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Daily Archives: August 15, 2017
Wall cuts his way right out of office – Winnipeg Free Press
Posted: August 15, 2017 at 12:11 pm
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Walls intuitive decision to step down one year and four months into a new mandate had some Saskatchewanians scratching their heads last week.
Others, like me, who understand the demanding electorate, observe that Wall had no other choice. It was either go now, or face leadership opposition within the Saskatchewan Party or, even worse, humiliation at the polls in 2020.
This time last year, Wall first elected in November 2007 was riding high in the polls after the April 2016 election in which he received a majority mandate to govern for the next four years.
So what happened?
One unpopular budget and the Saskatchewan Party premier, a member of the Mennonite faiths conservative wing, is folding up his evangelists tent and moving on like Steve Martin in Leap of Faith.
After the miserly April 2017 budget, Wall, who was once the most popular premier in Canada, watched on helplessly as his SaskParty approval ratings dipped to a record low of 40 per cent.
It was a small cut to the coffers and the elimination of the government-owned, money-draining Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC) that left Wall stranded.
Outside the provinces major centres, if you want to get on the bus, Gus, or make a new plan, Stan, youll have to hitch a ride, Clyde, cause Uber doesnt service rural Saskatchewan.
Walls rural stronghold of conservative seniors has evaporated, since those without drivers licences and with city medical appointments can no longer ride the STC, which has been the lifeline for rural people since 1946. That senior demographic can no longer rally for Wall in Regina.
Sure, there was a literate outcry over the de-funding of libraries in that same ill-fated budget. But the library funding was soon restored for just one more year. The funding structures will be re-evaluated in 2018 after a consultation with librarians.
When Wall and his government sharpened their pencils with this most recent budget, they made a massive miscalculation: the SaskParty didnt spend money during a downturn.
Instead, the government punished the electorate with a philosophical budget that off-loaded the treasurys shortfall onto voters. Walls ill-advised April budget was an act of fiscal conservatism, which was an attempt to bolster his credibility with his conservative base a rookie move for a premier of almost 10 years.
Like other western Canadian resource-based provinces, Saskatchewans economy has been listing like an old navy destroyer. Perhaps Wall, who has always had a good grasp on the mood of the electorate, knows his party is facing imminent failure at the polls in 2020.
Still, its a kick in the teeth to the loyal voters who elected his SaskParty based on the reassurance that a moderate would be at the helm for four more years.
The majority of voters in this polarized province chose between two extremes: the socialist NDP and the free-enterprise SaskParty. There hasnt been a Liberal premier since W. Ross Thatcher (1964-1971).
The so-called polarized major political parties are more alike then theyll admit: both are dominated by prudish social conservatives who thrive on the status quo; nothing changes in Saskatchewan not even the time zone.
Wall the populist knew this, so he assumed the position of the appearance of change, without any bold policies that would set off the stuffy electorate. His moderate stance endeared him to the voting majority while alienating the far-right factions of his party.
So its farewell to Brad Wall. His 2016 winning election platform of "Keeping Saskatchewan Strong" has been an epic fail. All it did was fortify the NDP, who are now poised to steal the province from the SaskParty, thanks to the erosion of Walls rural base.
So what are Brad Walls future career options? Open a surf shop in Tofino or sit on the board of PotashCorp? Will Brad and Tami Wall buy a Class A motorhome, become roadies and tour with their 22-year-old musician son, Colter, a rising blues-folk-Americana star in North America and Europe?
Perhaps Wall knew the voters were ready to run him, and his party, out on a rail. Its the only other way out of town now that the STC has been cut. To drown their transportation sorrows, rural voters thanks to a quasi-privatization scheme for liquor stores can now buy a cheap bottle of Golden Wedding rye at the same hotel bar where the STC once stopped.
Patricia Dawn Robertson is an independent journalist in Wakaw, Sask.
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Universal Basic Infrastructure to help decrease India’s poverty – Economic Times
Posted: at 12:10 pm
With over 200 million people still below the poverty line and a similar number earning barely enough, much needs to be done to improve their lives. While faster growth is an obvious antidote, the view that some sort of universal basic income (UBI) may be needed to provide immediate relief is gaining currency. The UBI must be embraced in a deliberate, phased manner as it allows reform to occur incrementally weighing the costs and benefits at every step, the Economic Survey of FY17 had said.
The idea of universal income support has been under discussion for several years but the first real push was given by chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian in the Survey. While UBI could be more of an imperative in developed countries where manufacturing and services are moving to the developing world, India has tremendous scope for improving job creation along with strengthening its social infrastructure that in turn could lift millions out of poverty. As a result, the idea, which has seen some global success, is yet to take root in India.
According to the Survey, identified beneficiaries can be given a choice of UBI instead of subsidies under existing programmes. Based on FY12 level of distribution and consumption, the Survey estimated the income needed to take one person out of poverty at Rs 7,620 per year.
The Survey said UBI that reduces poverty to 0.5% of population would cost 4-5% of GDP, assuming that those in top 25% income bracket do not participate. The existing middleclass, food, petroleum and fertiliser sops cost about 3% of GDP. While DK Pant, chief economist of India Ratings, is in sync with the proposal to replace other subsidies with UBI, he is apprehensive of how best can beneficiaries be identified.
Unless you identify beneficiaries, the government will not be able to assess cost implications. The next challenge will be to monitor the progress. However, ensuring that all citizens have the right to a minimum income as a long-term solution to reduce poverty seems to be a distant dream with not many in the government and academia believing the option is viable.
Even if you take 2011-12 urban poverty line as Rs 1,000 in nominal terms, per person it translates into Rs 15 trillion for a population of 1.25 billion whereas the Central budget is somewhere (in the region of) Rs 21 trillion.
Hence, it is not fiscally feasible, outgoing Niti Aayog vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya said. He said the socioeconomic and caste census available can help identify beneficiaries while the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme enables self-identification. Most experts believe that before supplementing the income of countrys over 200 million poor, India should put in place basic infrastructure for health, education, sanitation and drinking water to ensure a basic standard of living.
