Insights Succeeding in the Digital Age: Why AI-First Leadership Is Essential While AI makes powerful operational efficiencies possible, it cannot yet replace the creativity, adaptability, and contextual understanding that humans bring to strategic decision making. Effective AI integration requires leaders who can act as bridges between organizational goals and AI capabilities and then inspire their teams to trust and adopt AI tools to help achieve those goals. To download the full report, tell us a bit about yourself. 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Project Render. Image credit: The Bentway The Bentway has announced its summer 2025 season of programming headlined by a new public art exhibition, Sun/Shade, a dance performance atop a large sand dune, and a city-wide installation of a moving forest. From now until October 5, Sun/Shade will explore the city’s changing relationship with these natural features. The art exhibition aims to bring together a mix of artists, designers, and researchers from Toronto and beyond to deploy natural light and shadow as creative tools, to reveal how new thinking about familiar resources can improve urban life. The Gardiner offers a canvas for the new art exhibition and experimentation. Stretching over 6.5 km, the elevated highway’s canopy provides the city with its largest continuous shadow, making the area a natural haven for those seeking sun and shade. This space will provide the benefits of both elements while also serving as a gathering place for community events, public art, recreation, and lively celebrations throughout the summer. “As extreme urban heat events rise in Toronto and cities everywhere, it’s even more vital to create accessible spaces where communities can maximize access to shade and stay protected from harsh light,” said Ilana Altman, co-executive director of The Bentway. “This season of programming explores how we must adapt to our changing climate and reshape our public spaces to balance the benefits of both sun and shade. Our creative collaborators are prompting us to recognize shade as an essential public resource and embrace sunlight as a creative collaborator.” Visitors will be able to experience the world premiere of Sand Flight from Norway choreographer Ingri Fiksdal and theatre director Jonas Corell Petersen, where eight dancers and a 50-person choir will descend on a massive sand dune exploring new traditions for changing climates. Carrying on the theme is Moving Forest by Amsterdam’s NL Architects, a mobile project featuring a flock of 50 trees travelling throughout the city, will bring shade to sunbaked urban sites across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). A key dimension of Sun/Shade explores the importance of shaded spaces for public health, anchored by a new partnership with The Bentway’s official Sun-Safety Partner, the David Cornfield Melanoma Fund. “Skin cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Canada, and the incidence of melanoma – the deadliest form of skin cancer – is rising. The best way to prevent skin cancer is to protect your skin from the sun,” said Danielle Paterson, executive director of the David Cornfield Melanoma Fund. “We are proud to partner with The Bentway on Sun/Shade, an amazing sun safety initiative that emphasizes the importance of accessible public shade in Toronto.” For more information, click here. The post Sun and shade take centre stage with The Bentway’s immersive summer program appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Mauricio Rocha | TaAU | Alejandro Castro | OMA | Michel Desvigne | Robert Moses | El Equipo Mazzanti | ContraFuerte |  Batlleiroig | Christian Kerez Earlier this year, news broke that levels of fine particulate matter in Paris had dropped by an astounding 55 per cent since 2005. Through a combination of regulation and public policy, the city has vastly reduced the number of cars on its streets, introducing bike lanes and public green spaces in the place of around 50,000 parking spaces. This issue is dedicated to roads and the architectures that support them. Cities around the world are reckoning with 20th-century car-oriented urban planning, as epitomised by Robert Moses’s New York (p36). Existing roads are increasingly repurposed for broader uses, prioritising pedestrians, cyclists and other forms of movement. São Paulo’s Minhocão has been gradually reclaimed by residents, and the restoration of a historical promenade in Reus is inclusive for all. Meanwhile, OMA’s new bridge in Bordeaux is designed to host public events – as well as six lanes of motorised traffic. Elsewhere, automobile infrastructure continues to expand; in Bahrain, four new car parks stand largely empty, and a roadside service station in Colombia is yet to be occupied. Roads promise prosperity and progress, often with expansionist ambitions; as Nadi Abusaada writes, ‘The road is both the myth and mechanism of the colonial frontier’.  Electric vehicles are now heralded as the future of transport, but as Nelo Magalhães writes in this issue’s keynote, ‘EVs do nothing to change the mass of roads or the issue of their maintenance’. The shift needed is more radical and wide‑reaching.  