Following on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “A is for Automation”.

Cobots are collaborative robots that work and interact with humans.

Wikipedia defines Cobots as:

A cobot or co-robot (from collaborative robot) is a robot intended to physically interact with humans in a shared workspace. This is in contrast with other robots, designed to operate autonomously or with limited guidance, which is what most industrial robots were up until the decade of the 2010s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobot

Robots have been around for sometime within industries and work places mainly in manufacturing verticals. These are now moving towards being cobots with many research and development programs now underway within companies and academia to produce the next generation of cobots. From ones that help carry loads and work along side military personnel, assisting a production line assembling items alongside a skilled worker to cobots helping a medical technician with clinical research.

Robots have often been seen as a replacement for humans in many roles. Cobots, however are not, they instead work and interact with humans in various tasks and levels. Cobots have been around for the past few years, mainly in industrial workplaces such as manufacturing, automotive and supply chains. Their evolution is now bringing cobots into many other workplaces and use cases.

Source: Say ‘hello’ to your new colleague, the Cobot

Cobots will not replace jobs, but allow a different way of working to be experienced, helping to remove repetitive and tedious tasks allowing the more complex tasks and ones that need more time to be undertaken by the worker. As cobots are introduced into the workplace the adoption of new working practices will help to reduce stresses and improve the workplace.

There have been many different attempts to create a J.A.R.V.I.S type of AI system to act as a personal assistant, able to interact with you and automate things.  (If your not sure what J.A.R.V.I.S is then you need to look up on Marvels Iron Man and his AI Assistant).

These have been from high profile people like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) creating a version on J.A.R.V.I.S in his home, voiced by Morgan Freeman. This system has linked simple things like lights, music and toasters which all have IoT devices that you can link together, to more elaborate items such as a t-shirt dispenser, motors to open the curtains and face recognition door system. The brains behind is based on a chat bot and mobile app that the user can integrate with. Details in Mark’s blog post: Building Jarvis

Video: Mark Zuckerberg’s AI – Personal Assistant – Jarvis – Home Automation

Other J.A.R.V.I.S examples and developments  range from simple lights and desktop interactions, to Amazon Alexa being used to control interactions with apps called J.A.R.V.I.S.

If you are looking to build an open source version there is JASPER using a Raspberry PI and other components.  You could always build a version of Alexa on a Raspberry PI

The explosion of IoT and Voice controls is driving innovation and making it easier to start building your own version of J.A.R.V.I.S. There have been several recent announcements from Amazon that help with this:

Amazon have announced the Amazon Echo Look which is a device that can take a photo of you through an Amazon Alexa providing voice commands for the look and then displaying on your app. Another addition is Style Check which can compare your photos and using machine learning check against the latest fashion advise.

Another announcement from Amazon is LEX, which is the program behind aLEXa (Alexa) which has been opened up for developers to start creating conversational chat bots using voice and text.

For those thinking about an actual Iron Man Suit – Richard Browning is certainly a step closer to that vision – Richard Browning and his Real-Life Iron Man Jet Pack Suit

“Adding J.A.R.V.I.S Project to To-Do List.”

Its easy for the older generations to look at the subjects available at Schools that relate to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and understand the value that they hold in the workplace today, however looking through the lens of young person choosing their option subjects its not so easy.

How do I know? Well, I am basing this on what is going on in my family circle at the moment with my son having just gone through the myriad of options available and what he wants to do as his future career. We now are waiting to see if he has the subjects that he has chosen.

One of the challenges that we faced was that the subjects in the options are grouped into a set of choices and you are steered down a set of choosing one from group A, two from B etc. A formula that seems to be based on popularity of the subject, number of teachers of that subject and the national curriculum at that time. This can be a stress full time for a young person having to make a big life decision about what career path and subjects they should take.

The value of STEM subjects is invaluable to the knowledge and building blocks for a young persons career and for their future.

The internet has made it easier these days to research a career, as you can look at the many available and what types of qualifications are needed for them.

It is also important to look at the future and what is happening in the industries related to that career path. Many industries are increasingly utilising technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things) and Mixed Reality (Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality) to help drive innovation, growth and creativity. These will help shape career paths in the future, for example:

• An Optician  may be prescribing prescription lenses with Mixed Reality capability and need an understanding of Computing/Information Technology to program the correct settings.
• A Jeweller or Cobbler may need understanding of electronics and computing to include the latest IoT technology into a ring or the heel of a shoe.
• A Fashion Designer bringing IoT and wearables into the fabrics and using chemistry, physics and engineering to make new conductive/wearable fabrics that interact with surroundings, mood and environment.
• A Hairdresser using Mixed Reality via a mirror in front of a client to show the latest hair designs before cutting or colouring takes place.

STEM subjects are the core of most of the way that the world works today and will shape the future. Help challenge the way that we think and the way that we evolve.

When choosing your options, my advice is:

• Research your chosen career
• Look at the future directions
• Research people in that career and what they have done/doing
• Attend a career event,
  • Speak to people in that career
  • Ask questions
• Choose your subjects
• Study and pass the exams

After some months planning and organisation, at the weekend  (17th to 19th March 2017) I ran a Science Camp for around 50 Scouts at a local Scout Camp Site starting Friday night and finishing Sunday afternoon.

Also being a STEM Ambassador its another part of spreading the importance of STEM subjects to young people. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

STEM Ambassadors are people with experience in one or many of these fields who use their knowledge, enthusiasm and commitment to encourage young people to enjoy STEM subjects.