India still has a huge deficit on the social infrastructure side and unless we ramp up... there is no point in giving a little extra income,said another senior government official requesting not to be identified. The official said UBI has become imperative in developed countries to ensure a peaceful society or their youth will become disruptive in the wake of jobs migrating overseas.
UBI is not a bad idea but does the country have that much money? ...it is essential that government significantly increase its expenditure on creation of social infrastructure which will help to bring poor people into the mainstream, said Himanshu, assistant professor of economics at JNU.
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Universal Basic Infrastructure to help decrease India's poverty - Economic Times
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Ingram Micro to Invest $10 Million in Warehouse Automation Startup – Wall Street Journal (subscription)
Posted: at 12:10 pm
Wall Street Journal (subscription) | Ingram Micro to Invest $10 Million in Warehouse Automation Startup Wall Street Journal (subscription) HDS Global, the warehouse automation startup founded by entrepreneur Louis Borders, has lined up Ingram Micro Inc. as its first logistics customer. Ingram Micro, which has started stocking consumer goods and handling online orders for major retailers ... |
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Star Wars and C-3PO perpetuated myths about workplace automation – VentureBeat
Posted: at 12:10 pm
I recently introduced my kids to the original Star Wars trilogy. As we watched together, there was one thing that bothered me over and over. That thing was a gangly, gold-plated klutz of a droid called C-3PO.
Threepio is kind of a terrible robot. The problem is his heavy, accident-prone body really only exists to carry his software around. He easily could have been a handheld device that you take out of your pocket when you need to negotiate with some Jawas and put away when you want to travel through space without the snide commentary.
That said, the relationship between C-3PO and his human partners provides a few hints about knowledge work automation. Hes always on in the background to enable communication and provide data-based insights, and he even simulates variable outcomes. Yet despite possessing more logic than the humans around him, he is there to serve as an adviser. He relies on their creativity and emotional intelligence to solve problems.
Teams and CIOs can learn a lot from this relationship as automation in the enterprise becomes more normalized. In an ideal system, automation doesnt replace human thought but augments it by providing better information and by offloading repetitive tasks to software. The goal is to supplement the human mind to bring out the best quality of work from your most talented employees.
Since we dont have Threepio units for the enterprise (at least, not yet), were seeing more subtle forms of automation in white-collar work, especially in routine cognitive tasks. Theres a great 2014 post on Scott McLeods education blog Dangerously Irrelevant that describes the decreasing value of routine cognitive work, and in it you can see that software has been reducing routine tasks as far back the 1970s. Now, AI and machine learning are expanding the variability of semi-routine tasks that computers are able to perform, allowing bots to handle more complex tasks in fields like customer service, logistics coordination, payment processing, and many, many more.
For workers, bringing value in an automation-heavy world depends on their ability to execute non-routine cognitive work. This is work that requires problem-solving skills, creativity, empathy, and persuasion. Writing, for example, is a skill computers have yet to master (despite some hilarious attempts).
For those knowledge workers in cognitive fields, theyll still see automation creeping into their workflows in ways that will help eliminate some of the least pleasant parts of their jobs. According to McKinsey Global Institute, 60 percent of occupations could see 30 percent of their tasks automated with technologies available today. That means even if youre a creative professional say, a designer youve probably already used automation to do repeatable work, like batch file renames or applying filters to a collection of images. Simple automations like these free workers from mundane tasks and give them hours back every week to focus on higher-value portions of their job.
The next wave of automation for knowledge workers is workflow automation, which at a high level means automated systems can help you move repeatable work through a variable workflow, while keeping your team informed about handoffs and status changes. This is invaluable because in collaborative work, the biggest roadblocks occur when two or more people are working on the same task, and one doesnt realize the others are awaiting their contributions. This has a huge impact on productivity.
This is why theres so much value that can be gained from automating communications about tasks and projects as they move through a pipeline. By automating the delivery of updates and other information between team members, you can reduce the amount of emails and meetings needed in an organization, while ensuring receipt of important data. If some of those updates are about sales opportunities, automation can help a business increase revenue. And, as is the case with the previous example of the designer, youve given people back time to focus on more valuable work.
The biggest myth about automation is that its coming for your job, and that business leaders are longing to replace humans with cheaper machine labor. In an informal poll we recently conducted with about 250 attendees of a webinar on automation, reducing cost was dead last among reasons businesses are investing in it. The top two responses were consistent approach and work quality, which suggests leaders are thinking more about how automation can help them scale their operations rather than downsize them.
Still, for millions of workers, a day of reckoning may come where they need to uplevel their skills away from the routine. For these individuals, focusing on strategy, creativity, and people skills will help strengthen their careers and position them to bring lasting value, even after many of their daily tasks have been augmented by machines. In McLeods post, he discusses how the education system must also adapt to emphasize non-routine thought so that future generations are equipped with relevant skills in a world where machines execute routine work, and I agree.
Automation is a massive shift in work, and for many workers, it will be a shift they slowly notice alleviating some of the most repeatable parts of their job. And while were still far from the droids of Star Wars, as our work is increasingly augmented by machine intelligence, well be able to unlock more value than we ever thought possible.
Andrew Filev is the CEO of Wrike, thework management platform.
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Star Wars and C-3PO perpetuated myths about workplace automation - VentureBeat
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Qt Introduces Qt for Automation to Help Organizations Reduce Operating Costs and Improve Business Process Efficiency – Markets Insider
Posted: at 12:10 pm
HELSINKI, August 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Today The Qt Company introduced the Qt for Automation offering, a new set of libraries and development tools for the building, services and industrial automation sectors. Built on Qt for Device Creation and Qt for Application Development, Qt for Automation is designed to enhance the performance and capabilities of edge devices for the Internet of Things (IoT). With Qt for Automation's modular, scalable and secure libraries and interoperability capabilities, organizations in the automation industry can reduce operating costs and improve the efficiency of business processes. Qt's technology is currently in use by millions of developers across the world and eight of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies.