1522: Roads cover (above)Highway #5, Los Angeles, California, USA (2009) is part of Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration, an exhibition on view at the International Center of Photography in New York City until 28 September. In it, a motorway bulldozes its way through suburbia, sending out smaller branches that further subdivide it. Credit: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Flowers Gallery, London folio (lead image)Home follows a family living in a house next to an uncompleted motorway, who reclaim it, temporarily, as an extension of their home. Credit: Album / Alamy keynote How much does your road weigh? Nelo Magalhãesbuilding Malecón de Villahermosa by Taller de Arquitectura Mauricio Rocha, TaAU and Alejandro Castro in Villahermosa, Mexico Laure Nashed building Simon Veil bridge by OMA and Michel Desvigne Paysagiste in Bordeaux, France John Bingham-Hall reputations Robert Moses Andy Battlebuilding Control and operations centre by El Equipo Mazzanti and ContraFuerte in Bolombolo, Colombia Felipe Walter essay Cape to Cairo Sara Salem essay A short history of the roadblock Jan-Werner Müller outrage The Amazonian road to COP30 Martha Dillonrevisit Schlangenbader Straße estate in Berlin, Germany Sophie Lovell essay Living with the Big Worm Richard J Williamsbuilding Passeig de Boca de la Mina by Batlleiroig in Reus, Spain Blanca Pujals essay Taking Norway’s scenic routes Tomà Berlanda building Pearling Path car parks by Christian Kerez in Muharraq, Bahrain Oliver Wainwright typology Petrol station Tom Wilkinson essay The road is the frontier Nadi Abusaada

Tesla sales have rebounded in Norway this year, industry figures showed Monday, bucking a broader European trend as consumers turn away from Elon Musk's electric car brand.

Over a century ago, Henry Ford pioneered the mass production of cars and engines to provide transportation at an affordable price. Today, the technology industry manufactures the engines for a new kind of factory — those that produce intelligence. As companies and countries increasingly focus on AI, and move from experimentation to implementation, the demand for AI technologies continues to grow exponentially. Leading system builders are racing to ramp up production of the servers for AI factories – the engines of AI factories – to meet the world’s exploding demand for intelligence and growth. Dell Technologies is a leader in this renaissance. Dell and NVIDIA have partnered for decades and continue to push the pace of innovation. In its last earnings call, Dell projected that its AI server business will grow at least $15 billion this year. “We’re on a mission to bring AI to millions of customers around the world,” said Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive officer, Dell Technologies, in a recent announcement at Dell Technologies World. “With the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, enterprises can manage the entire AI lifecycle across use cases, from training to deployment, at any scale.” The latest Dell AI servers, powered by NVIDIA Blackwell, offer up to 50x more AI reasoning inference output and 5x improvement in throughput compared with the Hopper platform. Customers use them to generate tokens for new AI applications that will help solve some of the world’s biggest challenges, from disease prevention to advanced manufacturing. Dell servers with NVIDIA GB200 are shipping at scale for a variety of customers, such as CoreWeave’s new NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system. One of Dell’s U.S. factories can ship thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to customers in a week. It’s why they were chosen by one of their largest customers to deploy 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs in just six weeks. But how is an AI server made? We visited a facility to find out. Building the Engines of Intelligence We visited one of Dell’s U.S. facilities that builds the most compute-dense NVIDIA Blackwell generation servers ever manufactured. Modern automobile engines have more than 200 major components and take three to seven years to roll out to market. NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 servers have 1.2 million parts and were designed just a year ago. Amid a forest of racks, grouped by phases of assembly, Dell employees quickly slide in GB200 trays, NVLink Switch networking trays and then test the systems. The company said its ability to engineer the compute, network and storage assembly under one roof and fine tune, deploy and integrate complete systems is a powerful differentiator. Speed also matters. The Dell team can build, test, ship – test again on site at a customer location – and turn over a rack in 24 hours. The servers are destined for state-of-the-art data centers that require a dizzying quantity of cables, pipes and hoses to operate. One data center can have 27,000 miles of network cable — enough to wrap around the Earth. It can pack about six miles of water pipes, 77 miles of rubber hoses, and is capable of circulating 100,000 gallons of water per minute for cooling. With new AI factories being announced each week – the European Union has plans for seven AI factories, while India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Norway are also developing them – the demand for these engines of intelligence will only grow in the months and years ahead.

