General Motors Company (NYSE: GM) announced it has developed new technology to aid workplace safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. And the company is sharing its innovations with the world for potential use in job sites as diverse as manufacturing plants, offices, or even schools. The new technologies include an automated kiosk for temperature scanning and software for contact tracing and a mobile app for touchless printing.

While developing to aid the companys workplace protocols, GM made these tools available to the public for potential use in any workplace, school, or facility. GMs in-house software developers developed solutions aimed at helping employees return to work with more confidence, streamlining, and improving workplace safety protocols.

Thermal Scanning Kiosk

At GM workplaces and many other kinds of facilities today, safety protocols call for an entry process that includes a temperature evaluation, which is normally administered by another worker. GM developed new software code that integrates the operation of an infrared thermal camera with a computer and monitor, automating and streamlining the entire process.

Utilizing open-source code from the OpenCV project, the system automatically detects when someone has stepped in front of the camera and checks for an elevated skin temperature, indicating it is either safe to proceed or the entrant needs further evaluation. And the process can take as little as 1-2 seconds, thus relieving bottlenecks at workplace entry points and reducing physical contact between workers. The scanning is also effective when the worker is wearing a mask or face covering.

Kiosks are in use at a number of GM offices and plants acrossthe United Statesand will expand to other global locations soon. Even though the actual kiosk GM built is for its own facilities, the innovation that makes it work can be applied in many other kinds of workplaces. And the software is available to help any workplace or facility with similar entry scanning processes.

Workplace Contact Tracing

Developers around the world are designing technology solutions to improve contact tracing. GM had made significant improvements to Covid Watch, which is an open-source contact tracing application by adding real-time social distance alerts, boosting performance on both iOS and Android devices and adding support for Bluetooth beacons. And GM will release its open-source software soon, helping developers worldwide who are collaborating on open-source solutions to aid contact tracing.

GM is testing a mobile app that would create a record for the employee, listing other users with whom he or she has been in contact. And it can help medical staff reach employees that had contact with a worker testing positive for COVID-19 while maintaining privacy and security. The app also constantly computes the physical distance between users and can send an alert to help encourage safe behavior. GM is planning a pilot to test the application soon.

Touchless Print

The new Touchless Print mobile web application now enables employees to print documents without touching the printers control panel, which instead uses a QR code scanned through the employees mobile phone. This process is not only safer, but very quick and extremely simple.

This app is in use now at GM facilities worldwide for iOS and Android devices and exclusive to HP printers. And the open-source software for the app was released earlier this month.

These innovations are considered the latest in a series of pandemic-response actions from the company, including production of critical care ventilators and personal protective equipment like masks, face shields and N95 respirators.

KEY QUOTES:

We developed an extensive playbook for a safe return to work for our employees, and were seeing very good success. As we implemented the protocols, GM software developers started to work on how technology could make the process smoother and more precise.

GM medical director Dr.Jeffery Hess

We had to respond quickly to the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic created for our workforce. Our teams collaborated online with experts around the world to quickly innovate and support the safe return of our employees to the workplace. We know many of these challenges affect others globally. We felt it important to share our innovation so other companies, organizations, and institutions could benefit from our experience.

GM executive vice president and chief information officer Randy Mott

We believe our application advances the state of the art when it comes to mobile apps for contact tracing, which is the subject of massive software development efforts across multiple industries today.

Tony Bolton, GM chief information officer of Global Telecommunications and End-User Services

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GM Creates And Shares New Workplace Safety Technologies - Pulse 2.0

Las Vegas, Aug. 13, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (via Blockchain Wire) -Aspire Technology, developer of digital asset creation technologies, has launched the mainnet of its first-of-a-kind digital asset creation technology, Aspire (www.aspirewallet.com). Digital assets have been a key part of the growth of the blockchain, including the rapid growth of digital collectibles and new public blockchains during the pandemic.

Simply put, the Aspire platform consists of Aspire (ASP), which is currently only available through its airdrop campaign, with the first 10,000 users receiving sufficient Aspire and Aspire Gas (GASP) to create one full-fledged digital asset, each of which can comprise up to 92 billion tokens. Aspire Gas acts like bitcoin does for Counterparty, which was the platform for 30 of the top 100 tokens by market capitalization in 2014-15.