With Gartner, Inc. forecasting earlier this year that 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2017 and 5.5 million new devices being connected every day, the IoT is one of the most opportunity-rich areas across today's global technology landscape. Furthermore, McKinsey & Company found that the potential value that could be unlocked with IoT applications in factory settings which represent a significant portion of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) could be as much as $3.7 trillion in 2025, which is approximately one-third of all potential economic value of the IoT estimated by McKinsey. Consequently, organizations in the automation industry are increasingly looking for ways to pursue the market opportunities created by both the IoT and the IIoT.
The modern architecture and extensibility of the modular, scalable and secure tools and QtKNX libraries within Qt for Automation guarantees rapid innovation and future warranties, independent of any changes to the hardware or operating systems. By leveraging these features and the device interoperability capabilities of Qt for Automation, organizations in the industrial and home automation sectors are able to significantly reduce operating costs and streamline mission-critical business processes.
"With the rise of IoT, we realized thatthe amount ofsensors and I/O we collected in our control systems was increasing exponentially, and we needed to aggregate the data and present it in a better way to becomemore efficient," said Rune Volden, R&D Manager, Ulstein Power & Control. "Qt provides a very good tool for programming control systems as well as graphical user interfaces, which saved us a significant amount of development time."
Qt for Automation extends Qt's comprehensive portfolio of application development and device creation tools. The primary features of Qt for Automation include:
"Qt has been focused on the automation sector since our inception two decades ago, and our presence in the industry has expanded alongside the exponential growth of the global IoT market," said Lars Knoll, CTO, The Qt Company. "With the new Qt for Automation offering, we are bringing our automation capabilities together in an integrated and comprehensive set of software development tools and libraries that have been designed for edge devices in industrial and home automation. This enables our automation customers to quickly and easily gain tangible business benefits, including reduced costs and improved efficiencies across their entire organization, and further extends our leadership position in the automation industry."
Qt will share additional details about Qt for Automation during a webinar taking place at 4:00 p.m. CEST on Thursday, September 7th. You can register for the webinar here.
Additionally, to learn more about Qt for Automation, please read our blog post detailing the new offering.
Furthermore, you can learn more about The Qt Company and Qt for Automation at this year's Qt World Summit, the largest annual event dedicated to Qt developers, business leaders and product managers. The event will take place in Berlin, Germany from October 10-12 and will feature thought-provoking keynotes and demos, insightful breakouts, and industry highlights. For more information on the Qt World Summit 2017, please visit: http://www.qtworldsummit.com/
About The Qt Company
The Qt Company develops and delivers the Qt development framework under commercial and open source licenses. We enable a single software code across all operating systems, platforms and screen types, from desktops and embedded systems to wearables and mobile devices. Qt is used by approximately one million developers worldwide and is the leading independent technology behind millions of devices and applications. Qt is the platform of choice for in-vehicle systems, medical devices, industrial automation devices, and other business critical application manufacturers, and is used by leading global players in more than 70 industries. The Qt Company is owned by the Qt Group, which operates in China, Finland, Germany, Japan, Korea, Norway, Russia and USA with more than 200 employees worldwide. The Qt Group is headquartered in Espoo, Finland and is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki Stock Exchange. The company's net sales in year 2016 totaled 32,4 MEUR. To learn more visit http://qt.io
Media Contacts
The Qt Company
Katja Kumpulainen
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How 27-year-old Akash Gupta built the largest automation startup of India – YourStory.com
Posted: at 12:10 pm
For Akash Gupta, a journey which started with building humanoids has shaped into one of the largest automation companies of the world today. Our candidate for this weeks Techie Tuesdays, Akash is the Co-founder and CTO of GreyOrange, an automation startup that provides warehousing solutions.
What does it take to be the CTO of one of the largest hardware and automation startupsin India and the world at the age of 27? The secret, according to Akash Gupta, the Co-founder and CTO of GreyOrange, lies in having strong fundamentals, the ability to quickly learn and unlearn new technologies and learning from the mistakes/failures even more quickly.
A BITS Pilani graduate in Mechanical Engineering, Akashs interest in building robots (humanoids) was strong that he built one in his college days. Unlike most students who tend to get emotionally attached to college life, our Techie Tuesdays candidate of the week, Akash, was was happy to finish his degree in three years and be out of the college.
YourStory caught up with Akash recently at his Gurgaon office to retrace his journey.
Akash was born in Auraiya district of Uttar Pradesh, situated 400 km from Delhi. His father worked in railways and was posted at Dibiyapur railway station. He studied there till class IV. When his family moved to Kanpur he joined the Puranchandra Vaidyaniketan school there.
Akash started coding in class VI with GW-BASIC and learnt C the next year from his sisters book Let Us C. Subsequently, he developed an interest in 3D animation and learnt 3ds Max and Maya. This kept him busy in class IX and X. Akash believes that his interest in 3D animation plateaued partly because of limited exposure to algorithm at the time.
Incidentally, this geeky student was the 100m champion in school. However, the IIT JEE preparation in class XI and XII weaned him away from track and field activities forever.
Akash joined the Mechanical Engineering department at BITS Pilani in 2008. One of the predominant thoughts in his mind then was that he had solved enough problems on paper, and now wanted to do things in real life. He says,
I could draw a DC or an AC motor on paper very well, but looking at the motor of the ceiling fan, I couldnt tell which one of those it was.
Related read Meet Kiran Bhatthe man who engineered Hulk and Tarkin to win 2017 sci-tech Oscar
In his first year, Akash saw a demo of the AcYut humanoid project. To join the team, he gave the AcYut test where he was asked to make a 3D emblem of BITS Pilani on Inventor software. Being good at 3D animation, Akash made the cut easily and started working with the team AcYut in his very first month in college. He wanted to learn as much as possible.At AcYut, Akash started by designing the mechanical parts and then manufacturing them.