The Canada Council for the Arts is recognizing the potential of emerging architects and the contribution of practicing architects by awarding the following four prizes. The Canada Council contributes to the creative and diverse arts and literary scene, and supports their presence across Canada and around the world. The winners include the following: Prix de Rome in Architecture — Professional The Prix de Rome in Architecture – Professional is awarded to a young practitioner of architecture or an architectural firm that has completed their first built works and has demonstrated exceptional artistic potential. With this prize, the recipient may travel abroad to develop their skills and their creative practice, and to strengthen their position in the international architecture world. D’Arcy Jones ArchitectsPhoto: Shane Hauser This year’s winner is D’Arcy Jones Architects. D’Arcy Jones is the principal of D’Arcy Jones Architects (DJA), a Vancouver practice recognized for design excellence. DJA’s responses to contemporary conditions have earned awards and publications nationally and internationally. Their work focuses on arts, residential and commercial projects. Previous practice honours include an Architectural Institute of British Columbia Emerging Firm Award, a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Emerging Architectural Practice Award and the Ronald J. Thom Award for Early Design Achievement from the Canada Council for the Arts. Ronald J. Thom Award for Early Design Achievement The Ronald J. Thom Award for Early Design Achievement is given to a practitioner of architecture or an architectural firm. The successful candidate must be in the early stages of a career or practice and must demonstrate both outstanding creative talent and exceptional potential in architectural design. Odami. Photo: Arash Moallemi The latest winner, Odami, is an award-winning architecture and design studio that aims to “converge the pragmatic and the expressive, the subtle and the striking, the familiar and the unexpected.” Led by Arancha González Bernardo, a Spanish architect and Michael Fohring, a Canadian designer, the practice represents a merging of design values and histories, a process deepened by the contemporary multiculturalism of the city in which Odami lives and works. In embracing difference and purposely working between modes, perspectives and dichotomies, they’re in search of a fertile meeting ground—a space of conference and connection that gives rise to inventive outcomes.     Prix de Rome in Architecture — Emerging Practitioners Daniel Wong. Photo: Kabir Olatinwo The Prix de Rome in Architecture – Emerging Practitioners is awarded to a recent graduate from a Canadian architectural school who demonstrates exceptional potential in architectural design. With this prize, the recipient may visit architectural buildings and carry out an internship at an international architectural firm. The latest winner, Daniel Wong, is currently an intern architect at AAmp Studio, in Toronto. He holds a Bachelor of Architectural Science from the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) and a Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto. During his studies, he received several awards including the Barry W. Sampson Scholarship and the John and Myrna Daniels Foundation Opportunity Award. He also received the Kuwabara-Jackman Architecture Thesis Gold Medal for his research on architectural maintenance as a sustainable alternative for the built environment.   J.B.C. Watkins Award: Architecture Fabio Lima. Photo: Yixin Cao The J.B.C. Watkins Fellowship: Architecture is offered to an individual who has completed a bachelor’s or master’s degree in architecture in Canada and who will pursue postgraduate studies in another country, ideally Denmark, Norway, Sweden or Iceland. The latest winner, Fabio Lima is a graduate student and research fellow at Pratt Institute, in New York City, USA. His work explores the social archaeology of queer spaces by mobilizing the tools of historic preservation. Lima studied architecture at the Université de Montréal, in Quebec, and his work has been supported by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.           The post Canada Council announces Prix de Rome and J.B.C. Watkins Award winners appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Job DescriptionWe are looking for a highly organized and detail-oriented Administrative Assistant Intern to join our remote team from Germany, Norway, or Sweden.This internship is perfect for students or recent graduates who want to gain practical experience in remote administrative support, internal coordination, and virtual office operations.You’ll work closely with our operations team to support daily tasks, maintain documentation, and assist with internal communications.ResponsibilitiesManage scheduling, emails, and internal calendarsOrganize and update digital files and databasesAssist with reporting and document formattingSupport team members with admin tasks as neededHandle basic research and data entryCommunicate clearly via email and