With enlisted help from Manchester University, the main key theme of the camp was to highlight the importance of STEM subjects to the young people at the camp and to have some fun whilst doing this over a number of activity bases including;

• Building Lego Mindstorm Robots
• Programming Lego Mindstorm Robots
• Building a Metal Detector
• Programming the Metal Detector (Arduino)
• Thermal Imaging
• Science experimentation (hands on small fun experiments)
• Bottle Rockets
• Caucasian Divers

A great camp that worked well with the Scouts getting some great hands on and fun with science. The activities also contributed to the Scouts achieving stage 2 of the Digital Maker staged badge (https://maxhemingway.com/2016/01/25/digital-scouting/)

A big thank you to Manchester University and the staff who attended the camp for their assistance and help with this camp.

I spent part of today helping to run a STEM (Science,Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) session with some pupils from a local school. One part of the day involved programming in Python and I set a project of a simple higher or lower game based on a random number generated.

Running the session took me back to when I was at school reading my weekly copy of “Input Magazine” and programming a ZX81. A lot has changed between then and now in terms of computing, however some things haven’t with pupils having access to “Magpi Magazine” and programming a Raspberry Pi. (OK one was BASIC and the other is Python – but hopefully you get what a mean).

The ability to save and load has certainly got a lot easier and you don’t have to worry about pressing down on the keyboard too heavily and accidentally moving/dislodging the 16k RAM Pack placed into the back of the ZX81!

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81#/media/File:ZX81_Sinclair_Research_advert.jpg
• https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/

Having read this book previously its good to see that it is now available from Google on-line for reading/reference. The book itself is a collection of articles and essays on how Google run and maintain their computing systems by their Site Reliability Engineers.

The book can be accessed at  https://landing.google.com/sre/book/

List of the Table of Contents showing the articles and essays in the book.

Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Part I – Introduction
Chapter 1 – Introduction
Chapter 2 – The Production Environment at Google, from the Viewpoint of an SRE
Part II – Principles
Chapter 3 – Embracing Risk
Chapter 4 – Service Level Objectives
Chapter 5 – Eliminating Toil
Chapter 6 – Monitoring Distributed Systems
Chapter 7 – The Evolution of Automation at Google
Chapter 8 – Release Engineering
Chapter 9 – Simplicity
Part III – Practices
Chapter 10 – Practical Alerting
Chapter 11 – Being On-Call
Chapter 12 – Effective Troubleshooting
Chapter 13 – Emergency Response
Chapter 14 – Managing Incidents
Chapter 15 – Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
Chapter 16 – Tracking Outages
Chapter 17 – Testing for Reliability
Chapter 18 – Software Engineering in SRE
Chapter 19 – Load Balancing at the Frontend
Chapter 20 – Load Balancing in the Datacenter
Chapter 21 – Handling Overload
Chapter 22 – Addressing Cascading Failures
Chapter 23 – Managing Critical State: Distributed Consensus for Reliability
Chapter 24 – Distributed Periodic Scheduling with Cron
Chapter 25 – Data Processing Pipelines
Chapter 26 – Data Integrity: What You Read Is What You Wrote
Chapter 27 – Reliable Product Launches at Scale
Part IV – Management
Chapter 28 – Accelerating SREs to On-Call and Beyond
Chapter 29 – Dealing with Interrupts
Chapter 30 – Embedding an SRE to Recover from Operational Overload
Chapter 31 – Communication and Collaboration in SRE
Chapter 32 – The Evolving SRE Engagement Model
Part V – Conclusions
Chapter 33 – Lessons Learned from Other Industries
Chapter 34 – Conclusion
Appendix A – Availability Table
Appendix B – A Collection of Best Practices for Production Services
Appendix C – Example Incident State Document
Appendix D – Example Postmortem
Appendix E – Launch Coordination Checklist
Appendix F – Bibliography

With Christmas just round the corner and the uptake of drones the UK drone code has been upgraded to make it easier to understand.

• Don’t fly near airports or airfields
• Remember to stay below 120m (400ft) and at least 50m (150ft) away from people
• Observe your drone at all times
• Never fly near aircraft
• Enjoy responsibly

The Drone Safe Website (http://dronesafe.uk/drone-code) has also had a revamp to cover the rules and make it easier to understand the rules which is supported by Airports, Airlines and some electronic suppliers.

The main issue will be getting drone owners to understand that the code exists. Some of these are simple, however how many people actually know how high 120 meters is. Perhaps drones should contain an Altimeter to help drone users keep under this height. Possible market for a clip on drone Altimeter/phone app going forward.

There have been lots of comparisons to TV Programmes and Films made years ago showing technology of the future and where we are today. The prime example of this is Star Trek and communicators, Holodecks vs Hololens. Terminator and AI, etc..

Whilst looking at the latest drone technology I recalled a film I watched in my youth in 1984 called “Runaway” directed by Michael Crichton and stared Tom Selleck about a Police Officer that specialises in malfunctioning robots.

In the film he uses a drone to enter a house and search for people before the drone is shot by another robot. It depicts a near future where a lot of robots are used for everday tasks in farming, construction, housework etc. Most of which are in use today.

The interesting factor in the film though is a law enforcement agent with a specific purpose of dealing with malfunctioning robots, (with the added bad guy in programming them of course). We are not that far away from such an agency in reality with current agencies investigating drones causing issues. Drones being developed for search and rescue and technology that can knock them out of the sky. As the technology grows we may well see such specialised officers in the future.