engineering

5 items re: robotics

On 05/03/2014, in 21st century, engineering, robotics, STEAM-related, by Daniel Christian

5 cool (and informative) robot videos you don’t want to miss — from robohub.org by Frank Tobe

Excerpt:

This wide-ranging group of robotics-related videos are worth watching. Set aside some time, make sure you have a hi-speed connection, and watch them. They range from cool to informative to downright scary.

5 areas in robotics that will transform society and their economic impact — from robohub.org by Colin Lewis

Excerpt:

The 5 areas in Robotics, which are already here, that I believe will have a major economic impact and help to transform society over the next decade or so are:

Drones
Medical Procedures, Operations and Health
Prosthetics and exoskeletons
Artificial Assistants
Driverless Cars

Robot gives telecommuters a presence in the workplace — from bostonherald.com

Excerpt:

The robot memorizes the layout of an office building, allowing a remote user to simply press a point on a map to dispatch Ava 500 to a certain office or conference room. Once there, the worker “teleports” into the robot, appearing on the screen and engaging with whoever’s around.

4 robots that teach children science and math in engaging ways — from scientificamerican.com by David Greer
Modular, programmable automatons make STEM learning fun

Excerpt:

Robots can capture a child’s imagination like no other tool by creating a fun, physical learning process. With robots, kids learn programming via interactive play by moving a robot in various sequences and using intuitive, visual programming on a computer screen. The children also learn STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) by watching and interacting with robots that demonstrate the practical results of the day’s lesson.

Microsoft makes socially interactive robots a reality (video) — from technocrazed.com by Arsalan Rasheed

From DSC:
This is a bit troubling to me. My fear? Businesses will replace people with robots in a heartbeat if they can cut costs. If a robot can learn to give directions to visitors, will the companies keep their receptionists, information center employees, other — or lay them off?

Along those lines, here are a couple of items that speak to this fear:

It is not skills or majors that are being devalued. It is people.

Sarah Kendzior
Surviving the post-employment economy

Do today’s leaders actually care about the person that is doing the work?
Do they even know their name let alone what provides them with job satisfaction?

Dan Pontefract
Whose job is leadership, anyway?

From DSC:
Last spring, I saw the following graphic from Sparks & Honey’s presentation entitled, “8 Exponential Trends That Will Shape Humanity“:

If today’s changes are truly exponential — and I agree with Sparks & Honey that they are, especially as they relate to technological changes — how soon will it be before each of us is interacting with a robot?

This is not an idle idea or question, nor is it a joke. It will be here sooner than most of us think! The science fiction of the past is here (at least in part). Some recent items I’ve run across come to my mind, such as:

Hitachi’s EMIEW Robot Learns to Navigate Around the Office — from spectrum.ieee.org by Jason Falconer

Photo: Hitachi

Excerpt:

Now EMIEW 2 still relies on maps of its surroundings, but its navigation software has a new feature: It uses designated zones that make the robot change its speed and direction.

iRpobot Ava 500

Excerpt:

Ava 500 enables this new dimension in telepresence with:

autonomous navigation and mobility – remote users simply specify a destination and the robot automatically navigates to the desired location without any human intervention.
standards-based videoconferencing – built-in Cisco Telepresence® solutions deliver enterprise-class security and reliability.
an easy-to-use client application – an iPad mini™ tablet enables remote users to schedule and control the robot.
scheduling and management -seamlessly handled through an iRobot managed cloud service.

