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Washington AI Network Hosts AI Honors Gala, Honors Seven American Leaders in Artificial Intelligence

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Releases New Survey Findings on AI, Revealing a Sharp Divide Between Heavy AI Users and the General Public

WASHINGTON, June 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Washington AI Network’s second annual AI Honors, Washington’s only black-tie AI gala, drew more than 400 leaders from government, tech, and academia last night to honor seven Americans shaping the future of artificial intelligence (AI), with new polling showing that the technology is already reshaping how ordinary Americans make their most consequential decisions.

Here are the 2026 AI Honors Awardees

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) accepted the Bipartisan Leadership on AI Award presented by actor Michael KellyEntrepreneur Kevin O’Leary—a.k.a. Shark Tank’s Mr. Wonderful—(video interview) received the AI Global Ambassador Award from Ireland’s Ambassador to the United States Geraldine Byrne NasonNVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky received the Founder’s Education Accelerator Award from CNN anchor Pamela BrownOmidyar CEO Michele Jawando (video interview) was presented the Civic Technology Leadership Award by DC Mayor Muriel BowserMajor General Patrick J. Ellis, commanding general of the 4th Infantry Division and Fort Carson, received the AI Leadership Award from Army Secretary Dan DriscollDr. Katherine (Kathy) Yelick (video interview) received the Public Science Award from Dr. Darío Gil who serves as both the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Director of the Genesis Mission

The evening featured remarks by the newly appointed papal nuncio, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia; NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky; Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, and entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary.

“This gathering itself represents something that Pope Leo calls for in his recent encyclical entitled Magnifica Humanitas, a shared document involving many sectors of society. The future of this technology cannot be guided by one field alone. It needs science and policy, business and public service, ethics and faith,” said Archbishop Gabriele Caccia. “From the beginning, at every stage, the development and application of artificial intelligence must be guided by the dignity of the human person and by the common good of the human family.”

“Energy is what drives progress. It’s what drives innovation. It’s what lifts people’s standard of living up. We need to get our act together with electricity,” said Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “We’ve tripled our oil production, doubled our natural gas production — but energy in the form of electricity, we’ve barely grown in twenty years. We do not want to hold back this technology or push this technology overseas by not delivering the electricity.”

NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky said, “The AI era will give the next generation of students and workers the most powerful tools ever created to learn, build, and discover. And even beyond this, it will help reindustrialize America and shape our next 250 years. But to realize that future, we must empower all to reach their full potential. And it’ll take industry, government, and academia working together to get it right.”

Making the case that AI hesitation — not AI ambition — is the real threat, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll said, “The biggest risk to our national security is not moving too fast. It’s not moving fast enough.”

Entrepreneur and honoree Kevin O’Leary escalated his months-long fight over his proposed Utah data center, accusing China of funding a coordinated disinformation campaign against American energy and AI infrastructure projects — and vowing to press forward regardless. “I’m going to use my voice to fix this,” O’Leary said. “I’d never seen this before. It’s wrong. And as far as Box Elder County is — I’m going to build this data center. I’m going to build it as a shining example of what we can do here in America.”

“When the Secretary of the Army, a cofounder of NVIDIA, a serial entrepreneur, a National Lab director, and the Vatican’s representative to the United States are all on one stage, this is Washington at its best,” said Washington AI Network founder and CEO Tammy Haddad. “The Washington AI Network has been the catalyst for how Washington talks about AI, and last night, it was the moment for celebrating those leading Washington — and the world — into what comes next.”

During the AI Honors Gala, the Washington AI Network and Morning Consult released findings from a national poll of 1,501 U.S. adults examining how Americans use, trust, and want to govern artificial intelligence (AI). The survey, conducted May 27–30, 2026, comes as policymakers, industry, and the public face the rapid disruption and integration of AI into health, finance, work, and this year’s elections.

The poll surfaces three new insights: (1) about a quarter of Americans are turning to AI for high-stakes personal decisions on health, money, and legal questions — making AI a de facto doctor, accountant, and lawyer; (2) 70% of Americans across the political spectrum are concerned about AI’s role in the 2026 elections; and (3) views on AI are sharply divided between the nearly 20% of Americans who use AI daily and everyone else, who answer questions about trust, elections, and institutions 20 to 40 points apart.

The event, which was emceed by CNN anchor Pamela Brown, was aired on C-SPAN. Watch the entire AI Honors program on Washington AI Network’s YouTube

Photos are available HERE (Getty Images for the Washington AI Network with captions).

Website: www.washingtonainetwork.com

About Washington AI Network
Launched in July 2023 in response to the growing policy questions around artificial intelligence (AI), the Washington AI Network is a bipartisan forum focused on education, dialogue, and progress around AI innovation and governance – bringing the right people together to move the conversation and the country forward. The Washington AI Network is powered by Haddad Media.