The Aspire platform improves upon the standard Counterparty open-source code, but grafts in an automated checkpoint server to prevent 51 percent attacks that have caused many other blockchains to be attacked and lose funds, including two successful attacks on top 25 token Ethereum Classic this month, resulting in the loss of nearly $2 million. Aspire is also not subject to miner attacks, as recently happened to top 100 token Ravencoin, where an attack that exploited a weakness in the mining algorithm allowed for hackers to create and then steal nearly $6 million of Ravencoin by artificially expanding the block reward. Many other platforms have suffered one of these two common exploits that Aspire is immune from; even bitcoin can theoretically be 51 percent attacked, but it would cost an extraordinary amount of energy to pull off.

As we move into the second decade of cryptocurrency, there is still no easy solution for non-technical or technical users to create and customize a digital asset quickly and put it on a highly secure blockchain, said Jim Blasko, CEO and co-founder of Aspire Technology and core developer of the Aspire platform. Aspire solves this problem, and the Aspire Gas blockchain that it is teamed with solves the problem of excessive fees and slow throughput on most major blockchains. We believe Aspire is poised to be a leading creator of digital assets globally.

About Aspire Technology and the Aspire platformAspire Technology is a leading developer of digital asset creation technologies. It was incubated from the bCommerce Labs accelerator fund and other angel investors. The Aspire platform, which consists of the Aspire (ASP) digital asset creation platform and Aspire Gas (GASP) blockchain, is the first digital asset creation platform to resist both mining exploits and 51 percent attacks that are common to proof-of-work blockchains. For more information, contact info@aspirecrypto.com.

Read more from the original source:

Aspire Technology Launches First Truly Secure Public Blockchain for Creation of Digital Assets - GlobeNewswire

IBM was highly commended in the Best Social Good Campaign category at The Drum B2B Awards 2019. Here, the team behind reveals the challenges faced and the strategies used to deliver this successful project.

The challenge

IBM had a problem. Research showed we were losing the confidence of developers.

They were consistently ranking us in the bottom 10, if at all, behind our competitors in:

Innovation

Open Source Support

Community Advocacy

Technical Prowess

Humanity had a bigger problem. Natural disasters of apocalyptic proportion are occurring at a more rapid rate than ever before.

The strategy

We decided to hand over our code patterns (AI, IOT, Blockchain, Cloud) and unleash the creativity of developers from around the world to take on humanitys greatest challenge: the wrath of Mother Nature.

With key partners, we launched a global challenge that asked developers to use technology to address natural disaster preparedness and recovery and ultimately help save lives. Hosting the biggest hackathon in the world, would put our technology in the hands of new audiences and help IBMs pioneering capabilities and ethos shine through.

We needed to connect with developers but do so by avoiding traditional marketing efforts which they would ignore. Putting our code into their hands, gave us an opportunity to celebrate their creativity, compassion and inherent need to solve problems. We could bring attention to them with authenticity by putting them front and center rather than ourselves.

In addition, a documentary would turn the spotlight on what ingenuity can achieve and reveal the hard work and unique characters of coders from around the world. It would also be a way to inspire even more engagement and involvement from developers, employees, students, volunteers and partners in 2019.

The campaign

The best way to connect with our audience (18-34 year-old coders) was to give them our code and a problem they cared about to solve. Instead of advertising our story, we told theirs. We used the entries and hackathon events as a source for casting the documentary and along the way we captured footage of disasters as they happened, making sure that we presented the challenge as a global problem that had no regard for who, what or where--Mother Nature does not discriminate.

After hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of miles traveling to events, we found a diverse and global cast. The movie had to be cinema-worthy. We did not want to shoot a corporate brand video...so we removed the brand. It was a risk but we knew that is was true to our original strategy: this is about developersnot IBM.

We wanted to raise their profiles, so we needed to introduce them to new audiences, which meant filming a movie worthy of that larger audiences time - inclusive of beautiful photography and superior production design. These were a new set of first responders and we wanted to introduce them to audiences by creating a story that was worthy of theatrical release and eventual distribution.

The results

The film is won awards at several film festivals around the country and is now in negotiations for formal distribution.

We screened it for over 300 IT professionals at our largest annual event called Think and the film was rated 4.9 out of 5.0 (our highest-rated session ever).

In the process of making the film, we established a global platform for developers to drive positive change through the code they create for the greater good of all.

We created enough momentum that the movies name Code & Response became the name for the overall initiative IBM launched at CES in 2019: a new $25 million, four-year initiative to fortify, test and launch open source technology to help communities needing critical aid.