Also see:

Chinese city aims to have 80% of production done by Robots by 2020 — from robohub.org
Robohub Digest March 2014 — — from robohub.org
With Farm Robotics, the Cows Decide When It’s Milking Time — from the New York Times by Jesse McKinley

APP Ed Review (appedreview.org) & the Global Education Database (gedb.org)

On 04/11/2014, in 21st century, 3D, A/V -- audio/visual, Apple, art, biology, Bring your own device (BYOD), chemistry, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, computer science, content development, aggregation, repositories, creativity, digital audio, digital learning, digital photography, digital storytelling, digital textbooks, digital video, education technology, educational games / serious games, elearning, engagement / engaging students, engineering, Google, graphics, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, maker movement, mobile learning, multimedia, new media literacies, open courseware and systems, passions, physics, platforms, play, political science, presentations, productivity / tips and tricks, programming, publishing, science, simulations, STEAM-related, storytelling, student-related, tablets, teachers, teaching & learning, writing, youth, by Daniel Christian

App Ed Review

From the About Us page (emphasis DSC):

App Ed Review is a free searchable database of educational app reviews designed to support classroom teachers finding and using apps effectively in their teaching practice. In its database, each app review includes:

A brief, original description of the app;
A classification of the app based on its purpose;
Three or more ideas for how the app could be used in the classroom;
A comprehensive app evaluation;
The app’s target audience;
Subject areas where the app can be used; and,
The cost of the app.

Also see the Global Education Database:

From the About Us page:

It’s our belief that digital technologies will utterly change the way education is delivered and consumed over the next decade. We also reckon that this large-scale disruption doesn’t come with an instruction manual. And we’d like GEDB to be part of the answer to that.

It’s the pulling together of a number of different ways in which all those involved in education (teachers, parents, administrators, students) can make some sense of the huge changes going on around them. So there’s consumer reviews of technologies, a forum for advice, an aggregation of the most important EdTech news and online courses for users to equip themselves with digital skills. Backed by a growing community on social media (here, here and here for starters).

It’s a fast-track to digital literacy in the education industry.

GEDB has been pulled together by California residents Jeff Dunn, co-founder of Edudemic, and Katie Dunn, the other Edudemic co-founder, and, across the Atlantic in London, Jimmy Leach, a former habitue of digital government and media circles.

Addendum:

Favorite educational iPad apps that are also on Android — from the Learning in Hand blog by Tony Vincent

Major questions need to be asked — and addressed — due to these shifts [Christian]

On 03/17/2014, in 21st century, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, career development, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, emerging technologies, engineering, entrepreneurship, experimentation, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, global / globalization, heutagogy, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, informal learning, K-12 related, leadership, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, lifelong learning, marketplaces, new business models, pace of change, professional development, reinvent, robotics, staying relevant, strategy, surviving, the downsides of how people use tech, training / L&D, trends, vision/possibilities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Excerpts:

If Daniel Nadler is right, a generation of college graduates with well-paid positions as junior researchers and analysts in the banking industry should be worried about their jobs. Very worried.

Mr Nadler’s start-up, staffed with ex-Google engineers and backed partly by money from Google’s venture capital arm, is trying to put them out of work.

…

The threat to jobs stretches beyond the white-collar world. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) also make possible more versatile robots capable of taking over many types of manual work. “It’s going to decimate jobs at the low end,” predicts Jerry Kaplan, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who teaches a class about AI at Stanford University. Like others working in the field, he says he is surprised by the speed at which the new technologies are moving out of the research labs.

From DSC:
After reading the above article — and seeing presentations about these trends (example) — I have some major questions to ask:

What changes do those of us working within higher education need to make due to these shifts? How should we modify our curricula? Which skills need to be reinforced/developed?
What changes do Learning & Development groups and Training Departments need to make within the corporate world?
How should we be developing our K-12 students to deal with such a volatile workplace?
What changes do adult learners need to make to stay marketable/employable? How can they reinvent themselves (and know what that reinvention should look like)?
How can each of us know if our job is next on the chopping block and if it is, what should we do about it?
What kind of future do we want?

These changes are for real. The work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee further addresses some of these trends and changes. See:

Addendum:

Also see:

Bill Gates: Yes, robots really are about to take your jobs — from bgr.com by Brad Reed

Bill Gates Interview Robots

Excerpt:

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates isn’t going to sugarcoat things: The increasing power of automation technology is going to put a lot of people out of work. Business Insider reports that Gates gave a talk at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, DC this week and said that both governments and businesses need to start preparing for a future where lots of people will be put out of work by software and robots.