Contact: media@washingtonainetwork.com

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How Cool Is Shenzhen? Just Ask Global Journalists Who Come to See It

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SHENZHEN, China, Sept. 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — “Shenzhen may well be the world’s No. 1 innovation hub. And together, Shenzhen and Hong Kong form the perfect endpoint of the modern Silk Road.”

That was the glowing verdict American economist Jeffrey Sachs delivered in Shenzhen just over a month ago, effectively giving the city one of the highest-profile stamps of approval in the world of development economics.

Sachs is hardly an ordinary commentator. One of the world’s most influential authorities on sustainable development, and for years a special adviser to the UN secretary-general, he knows a thing or two about how cities and economies grow.

In a recent exclusive interview with Zhi News (from Shenzhen Media Group), Sachs shared his in-depth views. The following is the full report:

when representatives from APEC economies come to Shenzhen, they are bound to be impressed. They will discover that the city is not merely a great place to find capital and business partners, but also a window into entirely new models of development—and perhaps a glimpse of what the future could look like.

After decades of trailblazing development, Shenzhen has more than earned that kind of academic attention. It is, after all, a city built on miracles and a straight-A student in the school of urban development.

The more you admire Shenzhen, the more you begin to understand why it deserves admiration. That, to me, is precisely where the real significance of Shenzhen’s development lies: not simply in what the city has achieved, but in what its experience tells us about where the world may be heading.

As a journalist, I would put it this way: Shenzhen is a mother lode for anyone trying to understand China. For global academia, and perhaps even more so for the world’s media, it is a gold mine of stories, ideas and opportunities.

Over the past year or two, a curious phenomenon has swept across Western social media and, increasingly, Western society itself: China-maxxing, sometimes jokingly described as “becoming Chinese.”

“You met me at a very Chinese time in my life.”

Yes, that viral internet phrase borrows its punchline from the Hollywood classic Fight Club. Earlier this year, The New York Times offered a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek description of the trend in one of its features:  If you drink hot water, wear slippers indoors or shop at Asian supermarkets, you may be Chinese, according to the internet.

But here is what caught my attention.

When it comes to Shenzhen—and China more broadly—Western mainstream media can sometimes be surprisingly slow on the uptake. Take China-maxxing. It only became a mainstream media story, splashed across newspapers and television screens, earlier this year—more than six months after a Twitter user, @Girl_virus, first posted about “becoming Chinese.”

To put it bluntly, China-maxxing was not exactly handed down to the mainstream media from above. The world’s netizens pushed it up there.

The New York Times even framed the provocative question this way in a headline: From Labubu to “becoming Chinese,” has China become cool?

Well, if the Times’ reporter comes to Shenzhen, I’ll make a pretty safe bet: he or she will come away thinking, Shenzhen is super cool.

So here’s my advice to my fellow journalists around the world: follow the lead of those pioneering scholars. Get closer to Shenzhen. Walk into Shenzhen. Stay a little longer. Look a little deeper. And then go farther afield.

There are simply too many fascinating stories here waiting to be told—and too many forces behind those stories waiting to be decoded.

And here’s the best part.

More than two decades ago, Shenzhen residents already had the confidence to put it into one unforgettable slogan:

“Once you come, you’re a Shenzhener.”

I suspect foreign correspondents arriving in Shenzhen today may discover their own version of that old Shenzhen experience:

Come for the story. Stay for the experience. Leave having become, at least a little bit, a Shenzhener.

And trust me, it’s going to be quite an experience. 

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SOURCE Shenzhen Media Group

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Datamaran Appoints Bert Sinnema as Chief Technology Officer

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LONDON, NEW YORK and LEEUWARDEN, Netherlands, Sept. 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Datamaran, the AI-powered risk and governance software provider, today announced the appointment of Bert Sinnema as Chief Technology Officer. Based out of the company’s Leeuwarden office in the Netherlands, Sinnema will lead Datamaran’s global engineering and product teams, including the engineering hub in Valencia, Spain, driving the technology and product vision behind the platform that helps organizations understand and manage evolving risks and opportunities.

As CTO, Sinnema will own Datamaran’s product vision, strategy, and technology roadmap, from setting direction to architecture, delivery, and the teams building it. He steps into the role at a pivotal moment for the company, as Datamaran deepens its use of AI across the platform to give customers faster, more decision-ready insights into risk, regulation, and stakeholder expectations. His mandate: lead the engineering and product organization, accelerate the pace of AI-driven product development, and ensure the platform keeps pace with the increasingly complex and fast-moving risk landscape.

A track record scaling product engineering teams

Sinnema brings more than 12 years of product engineering leadership experience spanning startups, scale-ups, and category-leading platforms, with deep expertise at the intersection of engineering, cybersecurity, and AI. He joins Datamaran from Eye Security, Europe’s fastest-growing cybersecurity company, where he served as VP of Engineering and built the product and engineering organization from the ground up, scaling the multi-hub international team 3x and helping the company reach a €60M Series C round.

