Unity Technologies, creator of the world’s most widely used real-time 3D development platform, announced a collaboration with Baidu Inc., China’s leading Internet Giant, to develop a real-time simulation product that creates virtual environments allowing developers to test autonomous vehicles in simulated real-world situations. The Unity-based real-time simulation will now be available to developers taking part in Baidu’s Apollo platform – an open, comprehensive and reliable platform geared towards accelerating the development, testing, and deployment of Levels 3, 4, 5 autonomous vehicles.

Tim McDonough, General Manager of Industrial, Unity Technologies, said

Baidu is helping make significant advances in autonomous driving in China and around the world by advancing collaboration amongst many developers and manufacturers, which is why we’re thrilled to be collaborating.

The ability to accurately conduct autonomous testing in a simulated environment allows for millions of simulations to simultaneously occur, providing Apollo partners with a competitive advantage while helping to keep their business costs down.

Unity’s real-time 3D platform allows automotive manufacturers [OEMs] to reduce errors and risk while increasing efficiency and speed of testing by offering simulations that replicate real-world scenarios.  Unity also offers customizable content available through its Asset Store created by its millions of developers.

In addition to its collaboration with Baidu, Unity works with eight of the 10 largest OEMs in the world by helping improve the way they design, build, service and sell automobiles. The brand has continued to invest in its automotive division by bringing in experts from companies like BMW, General Motors, Toyota, Volvo, and the Volkswagen Group.

Jaewon Jung, Chief Architect, Baidu, said

By using a platform like Unity, our developers can focus on testing and research without worrying about non-functional environments or building something from scratch. The Unity-powered game engine simulation for Apollo has the ability to expedite autonomous vehicle validation and training with precise ground truth data in a more effective and safer way.

As part of its growing autonomy efforts, Unity has recently collaborated to support Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning for autonomous systems, as well as its recently launched SimViz Solution Template – a package that provides OEMs and other brands with autonomous driving simulations solutions. For more information, please visit Unity3d

Technology plays a pivotal role in shaping Indian construction industry. One new-gen technology that is gaining interest in the construction industry is the usage of drones. It is poised to serve as an effective medium towards building smart cities in a cost-effective, faster and safer manner with optimum utilization of skills and efforts. It is expected that in the next 10 years, the use of drones in construction will register a manifold growth and will play a leading role in futuristic buildings.

According to a recent industry report, India is one of the fastest growing markets for UAVs and by 2021, the Indian UAV market is expected to reach USD 885.7 million. The usage of drones in the construction industry, has seen a 239% growth year-over-year globally, higher than any other commercial sector. In India too, the growth is set to increase manifold.

In the present scenario, it is very crucial for India to realize the aerial revolution that can be brought about by the proper utilization of drones which have emerged as a highly viable commercial tool globally. As a matter of fact, the most notable sector of economy being benefited by drones is construction. There’s no denying on the fact that there is an unstoppable rise of commercial drones; a market set to be worth billions over the coming years.

There are numerous safety and legal implications that one should be aware of, as well as the differences between the commercial and personal use of drones. Despite increasing adoption and regulation, there is still tremendous growth in the use of drones in construction. Drones can add significant value to a project throughout its life-cycle.

The areas where drone technology will benefit the construction process

Improvised quality and thermal imaging

The quality of the scans and aerial imagery provided by the cameras mounted on top of the drones are undeniably superior. Drones equipped with high-resolution thermal cameras serve as an excellent investigative tool for a host of building-specific applications and energy efficiency audits, including roof insulation inspection. They can also graphically depict energy inefficiencies and identify wet insulations in the roof or elsewhere by displaying temperature variations within the building.

Drones integration with Building Information Modeling [BIM]

Drones have proved themselves to be an asset for data-driven approach and thus can effectively undertake numerous tasks to aid the BIM [Building Information Modeling] workflow. Giving an aerial perspective in the creation of the initial BIM, drones also provide scalable point cloud scanning and photography at different stages of construction.

Highly cost-effective in topographical surveys

A drone carrying out standard survey and inspection activities is undoubtedly a significant cost-effective approach, as it removes the need for any kind of monetary or physical efforts put in for the surveys. As an example, for a typical topographic survey, the use of a drone can help to reduce costs by approximately 50%.

Ensuring completion of projects

The use of drones completely eradicates the need of shutting down active work sites for the concerns of maintaining and inspecting work like pipeline or flare stacks, which can be carried out safely under UAV supervision. Drones also monitor site activity and provide a comprehensive overview of the site through land surveying. Therefore, it is highly efficient in reducing the time-frame for the process of construction leading to a speedy delivery of the projects.

Reducing risk and keeping people safe

Drones help in minimizing the possibility of risk by being monitored to perform a task. The UAV technology thus helps in supporting the drive towards zero incidents onsite as it takes away some of the risks from the construction activities like the need for labourers to work at heights when inspecting assets like bridges. UAVs and drones are effective in conducting safer, faster and more accurate inspections instead of safety managers, who physically conduct the site walk-throughs to identify potential hazards.

Compact and intelligent results

Acute 3D software can dramatically enhance productivity by turning a simple series of digital photos taken with a smart camera. When these cameras are mounted on drones they give a 360-degree overview of the project into a 3D reality mesh model. The result is a compact, intelligent representation of the asset in its current operating context. This also eases out the task for engineers and designers allowing them to work on an up-to-date 3D model for their enhancement and maintenance plans.

Drones are tools that will play a fundamental role in ensuring that the construction industry can deliver huge and complex projects with a better finishing and on-time results.

About the Author

AV Antao is the Chief Operating Officer [COO] of Synergy Property Development Services. You can more about him here.

VeriSign, Inc., a global leader in domain names and internet security, notifies that approximately 2.6 million domain name registrations were added to the internet in the Q3 of 2018, bringing the total number of domain name registrations to approximately 342.4 million across all Top-Level Domains [TLDs].

The increase of approximately 2.6 million domain name registrations globally equates to a growth rate of 0.8% compared to the Q2 of 2018. The Domain Name Industry Brief [DNIB] further brings out that the domain name registrations have grown by approximately 11.7 million, or 3.5%, Y-O-Y.

Key Highlights

• The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of approximately 151.7 million domain name registrations in the domain name base at the end of Q3 2018. This represents an increase of approximately 2.0 million domain name registrations, or 1.3%, compared to Q2 2018
• As of September 30, 2018, the .com domain name base totaled approximately 137.6 million domain name registrations, while the .net domain name base totaled approximately 14.1 million domain name registrations
• The .com and .net TLDs had a combined increase of approximately 5.9 million domain name registrations, or 4.0%, Y-O-Y
• New .com and .net domain name registrations totaled approximately 9.5 million at the end of Q3 2018, compared to 8.9 million domain name registrations for Q3 2017
• Growth of .com and .net domain names redirecting to popular global social media and e-commerce sites compared to Q3 2017 is dominated by Pinterest [50%] followed by Instagram [47%] and Etsy, Snapchat, Linkedin and Amazon in the following
• Total new gTLD [ngTLD] domain name registrations were approximately 23.4 million at the end of Q3 2018, with an increase of 1.6 million domain name registrations, or 7.5%, compared to Q2 2018. ngTLDs decreased by approximately 2.3 million domain name registrations, or 10.9%, Y-O-Y

Verisign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry. The Q3 2018 Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at Verisign.com/DNIB

Continuing its endeavor to make technology accessible and productive for all, Microsoft India has announced the availability of new Phonetic keyboards in Indian languages to members of the Windows Insider Program. The new feature is available in 10 Indian languages including Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Odia, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. The new Indic Phonetic keyboards are in addition to the Indic Traditional INSCRIPT keyboards already available with Windows.

The new keyboards have been added to Windows Insider Preview Build 18272. Users participating in the program can immediately start using them and share their feedback. The keyboards are expected to be added to Windows 10 later, subsequent to which Indian language users won’t need to download and install any external Input Method Editors [IMEs] to input Indic text in a phonetic style.

As words are typed using the existing keyboard, Indic Phonetic keyboards transliterate them to suggest possible Indic text options. For instance, if we type ‘namaste’ using the Phonetic keyboard, it will automatically suggest the same in Hindi/Punjabi/Gujarati.

Setting up and using Indic Phonetic keyboards

• Go to Time & Language in Settings and select the language from the navigation menu
• Click on the + icon labelled and add the preferred Indic language [by selecting into the search box and select it – for example ‘Hindi’ and click on the next button and install the Indic language on the device, which will then return to the Language page]
• Go to language page, select the language and then click the options button to go to language options page
• Add the keyboard by clicking the + icon and then select the type of keyboard
• Lastly, enable the phonetic keyboard by clicking on the input indicator on the taskbar [or press the Windows key + Space] and select the Indic Phonetic keyboard
• After adding the keyboard, one needs to download the dictionaries used for Indic Phonetic keyboard.

To get a first-hand experience of the Indic Phonetic keyboards, join Windows Insider Program.

Microsoft and Local Language computing – Microsoft has been consistently working to provide local language computing in Indian languages for over two decades since the launch of Project Bhasha in 1998, allowing users to input localized text easily and quickly using the Indian Language Input tool. Microsoft is also leveraging AI and Deep Neural Networks to improve real-time language translation for Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and now expanding it to real-time language translation for Telugu. Microsoft also recently announced support for email addresses in multiple Indian languages across most of its email apps and services. Also, as part of the latest Windows update, Microsoft added Tamil 99 virtual keyboard to Windows 10. Through its global Local Language Program [LLP], Microsoft provides people access to technology in their native language. This includes Language Interface Packs for Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, Malayalam, amongst others.

MachPrinciple is a LinkedIn-like professional network that allows general public and academicians to connect with each other, find latest discoveries in the field of their interest, find upcoming conferences, give feedback about different educational institutes etc. It was launched in India on 7th December, 2018.

A social network for scientists is not a new concept. But there is no such network to bring science to general public, to disseminate scientific knowledge and to foster scientific way of thinking among people. MachPrinciple comes into existence to fill that void.

There are about 150,000 research papers published per month in different fields. But more than 50% papers are never read and more than 90% are never cited. The situation is getting worse as the things are getting digital. Therefore, researchers are trying to increase the exposure of their scholarly work through social media. MachPrinciple gives researchers a unique platform to increase the visibility of their work to the people both inside and outside their research field. All the articles are verified by admin before publishing.

The conference search engine in MachPrinciple.com allows researchers to find all the upcoming conferences in their research field. People can check the popularity of a conference, check who else is attending the conference, their profile etc. People can also explore the location of the conference, nearby hotels, airports, tourist destinations etc.

The final but the most powerful feature of MachPrinciple is the institute feedback section. While purchasing any product from Amazon or eBay, people always look for user rating and feedback. However, while choosing an educational institute there is no viable platform where you can check its feedback from previous students. MachPrinciple provides a platform for writing feedback about different educational institutes.

About MachPrinciple

MachPrinciple is developed by Santanu Das, a research scientist at University of Wisconsin, Madison, along with his team. It comes with a promise to change the way academics is done across the world. The desktop version of the website is launched. A mobile version is also about to come in early January 2019. People can go to MachPrinciple and directly login using their Google or LinkedIn profile, without going through the full verification process.

Today, startups that build tools for businesses looking to automate their customer service experience and operations are being acquired by global companies. Though they may have the necessary automation tools that may be required during the digital journey, they may not necessarily have the experience to accelerate the digital transformation itself.

User/Customer Experience [CX] is the most important element in the journey of digital transformation that every organization should be striving to improve. Today AI drives almost every aspect of your shopping experience wherever or whoever you are. The dominance of user experience in retail, healthcare or banking verticals are due for the part to its mastery of artificial intelligence [including the decision-making process] to the ability of machines executing your request that was once the purview of humans alone. But then the question arises as to who should be the right people you will need to sign-up to be part of your journey? As customers we strive to expect more, and we will handshake only with partners/vendors that embrace this and deliver it through meaningful experiences.

Nowadays, most enterprises in their journey are not on a single digital platform. They’re on disparate platforms with number of different channels. For e.g. During our visits to different customer offices, we have witnessed enterprises using multiple tools that form their unified communication standards. Now if enterprises have to deep-dive and bring in their own teams to learn and then chalk out the DX roadmap, it could turn out very expensive or the ROI will take forever to be effective.

Collaboration of these instant-messaging or other in-house communication channels used with another programmable based API [Voice, Data, ITSM etc.] is something a managed service provider [MSP] will bring in the experience to integrate with all the components that form the part of the unified communication.

Secondly, the digital infrastructure that will be required as part of the digital transformation is often comprehensive and will be requiring a right service provider to stitch the solutions from many CX based solution partners that will form the full technology stack along with base infrastructure. This includes everything from managing the security and network for various omnichannel to rolling out AI and machine learning solutions to enable true digital transformation. I believe that enterprises will take more proactive steps to engage with the right service provider that has experience in bringing both sides of experience to empower their employees on how technology can change their everyday lives by embracing the DX journey.

Thirdly, with the way technology is behaving by evolving everyday as against a decade ago, managed service providers need to understand the enterprises ever changing business conditions and respond with a holistic solution during and after its DX transformation journey. Besides the one-time implementation strategy, a continuous improvement enhancement to analyze and inventory the CX environments on a regular basis, typically every quarterly will help to evaluate the validity of outcome when compared to its competition in the marketplace.

Enterprises that plan in taking the plunge into digital transformation journey, will need to have a strong relationship with IT managed service partner who can successfully guide them in adapting the new way of services model in this digital age.

About the author

Nilesh Gupta is the VP & Global Head – Digital Infrastructure Management Solutions & Strategy, at 3i Infotech Ltd. More details about him can be found here