Also see:

Make Work More Human — from Harold Jarche

Description:
Smart machines do what we thought only people could do. They include conversational assistants like GoogleNow that know how you work, understand written content and make recommendations based on what you’re doing; advisors like IBM’s Watson that can help clinicians keep up with medical literature and suggest courses of action; software that writes sports stories from box scores; and cars that drive themselves.

Key Issues
1. What are smart machines?
2. How will smart machines impact business, technology, economies and society?
3. What should you do about it?

The year ahead: ten amazing science and technology innovations coming up in 2014 — from telegraph.co.uk by Paul Kendall and Chris Bell
From the world’s largest underground hotel to Star Wars-style holographic communication, the coming year is set to unveil an array of incredible advances in science and technology

Former Windows leader Steven Sinofsky presents 10 Mega Trends in Tech for 2014 — from businessinsider.com by Jay Yarow; via Graeme Codrington (@FuturistGraeme) and Laura Goodrich (@LauraGoodrich)

Top Technology Trends for 2014 — from computer.org
Excerpt:

Supporting New Learning Styles
Online courses demand seamless, ubiquitous approach.

These days, students from all corners of the world can sign up for online classes to study everything from computer science, digital signal processing, and machine learning to European history, psychology, and astronomy–and all for free. As interest in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continues to explode, there will be a corresponding need for technology to support these new learning systems and styles. Platforms such as Coursera, with more than 3 million users and 107 partners; and edX, a partnership between Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University with 1.7 million users; are hosting classes with thousands of online enrollees each. And although lectures are still the mainstay of MOOCs, the classes require web forums, online meetups, and keystroke loggers to check identities, as well as powerful servers to handle the volumes. MOOCs and other new online classes are creating a demand for learning that is seamless—happening continuously via different technologies; ubiquitous—drawing from pervasive and embedded technologies; and contextual—drawing awareness from location-based and other sensor-based technologies.

5 Higher-Education Trends for 2014 — from theatlantic.com by Sophie Quinton
Expect an increased emphasis on teacher effectiveness, technical education, and more.

Headings include:

Earning College Credit for What You Know
Career and Technical Education
Student-Loan Outrage
Data-Privacy Concerns
Teacher Effectiveness

Special Report: 2014 Top Tech to Watch — from spectrum.ieee.org

NMC Horizon Report — 2014 Higher Education Preview

JWT’s 100 things to watch in 2014

IBM internal experts club together to offer 2014 predictions — from siliconangle.com by Bert Latamore

Headings include:

Analytics
Cloud
Mobile
Skills

2014 Technology Predictions Series: RadiumOne on Mobile — from siliconangle.com by Suzanne Kattau

Internet of Things may strangle enterprise bandwidth — from informationweek.comby Deepak Kumar
The Internet of Things is poised to bring a flood of WAN traffic and new Internet-enabled devices to enterprise WANs. Be sure your corporate network is ready for it.

7 things you should expect from your leaders in 2014 — from forbes.com by Glenn Llopis

10 Jobs for tomorrow that barely exist today (Infographic) — from jobmarketmonitor.com by Michel Cournoyer and Thomas Frey

Addendum on 1/4/14:

10 Competencies Students Need to Thrive in The Future — from educatorstechnology.com

From DSC:
First, some items:

Thinking for the future — from nytimes.com by David Brooks

Excerpt:

We’re living in an era of mechanized intelligence, an age in which you’re probably going to find yourself in a workplace with diagnostic systems, different algorithms and computer-driven data analysis. If you want to thrive in this era, you probably want to be good at working with intelligent machines. As Tyler Cowen puts it in his relentlessly provocative recent book, “Average Is Over,” “If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch.”

So our challenge for the day is to think of exactly which mental abilities complement mechanized intelligence. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few mental types that will probably thrive in the years ahead.

Excerpt:

Create your own employment avatar robot to replace you at work. Fight fire with fire. Could this be the solution to the coming robotic automation revolution?

