ABB Uses Artificial Intelligence to Revolutionize Energy Management

ABB is deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to help commercial and industrial buildings revolutionize their energy management and tackle rising electricity peak tariffs. The company has added two new AI-powered applications to the  ABB Ability Electrical Distribution Control System (EDCS): Energy Forecasting and Intelligent Alerts.

ABB has developed the AI functions in partnership with Silicon Valley AI specialist Verdigris Technologies as part of the company’s Open Innovation program. The Energy Forecasting app will enable users to reduce their electricity bills by reducing peak demand charges. The Intelligent Alerts app uses machine learning algorithms to help customers better manage their assets, identifying underlying issues before they become problems.

Andrea Temporiti, Digital Leader for ABB’s Electrification business, said: “Our use of AI to help customers make better energy management decisions demonstrates ABB’s commitment to innovation in our products and quality in our services. With the new Energy Forecasting and Smart Alerts apps, AI drills down into the facility’s power data to pinpoint actionable opportunities for productivity improvements and energy cost savings.”

ABB’s Open Innovation program engages incubators, accelerators, innovation centers and start-ups in the co-development and design of innovative new digital solutions and business models. The company is building an ecosystem of innovation partners to work on digital energy management services for applications that range from smart buildings to e-mobility. The collaborations help start-ups to develop services that can be marketed directly to ABB customers via its Digital Marketplace; the innovation strategy also enables ABB customers to benefit from cutting-edge digital technologies much sooner.

ABB Ability Energy Forecasting uses AI to give facility managers accurate power consumption predictions. Energy Forecasting enables them to take timely action to reduce unplanned consumption spikes by re-scheduling or switching off non-critical loads – and taking full advantage of Time of Use (TOU) tariffs.

The Energy Forecasting AI uses neural network methods to identify and learn patterns in a circuit or a building’s energy consumption, while also factoring in weather data. Using weather forecasts and historical data, Energy Forecasting is then able to predict power consumption (kW) for the next 24 hours, updating its forecast every 15 minutes with best-in-class accuracy.

“This innovative digital service makes it easy to take the necessary corrective actions to minimize any peak demand charges,” said Temporiti. “The precision of the forecasting reduces hedging positions, narrows variability and produces meaningful energy cost savings for commercial and industrial buildings.”

ABB  Ability Intelligent Alerts uses machine learning to help customers better manage critical assets. Intelligent Alerts learns how various factors affect the building and key assets so that it can minimize the distraction of false alerts and information overload, allowing facility teams to focus their time more productively. Intelligent Alerts also identifies the relevant circuits and makes potential recommendations to ensure any response can be swift and decisive.

Thomas Chung, Head of Product Strategy at Verdigris said: “Verdigris AI is 10 times more effective than traditional energy management methods. Our partnership with ABB enables our AI capabilities to reach a significantly larger ecosystem of ABB users. These energy and asset management tools will cut through the noise to deliver actionable insights, identify real energy savings and make resource allocation more effective.”

Energy Forecasting and Intelligent Alerts are available now to subscribe on the ABB Digital Marketplace. Further developments by ABB and Verdigris are planned.

ABB (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) is a technology leader that is driving the digital transformation of industries. With a history of innovation spanning more than 130 years, ABB has four customer-​​focused, globally leading businesses: Electrification, Industrial Automation, Motion, and Robotics & Discrete Automation, supported by the ABB Ability™ digital platform. ABB’s Power Grids business will be divested to Hitachi in 2020. ABB operates in more than 100 countries with about 147,000 employees. www.abb.com

Verdigris Technologies is a leading AI company based in historic NASA research park in Silicon Valley, California with offices in the US and Taiwan. They are a privately held company backed by prominent venture capitalists and have developed several award-winning products for commercial and industrial energy management. www.verdigris.com.

23 Year Old With Congenital Heart Defect Undergoes Heart Transplant at Manipal Hospitals

Manipal Hospitals Bangalore recently performed a path breaking heart transplant to give a new lease of life to 23 year old, Arshad who was detected with congenital heart defect at the age of 3 years. The surgery was performed by Dr. Devananda, HOD & Consultant, Cardiothoracic Vascular Surgeon and Heart Transplant along with a multi-disciplinary team of doctors i.e Dr. Murali Krishna, Consultant - Cardiothoracic Vascular Surgeon and Heart transplant, Dr. Lalchand Bandagi - Cardiothoracic Vascular Surgeon and Heart transplant, Dr. Ramesh – HOD and Consultant – Cardiac Anesthesia who left no stone unturned to save the life of young Arshad.

