Tag Archives: best

#430658 Why Every Leader Needs a Healthy ...

This article is part of a series exploring the skills leaders must learn to make the most of rapid change in an increasingly disruptive world. The first article in the series, “How the Most Successful Leaders Will Thrive in an Exponential World,” broadly outlines four critical leadership skills—futurist, technologist, innovator, and humanitarian—and how they work together.
Today’s post, part five in the series, takes a more detailed look at leaders as technologists. Be sure to check out part two of the series, “How Leaders Dream Boldly to Bring New Futures to Life,” part three of the series, “How All Leaders Can Make the World a Better Place,” and part four of the series, “How Leaders Can Make Innovation Everyone’s Day Job”.
In the 1990s, Tower Records was the place to get new music. Successful and popular, the California chain spread far and wide, and in 1998, they took on $110 million in debt to fund aggressive further expansion. This wasn’t, as it turns out, the best of timing.
The first portable digital music player went on sale the same year. The following year brought Napster, a file sharing service allowing users to freely share music online. By 2000, Napster hosted 20 million users swapping songs. Then in 2001, Apple’s iPod and iTunes arrived, and when the iTunes Music Store opened in 2003, Apple sold over a million songs the first week.
As music was digitized, hard copies began to go out of style, and sales and revenue declined.
Tower first filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and again (for the last time) in 2006. The internet wasn’t the only reason for Tower’s demise. Mismanagement and price competition from electronics retailers like Best Buy also played a part. Still, today, the vast majority of music is purchased or streamed entirely online, and record stores are for the most part a niche market.
The writing was on the wall, but those impacted most had trouble reading it.
Why is it difficult for leaders to see technological change coming and right the ship before it’s too late? Why did Tower go all out on expansion just as the next big thing took the stage?
This is one story of many. Digitization has moved beyond music and entertainment, and now many big retailers operating physical stores are struggling to stay relevant. Meanwhile, the pace of change is accelerating, and new potentially disruptive technologies are on the horizon.
More than ever, leaders need to develop a strong understanding of and perspective on technology. They need to survey new innovations, forecast their pace, gauge the implications, and adopt new tools and strategy to change course as an industry shifts, not after it’s shifted.
Simply, leaders need to adopt the mindset of a technologist. Here’s what that means.
Survey the Landscape
Nurturing curiosity is the first step to understanding technological change. To know how technology might disrupt your industry, you have to know what’s in the pipeline and identify which new inventions are directly or indirectly related to your industry.
Becoming more technologically minded takes discipline and focus as well as unstructured time to explore the non-obvious connections between what is right in front of us and what might be. It requires a commitment to ongoing learning and discovery.
Read outside your industry and comfort zone, not just Fast Company and Wired, but Science and Nature to expand your horizons. Identify experts with the ability to demystify specific technology areas—many have a solid following on Twitter or a frequently cited blog.
But it isn’t all about reading. Consider going where the change is happening too.
Visit one of the technology hubs around the world or a local university research lab in your own back yard. Or bring the innovation to you by building an internal exploration lab stocked with the latest technologies, creating a technology advisory board, hosting an internal innovation challenge, or a local pitch night where aspiring entrepreneurs can share their newest ideas.
You might even ask the crowd by inviting anyone to suggest what innovation is most likely to disrupt your product, service, or sector. And don’t hesitate to engage younger folks—the digital natives all around you—by asking questions about what technology they are using or excited about. Consider going on a field trip with them to see how they use technology in different aspects of their lives. Invite the seasoned executives on your team to explore long-term “reverse mentoring” with someone who can expose them to the latest technology and teach them to use it.
Whatever your strategy, the goal should be to develop a healthy obsession with technology.
By exploring fresh perspectives outside traditional work environments and then giving ourselves permission to see how these new ideas might influence existing products and strategies, we have a chance to be ready for what we’re not ready for—but is likely right around the corner.
Estimate the Pace of Progress
The next step is forecasting when a technology will mature.
One of the most challenging aspects of the changes underway is that in many technology arenas, we are quickly moving from a linear to an exponential pace. It is hard enough to envision what is needed in an industry buffeted by progress that is changing 10% per year, but what happens when technological progress doubles annually? That is another world altogether.
This kind of change can be deceiving. For example, machine learning and big data are finally reaching critical momentum after more than twenty years of being right around the corner. The advances in applications like speech and image recognition that we’ve seen in recent years dwarf what came before and many believe we’ve just begun to understand the implications.
Even as we begin to embrace disruptive change in one technology arena, far more exciting possibilities unfold when we explore how multiple arenas are converging.
Artificial intelligence and big data are great examples. As Hod Lipson, professor of Mechanical Engineering and Data Science at Columbia University and co-author of Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead, says, “AI is the engine, but big data is the fuel. They need each other.”
This convergence paired with an accelerating pace makes for surprising applications.
To keep his research lab agile and open to new uses of advancing technologies, Lipson routinely asks his PhD students, “How might AI disrupt this industry?” to prompt development of applications across a wide spectrum of sectors from healthcare to agriculture to food delivery.
Explore the Consequences
New technology inevitably gives rise to new ethical, social, and moral questions that we have never faced before. Rather than bury our heads in the sand, as leaders we must explore the full range of potential consequences of whatever is underway or still to come.
We can add AI to kids’ toys, like Mattel’s Hello Barbie or use cutting-edge gene editing technology like CRISPR-Cas9 to select for preferred gene sequences beyond basic health. But just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
Take time to listen to skeptics and understand the risks posed by technology.
Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and other well-known names in science and technology have expressed concern in the media and via open letters about the risks posed by AI. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, has even argued tech companies shouldn’t build artificial intelligence systems that will replace people rather than making them more productive.
Exploring unintended consequences goes beyond having a Plan B for when something goes wrong. It requires broadening our view of what we’re responsible for. Beyond customers, shareholders, and the bottom line, we should understand how our decisions may impact employees, communities, the environment, our broader industry, and even our competitors.
The minor inconvenience of mitigating these risks now is far better than the alternative. Create forums to listen to and value voices outside of the board room and C-Suite. Seek out naysayers, ethicists, community leaders, wise elders, and even neophytes—those who may not share our preconceived notions of right and wrong or our narrow view of our role in the larger world.
The question isn’t: If we build it, will they come? It’s now: If we can build it, should we?
Adopt New Technologies and Shift Course
The last step is hardest. Once you’ve identified a technology (or technologies) as a potential disruptor and understand the implications, you need to figure out how to evolve your organization to make the most of the opportunity. Simply recognizing disruption isn’t enough.
Take today’s struggling brick-and-mortar retail business. Online shopping isn’t new. Amazon isn’t a plucky startup. Both have been changing how we buy stuff for years. And yet many who still own and operate physical stores—perhaps most prominently, Sears—are now on the brink of bankruptcy.
There’s hope though. Netflix began as a DVD delivery service in the 90s, but quickly realized its core business didn’t have staying power. It would have been laughable to stream movies when Netflix was founded. Still, computers and bandwidth were advancing fast. In 2007, the company added streaming to its subscription. Even then it wasn’t a totally compelling product.
But Netflix clearly saw a streaming future would likely end their DVD business.
In recent years, faster connection speeds, a growing content library, and the company’s entrance into original programming have given Netflix streaming the upper hand over DVDs. Since 2011, DVD subscriptions have steadily declined. Yet the company itself is doing fine. Why? It anticipated the shift to streaming and acted on it.
Never Stop Looking for the Next Big Thing
Technology is and will increasingly be a driver of disruption, destabilizing entrenched businesses and entire industries while also creating new markets and value not yet imagined.
When faced with the rapidly accelerating pace of change, many companies still default to old models and established practices. Leading like a technologist requires vigilant understanding of potential sources of disruption—what might make your company’s offering obsolete? The answers may not always be perfectly clear. What’s most important is relentlessly seeking them.
Stock Media provided by MJTierney / Pond5 Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#430649 Robotherapy for children with autism

