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Featured in Development

Understandability is the concept that a system should be presented so that an engineer can easily comprehend it.  The more understandable a system is, the easier it will be for engineers to change it in a predictable and safe manner.  A system is understandable if it meets the following criteria: complete, concise, clear, and organized. 

Featured in Architecture & Design

Sonali Sharma and Shriya Arora describe how Netflix solved a complex join of two high-volume event streams using Flink.  They also talk about managing out of order events and processing late arriving data, exploring keyed state for maintaining large state, fault tolerance of a stateful application, strategies for failure recovery, data validation batch vs streaming, and more. 

Featured in Culture & Methods

Tim Cochran presents research gathered from ThoughtWorks' varied clients and projects, and shows some of the metrics their teams have identified as guides to creating the platform and the culture for high performing teams. 

News

Kirk Borne, principal data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton, gave a keynote presentation at this year’s Oracle Code One Conference on how the connection between emerging technologies, data, and machine learning are transforming data into value.  Emerging technological innovations like AI, robotics, computer vision and more, are enabled by data and create value from data. 

During ROSCon 2019 two interesting tools for visualising and interacting with ROS were demonstrated. 
The first tool which was demonstrated is Webviz, an online web-based replacement for RViz.  Another interesting option which gives you more options for interaction is using Jupyter notebooks to visualise and interact with your robot. 

During ROSCon 2019, Alberto Soragna, Juan Oxoby, and Dhiraj Goel from iRobot presented their experience in using ROS 2 on a low-cost embedded platform.  By experimenting with different Data Distribution Service (DDS) implementations they reduced the CPU and memory usage of their application, which improved performance. 

In 2018, the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) was launched as a successor to ROS1.  At ROSCon 2019, several speakers shared their experience in moving from ROS1 to ROS2.  Lessons were shared in two separate talks: the Autoware project, and the demo porting by Rover Robotics. 

The ROSCon 2019 conference kicked off with a keynote from Selina Seah from Changi General Hospital and Morgan Quigley from Open Robotics.  In their talk, they outlined the need for robotics and automation in hospitals.  To support robotics, the Open Robotics foundation works actively to create tools to support multiple robotics platforms, fleets working together, and tools for QA and simulation. 

At QCon New York, Brittany Postnikoff presented “Robot Social Engineering: Social Engineering Using Physical Robots”.  Quoting findings from academic research literature, she demonstrated that humans can often be manipulated via robots.  A core message of the talk was the need for security and privacy to be part of any robot's fundamental design. 

In a recent blog post, Facebook has announced they have open-sourced AI Habitat, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) simulation platform that is designed to train embodied agents, such as virtual robots.  Using this technology, robots can learn how to grab an object from an adjacent room or assist a visually-impaired person in navigating an unfamiliar transit system. 

At the recent Build conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced, in limited preview, an end-to-end toolchain to help developers and organizations build autonomous systems for their industries.  The platform includes machine teaching tools and simulation technologies that enable intelligent robotic systems to complete tasks like running autonomous forklifts and robotic inspection platforms. 

At the recent AWS re:Invent 2018 conference, Amazon introduced AWS RoboMaker, a service that simplifies the development, testing and deployment of intelligent robotic applications at scale.  RoboMaker includes extensions for the Robot Operating System (ROS) that enable cloud connectivity to AWS to take advantage of machine learning, cognitive, monitoring and analytics services. 

Robot Operating System (ROS), a meta-operating system for robot development, is now available on Windows 10.  Microsoft’s initial, experimental build, dubbed ROS1, is integrated within Visual Studio and includes a full port of ROS Core and several modules.  According to Microsoft, ROS on Windows will evolve to include full integration with GPU-based machine learning and Azure IoT Hub. 

In a recent KPMG study, the professional services organization published a report on the growth of Intelligent Automation.  The report suggests that overall spend will reach $232 billion by 2025, compared to $12.4 billion which is spent today.  But, this expected growth comes with many challenges, including tool maturity, skilled labor and organizational change management. 

A research team at the University of Zurich published a paper detailing how they got drones to fly on street-level in a safe manner.  To predict the steering angles and possible collisions the researchers created a deep neural network.  It produces a steering angle to navigate the drone itself, and a collision probability so the drone can recognize dangerous situations and react to them. 

In the last years there has been an increasing relevance of robotics which Bill Gates is considering as one of the most important future developments.  Microsoft has introduced a development environment for this area early and has recently introduced Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4.0 (RDS4).