chat toolsRequirementsCurrently studying or recently graduated (any field welcome)Strong attention to detail and time managementExcellent communication skills in EnglishBasic familiarity with tools like Google Docs, Sheets, or Microsoft OfficeSelf-motivated and reliable in a remote work environmentMust reside in Germany, Norway, or SwedenStable internet connectionWhat We Offer🌍 100% remote internship🕒 Flexible schedule (5–15 hours/week)📁 Hands-on experience in admin support🤝 Mentorship from experienced professionals🚀 Opportunity for paid roles after internship✅ How to ApplyClick Apply to access our official application form. Please fill in your name, email, WhatsApp number, and upload your CV.We will review your application and contact shortlisted candidates via email or WhatsApp within a few days.We look forward to learning more about you!

The UK is deploying AI to keep a watchful eye on Arctic security threats from hostile states amid growing geopolitical tensions. This will be underscored by Foreign Secretary David Lammy during his visit to the region, which kicks off today.The deployment is seen as a signal of the UK’s commitment to leveraging technology to navigate an increasingly complex global security landscape. For Britain, what unfolds in the territories of two of its closest Arctic neighbours – Norway and Iceland – has direct and profound implications.The national security of the UK is linked to stability in the High North. The once remote and frozen expanse is changing, and with it, the security calculus for the UK.Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “The Arctic is becoming an increasingly important frontier for geopolitical competition and trade, and a key flank for European and UK security. “We cannot bolster the UK’s defence and deliver the Plan for Change without greater security in the Arctic. This is a region where Russia’s shadowfleet operates, threatening critical infrastructure like undersea cables to the UK and Europe, and helping fund Russia’s aggressive activity.”British and Norwegian naval vessels conduct vital joint patrols in the Arctic. These missions are at the sharp end of efforts to detect, deter, and manage the increasing subsea threats that loom over vital energy supplies, national infrastructure, and broader regional security.Russia’s Northern Fleet, in particular, presents a persistent challenge in these icy waters. This high-level engagement follows closely on the heels of the Prime Minister’s visit to Norway earlier this month for a Joint Expeditionary Force meeting, where further support for Ukraine was a key talking point with allies from the Baltic and Scandinavian states.During the Icelandic stop of his tour, Lammy will unveil a UK-Iceland tech partnership to boost Arctic security. This new scheme is designed to harness AI technologies for monitoring hostile activity across this vast and challenging region. It’s a forward-looking strategy, acknowledging that as the Arctic opens up, so too do the opportunities for those who might seek to exploit its vulnerabilities.As global temperatures climb and the ancient ice caps continue their retreat, previously impassable shipping routes are emerging. This is not just a matter for climate scientists; it’s redrawing geopolitical maps. The Arctic is fast becoming an arena of increased competition, with nations eyeing newly accessible reserves of gas, oil, and precious minerals. Unsurprisingly, this scramble for resources is cranking up security concerns.Adding another layer of complexity, areas near the Arctic are being actively used by Russia’s fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers. Putin’s vessels are crucial to his “High North” strategy, carving paths for tankers that, in turn, help to bankroll his illegal war in Ukraine.Such operations cast a long shadow, threatening not only maritime security but also the delicate Arctic environment. Reports suggest Putin has been forced to rely on “dodgy and decaying vessels,” which frequently suffer breakdowns and increase the risk of devastating oil spills.The UK’s defence partnership with Norway is deeply rooted, with British troops undertaking vital Arctic training in the country for over half a century. This enduring collaboration is now being elevated through an agreement to fortify the security of both nations.“It’s more important than ever that we work with our allies in the High North, like Norway and Iceland, to enhance our ability to patrol and protect these waters,” added Lammy.