challenges around industry-specific product and software engineering, accelerated release cycles, quality, resilience, and cybersecurity readiness.

Manoj Raghavan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Tata Elxsi, said, “Through STEP.UP, Tata Elxsi’s startup engagement program for high-potential deep tech companies, we have worked closely with KAVIA AI and seen the strength of its technology firsthand. This investment reflects our shared vision for AI-driven software engineering.”

Across industries, distributed teams have been creating millions of lines of code over the years using multiple repositories and diverse technology stacks to evolve enterprise products and platforms. As organisations face this complex brownfield environment, critical knowledge often remains fragmented across code, documentation, systems, tools, and teams.

While most AI tools focus on accelerating coding, KAVIA AI enables enterprises to scale across the AIDLC by combining persistent knowledge, governed engineering artifacts, collaboration, traceability, and deployment through a single platform.

Labeeb Ismail, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, KAVIA AI, said, “We are delighted with this strategic investment by Tata Elxsi and the trust it has placed in us. KAVIA AI brings system assets for enterprises to establish AIDLC workflows, operating models, and the checks and balances needed to operationalise AI across the software lifecycle. Together with Tata Elxsi, we look forward to shaping the future of software delivery.”

Building on this foundation, Tata Elxsi and KAVIA AI are working together to harness the power of AI responsibly and help organisations transform their products and services.

About Tata Elxsi

Tata Elxsi is a global design and technology leader, driving innovation at the intersection of design, digital, and engineering. With 35+ years of experience across industries, the company delivers end-to-end solutions for automotive, media, healthcare, energy, smart manufacturing and communications—from embedded systems to cloud-native platforms.

Tata Elxsi combines domain-led consulting, full-stack development, and system integration with a portfolio of award-winning AI and GenAI platforms.

By combining AI-first thinking with full-stack product engineering, Tata Elxsi enables organisations to move from GenAI experimentation to scaled deployment—securely, efficiently, and with confidence.

For more information, visit www.tataelxsi.com.

About STEP.UP

STEP.UP is Tata Elxsi’s startup engagement program for deep tech startups, combining co-creation and joint go-to-market engagement with an innovation fund. The program supports founders with strategic investment, engineering and design expertise, and access to global markets. By bridging innovation and commercialization, STEP.UP helps accelerate the journey from breakthrough ideas to industry-scale impact.

For more information, visit https://www.tataelxsi.com/step.up.

About KAVIA AI

KAVIA AI is the enterprise software engineering platform for complex codebases. KAVIA connects teams through code understanding, workflow automation, artifact generation, reviewable code and validation across repositories and environments.

The platform supports Visual Studio Code, CLI and Git-based workflows and offers customer-controlled deployment options and flexible model choices.

Learn more at kavia.ai.

General inquiries: Submit a request through the KAVIA AI Contact Page.

 

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