Monthly Archives: July 2017

The United States has denied visas to five teenage students from Gambia competing in a prestigious international robotics contest in Washington, the team's leader said Tuesday.

The teens found the rejection "very disheartening," said Mucktarr M.Y. Darboe, who is also a director in the largely Muslim West African nation's ministry of higher education.

Darboe said the students were not given a reason for the visa denials in April, and he called the decision "disappointing and unfair."

The Gambia team is not alone. An all-female team from Afghanistan also was denied visas.

The U.S. Embassy in Banjul could not immediately be reached for comment.

Tiny Gambia has been through dramatic change in recent months, ousting via elections a longtime dictator, Yahya Jammeh, whose administration was accused of human rights abuses. The new administration, inaugurated in January, has promised widespread democratic reforms.

Gambia's government has put forth the money for another round of U.S. visa applications for the robotics team members, and the teens are being interviewed again Wednesday, Darboe said. The students' creation was being shipped Tuesday to the competition.

"We will go for an interview and hope for the best," he said. Each student had to pay a fee of more than $160 for the visas and travel for the interviews.

For months, the team has worked on a machine that sorts balls as part of an effort to simulate solutions for separating contaminates from water.

FIRST Global holds the annual robotics competition to encourage learning in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or STEM, around the world. It invites one team from each country in an effort to build bridges, organizers said. This year's competition takes place from July 16-18.

Gambia team member Fatoumata Ceesay, 17, said she hopes their second interview will get them to the U.S., but she was not optimistic.

"It's very disappointing knowing that we are the only two countries that aren't going to take part in the competition," she said. "It would be an experience to see and discover other robots and ask questions and exchange ideas with others. It's more than 160 countries, so we'd have the chance to mingle."

The aspiring engineering student said she was grateful for the opportunity to work with the team and learn about building robots.

"This is the first time I've worked on a robot ... The experience is so amazing," she said.

If team members are denied visas again, the Gambian American association will represent the robot at the competition, Ceesay said.

Joe Sestak, the president of FIRST Global, said he has already promised the Gambia and Afghanistan teams that they will be Skyping into the competition as their robots are presented. "We still are making them a part of this," he said.

Afghanistan has had a U.S. visa refusal rate of 75 percent and Gambia 70 percent, Sestak said.

Overall, he called the visa approval rate unprecedented, saying that "we had an extraordinarily fair process." FIRST provided letters of support and informed teams about the questions that might be asked during interviews.

Forty African nations will be among those attending the competition.

"For Gambia I feel just as saddened. We started this effort in Africa," Sestak said, adding that his organization hopes to hold the competition in various countries in the future to encourage wider attendance.

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US denies visas to Gambia teens in global robotics contest - ABC News

By Jalil Ahmad Rezayee | HERAT, Afghanistan

HERAT, Afghanistan Two Afghan girls refused visas to the United States for a robot-building competition said on Tuesday they were mystified by the decision, as the contest's organizers said teams from Iran and Sudan as well as a de facto Syrian team had gained visas.

The unusual story of the Afghan all-girl team of robotics students emerged as the United States grapples with the legality of President Donald Trump's order to temporarily ban travel from six Muslim-majority countries.

Afghanistan itself is not on the list and Team Afghanistan's robot, unlike its creators, has been allowed entry to the United States. Asked by Reuters on Tuesday why the girls were banned, a U.S. State Department spokesperson cited regulations prohibiting the agency from discussing individual visa cases.

So the six team members will watch the ball-sorting machine compete in Washington D.C. via video link during the July 16-18 event from their hometown of Herat, in western Afghanistan, according to the FIRST Global contest organizers.

"We still don't know the reason why we were not granted visas, because other countries participating in the competition have been given visas," said 14-year-old Fatemah Qaderyan, part of the team that made two journeys to the U.S. Embassy in the Afghan capital Kabul to apply for their papers.

"No one knows about the future but ... we did our best and we hope that our robot could get a position along other robots from other countries," Qaderyan said.

Most of the female team members were either infants or not yet born at the time of the U.S.-backed military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 that toppled the Taliban regime whose ultra-hardline interpretation of sharia (Islamic law) banned girls from school, women from working outside the home and all females from leaving home without a male relative.

More than 15 years later, around 10,000 U.S. and allied international troops remain in Afghanistan to support an elected government in Kabul that constitutionally guarantees women's rights but is increasingly losing ground to a Taliban insurgency that now controls or contests some 40 percent of territory.

"CLEAR INSULT"

Qaderyan's teammate from Herat, 17-year-old Lida Azizi, was less forgiving of the U.S. visa decision. "All of the countries can participate in the competitions, but we can't. So it's a clear insult for the people of Afghanistan," Azizi said.

FIRST Global's president, Joe Sestak, said in a post on the organization's Facebook page that he was "saddened" by the U.S. decision but the Afghan team would be able to connect with the competition via a live Skype video link.

"That is how we must now honor our fellow teammates, those brave girls from Afghanistan," he said.

He added that the teams of 156 countries including from Iran and Sudan, which are on Trumps list of countries whose citizens are banned from entry had received their visas.

"The support of the U.S. State Department (including its embassies) has been simply nothing short of amazing," Sestak said in the post, adding that one other team, from Gambia, had been also denied visas.

Also approved for visas was "Team Hope," a group of Syrian refugees, he said.