“That’s why we have today announced new UK funding to work more closely with Iceland, using AI to bolster our ability to monitor and detect hostile state activity in the Arctic.”Throughout his Arctic tour, the Foreign Secretary will be emphasising the UK’s role in securing NATO’s northern flank. This includes the often unseen but hugely significant task of protecting the region’s critical undersea infrastructure – the cables and pipelines that are the lifelines for stable energy supplies and telecoms for the UK and much of Europe.These targeted Arctic security initiatives are part and parcel of a broader, robust enhancement of the UK’s overall defence posture. Earlier this year, the Prime Minister announced the most significant sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War. This will see UK defence expenditure climb to 2.5% of GDP by April 2027, with a clear ambition to reach 3% in the next Parliament, contingent on economic and fiscal conditions.The significance of maritime security and the Arctic is also recognised in the UK’s ambitious new Security and Defence Partnership with the EU, agreed last week. This pact commits both sides to closer collaboration to make Europe a safer place.In today’s interconnected world, security, climate action, and international collaboration are inextricably linked. The turn to AI isn’t just a tech upgrade; it’s a strategic necessity.(Photo by Annie Spratt)Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

The Trump administration’s recent decision to bar international students from attending Harvard University was less a policy decision than an act of war. The White House had hoped its opening salvo against the nation’s oldest university would yield the kind of immediate capitulation offered by Columbia University. When Harvard chose to fight back instead, Trump decided to hit the university where it hurts most. The administration’s actions are illegal and were immediately stayed by a federal judge. But that won’t prevent real harm to students and higher learning. While Harvard has a famously selective undergraduate college, most of the university’s students are in graduate or professional school, and more than a third of those older students arrive from other countries. Overall, more than a quarter of Harvard’s 25,000 students come from outside the United States, a percentage that has steadily grown over time. The proportion of Harvard’s international students has increased 38 percent since 2006. Even if the courts continue to block this move, it will be difficult for anyone to study there knowing they might be deported or imprisoned by a hostile regime — even if they’re the future queen of Belgium. And an exodus of international students will end up harming universities far beyond Harvard, as well as American research and innovation itself. The question looming over higher education is whether the international student ban is merely the next escalation of the Trump administration’s apocalyptic campaign against a handful of elite institutions (as seen by the administration’s announcement Tuesday that it would cancel its remaining federal contracts with Harvard) — or the beginning of a broader attempt to apply “America First” protectionist principles to one the nation’s most valuable and successful export goods: higher learning. The rapid growth of international college students in the 21st century represents exactly the kind of global cooperation the isolationists in the White House would love to destroy. International students helped buoy American universities after the Great RecessionIn recent decades, international enrollment has shaped, and in some places transformed, higher learning across the country. According to the State Department, the number of annual F-1 student visas issued to international students nearly tripled from 216,000 in 2003 to 644,000 in 2015. And while many nations sent more students to America during that time, the story of international college enrollment over the last two decades has been dominated by a single country: the People’s Republic of China. In 1997, roughly 12,000 F-1 visas were issued to Chinese students; this was only a third of the number issued to the two biggest student senders that year, South Korea and Japan. Chinese enrollment started to accelerate in the early aughts and then exploded: 114,000 by 2010; 190,000 in 2012; and a peak of 274,000 in 2015. The change was driven by profound social and economic shifts within China. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution essentially shut down university enrollment for a decade. When it ended in 1976, there was a huge backlog of college students who graduated in the 1980s into the economic liberalization of Deng Xiaoping. Many of them prospered and had children — often only one — who came of age in the early 2000s. Attending an American university was a status marker and an opportunity to become a global citizen. At the same time, many colleges were newly hungry for international enrollment. The Great Recession savaged college finances. State governments slashed funding for public universities while families had less money to pay tuition at private colleges. Public universities offer lower prices to state residents and private schools typically discount their sticker-price tuition by more than 50 percent through grants and scholarships. But those rules only apply to Americans. Recruiting so-called full-pay international students became a key strategy for shoring up the bottom line. Colleges weren’t always judicious in managing the influx of students from overseas. Purdue University enrolled so many Chinese students so quickly that in 2013 one of them noted that