As a team member, he had full access to the CNC (Computer Numerical Control) Lab for manufacturing. He learnt to write G Code (input for CNC machines) and to run CNC machines. In the first year, the team made three versions of the complete mechanical structure of AcYut. Akash says,
I was so much into it that I couldnt see anything else and fortunately BITS (Pilani) gives you that flexibility.
In October 2008, Akash went to Japan to participate in a robotic competition. This was his first exposure to an international technology-based competition which helped him understand the global benchmarks for such competitions. Team AcYut was then planning to participate in the Robo Games next year (2009) for which they started building two robots. Akash picked up micro-controller programming and took his understanding of robotics further.
In AcYut-II, the team used bust motors (motors serially connected to each other using RS-485). There were two series of 16 motors each and hence, writing fool-proof protocols was not easy for them. Akash says,
In humanoids, the most complicated thing is stability. We underestimate how easily we walk (and balance). Walking is very difficult to simulate. With a lot of enthusiasm, we chose six DOF (degree of freedom) leg and then we spent good two months solving the inverse kinematics for them.
Even after figuring out the right inverse kinematics model, it took the team another six months to put it in codes and ensure that those signals go to the motors at the right time and they behave as intended. Team AcYut used ATmega1280 for controlling the complete bot and 3mm sheets of 6061 aluminium to manufacture the brackets (chassis structure on which you mount motors etc) of AcYut.
Since the workshop occupied the day time, Akash (and team AcYut) got to work only at night.
Eventually, the team won the bronze model at the Robo Games in San Francisco..The main competition at the Robo Games was humanoid Kung-Fu where the robot which can knock down the other robot three times wins.
At the end of his first year, Akash and Samay Kohli (Co-founder GreyOrange and team member AcYut) got an internship at University of Louisiana where they worked at the CajunBot Lab on an autonomous vehicle project for some time. At the university, they met Thomas Chance, CEO, C&C Technologies, which built equipment for underwater surveying. This was their first exposure to industrial robotics. The duo worked at C&C Technologies in the areas of mechanical design, electronics and microprocessors.
One of the major projects Akash worked on was the SONAR stabilising system which solved the problem of mapping the ocean bed accurately and get rid of the inconsistency caused by the waves. This included fair amounts of mechanics and electronics. Since Akash and Samay had time on their hands, they went on to build a kind of Disney ride (by joining two trailers) in a haunted house owned by Thomas. Akash says,
One could sit on a trolly and go through the rooms which were themed differently like earthquake room, laser room. More than 200 microcontrollers were working in sync with 5 computers and 1,000 air pistons (for doing a lot of actuations) to make it all happen. The entire setup cost almost $250,000.
In his second year, Akash spent a lot of time on electronics, designing and manufacturing PCBs end to end. The AcYut team won the gold and silver medal at the Robo Games. They built an exoskeleton suit wherein if a person wears this suit and moves his/her hands, then the robot will copy/replicate it. They went to the Ideen Expo in Germany with this project. Akash visited the BMW manufacturing plant there which helped him understand the importance of factors like reliability in the automation industry.
Akash recalls meetingWolfgang Hoeltgen during the visit. He is one of the earliest angels and a strategic mentor to the founding team at GreyOrange.
In January 2011, Akash and Samay were invited to take part in a humanoid hand (robotics) workshop at IIT Bombay. Soon, other colleges too invited them and thats when they started thinking about starting a company. Also, since the work had started, Akash was very keen to come out of college as soon as possible. At the time he was juggling between AcYut, GreyOrange and his studies (curriculum). He used to be in Delhi from Saturday to Monday (running GreyOrange) and back in Pilani from Tuesday to Friday (to attend the labs, as a part of the curriculum were on Tuesdays and Fridays).
Akash and Samay started making kits for the workshops which gave them an experience of doing things at scale. By now, they were done with the Robo Games and started targeting the Robo Cup. While the Robo Games had remote controlled robots, the Robo Cup had completely autonomous (robot) 2*2 soccer.
While preparing, Akash got into image processing, cognitive understanding,vision systems andstarted solving the localisation problems. He understood the complexities of gyroscope, magnetometer, accelerometer.
Akash finished his college degree in three years somehow and took the final-year internship at GreyOrange. In June-July 2011, he shifted to Samays house in Delhi marking the formal start of GreyOrange.
Also read From UP to the US: The journey of Abhinav Asthana and his affair with APIs
Even though Akash and Samay were making good money through workshops, they were clear that they were not going to do it for long. Soon, they started building white labeled products for other companies. These included:
This gave Akash an exposure to different standards of coding and manufacturing. He used Qt language (application development framework based on C++) for the software. He says,
I started understanding the importance of getting the right abstraction (very well structured in programmes) from the real world. For example, while programming for a pump, youve to make sure that all the different attributes of that pump are kept in your data structure in order to perform different actions on it. This becomes even more important when were building longer-term products.
After building 3-4 white label products, Akash realised that he (and Samay) were playing with way too many technologies and products. Hence, they decided to choose an industry and build products only for that. While researching to finalie the industry, they wrote down some rules to help them choose the right industry:
They finally zeroed in on three industries:
They chose option #1 and built a prototype. They proposed the idea of maintenance of tanks to a company. They even gave them the design. Unfortunately, the company floated the tender with their requirements sharing the design submitted by GreyOrange and somebody else bought the tender. Akash recalls, Being a startup we were left with nothing. We even filed a complaint but couldnt give more time to it and had to let it go.
They then moved to supply chain. Akash visited a lot of warehouses, enough to convince him that a lot needed to be done there. He started looking at goods to person systems and found that it could be made much more efficient using Grey Pranges solution of using an elegant hardware and a complex software. The first thought was to build a bot.