Syria is among the Muslim-majority countries named in Trump's executive order prohibiting all citizens from entry for 90 days. The other countries, apart from Iran, Syria and Sudan, are Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

In a June 26 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court revived parts of Trump's March 6 executive order that had been blocked by lower courts. The highest court let the ban go forward with a limited scope, saying that it cannot apply to anyone with credible "bona fide relationship" with a U.S. person or entity.

(Additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici in Washington; writing by Kay Johnson; editing by Mark Heinrich)

GENEVA Singapore has a near-perfect approach to cybersecurity, but many other rich countries have holes in their defenses and some poorer countries are showing them how it should be done, a U.N. survey showed on Wednesday.

KIEV The Ukrainian software firm at the center of a cyber attack that spread around the world last week said on Wednesday that computers which use its accounting software are compromised by a so-called "backdoor" installed by hackers during the attack.

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Denied US visas, all-girl Afghan robotics team to watch their creation compete via Skype - Reuters

Miso Robotics recently raised $3.1 million in a funding round led by patent services firm Acacia Research, a relatively new fund called Match Robotics VC, and earlier investors including the restaurant chain CaliBurger.

The company will use the capital to produce its first commercial Flippy units. It expects to roll Flippy out, starting at the Los Angeles CaliBurger, in the first quarter of 2018, Zito said. Along with its investment, Acacia will provide the start-up with patent and intellectual property-related services, helping Miso Robotics prepare for global expansion.

"I see robotics in the kitchen as kind of an extension of going from the open flame to the oven," said Rob Stewart, Acacia's president, in an interview. "It's next-level efficiency,"

What does this mean for the industry's 2.3 million cooks?

"Like the electronic spreadsheet did for accountants, this will cause the jobs to go elsewhere," Stewart said. "But there will be new hospitality and culinary jobs we have yet to imagine. And those will be jobs where people will get paid a higher wage, and where they'll want to stay long-term."

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Miso Robotics is bringing artificial intelligence to restaurants - CNBC

Each year, on average, there are 240 million bushels of apples in the U.S. that need to be picked. Backed by a $10 million investment from Google Ventures, Yamaha Motor Company, and others, Abundant Robotics hopes to help growers shoulder that task.

Most types of agriculture relied on muscle power until the 19thcentury. Since then, automation has provided tremendous gains in productivity and standard of living, said Abundant Robotics cofounder and CEO, Dan Steere.However, for many types of fruits and vegetables, it simply hasnt been possible to automate manual tasks such as picking fruit.

That was, until 2012, when the idea popped up in the robotics division of SRI International, a research lab in Silicon Valley. That brainchild then came to fruition when Curt Salisbury, who is now Abundant Robotics CTO, approached the U.S. apple industry to explore his ideas about using robotics to automate the apple harvest.

The Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission and SRI provided grant funding for the next two-and-a-half years. By the end of 2015, Steere and Salisbury felt that the technology was working well enough that it was time to move from research to commercialization.

Thus, Abundant Robotics was formed.

Along the way, the company has worked alongside orchard growers to develop and fine-tune the product for some of apple-pickings pickiest challenges, such as how to identify ripe apples and how to pick apples at night, as well as how to incorporate a vacuum to gently pull apples from the branches.

From the beginning, weve stayed in close contact with growers, Steere said. Weve developed a series of prototypes and quickly gotten them into orchards to test our ideas in the real environment.

With the current farm labor shortage, Steere sees the robots fitting in as a feasible alternative for farms.

I see technology getting to the point that we are able to automate many tasks in agriculture that havent been possible before, Steere said. The fact that its becoming practical to automate these tasks means that automation is poised to bring big productivity gains to specialty crops.

Abundant Robotics has yet to release their first commercial system, so it is still unknown how many employees a robot could replace on a farm. The companys goal is to release the robot for commercial systems in 2018.

After that, Abundant Robotics hopes to continue to upset the fruit basket with more robots.

Were focused on apple harvest initially, Steere said. In the longer term, we expect to automate harvest of many types of fruit.

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Abundant Robotics aims to upset the apple cart - AGDAILY

MARLBORO The Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School robotics team, the Aztechs, has received a $2,000 sponsorship from TierPoint, a national hybrid IT provider. The donation makes TierPoint one of the teams largest sponsors for the 2017-18 season.

The Aztechs are a FIRST Robotics team. FIRST Robotics competitions, held worldwide, challenge teams of high school students and their volunteer mentors to build and program robots to perform challenging tasks against a field of competitors.

TierPoint Solutions Engineer Nick Molina nominated the Aztechs through the TierPoint Gives Back program, which invites the companys employees to submit charitable requests on behalf of their favorite nonprofit organizations. TierPoint Gives Back supports a variety of causes, with a special focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education.

I was excited to learn the Aztech team has been competing for 25 years, Molina said. Touring their workroom took me back to my days on Team 88 in Bridgewater. I appreciate the need for volunteers and sponsorships to keep these programs active.

Molina plans to donate time to the team during the next competition season, and hopes to recruit colleagues.

The teams project leader, Marcus Fletcher, and I are discussing other ways TierPoint might partner with Assabet Valley High School and the robotics team, Molina said. Like my company, they are committed to STEM education. Its a good fit.

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TierPoint sponsors Assabet Valley robotics team - Worcester Telegram