New Robotherapy for children with autism could reduce patient supervision by therapists.
05.07.2017
Autism treatments and therapies routinely make headlines. With robot enhanced therapies on the rise, often overlooked though, is the mental stress and physical toll the procedures take on therapists. As autism treatments can be taxing on both patient and therapists, few realize the stress and workload of those working with autistic patients.
It is against this backdrop, that researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel are pioneering a new technology to aid behavioural therapy, and one with a very deliberate aspect: they are using robots to boost the basic social learning skills of children with ASD and while doing so, they hope to make the therapists’ job substantially easier.
A study, just published in PALADYN – Journal of Behavioural Robotics examines the use of social robots as tools in clinical situations by addressing the challenge of increasing robot autonomy.
The growing deployment of robot-assisted therapies in recent decades means children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can develop and nurture social behaviour and cognitive skills. Learning skills that hold out in real life is the first and foremost goal of all autism therapies, including the Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT), with effectiveness always considered a key concern. However, this time round the scientists have set off on the additional mission to take the load off the human therapists by letting parts of the intervention be taken over by the supervised yet autonomous robots.
The researchers developed a complete system of robot-enhanced therapy (RET) for children with ASD. The therapy works by teaching behaviours during repeated sessions of interactive games. Since the individuals with ASD tend to be more responsive to feedback coming from an interaction with technology, robots are often used for this therapy. In this approach, the social robot acts as a mediator and typically remains remote-controlled by a human operator. The technique, called Wizard of Oz, requires the robot to be operated by an additional person and the robot is not recording the performance during the therapy. In order to reduce operator workload, authors introduced a system with a supervised autonomous robot – which is able to understand the psychological disposition of the child and use it to select actions appropriate to the current state of the interaction.
Admittedly, robots with supervised autonomy can substantially benefit behavioural therapy for children with ASD – diminishing the therapist workload on the one hand, and achieving more objective measurements of therapy outcomes on the other. Yet, complex as it is, this therapy requires a multidisciplinary approach, as RET provides mixed effectiveness for primary tasks: the turn-taking, joint attention and imitation task comparing to Standard Human Treatment (SHT).
Results are likely to prompt a further development of the robot assisted therapy with increasing robot’s autonomy. With many outstanding conceptual and technical issues yet to tackle –it is definitely the ethical questions that pose one of the major challenges as far as the potential and maximal degree of robot autonomy is concerned.
The article is fully available in open access to read, download and share on De Gruyter Online.
Research was conducted as a part of DREAM (Development of Robot-Enhanced therapy for children with Autism spectrum disorders) project.
DOI: 10.1515/pjbr-2017-0002
Image credit: P.G. Esteban
About the Journal: PALADYN – Journal of Behavioural Robotics is a fully peer-reviewed, electronic-only journal that publishes original, high-quality research on topics broadly related to neuronally and psychologically inspired robots and other behaving autonomous systems.
About De Gruyter Open: De Gruyter Open is a leading publisher of Open Access academic content. Publishing in all major disciplines, De Gruyter Open is home to more than 500 scholarly journals and over 100 books. The company is part of the De Gruyter Group (www.degruyter.com) and a member of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). De Gruyter Open’s book and journal programs have been endorsed by the international research community and some of the world’s top scientists, including Nobel laureates. The company’s mission is to make the very best in academic content freely available to scholars and lay readers alike.
The post Robotherapy for children with autism appeared first on Roboticmagazine. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#429492 The top five female androids today