You may also like Meet Mitesh Agarwalthe brain of BITS whos heading technology at Oracle India
According to Akash, building a butler system is almost like bringing four large products together to make a complete system. It will have bots, pick-put stations, MSUs (mobile storage units) and a software that runs robots and business logic of inventory management. Akash and Samay spent the first few days understanding the entire problem and figuring out what the solution will be like. Akash says,
Our thought process was slightly different than what Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics) was doing. Kiva had a lot of Swan robotics which refers to distributed intelligence. Only the main server didnt have the onus of being intelligent. Bots were intelligentas well. We wanted to have a simple hardware and table up all the complexity on the server side.
This gave Grey Orange a flexibility which is desirable in the warehouses. Keeping the product software centric helped it and the hardware acted as more of generic agents.
Akash and Samay knew that its going to take them more than two years to build a butler system. And they also understood that survival of a startup for two years without revenues is very difficult. This thought coupled with an opportunity to build a sortation system for warehouses, made the duo explore it after visiting Flipkarts first ever warehouse. Akash says,
We decided to build a sortation system on the side while working on the butler system. It was a hard decision to take as we were a team of only ten people and bulter system itself was hard enough problem to solve. Technically its not advisable to do such a thing.
For two years, the team kept switching between sortation system and butler systems as working in parallel wasnt possible.
Lifting (500 kg weight) was one of the most challenging problems to be solved in order to build a butler system. The team at GreyOrange used a complex dual scissor lift mechanism to lift and built multiple prototypes. Akash says, In the hardware world, its better to build as many prototypes as possible and fail rather than getting stuck with building a perfect prototype.
Akash drew the architecture of the robot (butler) with safety system, navigation system and communication system. On server side, the team chose Erlang as the language for the main system. It was a hard decision as there were very few programmers who knew the language. Akash says,
At that point we had a dream to run 1,000 robots in a single warehouse. We couldnt find any other language or stack which allowed so many agents running in a soft real-time system.
Initially, the team used Hub motors where the motor and suspension was on wheels but later on scrapped it as it created a lot of problems. After three revisions, they got the design and production of the gear box right. Akash adds, Lack of prototyping ecosystem in India created further problems and delays. We resorted to doing things in-house as we couldnt be dependent on outside shops.
Finally, in November, Grey Orange launched its first prototype. Now, the challenge was to make them manufacturable (so that robots arent handcrafted). That took another 8-9 months. In the meanwhile, the team received an order for building sortation system. They decide to build a completely modular sortation system, so that even when one of the arms stops functioning, the rest can still work. An overall control system was designed for this. Akash says, Because PLCs (programmable logic controllers) had a lot of limitations, we built our own control systems. The sortation system was relatively less complex on the server side and fairly complex on the embedded side.
The first butler system was installed in Hong Kong. It had a small ten bot system, 200 MSUs, 2 pick-put stations, auto charging.
Related read Meet the co-creator of Julia programming language, Viral Shah
Usually, sortation systems are built to sort boxes. Akash too thought so and used IR (infra red) sensors. But when he received the sample packs from Flipkart, he realised they are poly packs (and not boxes). The IR sensors behaved very differently for these poly packs. Akash adds, This was the first ever sorter built for e-commerce company in India. And outside India, everyone used a box. So, this problem was left virgin.
Akash and his team fixed the problems of motor heating, slipping of belt, incorrect counting of the package, before installing the system at Flipkart warehouse. Moving the sorter from Gurgaon to Bangalore was very challenging. It was only now that the team started thinking about transporting the machine. It was a 40-45-ft-long machine which had to be dis-assembled and transported. It was a humongous task which taught that designing to make it work isnt enough. One has to design while making sure that the system is assembled, dis-assembled, supported, moved comfortably.
From the current capacity of supporting 1,500 to 2,000 butlers (bots), GreyOrange wants to build systems which can support infinite number of bots. The team has converted its monolithic architecture to micro services based architecture to achieve scale.
For GreyOrange, if servers go down, its not just the website which will go down, but also hundreds of robots with 500 kg weight on each will crash with each other. Hence, Akash and his team has to be even more careful while writing algorithms and ensure that any path reserved by a bot isnt taken by anyone else and that the orders are optimised in the best possible ways. According to Akash, right choices of architecture, stacks, thinking it through, being flexible and ensuring that the team focuses in-depth into modules has helped the company.
Some of the key challenges which Akash and his team are solving at GreyOrange are as follows:
In the last few months, rapid expansion to multiple geographies has brought in some operational problems like translating documentation, communication, screens, APIs, databases in five languages. To solve this, the team has built a clear framework and web interface for translators who get notifications sprint by sprint of new strings that are coming.
Akash believes that the hardware ecosystem in India has definitely evolved in this decade but the change is minimal. He says, People have become more supportive of working for prototypes of startups because somewhere they have seen startups becoming big.
Four years ago, when Akash went to a company which produced suspensions for automobiles, he was turned down immediately because of the low production volume requirement (relative to what the company produced for automobiles) and a lack of understanding of startups. But a year ago, when he spoke to them again, they agreed.
In the early days of GreyOrange, Akash used to hire people who were ready to learn and had a good understanding of basic sciences physics and mathematics. Lately, he has changed his approach and now he looks for the following kinds of people:
Also read How a small-town commerce graduate became CTO of a multibillion-dollar company
Akash is a big fan of flexibility and believes that the way supply chain is growing, the only way to build an efficient supply chain is by making it extremely flexible. He says,
In next three to five years, were looking at warehouses running with mobile platforms with changeable accessories. We really want to get to the point where you dont have any fixed infrastructure thats running in the warehouse. These mobile platforms can attach themselves with different accessories and can work as lifting units, or conveyers or robotic arms or static platform.
In order to get there, therere certain technology platforms that need to be built which will enable that. Akash and his team is already working on it at the moment (along with architecturing the entire solution). Once thats done, itll take another year or two to integrate with the system. The team is also working towards introducing the concept of unibots (similar to human beings) in the next five to seven years.