From Think event feedback:

Moved me to tears! So awesome! Thanks all! What an inspiring film Fantastic story and a great piece of community involvement and support. Very inspiring stories and awesome that IBM is supporting the execution of these life-saving solutions.

The project as a winner at The Drum B2B Awards 2019. To find out which Drum Awards are currently open for entries, click here.

// Featured in this article

IBM

IBM is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries.

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IBM asked software developers to take on the wrath of Mother Nature - The Drum

In this post, you learn how the new CDK construct library for the serverless LAMP stack is helping developers build serverless PHP applications.

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open source software development framework for defining cloud application resources in code. It allows developers to define their infrastructure in familiar programming languages such as TypeScript, Python, C# or Java. Developers benefit from the features those languages provide such as Interfaces, Generics, Inheritance, and Method Access Modifiers. The AWS Construct Library provides a broad set of modules that expose APIs for defining AWS resources in CDK applications.

The Serverless LAMP stack blog series provides best practices, code examples and deep dives into many serverless concepts and demonstrates how these are applied to PHP applications. It also highlights valuable contributions from the community to help spark inspiration for PHP developers.

Each component of this serverless LAMP stack is explained in detail in the blog post series:

The CDK construct library for the serverless LAMP stack is an abstraction created by AWS Developer Advocate, Pahud Hsieh. It offers a single high-level component for defining all resources that make up the serverless LAMP stack.

Building complex web applications from scratch is a time-consuming process. PHP frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony provide a structured and standardized way to build web applications. Using templates and generic components helps reduce overall development effort. Using a serverless approach helps to address some of the traditional LAMP stack challenges of scalability and infrastructure management. Defining these resources with the AWS CDK construct library allows developers to apply the same framework principles to infrastructure as code.

The AWS CDK enables fast and easy onboarding for new developers. In addition to improved readability through reduced codebase size, PHP developers can use their existing skills and tools to build cloud infrastructure. Familiar concepts such as objects, loops, and conditions help to reduce cognitive overhead. Defining the LAMP stack infrastructure for your PHP application within the same codebase reduces context switching and streamlines the provisioning process. Connect CDK constructs to deploy a serverless LAMP infrastructure quickly with minimal code.

Code is a liability and with the AWS CDK you are applying the serverless first mindset to infra code by allowing others to create abstractions they maintain so you dont need to. I always love deleting code

Says Matt Coulter, creator of CDK patterns An open source resource for CDK based architecture patterns.

The cdk-serverless-lamp construct library is built with aws/jsii and published as npm and Python modules. The stack is deployed in either TypeScript or Python and includes the ServerlessLaravel construct. This makes it easier for PHP developers to deploy a serverless Laravel application.

First, follow the Working with the AWS CDK with in TypeScript steps to prepare the AWS CDK environment for TypeScript.

Deploy the serverless LAMP stack with the following steps:

The cdk-serverless-lamp construct library uses the bref-FPM custom runtime to run PHP code in a Lambda function. The bref runtime performs similar functionality to Apache or NGINX by forwarding HTTP requests through the FastCGI protocol. This process is explained in detail in The Serverless LAMP stack part 3: Replacing the web server. In addition to this, a bref package named larval-bridge automatically configures Laravel to work on Lambda. This saves the developer from having to manually implement some of the configurations detailed in The serverless LAMP stack part 4: Building a serverless Laravel application

This creates the following directory structure:

The cdk directory contains the AWS CDK resource definitions. The codebase directory contains the Laravel project.

Replace the contents of ./lib/cdk-stack.ts with:

The brefLayerVersion argument refers to the AWS Lambda layer version ARN of the Bref PHP runtime. Select the correct ARN and corresponding Region from the bref website. This example deploys the stack into the us-east-1 Region with the corresponding Lambda layer version ARN for the Region.

Once the deployment is complete, an Amazon API Gateway HTTP API endpoint is returned in the CDK output. This URL serves the Laravel application.

The application is running PHP on Lambda using brefs FPM custom runtime. This entire stack is deployed by a single instantiation of the ServerlessLaravel construct class with required properties.