Geminoid F, Sophia, DER2, HRP-4C and Asuna are considered by many to be the top five fembots today. See for yourself why…

Posted in Human Robots

#428626 Cimcorp to fully automate Turkish Tire ...

Cimcorp Selected to Supply Turnkey Automated Handling System to Large Turkish Tire Manufacturer, Petlas
The leading tire handling specialist’s system will handle tires in the tire-finishing and palletizing areas in Turkish manufacturer’s expanded facility
Ulvila, Finland – November 9, 2016 – Cimcorp, leading global supplier of turnkey automation for intralogistics and tire-handling solutions, announces it has been selected to implement a fully automated handling system in Petlas Tire Corporation’s (Petlas) factory in Kirsehir, Turkey. Based on Cimcorp’s Dream Factory solution, the automation will take care of the handling of passenger car radial (PCR) finished tires in the tire-finishing and palletizing areas. Work on the order is already underway and the’ turnkey material handling system will become fully operational in fall 2017.
The order, Cimcorp’s first project for Petlas, is part of a huge investment program to expand the Kirsehir plant in order to increase Petlas’ PCR production capacity and meet growing demand.
Turkey achieved record car production and export levels in 2015, with production up by 16 percent and exports up 12 percent over the preceding year. This growth rate is higher than in any other European country and, with its automotive plants rolling out 1.36 million vehicles in 2015, Turkey is now the seventh largest automotive producer in Europe.
With the production equipment – the tire-building machines, presses and testing machines – already installed, Petlas is commencing the automation of the plant’s material handling. This comprises Cimcorp’s robotic buffer stores, tire conveyors and control software – Cimcorp WCS (Warehouse Control Software) – to take care of all material flows. Using linear robots operating on overhead gantries, the system will automate the handling and transfer of finished tires from the trimming stations, through visual inspection and uniformity testing, to palletizing.
Yahya Ertem, general manager, Petlas Tire Corporation, said, “We think highly of Cimcorp’s software, which integrates the machines into one entity and keeps the flow of material and data under complete control. Cimcorp’s Dream Factory solution fits with our vision to achieve ‘excellence in business’ and will help us to achieve our strategic goals.”
Tero Peltomäki, vice president of sales and projects, Cimcorp, said, “It has been fantastic to work with the Petlas team, honing our design into the best possible solution for the Kirsehir plant. The automation will help Petlas to enhance its market position as a leading tire manufacturer and distributor and we look forward to working on future automation projects with the company.”
To receive high-resolution images, please send requests to Heidi Scott via email at: lasendio@dprgroup.com