Akash wants to run one of the largest warehouses with 10,000 robots very soon. He is also keen to build GreyOrange as a company where he would still want to work ten years hence. Hes making sure that the company retains the culture of innovation and building new products. He adds, GreyOranges products are disruptive. For example, while other companies in the world offering linear sorters have a lead/installation time of at least three-four months, we do it in as less as four weeks.
He wants to stick to producing simple elegant hardware with extremely complex software which disrupts the industry.
Akash believes in being sincere to oneself and ones work. For the first three-four years of the company, he was always the first to reach office and last to leave. He felt it as a responsibility that till any employee was in the office, he should be there with him/her to support, to help.He says,
The biggest fear that you have as an entrepreneur is that if you fail, then you shouldnt have this in your heart that you didnt give your best.
You can connect with him on Linkedin or Twitter.
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Globalisation, the sledgehammer battering Africa Part Two – The Zimbabwean
Posted: at 12:09 pm
Today, we will look at more reasons why this is so. And you will see they are one of the major reasons who extreme poverty is still the norm in Africa when it could have been eradicated years ago.
This says that globalisation and free trade will allow you to sell globally the products you are best at producing. As a backward country, the products you are best at producing will be the cheap, labour-intensive ones because you can pay your workers at well below what is legally allowed in the developed world, and at near slavery levels.
The theory is that, as your business develops, you will then be able to pay your workers more and thus lift them out of poverty. In practice, this wont happen because the minute you try to pay your workers more, your customers will just go to another company or another country which is charging less than you. So you cant increase your workers wages, and what you are really doing is locking them into not just poverty, but abject poverty.
For example, the world is applauding Ethiopia for its initiative in developing a fast-developing textile, clothing & footwear manufacturing trade. This may be good news for the country and its manufacturing bosses, but what is happening to its workers?
To find that out, lets look at the history of textile, clothing & footwear manufacture. Originally, many European and African nations had their own thriving, home-grown industries. And their workers were well-paid by local standards.
Then China and Bangladesh (and other developing countries) came out with dramatically lower costs, just by paying their workers what can only be described as slave wages. Result: widespread destruction of the European and African textile, clothing & footwear manufacturing. Yes, the general public benefited greatly from being able to buy much cheaper clothes and shoes, but it was at the cost of huge unemployment in Europe and Africa in those particular trades.
Then China and Bangladesh start to pay their workers more. So now what happens? Ethiopia steps in and takes trade off them by paying its workers only US$1.32 a day (which, by the way, is well below the UN and World Banks threshold of $1.90 a day). Ethiopia and its industry bosses will do very well out of this (but the workers certainly do not), until a point when it wants to pay its workers more.
Then another country will step in and take Ethiopias trade by cutting workers pay. This will put Ethiopias workers out of work. The bosses will be OK because they will generally be the ones who move their manufacturing out of Ethiopia and to the new country.
So what the Law of Comparative Advantage actually does is create a cycle of never-ending abject poverty with manufacturing moving to ever-cheaper countries. This is called The Race To The Bottom.
The other side of the Law of Comparative Advantage is that if you are good at producing high-value technically advanced products, then that is what you will specialise in. In practice, the only countries able to do this are wealthy ones. So what actually happens is that, as a backward nation, you are swapping low profit products that keep your workers in abject poverty for high profit ones from the wealthy nations that can pay their workers well.
Japan understood this very well when it came under immense pressure from the USA to open its borders after World War II. The Japanese government told the USA it was not going to be consigned to exporting tins of tuna to the USA in exchange for Cadillacs. Instead, it put up barriers to importing American cars to give its automobile industry (at the time virtually non-existent) a chance to develop. The incredible rise of the Japanese car industry is history.
Agenda 2063 has learnt the vital lesson of protectionism to allow Africas domestic industries to develop, which is why it focuses on building up an African financed, owned and led business-base, and wants to heavily reduce its reliance on globalisation.
If African nations want the living standards of their citizens to rise, they, too must learn from the experience of Japan, China and South Korea. However, the big problem there is either incompetence (they dont know what to do, so they just accept the story of globalisation), or corruption: a large part of their illicit fortunes come from supporting foreign commercial and financial interests.
Even if this is true for weak nations that want to develop their GDP (although that is debatable), it is certainly not true for their workers as we have seen.
Where wealthy nations are concerned, it is true for them and their higher-end businesses. But it is definitely not true for companies specialising in lower-end products, or their workers.
That is because it is not a level playing field when the laws of developed nations prevent them from competing on labour costs against nations that have no minimum wage or have one but dont enforce it, as hardly any developing nations do. So labour-intensive companies and those dealing in lower-end products are forced to sack their workers and either take their manufacture abroad or go bankrupt. On balance, wealthy nations can and do benefit in GDP terms, but at a big cost to their workers.
We have already seen this is definitely not true where weaker trading nations are concerned. Yes, the owners of some manufacturing businesses can do well out of it. Yes, globalisation and free trade produce jobs and someone who earns nothing will grasp at the opportunity to earn US$1.90 or $1.32 a day. But that doesnt get them out of poverty in fact, nowhere near it.
And what it does not do is put them into a system where their standards of living will steadily rise and keep rising. And that is the system everyone should be concentrating on.
In the long run, it may not even be win-win for wealthy nations. It is true that all of them achieved their huge wealth via globalisation. But the cracks are already starting to appear for them. Once a developing nation like China or South Korea can get itself into a position of having the expertise to produce technical products, it can suddenly forge ahead for the simple reason that, as it pays its scientists, designers and engineers very much less than developed nations do, it can put a lot more manpower into product development.
The other problem that is already reaching an advanced stage in the UK and USA is a rapidly widening gap between rich and poor. The rich are getting richer at a rate that often far exceeds increases in GDP. In contrast, the wages of workers is not only stagnating, the incidence of poverty is increasing year by year, as witness what can only be described as a dramatic rise in food banks and increase in starvation among children. We saw earlier how the Race to the Bottom affects developing nations. This is how it affects developed ones.