The ServerlessLaravel stack is extended with the DatabaseCluster construct class to provision an Amazon Aurora database. Pass a Amazon RDS Proxy instance for this cluster to the ServerlessLaravel construct:

The output shows that a shared VPC is created for the ServerlessLaravel stack and the DatabaseCluster stack. An Amazon Aurora DB cluster with a single DB instance and a default secret from AWS Secrets Manager is also created. The cdk-serverless-lamp construct library configures Amazon RDS proxy automatically with the required AWS IAM policies and connection rules.

The ServerlessLaravel stack is running with DatabaseCluster in a single VPC. A single Lambda function is automatically configured with the RDS Proxy DB_WRITER and DB_READER stored as Lambda environment variables.

The Lambda function authenticates to RDS Proxy with the execution IAM role. RDS Proxy authenticates to the Aurora DB cluster using the credentials stored in the AWS Secrets Manager. This is a more secure alternative to embedding database credentials in the application code base. Read Introducing the serverless LAMP stack part 2 relational databases for more information on connecting to an Aurora DB cluster with Lambda using RDS Proxy.

To remove the stack, run:$ cdk destroy

The video below demonstrates a deployment with the CDK construct for the serverless LAMP stack.

This post introduces the new CDK construct library for the serverless LAMP stack. It explains how to use it to deploy a serverless Laravel application. Combining this with other CDK constructs such as DatabaseCluster gives PHP developers the building blocks to create scalable, repeatable patterns at speed with minimal coding.

With the CDK construct library for the serverless LAMP stack, PHP development teams can focus on shipping code without changing the way they build.

Start building serverless applications with PHP.

See the original post here:

Introducing the CDK construct library for the serverless LAMP stack - idk.dev

This is a guest post for Computer Weekly Open Source Insider written by Christopher Goes in his roles as lead developer of IBC at Interchain GmbH.

Interchain GmbH is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Interchain Foundation. As maintainers of the Tendermint project, lead architects of the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol and contributors to the Cosmos SDK, the organisation has envision a more connected, open and self-sovereign world made possible through the Cosmos Network.

Goes writes as follows

While technological change has moved rapidly in the information era, the system of international payments has lagged behind. In a world where a user can order organic beetroot on AmazonFresh to be delivered to their doorstep overnight, we are still trapped by the network effects of archaic monetary systems subject to the political vagaries of fiat powers.

The protocols that power the Internet are capable of efficient information transfer but they were not designed for monetary exchange or the similar exchange of digital assets.

Enter Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC): This is a protocol designed to enable an open, sovereign, secure network of interconnected blockchains or Internet of Blockchains if you will.

IBC is the connective substrate of the distributed interchain future the cornerstone upon which the entire structure rests. IBC enables blockchains to send & receive messages to & from other blockchains, just as computers send messages to & from each other over TCP/IP. IBC facilitates interoperability between blockchains with different consensus algorithms, state machines and design philosophies, allowing them to selectively interoperate while retaining their diversity. IBC is blockchain agnostic and does not need to be hosted on or controlled by any single project.

Goes: IBC is the connective substrate of the distributed interchain future .

Any distributed ledger which supports IBC can permissionlessly initiate a handshake to another IBC-supporting ledger.Once a handshake is complete, it opens up a channel of communication between the two ledgers. IBC packets, containing arbitrary data, can then start traveling back and forth. Should the protocol gain wide adoption, well see an organic explosion of IBC packets and the concept of an Internet of Blockchains can become a practical reality.

Currently, there are a lot of different blockchains in the world that perform different functions, for instance: providing currency in the case of Bitcoin, localised application platforms in the case of Ethereum and efficient light client verification in the case of Coda.

These blockchains are highly specialized in different tasks, but right now they are isolated from one another.

Specialisation of blockchains is beneficial because it allows these blockchains to perform a specific function expertly, instead of trying to do everything all at once. However, synergies & seamless user experiences are lost when there is no communication between them. Interoperability between these chains would allow for the benefits of specialisation without the drawbacks. For example, one could send Bitcoin over to Ethereum and use it in a smart contract or vice versa. Two pieces of software designed totally independently can now be connected and introduced to each other, without the thousands of coding hours required to build a custom interop system or bridge.

So here is what developers need to know about the upcoming release of IBC:

Interoperability is essential for decentralised networks to compete with the status quo. An ecosystem of politically independent, sovereign chains economically interacting will be able to knit all the different specialised blockchains into a single interoperable economy pulling in mainstream users and forming the foundations of a new crypto-economic system.

Read more here:

What developers need to know about inter-blockchain communication - ComputerWeekly.com