…

The question on everyone’s mind is “If all the jobs are automated, who will have money to buy the products from these corporations?” This is not just a blue-collar issue. Predictive analytics in soft A.I. robots could replace creative jobs as well.

Siri says ‘dump him’? How mobile devices could run (or ruin) your life — from CNN.com by futurist Gerd Leonhard

Excerpt:

(CNN) — The Web is set to change our lives dramatically over the next decade. This will also raise questions about the use of personal data and the need to balance new powers with ethics. Here are five ways you can expect the explosion in technology to impact you:

From DSC:
These items caused me to reflect…they made me wonder…

How should we educate our youth in this age of automation?
How should our curricula respond/change/adapt to these trends?
Or should we even be talking about curricula? Perhaps we should rather be curating and providing streams of content — and doing so on a lifelong basis…?
How should we reinvent ourselves and keep ourselves marketable?

Addendum:

Why Cognition-as-a-Service is the next operating system battlefield — from gigaom.com by Nova Spivack

Siemens’ Pictures of the Future

On 08/07/2013, in 21st century, emerging technologies, engineering, future, innovation, research, by Daniel Christian

How not to mint more engineers [Lynda Weinman]

On 07/24/2013, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, blended learning, budgets, business side of he, digital learning, engineering, flipping -- inverted learning, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, hybrid learning, liberal arts, new business models, online learning, student-related, by Daniel Christian

How not to mint more engineers — from linkedin.com by Lynda Weinman

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Let’s tackle the economics of the situation head on — and not based on theory, but on experience. When lynda.com opened in 1997, it was a physical school that taught web design. We charged $1,500 per person for a single week of instruction. In those days, the world economy was robust and people came from every continent to study with us, enabling our business to grow and thrive. It was a heady time—until 2001, when the dotcom bubble burst and people and companies lost their budgets.

It was scary to witness the sudden demise of a business model that had worked so incredibly well up until then. In response, we could have simply raised our prices, and targeted a much smaller, more elite audience, hoping to keep our doors open. Instead, we did something crazy. We closed our eyes and leapt into something that was, at that time, unproven: We put our lessons online in video format for $25 per month.

While it took a few years to make as much money as the school did, it eventually far surpassed the earning power of the brick and mortar we started with. Instead of serving 80 people or so a week at our physical school, we started serving thousands in the virtual world, and today that number is in the millions every year.

…

The solution? Take the teachers who are experts and thought leaders and memorialize their lectures and materials via videos and other rich media to share those ideas broadly. Pay them royalties for this, the same as if they published a popular textbook. Leverage in-person class time for projects, collaborations, discussions, reviews, and presentations—the types of activities that are better experienced in person than online.

The science-fiction world continues to develop — but it’s often for real!

On 07/17/2013, in 21st century, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Augmented Reality (AR), computer science, Daniel S. Christian, digital video, engineering, global / globalization, Google, interactivity, internet, learning ecosystem, robotics, society, telecommunications, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Some items that made me think of this posting:

DARPA unveils Atlas DRC Robot — from spectrum.ieee.org by Stephen Cass

Specs:

Six feet, two inches tall (1.88m)
330 pounds (150kg)
On-board real-time control computer
On-board hydraulic pump and thermal management
Tethered for networking and 480-V three-phase power at 15 kW
Two arms, two legs, a torso and a head
28 hydraulically actuated joints
Carnegie Robotics sensor head with LIDAR and stereo sensors
Two sets of hands, one provided by iRobot and one by Sandia National Labs

Drone Home — from time.com by Lev Grossman — also see TIME: “Rise of the Robots” Special Issue

Excerpt:

Flying a drone, even just a Parrot, makes you realize what a radically new and deeply strange technology drones are. A drone isn’t just a tool; when you use it you see and act through it — you inhabit it. It expands the reach of your body and senses in much the same way that the Internet expands your mind. The Net extends our virtual presence; drones extend our physical presence. They are, along with smart phones and 3-D printing, one of a handful of genuinely transformative technologies to emerge in the past 10 years.

.