And when workers pay reduces, this has a knock-on effect to middle class incomes as well, as is happening. The only people to benefit, and they benefit out of all proportion, are those at the top income level.
Up to now, the USA has been the architect and biggest promoter of globalisation. Now, however, it intends to embark on a programme of selective protectionism. Love or hate President Trump, he has recognised that, while the affluent nations, the big multinationals and the ruling elite all do very nicely out of globalisation, it can be very damaging to vast swathes of the working class, with serious consequences to the fabric of society.
For any supporter of globalisation and free trade, this is absolute proof that it is not what it is cracked up to be. In some situations and under some circumstances, it may be a good thing. But not in all.
The sooner all Africa realises that their only route out of poverty and into wealth in fact, their ONLY such route is via an African financed, owned and led business-base, just as Agenda 2063 is proposing, the sooner they will start to progress rapidly to a Western-quality lifestyle.
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Liz Sayce: ‘The UK thinks it is a leader in disability rights. But it has a long way to go’ – The Guardian
Posted: at 12:09 pm
The culture of pressurising people to take up ineffective, one-size-fits-all programmes has failed disabled people, says Liz Sayce. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
In the quarter century that Liz Sayce, 63, has been an advocate for disability rights, she has witnessed momentous changes. But the former chief executive of Disability Rights UK (DRUK), who stepped down from the role earlier this summer, believes that the movement has reached a critical moment.
Next week a delegation from DRUK and other organisations is travelling to Geneva and is expected to highlight concerns about the governments response to a UN committees investigation into the upholding of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Last year, the committee concluded that the government was guilty of grave and systematic violations of disabled peoples rights under the convention, and made 11 recommendations for improvements. All were rejected by ministers. Sayce says this unfortunate response is discouraging.
She believes it is crucial that protecting and securing rights is a priority, during a time when people with disabilities have borne the brunt of austerity policies and disabled peoples organisations have had to vociferously resist a vast array of cuts to benefits and social care. Initiatives such as the Work Programme, policies like the bedroom tax and benefits sanctions, moves to alter social care criteria so it is harder for people to access support, and the abolition of the Independent Living Fund for severely disabled people have made resistance essential, she adds.
A damning 2013 DRUK report called for the Work Programme to be scrapped for unemployed disabled people. The culture of pressurising people to take up ineffective, one-size-fits-all programmes has failed disabled people, she says. She asserts that the wider goal of the disability rights movement, pushing for equal participation in society, needs to underpin actions. Were not just saying [individual policies] are important. Were saying that belonging and participating in society are critical. They are human rights and they are crucial to human wellbeing. Sayce believes that being an organisation led largely by people with disability or long-term health conditions is central to DRUK achieving its objectives, including lobbying and influencing.
Earlier this year, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) concluded that despite progress over the years, disabled people are still not treated as equal citizens. Its report outlined a litany of missed opportunities and failures across six key areas of life. These included gaps in educational attainment between disabled children and their non-disabled peers, and high rates of unemployment and poverty. This analysis came just months after the UN investigation.
All of this means extreme inequalities are exacerbated, says Sayce. It feeds into an unacceptable othering of disabled people, which in turn hinders further progress and contributes to a pattern of disability being couched in terms of vulnerability, rather than rights and equal citizenship.
Having worked early on in psychiatric hospitals, Sayce says she witnessed the way that institutionalisation and discrimination drastically curtailed peoples rights to participate and was always motivated to do something about it. Highlighting burning social justice issues affecting disabled people became the hallmark of her long career. Despite the low points seeing the clock turned back by successive governments (she singles out the erosion of independent living) she is also keen to acknowledge advances along the way.
As policy director at Mind, she was on the frontline of lobbying in the lead up to the landmark Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) in 1995. Remember that before that point it was completely legal to refuse somebody [entry] into a cafe because they were disabled, or to refuse somebody a job overtly. No law against it whatsoever.
Sayce stresses that proactive moves in the 1990s and 2000s helped to shift and shape the rights agenda. She cites the introduction of public sector equality duties in 2005 as one example. Absolutely pivotal, she says, is the degree to which progressive policies were, and continue to be, conceived and shaped by disabled people. Referring to developments such as personal budgets for social care, Sayce says: It happened with independent living in the 90s and thats exactly how it should work.
Among the highlights of her career, she says, was being a director at the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) in the 2000s: A time when disabled people and allies set and secured a new agenda; new rights and new enforcement, for example the recent supreme court case on access to public transport.
Her career has not been without controversy. In 2011 she headed a highly charged government review into disability employment, and described Remploy sheltered factories as ghettos that reinforced stigmas and were obstacles to inclusion in mainstream workplaces. Despite the government accepting all of her recommendations, and extending the access to work initiative to apprenticeships, she says there has been real backsliding.
Government has continued to focus on influencing individuals to change their behaviour, rather than influencing the behaviour of employers to open up employment opportunities [to disabled people]. You cant just keep putting pressure on the individuals. You have to change the way employment works and the way [we] support individuals into work. What we want is policy across government whether it is transport, social care, education or employment policy that is all working to an agenda of full participation and independent living.
Sayce is not leaving the disability rights arena entirely (shes a member of the Healthwatch England Committee and the Social Security Advisory Committee and will continue to mentor) and eagerly awaits the outcome of the UN assessment later this year. She welcomes new disabled MPs including Marsha de Cordova and Jared OMara to parliament, and believes it will be critical for the government to demonstrate it can build trust with disabled people through an action plan (in response to the UN committee) with short- and long-term policies to achieve rights to full participation. The UK has often thought of itself as a world leader in disability rights, she says. Well, to earn that title it needs to be ahead of the game. Its got some way to go to demonstrate that.
Curriculum vitae
Age 63.
Lives Tooting, south London.
Family Civil partnership.