Arshad was born with a serious and rare heart condition known as Transposition of Great Arteries (TGA), which occurs in 3 percent of all congenital heart defects, and about two-thirds of the cases are identified in boys. In TGA, two main arteries carrying blood from the heart to the lungs and body are not connected as they should be and are in reversed position. Ideally, such children needs corrective surgery within first 6 weeks of life. However, in his case it remained undetected till he attained the age of 3 years. Hence, he was put through a palliative Operative at Chennai. Due to his bad luck, he developed viral Infection of the heart making his left ventricle (main pumping chamber) weak that made many surgeons refuse to perform further palliative surgeries.

Speaking about the case, Dr. Devananda N S, HOD & Consultant, Cardiothoracic Vascular Surgeon and Heart Transplant at Manipal Hospitals Bangalore said, “Arshad has been consulting with us from 2011 when he was just 14 years old. He had severe infection coupled with complications due to which the left side of his heart was weak. After crucial examination, we decided to perform modification of Sennings Operation. As the right ventricle was performing better, we decided to increase the load on right Ventricle. After the surgery, his right ventricle started pumping blood to aorta with which the condition of the patient improved but we were not sure for how long we could sustain” Dr. Devananda added.

The operation reaped benefit and the boy was robust in health and progressed in academics too. He was in pink of his health and enjoyed cycling as well. After completing his schooling and PUC, he embarked on his Engineering studies. However, during his follow up visit to the Hospital, Dr. Devananda observed that the boy’s heart was deteriorating. Further investigations and medical reports confirmed his doubts. It was decided that a heart transplant was the only viable option.

Speaking after the success of Heart transplant, Dr. Devananda N S, HOD & Consultant, Cardiothoracic Vascular Surgeon and Heart Transplant at Manipal Hospitals Bangalore said, “The task of operating on a boy who has already undergone two surgeries earlier was quite challenging. This was an emotional journey for the team as we have been associated with the case for 8 long years. However, multidisciplinary approach, proper planning for the transplant and a focused and dedicated team effort paved the way for a successful heart transplant. Infact we had to undo various procedures that was done previously and to many modifications to fit the normal heart. Sincere efforts put in by our doctors, reliable and expert nursing staff, anesthetists gave new lease of life to the boy and he was discharged on 10th day post the surgery and was administered Immuno suppression medicine and has recovered well.”

Sharing his thoughts, the patient said, “I have no words to thank Dr. Devananda and the entire team of Manipal Hospitals who have been a rock solid support to me and my family. Ever since I was 14-year-old, they have been taking care of me. I am feeling quite healthy and have resumed normal routine. My heart felt gratitude to Manipal Hospitals and most importantly to the donor’s family who have given me a new lease of life. I would like to take this opportunity and highlight the need and importance of Organ Donation and urge people to come forward without hesitation and pledge for this nobel cause.”

upGrad Receives Accreditation by National Skill Development Corporation

In line with the 'SKILL INDIA MISSION' launched by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to train over 40 crore people in India by 2022, National Skill Development Corporation extended accreditation to upGrad, making it a part of Government’s Skill India initiative.

Through this association, the mission aims at providing vocational training and certification facilities for the Indian youth with a focus on job opportunity creation. Through this partnership, upGrad commits to train and place 32,000 learners in the course for the next three years, in the sectors of IT/ITES, BFSI and Management among others.

upGrad Co-founder and MD, Mayank Kumar said, “We are pleased to gain accreditation by the NSDC which aims at promoting skill development and enhancing private sector initiatives. Through this association, we look forward to upskilling the talent pool and preparing them for a better tomorrow. As a brand largely committed and passionate towards education, we look forward to extending our support and build a learning ecosystem that will make a difference in society.”

“This accreditation conveys and recognizes the existing efforts and best practices adopted by us. Through this collaboration we are confident to play a big role in shaping the talent pool of the nation,” he further added.

upGrad’s online courses are certified and highly regarded among students and professionals looking at upskilling for better job opportunities in their corresponding fields.

About upGrad:

upGrad was founded in early 2015 by Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar, Phalgun Kompalli and Ravijot Chugh, with the aim of providing formal education online. In a short span of 4 years, upGrad on-boarded over 15K paid learners and impacted more than 363K individuals globally, making it India’s largest online higher education company, basis gross revenue generated from the Indian market.

upGrad provides programs in the areas of Data Science, Technology and Management to college students, working professionals and enterprises. These programs are designed and delivered in collaboration with top-notch universities like IIT Madras, IIIT-B, BITS Pilani, MICA, NMIMS Global Access School For Continuing Education, Cambridge Judge Business School Executive Education, Duke CE and others. To further enhance the learning experience, a comprehensive ecosystem has been built which includes one-on-one mentoring, peer-to-peer learning, industry networking and most importantly an expert career guidance, in order to provide learners a holistic support to elevate their careers to the next level.

The company has been awarded the ‘Best Tech for Education’ by IAMAI in 2019. The company received the ‘Best Education Brands’ award by Economic Times and has made it to LinkedIn’s ‘Top 25 Startups’ two years in a row in 2018 and 2019.

Cloudera Enterprise Data Platform Available on Microsoft Azure

Cloudera, the enterprise data cloud company, today announced the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) powered by Microsoft Azure. CDP is an integrated data platform that is easy to secure, manage, and deploy. Now available on Azure, it delivers powerful, self-service analytics with a consistent Azure experience and enterprise-grade performance across hybrid environments with the granular security and governance policies that IT leaders demand.

“Much like what happened with the Bring Your Own Device phenomenon of the last decade, today’s business users are demanding to Bring Their Own Data into the enterprise. They want to analyze, report, and predict business outcomes on that data in real-time,” said Mick Hollison, chief marketing officer of Cloudera. “For enterprise IT, this means that delivering speed and agility is now just as important as security and governance when it comes to enterprise data management and advanced analytics. CDP, powered by Microsoft Azure, provides IT with an integrated data platform to work at the speed of business with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance for any type of data.”

CDP on Azure includes Cloudera’s Shared Data Experience (SDX), which makes it easy to create a secure data lake in hours instead of weeks and replaces tedious scripting with ‘set it and forget it’ convenience. With CDP on Azure, organizations can speed time to value for data engineering, data warehousing, and machine learning.

Cloudera leverages Azure infrastructure services such as:

·         Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) to run high performance analytics with increased availability and durability.

·         Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to deploy infrastructure as code in Azure, ensuring rapid, consistent, and repeatable deployment of CDP services.

·         Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to scale up or down depending on the analytics workload to more easily and cost effectively meet service level agreements (SLA) and take advantage of the benefits of cloud bursting.

“Cloudera customers choose Azure because of the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a global, hybrid cloud offering using their favorite tools and frameworks,” said Arpan Shah, General Manager, Azure Marketing, Microsoft. “I am excited to have the Cloudera Data Platform available on Azure.”

Showing Robots “Tough Love” Helps them Succeed, Finds USC Study

Humans acting in an adversarial manner towards robotic systems can actually improve their robustness, says a team of USC computer scientists.

Los Angeles, November 7, 2019: According to a new study by University of Southern California (USC) computer scientists, to help a robot succeed, you might need to show it some tough love. In a computer-simulated manipulation task, the researchers found that training a robot with a human adversary significantly improved its grasp of objects.

“This is the first robot learning effort using adversarial human users,” said study co-author Stefanos Nikolaidis, an assistant professor of computer science.

“Picture it like playing a sport: if you’re playing tennis with someone who always lets you win, you won’t get better. Same with robots. If we want them to learn a manipulation task, such as grasping, so they can help people, we need to challenge them.”

The study, “Robot Learning via Human Adversarial Games,” was presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. USC PhD students Jiali Duan and Qian Wang are lead authors, advised by Professor C. C. Jay Kuo, with additional co-author Lerrel Pinto from Carnegie Mellon University.

Learning from practice

Nikolaidis, who joined the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in 2018, and his team use reinforcement learning, a technique in which artificial intelligence programs “learn” from repeated experimentation.

Instead of being limited to completing a small range of repetitive tasks, such as industrial robots, the robotic system “learns” based on previous examples, in theory increasing the range of tasks it can perform.

But creating general-purpose robots is notoriously challenging, due in part to the amount of training required. Robotic systems need to see a huge number of examples to learn how to manipulate an object in a human-like manner.

For instance, OpenAI’s impressive robotic system learned to solve a Rubik’s cube with a humanoid hand, but required the equivalent of 10,000 years of simulated training to learn to manipulate the cube.

More importantly, the robot’s dexterity is very specific. Without extensive training, it can’t pick up an object, manipulate it with another grip, or grasp and handle a different object.

“As a human, even if I know the object’s location, I don’t know exactly how much it weighs or how it will move or behave when I pick it up, yet we do this successfully almost all of the time,” said Nikolaidis.

“That’s because people are very intuitive about how the world behaves, but the robot is like a newborn baby.”

In other words, robotic systems find it hard to generalize, a skill which humans take for granted. This may seem trivial, but it can have serious consequences. If assistive robotic devices, such as grasping robots, are to fulfill their promise of helping people with disabilities, robotic systems must be able to operate reliably in real-world environments.

Human in the loop

One line of research that’s been quite successful in overcoming this issue is having a “human in the loop.” In other words, the human provides feedback to the robotic system by demonstrating the ability to complete the task.

But, until now, these algorithms have made a strong assumption of a cooperating human supervisor assisting the robot.

“I’ve always worked on human-robot collaboration, but in reality, people won’t always be collaborators with robots in the wild,” said Nikolaidis.

As an example, he points to a study by Japanese researchers, who set a robot loose in a public shopping complex and observed children “acting violently” towards it on several occasions.

So, thought Nikolaidis, what if we leveraged our human inclination to make things harder for the robot instead? Rather than showing it how to better grasp an object, what if we tried to pull it away? By adding challenge, the thinking goes, the system would learn to be more robust to real world complexity.

Element of challenge

The experiment went something like this: in a computer simulation, the robot attempts to grasp an object. The human, at the computer, observes the simulated robot’s grasp. If the grasp is successful, the human tries to snatch the object from the robot’s grasp, using the keyboard to signal direction.

Adding this element of challenge helps the robot learn the difference between a weak grasp (say, holding a bottle at the top), versus a firm grasp (holding it in the middle), which makes it much harder for the human adversary to snatch away.

It was a bit of a crazy idea, admits Nikolaidis, but it worked.

The researchers found the system trained with the human adversary rejected unstable grasps, and quickly learned robust grasps for these objects. In an experiment, the model achieved a 52 percent grasping success rate with a human adversary versus those with a human collaborator, which had a 26.5 percent grasping success rate.

“The robot learned not only how to grasp objects more robustly, but also to succeed more often in with new objects in a different orientation, because it has learned a more stable grasp,” said Nikolaidis.

They also found that the model trained with a human adversary performed better than a simulated adversary, which had 28 percent grasping success rate. So, robotic systems learn best from flesh-and-blood adversaries.

“That’s because humans can understand stability and robustness better than learned adversaries,” explained Nikolaidis.

“The robot tries to pick up stuff and, if the human tries to disrupt, it leads to more stable grasps. And because it has learned a more stable grasp, it will succeed more often, even if the object is in a different position. In other words, it’s learned to generalize. That’s a big deal.”

Finding a balance

Nikolaidis hopes to have the system working on a real robot arm within a year. This will present a new challenge — in the real world, the slightest bit of friction or noise in a robot’s joints can throw things off.  But Nikolaidis is hopeful about the future of adversarial learning for robotics.

“I think we’ve just scratched the surface of potential applications of learning via adversarial human games,” said Nikolaidis.

“We are excited to explore human-in-the-loop adversarial learning in other tasks as well, such as obstacle avoidance for robotic arms and mobile robots, such as self-driving cars.”

This begs the question: how far are we willing to take adversarial learning? Would we be willing to kick and beat robots into submission? The answer, said Nikolaidis, lies in finding a balance of tough love and encouragement with our robotics counterparts.

“I feel that tough love – in the context of the algorithm that we propose – is again like a sport: it falls within specific rules and constraints,” said Nikolaidis.

“If the human just breaks the robot's gripper, the robot will continuously fail and never learn. In other words, the robot needs to be challenged but still be allowed to succeed in order to learn.”

Unity Technologies Unveils the 3rd Edition of Unite India in Association with KSUM

Unity Technologies (https://unity3d.com/), creator of the world’s most popular end-to-end development engine that reaches nearly 3 billion devices worldwide is back with its third edition of Unite India in association with Kerala Start-up Mission during 14 and 15 November 2019 at Grand Hyatt, Kochi. The conference will bring together Indian and global representatives across industry verticals Automobile, Defence, Gaming, Film. Animation and Education amongst others to explore real-time development in the rapidly evolving landscape. More specifically, the conference envisions how Unity, the platform for creating games, simulations, and VR/AR tools help you focus on your top priority – improving learners’ skills, knowledge and performance.

This year at Unite will majorly focusing on latest developments in the content creation industry. At Unite, creativity and interactive learning take center stage. The goal is to learn from fellow artists, creators and experts across all verticals of industries and walk away with knowledge and tools to boost creative success

Hubert Larenaudie, President APAC & Global Head Distribution Portal, Unity Technologies said “After the two successful editions of Unite India, the third edition is expected to be bigger and better. Over these years Unite India has become a platform for the industry to witness the power of AR, VR and 3D technologies simplifying the industry challenges. We believe that India has a huge potential and as a country, we are sitting at a sweet spot to adopt new technologies and keep evolving with the changing needs.”

The event is going to bring an opportunity to learn, network and participate in exciting activities, including advanced hands-on demo workshops, technical sessions–customized for different levels from beginner to intermediate and advanced, previews of upcoming Unity tech, opportunities to get tips from Unity experts, Auto and Industrial mini-summit, Animation and VFX mini-summit and Networking. Individual sessions include representatives from Byjus, Kerala Start-up Mission, NCERT, Autodesk, Ford, Dassault systems, HTC Vive, Hexaware, Tata Elxsi, Tech Mahindra, Trimble, Cyient, Merkel, Toonz Animation, Vidwath, June Gaming, Dreamerz Lab to name a few.

Kerala Startup Mission and Unity Technologies entered into a partnership in January 2019. As part of this partnership, Unity Technologies has setup it’s Center of Excellence(CoE) in Kerala. In order to support an ecosystem of startups working in disruptive technologies Startup Mission has been collaborating with leading global universities and corporates. The CoE in Extended reality in Kochi was set up in association with Unity Technologies with this objective and Startup Mission is extremely happy to host Unite India 2019 to bring together all the stakeholders of the mixed reality and gaming ecosystem in Kochi. The CoE will play an important role in shaping Kerala into an AR/VR hotspot of India. Unite India 2019 being hosted in Kerala itself, will play a crucial role in Unity’s and KSUM’s contribution to the growing ecosystem here.

Attendees at the event will get a chance to explore the powerful new tools and workflows used to create best-in-class AR, VR and 3D experiences by Unity. This conference aims to offer learning and networking opportunities for almost 1200 participants across the globe. Furthermore, the event shall also give an inside scoop with technical sessions and workshops about the latest developments in Unity Technologies. There will be roundtables curated by Unity to understand the challenges faced by the industry which will then dictate the roadmap. 

Abbott Announces Discovery of New Strain of HIV, Keeping Global Health Community a Step Ahead of the Virus

Abbott announced today that a team of its scientists identified a new subtype of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), called HIV-1 Group M, subtype L.1 The findings, published today in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (JAIDS), show the role next-generation genome sequencing is playing in helping researchers stay one step ahead of mutating viruses and avoiding new pandemics.

Since the beginning of the global AIDS pandemic, 75 million people have been infected with HIV and 37.9 million people today are living with the virus.2 Thanks to the work done by the global health community over the past few decades, the goal of ending the HIV pandemic is becoming feasible. Yet researchers must remain vigilant to monitor for new strains to make sure testing and treatments continue to work.

"In an increasingly connected world, we can no longer think of viruses being contained to one location," said Carole McArthur, Ph.D., M.D., professor in the departments of oral and craniofacial sciences, University of Missouri — Kansas City, and one of the study authors. "This discovery reminds us that to end the HIV pandemic, we must continue to outthink this continuously changing virus and use the latest advancements in technology and resources to monitor its evolution."

This research marks the first time a new subtype of "Group M" HIV virus has been identified since guidelines for classifying new strains of HIV were established in 2000. Group M viruses are responsible for the global pandemic, which can be traced back to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in Sub-Saharan Africa.3,4

The science behind genetic sequencing to discover new viruses

To determine whether an unusual virus is in fact a new HIV subtype, three cases must be discovered independently.5 The first two samples of this subtype were discovered in DRC in the 1980s and the 1990s. The third, collected in 2001, was difficult to sequence at that time because of the amount of virus in the sample and the existing technology.

Today, next-generation sequencing technology allows researchers to build an entire genome at higher speeds and lower costs. In order to utilize this technology, Abbott scientists had to develop and apply new techniques to help narrow in on the virus portion of the sample to fully sequence and complete the genome.6

"Identifying new viruses such as this one is like searching for a needle in a haystack," said Mary Rodgers, Ph.D., a principal scientist and head of the Global Viral Surveillance Program, Diagnostics, Abbott, and one of the study authors. "By advancing our techniques and using next generation sequencing technology, we are pulling the needle out with a magnet. This scientific discovery can help us ensure we are stopping new pandemics in their tracks."

Twenty-five years of tracking mutating viruses around the world

As a leader in blood screening and infectious disease testing, Abbott created its Global Viral Surveillance Program 25 years ago to monitor HIV and hepatitis viruses and identify mutations to ensure the company's diagnostic tests remain up to date. As part of this research, Abbott scientists confirmed that its core and molecular laboratory diagnostic tests can detect this new HIV strain.

In partnership with blood centers, hospitals and academic institutions around the world, Abbott has collected more than 78,000 samples containing HIV and hepatitis viruses from 45 countries, identified and characterized more than 5,000 strains, and published 125 research papers to date to help the scientific community learn more about these viruses. The study published today, "Complete genome sequence of CG-0018a-01 establishes HIV-1 subtype L," is now available online.