Bioengineers 3D print tiny functioning human liver — from wired.co.uk

Peek inside Tesla’s robotic factory — from wired.com

Image from
http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/alternative/1206_2012_tesla_model_s_first_drive/photo_11.html

.

From DSC:
And, if you are up to filtering through a great deal of content, create some Google Alerts on the following things to see what’s happening with them:
.

Internet of Things
.
Augmented reality
.
WebRTC
.
Artificial intelligence
.
Self-driving cars
.
Wearable technologies

Engineers: This is how and why you need a free ‘big data’ education [Perez]

On 06/27/2013, in analytics, career development, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, data related items, engineering, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, reinvent, by Daniel Christian

Engineers: This is how and why you need a free ‘big data’ education — from venturebeat.com by Esther Perez

Excerpt:

Additionally, most engineers, myself included, were trained before the rise of the big data ecosystem. There were no courses in our respective engineering schools on Hadoop, and we didn’t receive specialized training on HBase or Hive. While there’s a growing group of recent engineering graduates that had the luxury of learning these skills in university, the majority of engineers out there today still predate the rise of big data.

In an effort to attract top engineering students, a growing number of high-profile universities – Harvard, MIT and Columbia among them – have begun to incorporate big data and data science-centric majors. While this does in theory make it easier for mid-career engineering professionals to gain the requisite skills needed to stay competitive in a fast-changing field, it’s not always so simple.

Taking the necessary time and resources to pause your career and go back to school for one or two years is an extremely risky professional move for most; it’s not as if your employer is simply going to wait two years for you to complete a program and hand your job back once you have a degree in hand.

There is an alternative to this approach, however. A growing number of online learning platforms aimed at providing technical training and certification have appeared in recent years. Some notable examples include Coursera, Khan Academy and Big Data University, all of which are free of charge (a stark contrast to the wave of for-profit “universities” that had previously dominated the online education landscape).

From DSC:
Is this a piece of where higher education is heading?

Your new lab partner? How about Baxter’s Research Robot? Hmmmm….

On 04/26/2013, in chemistry, computer science, engineering, entrepreneurship, higher education, robotics, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
There seems to be some potential here for Computer Science students, Engineering majors, Chemistry students, aspiring entrepreneurs in the Business/Economics Departments out there, and more…

metaio Augmented Reality Solutions for Engineering

On 04/18/2013, in Augmented Reality (AR), engineering, by Daniel Christian

metaio Augmented Reality Solutions for Engineering
.

Video on YouTube — published on Apr 18, 2013
With over 10 years of experience, metaio offers the perfect Augmented Reality solutions for companies in the engineering and industrial fields. The built-in availability to connect AR with industry-standard measurement arms and high-precision laser-tracking systems lead to increases in quality, efficiency and accuracy through all phases of industrial processes.

Visualize virtual products or changes to production facilities in their natural environment, leading to increases in early error detection, prevention of extensive iteration loops and benefiting workers thanks to precise operational guidelines.

Also see:

Introduction to metaio software & solutions

Updated Robotics Roadmap presented to US congress [Tobe]

On 03/28/2013, in emerging technologies, engineering, future, legislatures / government / legal, robotics, by Daniel Christian

Updated Robotics Roadmap presented to US congress — from robohub.org by Frank Tobe

Excerpt:

Henrik Christensen, the KUKA Chair of Robotics at GA Tech and Chairman of the Roadmap project, Rodney Brooks, CEO of Rethink Robotics, Pete Wurman, CTO of Kiva Systems, and Russ Angold, CTO of Ekso Bionics all presented the new Roadmap to a packed gallery of the Robotics Caucus of the US Congress

The Roadmap and presentation covered six areas of robotics:

Manufacturing
Medical Robots
Healthcare
Service
Space
Defense

The roadmap is here:

Learning Ecosystems

Siemens’ Pictures of the Future

Your new lab partner? How about Baxter’s Research Robot? Hmmmm….

metaio Augmented Reality Solutions for Engineering

Updated Robotics Roadmap presented to US congress [Tobe]

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