Education Oxford high school; University of Kent, English and French; University of London, MSc social work and social policy.
Career 2012-2017: chief executive, Disability Rights UK [following merger of Radar, National Centre for Independent Living and Disability Alliance]; 2007-12: chief executive, Radar; 2000-07: director, policy and communications, Disability Rights Commission; 1998-2000: director, Lambeth Southwark and Lewisham Health Action Zone; 1990-98: policy director, Mind; 1987-90: programme coordinator, research and development for Psychiatry (now Centre for Mental Health); 1985-87: good practices in mental health project worker, which included visiting Bexley hospital in south London and visiting people coming out of both Bexley and Cane Hill hospitals.
Public life Member, Healthwatch England Committee; member, Social Security Advisory Committee; OBE in 2008; honorary doctorate, University of Kent, 2014.
Interests Long evenings with friends, long-distance walking, social history of movements for change, and London.
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Africa’s second liberation will be women’s empowerment | News … – Mail & Guardian
Posted: at 12:07 pm
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Graa Machel said the forum will help to establish networks among women with a common interest in developing their countries using pan-African ideas. (Gallo)
The Women Advancing Africa (WAA) Forum launched this weekend in the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam with a call on women to take centre stage in Africas economic liberation. The forum is an initiative of the Graa Machel Trust and celebrates the critical role women play in development. It will also provide a platform to showcase womens leadership and how that can be used for social change and economic transformation. Suzgo Chitete was at the launch.
The platforms launch attracted nearly 300 professional women from across Africa, representing business, politics, law, civil society, and media. Speakers at the forum said that the political liberation achieved decades ago is not good enough for Africa to move forward, and therefore there was a push for what they are calling the second liberation with a focus on making the continent economically independent.
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Graa Machel said the forum will help to establish networks among women in the region with a common interest in developing their countries using pan-African ideas.
Our networks are rooted in each country where we are represented. We believe that any social, cultural and economic transformation has to be driven by women in the context of the country they belong to, but a country alone is not enough. Hence, we encourage sub-regional cooperation, explained Machel.
She said the choice of Tanzania as the host of the event was deliberate, as the country was a sanctuary of early African liberation struggles. Machel said the delegates came to Tanzania to pay respect to the East African countrys role in achieving African liberation, and to embark on a second liberation which will set the continent on a path to economic independence, with women as central drivers of change.
In her opening address at the conference, Tanzanian vice-president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, commended the initiative saying ideas shared there could help inform policies and bring about gender parity. She agreed with other speakers that it would be a mistake to ignore women in pushing forward Africas transformation agenda. The Tanzanian deputy leader, who is also a member of the UN High Level Panel on Womens Economic Empowerment, made a personal commitment to support women in her country in any way to ensure their effective participation in the WAA forum.
Tanzanian vice-president Samia Suluhu Hassan
Governments should provide an enabling infrastructure which seeks to promote gender parity. May I also call upon all of us here to ask our governments to take into account the implementation of [the United Nations] sustainable development goals for faster realisation of economic empowerment, especially for women, Hassan said.
The four-day event hosted several specialised discussions covering topics like agribusiness, energy and extractive industries, cross-border trade, financial inclusion, technology, and media in the context of changing the narrative on womens representation.
The discussions highlighted varied opinions, with some participants blaming men for monopolising power during the independence movement, thereby marginalising women. Other participants felt lessons could be drawn from the first stage of political liberation to succeed in the second struggle for economic independence.
Appearing on a conference panel, Hadeel Ibrahim, the executive director of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, stressed that the second liberation struggle needs to have an inclusive feminist agenda.
The first liberation was about gaining power while the second one is about empowerment. This liberation should aim at inclusiveness for marginalised groups while adhering to good governance, where everyone is treated with dignity regardless of gender, said Ebrahim.
The former president of the Pan-African Parliament, Gertrude Mongella, thinks that independence was achieved due to unity of purpose among nations, and that same spirit of unity should help to make the second liberation a success.
Male speakers at the forum also supported women taking a driving seat in the economic transformation of Africa. Studies have shown that investing in women has economic benefits because the global GDP can expand by $12 trillion. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, the GDP can expand by $300 billion, which is three times the amount of foreign aid to the continent, explained Sangu Delle, a Ghanaian entrepreneur and chief executive officer of the Golden Palm Investments Corporation.
Reporting by Suzgo Chitete, images by Gare Amadou
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PM: Youth entrepreneurial empowerment to be ‘major focus’ of … – Bahamas Tribune
Posted: at 12:07 pm
By Natario McKenzie
Tribune Business Reporter
Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis said that youth entrepreneurial empowerment will be a major focus of his administration, while urging the private sector to be "bold and imaginative".
Dr Minnis, who was speaking at the recent launch of the Bahamas Striping Group's Investment Group funding arm, said: "Youth entrepreneurial empowerment will be a major focus of my administration as we see this as a means of tackling some of our long-entrenched problems in our urban areas such as unemployment, crime and social anomie."
Dr Minnis applauded the efforts of the striping group, while noting there are countless examples of young individuals who have ideas to start a business enterprise but who have nowhere to turn to find the necessary funding to advance their proposals. "They are unable to obtain funding through the established commercial banks and quite naturally they would not have the connections or the knowledge to obtain private financing. And so what happens, the dream is deferred, and the dream dies. Needless to say, this leads to personal frustration and social explosion."
Dr Minnis also stressed that the private sector must expand. "One of today's realities is that the private sector must expand. It must be that sector of our economy that must be bold and imaginative. We know that the public sector is already overburdened when it comes to creating new employment and so any opportunity that the private sector has to expand and create new employment should be welcomed," said Dr Minnis.
He added: "Our economy needs small and medium enterprises to grow and become successful. More often than not, these are the companies that employ those who are marginalised and who may not fit into the conventional mainstream of employable skills. But the market place must find room for such young men and women, and often the best way to do this is allowing such persons to do their own thing."
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