About Cimcorp
Cimcorp Group – part of Murata Machinery, Ltd. (Muratec) – is a leading global supplier of turnkey automation for intralogistics, using advanced robotics and software technologies. As well as being a manufacturer and integrator of pioneering material handling systems for the tire industry, Cimcorp has developed unique robotic solutions for order fulfillment and storage that are being used in the food & beverage, retail, e-commerce, FMCG and postal services sectors. With locations in Finland, Canada and the United States, the group has around 300 employees and has delivered over 2,000 logistics automation solutions. Designed to reduce operating costs, ensure traceability and improve efficiency, these systems are used within manufacturing and distribution centers in 40 countries across five continents. For more information, visit www.cimcorp.com.
About Petlas Tire Corporation (Petlas)
Founded in 1976, Petlas Tire Corporation has operations in 98 countries worldwide and employs 2,150 people. The company’s plant in Kirsehir currently has the capacity to produce 8 million PCR (passenger car radial) tires, 2 million agricultural tires, 500,000 TBR (truck & bus radial) tires and 300,000 OTR (off-the-road) tires per year. For more information, visit www.petlas.com.

The post Cimcorp to fully automate Turkish Tire Manufacturer Petlas appeared first on Roboticmagazine. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#428173 Next-Gen Robotics & Automation: ...

PRESS RELEASE:

The fall in price of next-generation robots from hundreds to tens of thousands of pounds means that the business case just became stronger for automotive vehicle and parts manufacturers to implement robotic solutions across individual manufacturing lines.

Challenges and pitfalls remain though, with nearly 76% of the target audience lacking clarity on robotic capabilities and implementation best practice. From how to prepare process for automation, to the individual capabilities of each type of robot for individual production lines, OEMs need to know the next best step.

This year’s must attend Next-Generation Robotics & Automation: Automotive Manufacturing Europe 2016 Summit will be the only event focused on robotic upgrade and innovation, specifically for the automotive industry.

Co-located with our UK flagship Joining, Forming & Manufacturing Technologies Summit, on 29th-30th November, at the VOX in Birmingham, this must attend event addresses how to retain cutting edge in automotive manufacturing and the tactics needed to get next-generation robots right, first time.

Reasons To Attend:

The Only European Robotics Event Dedicated To The Automotive Industry

Discuss selection and implementation challenges specific to your sector:

8+ Robotic Capabilities Case Studies – Comprehensive access to exclusive manufacturer perspectives on Next-Generation Robotic applications – direct from the plant

5 Process Specific Breakout Groups – Grapple with application, maintenance & selection considerations particular to your production process: Body Shop, Paint Shop, Power Train & Final Assembly

4 Robot-Type Deep Dive Discussion Groups – Discuss with peers the capabilities and attributes of each specific next-generation robot type to address their relevance to your needs: Zero Speed Monitoring, Power & Force Limited, Speed & Separation & Hand Guided Robots

Strategic & Technical Focus – A blended programme offers access to business case and strategic considerations, as well as tactical robotic application techniques
Speakers Include:

Willem Grobler, Technology Project Leader, BMW
Rich McDonnell, Senior Manufacturing Manager TS-22,
Jaguar XE & F-Pace Body Construction, Jaguar Land Rover
Dan Lämkull , Methods Developer, Volvo Car Corporation
Ali Ackay, Control Technologies & Robotics – Manufacturing Engineering Development, Daimler AG & Mercedes-Benz Trucks

Register today to profit from the Super Early Bird Discount, and reserve your place at the innovation hub of the European Automotive sector in time!
The post Next-Gen Robotics & Automation: Automotive Manufacturing Europe 2016 appeared first on Roboticmagazine. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots