SAMSUNG will set out selling its Galaxy Fold in September, resurrecting a device that it pulled months ago shortly after early reviewers claimed defects in the gadget's much-touted flexible screen. The world's biggest smartphone maker is engaging in final testing after making a number of modifications to the device, and said in an online post that it will sell the phone in select markets without elaborating.

Apple conformed Thursday to pay US$1 billion to purchase the majority of Intel's smartphone modem business, a move giving the iPhone maker more control over its supply chain. Included in the deal, some 2,200 Intel employees will join Apple, which will acquire intellectual property, equipment and leases.

Alibaba Group Holding has disclosed its first self-designed microprocessor, most likely marking a key step in China's efforts to promote chip self-sufficiency in the middle of clashes with the U.S. over access to technology. The new processor could be obtained by Chinese device makers to power smart speakers, self-driving cars or other internet-connected equipment requiring high-performance computing, Alibaba said at an event on Thursday.

Southeast Asia’s most massive budget carrier, AirAsia, is utilizing cloud technology to manage the company’s 22,000 employees across the region as part of its digital transformation.

Electronics additive manufacturing firm Nano Dimension has stated the launch of new technology facilitating round-the clock 3D printing of electronic circuitry.
 
The Dragonfly Lights-Out Digital Manufacturing (LDM) technology has already been deployed at the Munich factory of defense and security electronics company Hensoldt. “The DragonFly LDM is a vital evolutionary setup up from the DragonFly Pro, enabling low-volume manufacturing of electronic circuits fast and easy to do in-house, with minimum operator time. It will be a great addition for Hensoldt, enabling us to create innovative applications faster and with far better machine availability and lower maintenance than ever before,” said Andreas Salomon, responsible project leader for 3D printed electronics at Hensoldt.
 
The technology enables for uninterrupted printing thanks in part to a self cleaning print-head, as well as supporting 3D printed multilayer PCBs and other electronic components. The company said that the technology would extend printed electronics beyond the prototype phase, enabling low-volume manufacturing of 3D printed PCBs and other electronics.
 
“The DragonFly LDM is manufactured to help our customers prepare for Industry 4.0. and stay spirited in a world that demands digital devices with increasingly sophisticated features. Like its predecessor, the DragonFly Pro, it's the first of its kind on the market, carefully manufactured for both ease-of-use and even more easy-moving, faster and low-cost 3D printing of functional circuitry,” said Amit Dror, CEO and co-founder of Nano Dimension. “We’re confident that the LDM system will give best in class additive manufacturing of printed electronics on the market, making it possible for companies to be more innovative, improve productivity and reliability, lower costs and reduce time-to-market.”



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

Just a short distance aside from me, two astronauts are learning for a spacewalk. I’m shifting weightlessly, in a silence broken only by my own breathing and the infrequent update from Mission Control in my headset. But this isn’t the dark void of space. I’m in Houston, scuba diving in a massive swimming pool that NASA uses to train astronauts for zero-gravity environments. And though it’s a thrill to observe the space-suited figures at work, I didn’t come to see them. I’m here for a peek at Aquanaut, the bright orange robot that we’re sharing the pool with.
 
Aquanaut glides smoothly through the water like a miniature submarine. At first, it doesn’t seem all that different from other unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs, equipped with sensors for gathering data and thrusters for propulsion. Then, in what could be a scene from the movie Transformers, the top part of the robot’s hull rises up from the base, revealing two massive arms that unfold from either side. A wedge-shaped head packed full of sensors rotates into place, and in a matter of seconds, the change is complete. The sleek submarine is now a half-humanoid robot, ready to get to work.
 
Aquanaut signifies a revolutionary new design that its creators, at a startup called Houston Mechatronics Inc. (HMI), hope will totally change subsea robotics. Conventional UUVs typically fit into two categories: torpedo-like free-swimming submersibles, which are employed for long-distance survey missions, and boxy remotely operated machines, which are tethered to help vessels and used for underwater manipulation. HMI wants to blend both of these modes into a single robot. It’s a bold method that no one has started before.
 
The HMI engineers, who often joke that developing a Transformer has been one of their long-term career objectives, are sure that it can be done. Aquanaut has been designed mainly for servicing subsea oil and gas installations. The companies that own and operate this infrastructure spend vast sums of money to examine and protect it. They trust on robotic technologies that haven’t generally changed in years, largely because of the dispute of working in such an extreme environment. For HMI, however, that’s not a problem: Of its 75 employees, over two dozen used to work for NASA. Extreme environments are what they’re best at.
 
HMI co-founder and prime technology officer Nic Radford spent 14 years working on advanced robotics projects at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in Houston. “I’ll aid you that being into space is stronger than getting underwater,” he says. “But space is a perfect environment. Underwater, things are extraordinarily dynamic. I haven’t planned yet whether it’s 10 times harder or 50 times harder for robots operating underwater than it is in space.”
 
Radford and fellow cofounders Matt Ondler and Reg Berka have raised more than US $23 million in venture capital since starting HMI in 2014. Now, after countless design iterations, Aquanaut is finally coming together. Before taking to the open ocean, though, the robot needs to establish itself in more controlled conditions, and that indicates a swim in NASA’s pool.
 
Holding 23.5 million liters of water and with a high depth of 12 meters, NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, or NBL, is huge enough to include a full-scale mock-up of most of the International Space Station, with room to save. Astronauts train for spacewalks at the NBL, coming just about as close to weightlessness as you can get here on the ground. On this late-March morning, HMI has taken over the north end of the facility to test Aquanaut.
 
Ten meters down and with two tanks of nitrox on my back, I try to keep myself consistent as I observe the robot shifting through the water. Aquanaut has been in one piece for only about eight days now, but the testing is going well. The only hiccup is a communication glitch with the arms, but the HMI team is unfazed; they know there’s still a lot of work to do, and the robot will be back here early tomorrow.
 
Radford tells me he enjoys the frenetic routine of running a startup, a sharp contrast with the typical pace of a huge government agency like NASA. Before HMI, he spent five years as chief engineer of NASA’s Robonaut program, building a humanoid robot that flew to the International Space Station, and he later led the development of Valkyrie, an even more sophisticated humanoid platform. In his office at HMI, small 3D-printed models of Aquanaut prototypes fit right in with wall art featuring Valkyrie and Marvel’s Iron Man.
 
“The type of skills that we have at NASA,” he says, “putting robots in remote regions, and getting them to do useful work in austere data environments, best matched this big problem: working offshore.”
 
Most of what we see and hear about the offshore oil and gas industry includes work done from platforms, where people conduct underwater drilling operations from the surface. The platforms are the most noticeable part of the process, but there’s an gigantic amount of complex infrastructure on the seabed as well.
 
Wellheads on the ocean floor are capped by metal assemblies used to control the flow of hydrocarbons to the surface. These structures, covered with pipes, valves, manifolds, and gauges are so intricate they are generally known as Christmas trees. Some are the size of a four-story building.
 
To play routine repair on a wellhead, or to adjust the output of the well, some of the valves on the tree have to be switched, and with wells in deep water — below 300 meters, where divers normally don’t operate — the only way to do that is with a robotic vehicle.
 
For many years, the established process for working on deepwater wells has been to send out a remotely handled underwater vehicle, or ROV, to the well site. But you can’t just send the ROV by itself — you also have to send a large support vessel packed with highly certified people to serve as a base of operations for the ROV, which has little or no autonomy and is tethered to the surface for power and control. This gets very pricey very quickly, with regular jobs costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per day.
 
HMI’s plan is to cut the cord — cutting out most of the need for people along with it. Aquanaut will not need a tether or a support ship. It will travel in submarine mode to its deepwater destination, where it’ll transform into its humanoid form, unfolding its mighty arms. Each arm is geared up with force-torque sensors and has eight axes of motion, similar to that of a human arm. The arms on Aquanaut also have grippers capable of turning valves on the subsea “trees” and even running specialized maintenance tools that the robot carries with it in an internal payload bay.
 
Aquanaut will carry out tasks with human operators supervising but not directly controlling it. And once the job is done, the robot will autonomously return home. Radford says the approach will make Aquanaut both faster to position and cheaper to operate than today’s ROVs. He guesses that costs could be well below half the market rate of a traditional operation.
 
The timing seems right. According to Chuck Richards , a subsea technology pioneer who is currently chair of the ROV Committee of the Marine Technology Society, based in Washington, D.C., the low price of oil over the past several years has cut earnings and led to enhanced competition among oil companies, driving the adoption of new technologies. Richards, whose firm, C.A. Richards & Associates, in Houston, supplies equipment to dozens of subsea companies — HMI among them — explains that while the industry will likely be cautious about an innovation like Aquanaut, it will also be happy to see what the robot can do.
 
Richards explains that when the benefits of commercial ROV technology became evident after its introduction in the 1970s, the industry was enthusiastic to embrace it, even though things were a little tough in the start. “The oil companies were very useful and patient with the ROV industry as it aged,” he says, “and I think they’ll be the same way with a more autonomous vehicle.”
 
Aquanaut’s main advantage over conventional ROVs depends on its untethered operation, and HMI had to solve several key problems to enable that capability. The starting is merely acquiring the robot to the offshore work site without a large support vessel. While Aquanaut could be deployed from a relatively small boat, or even dropped out of a helicopter, the robot can travel more than 200 kilometers in submarine mode. Once it arrives, the robot transforms into ROV mode, with extra thrusters hidden inside the hull folding out to make it more maneuverable.
 
The transformation itself was another major challenge—and a source of much internal debate. “We fought ourselves the whole way intending to prove that we didn’t need to do it,” says Sandeep Yayathi, Aquanaut’s chief engineer, who prior to HMI was the power lead on the Lunar Prospector rover at NASA. But the group fundamentally decided that the benefits outweighed the added complexity: They were going to build their underwater Transformer.
 
To enable Aquanaut to alter its shape so drastically, the robot is supplied with four custom linear actuators that separate the top and bottom halves of its body. Additional motors, also highly customized and housed in waterproof cases, drive the arms and the head. For power, Aquanaut uses a lithium-ion battery similar to those found in electric cars. The full transformation currently takes just 30 seconds.
 
But perhaps none of these challenges is as considerable as designing Aquanaut’s control system. Traditional ROVs have multiple live camera feeds, and human operators maneuver these vehicles with joysticks in real time. Without a tether, the only way to communicate with Aquanaut is through an acoustic modem. This well-established technology has a range of a few tens of kilometers underwater, at the price of high latency and very low bandwidth, in the neighborhood of a few kilobytes per second, at best. HMI plans to rely on small unmanned surface vessels to act as relays between the robot and communication satellites, and from there, Aquanaut can be controlled from anywhere in the world. However, these limitations make direct human control impractical, so Aquanaut will need to do as much as it can on its own.
 
“There’s a lot of autonomy that has to be built in,” Yayathi explains. “You entrust the robot to do a lot.”
 
HMI is planning on maintaining high-level supervisory control over Aquanaut, while delegating most of the low-level decisions to the robot’s powerful onboard computers, which run the Robot Operating System, or ROS, a well-known software platform for research and commercial robots. Using the sensor suite in the head, which contains stereo cameras, a structured light sensor, and a sonar system, the robot constructs a detailed 3D rendering of its surroundings. But instead of trying to send the entire 3D map back to the operator, only very small and highly condensed subsections are sent, and the operator can then match them to an active model of the structure that Aquanaut is looking at.
 
The operator then sends simple commands, such as “Turn the valve at these coordinates 90 degrees clockwise.” The robot will autonomously evaluate how to grasp the valve and how much force to apply while turning, and it will send back a confirmation when the task is total. The operator is still leading the robot’s actions, but in a way that doesn’t require steering the robot by hand, or a bandwidth-intensive live video feed.
 
HMI’s long-term plan is to sell Aquanaut interventions as a service. Using small fleets of robots distributed across areas like the North Sea or off the coast of California, oil and gas companies would simply need to ask that a provided task be accomplished, and HMI would then schedule the nearest robot to take care of it. Radford says it takes about seven people to work a single traditional ROV. “We think we can invert that,” he says. “We suspect one operator could run seven Aquanauts.”
 
With a low-bandwidth connection and an operator only intermittently in the loop, there may be a bigger risk of something going wrong, says Matthew A. Franchek , a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston and director of the International Subsea Engineering Research Institute . “The uncertainty is there,” he says. “I’m worried about a malfunction during an functioning, which could have both financial and environmental consequences. Although the technology is exciting, they’re going to need to prove that it’ll work.”
 
After three exhausting days testing Aquanaut at the NBL, the team celebrates with a crawfish boil in the parking lot behind the HMI office, accompanied by improbable cans of Robot Fish IPA, which came all the way from a brewery in Brooklyn, N.Y. Stories about robotics at NASA flow as quickly as the beer, while I learn how to play cornhole and suck the juice out of crawfish heads.
 
A sense of relief that the testing went well transitions easily into excitement about the future. Radford explains that the existing version of Aquanaut is primarily a demonstration and testing platform, designed for relatively shallow water with a maximum working depth of 300 meters. While this version could perform commercial operations in many parts of the world, HMI is already in the process of designing a scaled-up version that will be able to travel several hundred kilometers and reach depths of 3,000 meters, required for maintaining areas like the Gulf of Mexico.
 
And of course, commercial operations aren’t the only things that HMI is exploring for Aquanaut. Radford couldn’t talk to me on the record about any potential work with the U.S. Department of Defense, but in late 2018 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a program called Angler seeking proposals to “develop an undersea autonomous system that can navigate to and physically manipulate objects on the sea floor.” DARPA’s illustration accompanying the announcement features a streamlined robotic submarine with two arms, a concept that bodes well for a certain Houston company.
 
The party proceeds outside, but folks are already starting to trickle back to their desks, intent on getting Aquanaut ready for its next NBL test. Its first open-water demonstration will likely take place at a naval technology exercise in Rhode Island in August. For a robot that was in pieces in March, it’s an hostile timeline, but Radford is secure that his team can deal with it.
 
“It’s fun to come to work on something that’s audacious,” he says. “We think there’s a better, more cost-effective way to do work underwater. And we’re going to prove it.”
 
This article appears in the August 2019 print issue as “The Underwater Transformer.”



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has announced a partnership with the aerospace giant Airbus, with the purpose of researching the hybrid and electric aircraft of the future. The two signed a joint memorandum of understanding on the project, with SAS stating in their press unleash that it will concentrate on investigation into the eco-system and infrastructure demands of hybrid-electric aircraft on a large scale commercial level.
 
“We are happy to be starting out on this partnership with SAS,” said Grazia Vittadini, Airbus Chief Technology Officer. “Leveraging our individual training to enjoy the potential of hybrid-electric propulsion opportunities in our aviation eco-system.” The alignment of the airline and the aircraft manufacturer will help to make clear the demands for hybrid and electric aircraft down the line. SAS’ interest in the technology is inspired by its focus on reducing emissions and sustainable flying. The company sees the research as part of the next step beyond its current target of reducing emissions 25% by 2030, which it hopes to achieve via fleet modernization and biofuels. Rickard Gustafson, CEO of SAS, said: “We are pleased of our challenging sustainability work and are now pleased that Airbus has chosen SAS to partner up with us for this future project. If this becomes a reality, it will change emissions.”



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

LG Electronics has made a decision to sell its two water treatment subsidiaries to Techcross, an affiliated company of Seoul-based Bubang Group, for some 200 billion won ($170 million), as stated by industry banking sources on Tuesday. A definitive agreement is expected to be signed this week.

Lenovo has launched an Experience Store opens at Singapore’s Funan mall, giving an online-to-offline experience. The 4500sqft store has dedicated areas for product showcases, workshops and pop-up events.

Hyundai Motor Group, South Korea`s leading car maker, on Friday declared the world’s first commercial development of active shift control (ASC) technology, which improves transmission efficiency in hybrid electric vehicles by monitoring gear shifts up to 500 times per second, and thereby precisely adjusting the transmission rotation speed for faster shift times.

One of the chief characteristics of today's U.S.-China relationship is fear, in specific, America's fear that China's rising economic, and frequently technological, power will displace its own long-held position.

axial3D, a top medical 3D printing firm, has announced the closing of a USD $3 million funding round. The pioneering company is building an robotic 3D printing solution for the healthcare sector that is dramatically advancing the standards and efficiency of surgery worldwide.
 
The funding round was led by London-based Imprimatur Capital Fund Management, an international science and technology investor. The round was also supported by a U.S. investment consortium containing of a number of surgical angel investors. axial3D's previous institutional investors, Techstart Ventures, Clarendon Fund Managers and Innovation Ulster Ltd, also participated in the round. The investment will support axial3D's fast development plans for the USA. The company plans to open an office in the region, following previous customer wins and as other healthcare institutions sign up to the service. The firm is making roles within the increasing U.S. market and at its base in Belfast to help the large growth and ensure continuous innovation.
 
There's a big concentration on expanding its machine learning team, which builds groundbreaking automated algorithms that make access to medical 3D printing better than ever for hospitals. Daniel Crawford, CEO at axial3D, said, 'The closure of this investment round marks an important milestone for our company. It will accelerate our growth within our expanding markets and enable us to bring our 3D printing solution to more healthcare organizations, helping them to drive down costs, improve compliance and, ultimately, enhance patient care.' He continued, 'Continuous innovation is crucial to bring the best solutions to market and keep up with customer demand. Following our recent collaborations with Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare and University Hospital Basel, we will focus further on the North American and European markets. This includes opening an office in the USA and recruiting more talent into our team, particularly to grow our machine learning capability. This will enable us to maintain to innovate and find new ways to bring 3D printing on-demand to the entire healthcare sector.' Dr. Christopher Rumana, Neurosurgeon & Charmain of the Board at Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare (TMH), has been a user of axial3D's medical 3D printing service since 2018 and is part of the cohort who are now investing in the company. 'axial3D has built a scalable, accessible platform for clinicians to access 3D printing without the capital expenditure or manpower typically required. Having been in the medical field for over two decades, I have seen how technology boosts patient care. With TMH being a user of axial3D's service, our own patients have been absolutely affected by the use of 3D printing. I want to see this service adopted in more healthcare institutions across the USA so that everyone who needs it can gain from the technology.'
 
Since 2011, Dr. Rumana has been a user of the Board of Directors at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, where he currently serves as the Chairman of the Board. The global 3D printing medical devices market is estimated to see a compounding annual growth rate of 23%, largely due to the increasing adoption of 3D printing technology within the medical sector. axial3D has a range of solutions for healthcare institutions at every stage of their 3D printing journey, from those seeking a one-off custom print, to those with an established 3D print lab hoping to increase compliance and productivity, while reducing operating costs.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

Xometry, the largest on-demand manufacturing marketplace, today announced it is joining Alibaba.com's U.S. B2B ecosystem as a Co-Marketing Sponsor. Alibaba.com, one of the world's largest B2B eCommerce marketplaces and a business unit of Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA), is launching this move to help SMBs access a $23.9 trillion eCommerce industry.
 
'We're excited to announce our partnership with Alibaba.com,' said Bill Cronin, Xometry's Chief Revenue Officer. 'Empowering small and medium-sized business success is one of the reasons Xometry was started, which is why we are so excited to be part of this effort. We look forth to driving new business both from the U.S. and global markets to our Partner Network of over 3,000 manufacturers.'
 
Xometry's industry-leading Instant Quoting Engine provides engineers and product designers the capability to upload a CAD file, get an instant quote, and order a wide variety of custom manufactured parts. Orders are sourced through Xometry's Partner Network of manufacturers, many of them small and medium-sized businesses. Xometry's manufacturing capabilities include CNC Machining, 3D Printing, Sheet Metal Fabrication, and Injection Molding.
 
Xometry joins the newly announced, widening Alibaba.com ecosystem of leading service providers and major U.S. businesses as a Co-Marketing Sponsor because of a shared enthusiasm for supporting U.S. SMBs. Through its effort with Alibaba, Xometry will provide Alibaba.com's business buyers with exclusive deals on Xometry's on-demand manufacturing services.
 
'We welcome Xometry's engagement to U.S. small businesses and their collaboration to give them the tools to succeed in today's global marketplace,' said John Caplan, Head of North America B2B at Alibaba Group. 'Together we'll give valuable choices for SMBs to do business anywhere.'
 



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

Artificial Intelligence (AI) - the automated and technological imitation of human and animal intelligence - is a concept almost as old as civilization itself. In Homer’s Iliad, the Greek God of fire and forges, Hephaestus, was a maker of robots. From golden tripods that served food at banquets to fully recognized simulacrums of humanity suitable of conversation and storytelling.
 
The equipments may have been divine in origin, but were also physical in nature, and betray the first flickerings of human attraction with recreating, from metal and stone, the most enigmatic and powerful element of humanity: our intelligence.
 
In her book, Machines Who Think, Pamela McCorduck notes that, historically, human behaviors alongside AI diverged in antiquity into two camps: the Hellenic and the Hebraic. The Hellenic (Greek) tradition, as in the Iliad, attributed human wonder at the idea of thinking machines, and treated them as something to be strived for.
 
The latter school of thought, educated by the Second Commandment ('Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image' - basically a non-compete clause stating humans shouldn’t have any other gods or undertake any of the activities that fell within God’s purview) acknowledged the idea of making something akin to life in any way but the biblical sense with fear and revulsion. Turning to his creator, the monster says: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel.” Frankenstein’s monster completely embodies the Judeo-Christian fear of the thinking machine. Fast forward to the 1980’s, and you have The Terminator; fascination and fear have always surrounded the idea of AI.
 
Clearly, the Second Commandment didn’t stand in the way of human inventiveness for long. Today, AI drives business analysis and decision making around the world. Accenture expected in 2017 that by 2035, the US market for AI would attain a value of $8.3trn per year. Constantly improving in terms of power and computational strength, AI is perhaps the most remarkable advancement of the past century, competing with polio vaccines, the internet and manned space travel. But there’s a problem...
 
The limitations of specialized AI
 
An AI can play chess better than a grandmaster, read an x-ray with more preciseness than a head of surgery and fly a fighter jet with more flair than Will Smith in Independence Day. However, all these mind-boggling feats need to be practiced by various AI systems, and each one needs extensive training and preparation.
 
“We’re really far from having models that can learn the most basic things about the world in the way humans and animals can do,” said Facebook’s head of AI, Yann LeCun in an interview with The Verge. “In unique areas devices have superhuman performance, but in terms of general intelligence we’re not even close to a rat.”
 
The future is adaptable
 
The secret to the next step towards the holy grail of an adaptable, generally intelligent AI (an AGI) may already lie within the walls of an office on 18th Street in San Francisco. Founded in 2015 by a cohort of Silicon Valley luminaries (including Elon Musk) OpenAI’s 100-strong team has been working to rupture the chasm between the active state of the art and the possibly limitless applications of the next step in creating a true “thinking machine.”
 
According to the OpenAI team, “AI system building today involves a lot of manual engineering for each well-defined task. In comparison, an AGI will be a system capable of understanding a field of study to the world-expert level, and mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which blends the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An AGI working on a problem would be able to see connections across disciplines that no human could. We want AGI to run with society to solve presently intractable multi-disciplinary problems, including global challenges such as climate change, affordable and high-quality healthcare, and personalized education. We think its impact should be to give everyone economic freedom to pursue what they find most gratifying, creating new opportunities for all of our lives that are unimaginable today.”
 
So far, it’s done really well. The OpenAI has presented a diverse range of skills, breaking records for dexterity, making convincing song lyrics and short stories, and taking on human champions at Dota 2. The OpenAI project was originally intended to be purely non-profit, but has since announced that it is cracking open itself up to external investment.
 
Enter: Microsoft
 
The software giant announced yesterday that it will be spending $1bn into OpenAI, in order to further drive the company’s invention. According to the OpenAI team, “we’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll together build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our special cloud provider—so we’ll be operating hard along to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems.”
 
“The creation of AGI will be the most significant complex development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humankind,” said Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI. “Our mission is to guarantee that AGI technology advantages all of humanity, and we’re working with Microsoft to build the supercomputing foundation on which we’ll build AGI. We think it’s vital that AGI is implemented safely and securely and that its economic benefits are widely distributed. We are happy about how deeply Microsoft shares this vision.”
 



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

Fourteen world companies are seeking for Vietnam franchise partners. The brands will gather at VF Franchise Consulting headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City on July 9 to discuss with possible area or master franchisees for the market. The businesses are in the food-and-beverage sector, education, services, and come from the US, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, India and Japan.

Intel's shock decision to depart the 5G smartphone modem business marks another setback for the world's greatest microprocessor maker, which once dreamed of acquiring a leading role in the next-generation communication technology. Intel's announcement came out right after news that rival Qualcomm had reached a settlement in its year long, bitter legal fight with Apple over royalty payments. Subsequently Qualcomm's chips will be used in Apple's future 5G iPhone, resulting an end to Intel's ambitions in the smartphone market.

China’s Huawei Technologies laid off at least two-thirds of the 850-strong workforce at its Futurewei Technologies research arm in the United States, following being blacklisted by the government. Futurewei, which has offices in Silicon Valley and the greater Seattle, Chicago and Dallas areas, said it trimmed more than 600 jobs. The unit, set up in part to work with universities and researchers, recorded $510 million in operating costs last year.

Seems Hongmeng is not the Android substitution it’s been pitched as, after all. The preliminary story undeniably tracked, as Huawei has been planning for the very real possibility of life after Google, but the Chinese hardware giant says the operating system is mainly devoted to industrial use.

Backed by £30mn (US$37.3mn) of funding, the competition is for projects to develop productivity and agility in UK manufacturing.
 
Business Secretary Greg Clark said: “We want to support companies of all sizes who want to formulate new digital capabilities, and will support projects that will help confirm the UK stays at the forefront of technological developments. Through Made Smarter and our modern Industrial Strategy we are determined to making sure manufacturers are best located to take reward of the opportunities being created by industrial digitalization and help our leading advanced manufacturing sector continue to grow.”
 
Part of the broader ‘Manufacturing Made Smarter’ challenge, the government is wanting to support the application of technology to manufacturing via technologies such as data analytics and IoT.
 
Bidding for the competition began on 22 July, with funding intended for projects ready to begin promptly with instantaneous impact. Projects must include at least one SME.
 
UK Research and Innovation Chief Executive, Professor Sir Mark Walport said: “The Manufacturing Made Smarter challenge will boost the productivity of UK manufacturing by inspiring the adoption of digital technologies across a wide range of sectors. It will ensure the long-term wealth of UK manufacturing and give to an increase in total productivity, making the UK a global leader of the 4th Industrial Revolution and delivering clean increase.”



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com

The New York and Munich-based enterprise software institution offers smart business solutions powered by process mining technologies.
 
The firm aims to “empower companies to envision and augment the flow of their steps in order to change the way they work.”
 
Celonis, which was created in 2011, has clients such as ABB, HP, Innogy, Siemens and Vodafone.
 
The firm’s founders – Alexander Rinke, Martin Klenk, and Bastian Nominacher – still own virtually 70% of the business.
 
Prior to his current position, Vollmer had worked for SAP over 10 years, serving as Chief Operating Officer, Chief Procurement Officer, Vice President Global Finance Projects, and Head of Strategic Projects. Vollmer has also worked at DHL for 15 years.
 
The new Chief Innovation Officer, 48, graduated from the University of Hamburg.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com