Before Eye Security, Sinnema spent over three years at HackerOne, the world’s leading ethical hacking and bug bounty platform, rising to Director of Engineering. Earlier in his career, Sinnema founded and served as CTO of SmartLockr, a secure communications and privacy platform he bootstrapped, scaled across three countries, and took through Microsoft’s Ventures Accelerator in Berlin.

Building for Datamaran’s next chapter

“Bert has spent his career building engineering organizations from the ground up and scaling them through some of the most demanding environments, including as a founder himself. He knows firsthand what it takes to turn conviction into something real, and to keep adapting as the market evolves,” said Marjella Lecourt-Alma, CEO and co-founder of Datamaran. “As Datamaran evolves from ESG issue management into an AI-powered governance platform, Bert’s founder mindset and experience building teams, technology, and culture make him exactly the right leader to shape what comes next for our teams, customers, and partners.”

“I like to operate at the intersection of product engineering leadership and AI, where the hardest problems live, and the highest-leverage decisions get made,” said Sinnema. “Datamaran is applying AI to help organizations navigate a genuinely complex risk landscape, and I’m excited to bring my experience building and scaling engineering and product organizations to that mission. This is the most interesting time to be building in tech, and I’m looking forward to being in the middle of it with the team.”

Contact: Helen Skeen, Director of Communications and Insights: helen.skeen@datamaran.com.

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Diving deeper into real-life home demands, EZVIZ brings next-generation home innovations and products to IFA with expanded application scenarios

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HOOFDDORP, Netherlands, Sept. 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — This IFA, EZVIZ explores new frontiers with its full-range products in the smart home hall 1.2. Under the theme “Accelerating Innovation”, the company creates an immersive experience at booth 175, featuring anticipated debuts that highlight its leadership in self-developed smart home security and home entry products, and introducing next-generation devices powered by local-first EZVIZ AI. EZVIZ also builds excitement by unveiling brand-new smart cleaning robots and wearable electronics for stay-at-home and on-the-go lifestyle needs.

“EZVIZ has prepared a technological feast, with each line-up full of hardcore innovations,” said Chris Xu, General Manager of EZVIZ’s International Business Center. “Especially in Europe, where we’ve developed our portfolio and services for over a decade, we offer global solutions and Europe-tailored options rooted in insights and localization.”

As the hall’s largest stand, EZVIZ designs 5 interlinked areas, allowing audiences to embark on a journey from visual protection and add-on home convenience to robotic fun and future imagination.

For its renowned smart home cameras, EZVIZ aims to lead with an innovative leap in technology and product design.

The triple-lens 90f series for ultra-vision: Upgraded from the 90 Duals, the wired H90f and battery-powered HB90f pack three lenses, ushering in the triple-lens era of professional-level awareness. They are designed to cover visible distance with 12x mixed zoom, capturing details that are easy to miss across broad areas like ranches.The dual-lens 3K series for compact, mobile security: With the basic CB30 and advanced CB60 models, this series embodies flexibility enabled by high-capacity batteries and magnetic bases. The CB60 further maintains a clear view beyond Wi-Fi range with 8x zoom and switchable 4G-WiFi connectivity.

EZVIZ further expands the potential of smart cameras with EZVIZ AI, delivering the EZVIZ MIRA advanced model system directly on devices to unlock advanced detection and management.

EZVIZ AI CoreX home station: Bringing EZVIZ MIRA to the local level, EZVIZ delivers uncompromised AI performance through the masterpiece edge model AI CoreX. Acting as a private home station without reliance on the cloud, it offers large file storage, smart search with text, photos and videos, and multi-device management, without needing to be online.Local-first AI solutions: Making local AI features accessible at all levels, EZVIZ integrates the power of local AI chips on end devices with AI capabilities on edge devices, and by offering flexible AI home plans. Users can either enable detection features on standalone cameras without subscriptions, or customize scalable systems by adding AI CoreX or other home hubs like the X6.

In smart entry, EZVIZ introduces new line-ups for broader scenarios.

Smart AI locks: From DIY options to high-end choices, EZVIZ offers a complete understanding of smart locks. Among them is the flagship DL50FVX, integrated with pioneering technologies. It provides on-device palm vein and facial unlocking, enhanced awareness with dual lenses and a built-in screen.Doorbells & peephole cameras with add-on AI: EZVIZ showcases versatile options, from door viewers to dual-lens video doorbells that keep entrances connected. The state-of-the-art EP8 Ultra marks a new chapter in video doorbells, providing thoughtful care beyond security with its interactive local AI screen.Smart entry systems for villas: Designed for interaction at gates and driveways, EZVIZ presents systematic solutions with the representative HP7 Pro Video Doorphone and HG2 600 Pro Gate Opener. The HP7 Pro ditches bulky intercoms, offering keyless entry, 4K awareness and centralised management, while the HG2 600 Pro delivers lag-free vehicle access.

For more information, please visit ezviz.com/page/ifa2026.

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