a main benefit of traveling 7,000 miles to West Lafayette, Indiana, was improving his language skills — by talking to students from other regions of China. That same year, an administrator at a second-tier private college in Philadelphia told me that the college tried to keep enrollment from any one country below a certain threshold “or else we’d have to build them a student center or something.” While federal law prohibits colleges from paying recruiters based on the number of students they sign up, this, too, only applies within American borders. International students sometimes pay middlemen large sums to help them navigate the huge and varied global college landscape. While many are legitimate, some are prone to falsehoods and fraud. At the same time, colleges also used the new influx of students to expand course offerings, build strong connections overseas, and diversify their academic communities. One of the great educational benefits of going to college is learning among people from different experiences and backgrounds. There has likely never been a better place to do that than an American college campus in the 21st century. The most talented international students helped drive American economic productivity and research supremacy to new heights. F-1 visas declined sharply in 2016, in part because of an administrative change that allowed Chinese students to receive five-year visas instead of reapplying every year. But the market itself was also shifting. The Chinese government invested enormous sums to build the capacity of its own national research universities, giving students better options to stay home. Geopolitical tensions were growing, and American voters chose to elect a rabidly xenophobic president in Donald Trump. Covid radically depressed international enrollment in 2020, but even after the recovery, Chinese F-1 visas in 2023 were only a third of the 2015 peak. Colleges managed by recruiting students from other countries to take their place. India crossed 100,000 student visa for the first time in 2022. At the turn of the century, fewer than 1,000 Vietnamese students studied in America. Today, Vietnam is our fourth-largest source of international students, more than Japan, Mexico, Germany, or Brazil. Enrollment from Ghana has quintupled in the last 10 years.A catastrophe for American science and innovationIf the Trump administration expands its scorched-earth student visa strategy beyond Harvard, it won’t just be the liberal enclaves and snooty college towns that suffer. Communities across the country will feel the hurt, urban and rural, in red states and blue. Some colleges might tip into bankruptcy. Others will make fewer hires and produce fewer graduates for local employers. Even before the visa ban, the government of Norway set aside money to lure away American scholars whose research has been devastated by deep Trump administration cuts to scientific research. Other countries are sure to follow. And if international students stop coming to the US, it will be a catastrophe for American leadership in science and technology. World-class research universities are magnets for global talent. Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a worldwide center of medical breakthroughs because Harvard and its neighbor MIT attract some of the smartest people in the world, who often stay in the United States to found new companies and conduct research. The same dynamic drives technology innovation around Stanford and UC Berkeley in Silicon Valley, and in university towns nationwide. If you or a loved one benefited from a new cancer treatment, there’s a good chance the person who saved your life came to America on the kind of student visa the Trump administration is trying to destroy. Like printing the global reserve currency or having a good relationship with Canada, getting the pick of international students is one of those incredibly valuable things that Americans won’t fully appreciate until someone is stupid enough to throw it away. In 2021, JD Vance told a group of movement conservatives that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” The administration has more than made good on his word, in part because the electorate is rapidly reorganizing around education attainment, with college graduates clustering in the Democratic party and nongraduates moving to the Republican side. Trump and his minions see elite colleges and universities as enemy fortresses in the culture wars, training grounds for the opposition that must be razed and broken.Modern colleges look like the future that MAGA forces most fear. Visitors to campus today see students from scores of global communities, speaking multiple languages and practicing different cultural traditions. Places where people from other countries are welcome, and no single race, nationality, or religion reigns supreme. People like JD Vance are so terrified by this vision that they would rather destroy America’s world-leading higher education system and terrorize hundreds of thousands of people who are in this country legally and only want to learn. See More: