Monthly Archives: July 2017

When six Afghan teenage girls were denied U.S. visas to enter an international robotics contest in Washington set for later this month, the unexplained decision seemed to be punishing the very ambitions U.S. agencies have long advocated for girls in Afghanistan, where many are denied educational opportunities.

But the story is more complicated than that.

Afghanistan, beset by insurgent violence and economic uncertainty, is suffering from a massive brain drain, according to Afghan and U.S. officials. Scholarship students, academic fellows and teachers who receive temporary visas to visit the United States often vanish into immigrant communities instead of returning home.

The growing phenomenon has made U.S. officials especially wary of approving visa requests - even for applicants like the robotics students who may otherwise deserve them - if they decide there is a risk the person will fail to return home.

"It is sad to say, but some of them do not come back," said Elham Shaheen, a senior official at the Ministry of Higher Education who manages foreign-study policies. He said 10 percent of all Afghans who are awarded temporary visas for academic purposes in the United States or Europe defy immigration rules to remain there permanently.

Female students and faculty members, facing extra frustrations at home, are no exception. Several years ago, Shaheen said, 12 female university lecturers won scholarships to obtain MA degrees in economics in Germany. Of the 12, he said, "11 of them escaped."

American officials here and in Washington have refused to discuss the case of the robotics team, but several pointed out that U.S. law "presumes" all temporary visa seekers intend to remain in the United States unless they are able to prove they have compellingly strong ties to their country.

Two members of the team, interviewed Thursday from their home city of Herat, said U.S. consular officers had asked about their ties to Afghanistan, whether they had relatives in the United States and whether they intended to return home after the competition.

Youth teams from about 150 countries will face off next week in the FIRST Global Challenge contest, created to promote international student interest in science, technology and math. Only one other team, from Gambia, was turned down.

"Each of us gave them written guarantees from two government employees vouching for our return," said Rodaba Noori, 16, a member of the Afghan team that built a ball-sorting robot. "This is our country. We have our life and family here," she said. "How could we abandon them and not return after the competition?"

Obtaining a visa, though, is just the last of many daunting hurdles the female students face in their efforts to advance academically - long before they can even dream of traveling abroad.

Afghan families often oppose their daughters attending universities in Kabul or other cities, fearing for their safety and exposure to young men. Agencies that offer domestic scholarships, such as the nonprofit Asia Foundation, often have to negotiate with families or agree to support a male relative who can accompany the girl each semester.

Girls are also at a disadvantage in English and math, because Afghan families are more willing to pay for boys to take private classes. As a result, more girls fail college-entrance exams. To help even the balance, USAID sponsors exam-prep classes for girls, and education officials have established a 30 percent female quota for all in-country scholarships.

"There is a chain of barriers for Afghan girls that requires a network of support to overcome," said Razia Stanikzai of the Asia Foundation in Kabul, whose job is to promote Afghan female students' participation in science and technology.

Many Afghans, however, view these as "male" fields, and families may try to steer daughters into nursing or teaching instead. To overcome such stereotypes, Stanikzai's program sponsors science fairs at provincial schools, where girls demonstrate projects to fathers and male community elders. "We don't want girls sitting at home and being told that science and technology are for boys," she said.

Even students at such elite institutions as the American University in Afghanistan, where the U.S. Embassy has funded more than 400 scholarships for women, face prejudice. Two female information technology students said that in most of their classes, all of the other students were male and that some of their friends and relatives had no idea what they were studying - or why.

"Some of them tell us to change majors, to do something more acceptable like nursing or arts," said Shamim Ali, 26, whose dream is to start her own IT company. "This is a traditional society, and even the concept of IT is strange. People think we are going to become mechanics or electricians and climb up on ladders."

When it comes to studying abroad, there are many opportunities, such as the Fulbright program, which has sent 535 Afghan students - among them, 102 women - to the United States since 2002. There are also closer international universities in countries such as India, Iran and Bangladesh, which Afghan officials are promoting as cheaper, more comfortable places to study at a time of growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the West.

Yet even accomplished female students can be thwarted by family resistance and competing cultural priorities. Education officials described cases in which applicants for foreign scholarships turned out to be married, pregnant and unable to accept by the time their tickets and visas came through.

One woman in Kabul named Raihana, 27, who obtained a scholarship to study economics in Bangladesh, said her older brother, the senior male in the family, at first refused to let her to go, but her younger and more liberal brother finally persuaded him.

"Since my father was dead, he felt he had to take responsibility for me and my safety," the woman said, "but the real reason was that he was married and he did not want his wife to study or travel. If I went, she would be jealous and complain."

The members of the robotics team said they, too, encountered initial resistance from their parents - not only to travel to the United States for the robotics contest, but also to fly cross-country to Kabul, with its constant news of insurgent bombings, to apply for their visas.

"We finally convinced them, and in the end they were very happy, but it was a difficult path," said Yasamin Yasinzada, 16, who said her dream is to "be a pioneer in robotics and set an example for other girls." She said it was "much easier for boys, because they are allowed to travel, but it helped that our coach was going with us."

Read the original post:

For Afghan girls' robotics team, US visa denial was last of many hurdles - Chicago Tribune

BLACKSBURG Youre probably going to be nervous the first time you pull out of a parking lot in a self-driving car, TORC Robotics CEO Michael Fleming said from his 10 years of experience testing vehicles around the town and beyond.

Next comes the realization that all the humans on the road arent such great drivers after all.

Because this self-driving car is incredibly smooth, its not veering to the right or veering to the left, Fleming said. Its in the center of the lane.

The third sensation hes seen from passengers over and over again may be the most important: boredom.

Thats what happens when technology that appears so impossible and futuristic suddenly comes together in a seamless, safe and reliable way.

Eventually, it just fades into the background.

TORC has been working toward that feeling of comfortable boredom for a decade. Up until now, the 80-person company has worked almost exclusively in the military and mining industries, which Fleming called early adopters of autonomous technology.

But this week the company came out for the first time, thumping its chest as the newest contender in the self-driving consumer vehicle market.

TORC recently drove one of its cars from Blacksburg to the birthplace of the Ford Model T in Detroit, just to show off what the company can do.

We think the automotive industry is at an inflection point, Fleming said. You see a lot of folks making comments about how this technology will be commercially available in the next three to five years. Were working with a lot of big players to make that happen.

TORCs technology is designed to be integrated into automobiles already being produced by major manufacturers. The company would partner with brand name vehicle makers and then find a way to make everything fit together so TORCs technology could be baked in off the assembly lines.

Fleming didnt announce any of these partnerships as he showed off the technology during a recent visit, but he did hint at many more announcements to come later this year.

TORCs two newest self-driving cars, which it uses for its own experiments, are converted Lexus RXs. They hit public roads for the first time in February.

The most noticeable modification is the large, spinning lidar (light detection and ranging) system mounted to the roof. This is one of the main ways the car is able to see the world. Below the lidar is an array of radar, video cameras and two GPS antennas. Additional radar systems are hidden inside the bumpers.

All these sensors feed data to a computer tucked away in a compartment below the trunk.

Inside the vehicle, the only noticeable modification TORC made to the Lexus was the addition of a tablet mounted on the center console.

The car is able to navigate roads on its own by collecting imaging data with the sensors. The computer in the trunk then analyzes the environment, detecting things like road markings, other cars and traffic hazards.

That information is displayed on the tablet so the driver knows if something is going wrong, such as if the car is having a hard time finding markings on the road.

The dashboard has three indicator lights: green to let the driver know all is going well, yellow for when the car detects a minor obstacle that the driver should be aware of, and red for when its time to hand controls back over to a human.

TORC was founded in 2005 and began developing the technology in partnership with Virginia Tech in 2007. The two collaborated to compete in the Urban Challenge hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

TORC was a startup, competing against teams sponsored by General Motors and Google. But the Blacksburg team took third place, a moment Fleming called TORCs first breakthrough.

Fleming said the challenge was a little ahead of its time, as regular car owners back then werent ready to hand the steering wheel over to a robot.

Some of the scientists who competed in the Urban Challenge went to work for Google, which has long been a leader in self-driving technologies. Others went into other fields since there wasnt a market yet for what they were building.

But TORC decided to keep its team together to begin going after different industries that were more ready for change.

Thats why the company began targeting mining companies, where TORC worked with Caterpillar to develop increasingly autonomous equipment. TORC also began working on military applications.

TORC was able to keep growing and learning for 10 years, and it was during that time the consumer market started to change.

I think this was really viewed as science fiction and a research project. But we didnt see it that way 10 years ago, Fleming said.

We were really completely committed to the commercialization of this technology and fulfilling our purpose of impacting the world. Weve held to that for the last decade. To be honest with you, weve been waiting for the automotive industry to catch up.

Fleming said he believes self-driving cars are now just a few years away from regular consumers.

If he had to predict the future, he said he thinks the transition will be similar to those of the past.

A long time ago, he said, people relied on horses for transportation. But then technology advanced and more people began using automobiles.

Today, many people still choose to ride horses. But its mostly for recreation, not to get from point A to point B.

The same, Fleming said, could one day be true of driving.

Not only do we believe this technology will make the world a safer place, but we also believe it will free up a tremendous amount of time in our lives, Fleming said. There are other folks that are maybe viewing this as a sprint. Were convinced its a marathon.

See the article here:

Blacksburg's TORC Robotics debuts self-driving cars, looks to make ... - Martinsville Bulletin