Daily Archives: August 1, 2017

The dictionary definesautomationas the technique of making an apparatus, a process, or a system operate automatically.

We define automation as "the creation and application of technology to monitor and control the production and delivery of products and services.

Using our definition, the automation profession includes everyone involved in the creation and application of technology to monitor and control the production and delivery of products and services; and the automation professional is any individual involved in the creation and application of technology to monitor and control the production and delivery of products and services.

Automation provides benefits to virtually all of industry. Here are some examples:

Automationcrosses all functions within industry from installation, integration, and maintenance to design, procurement, and management. Automation even reaches into the marketing and sales functions of these industries.

Automation involves a verybroad range of technologies including robotics and expert systems, telemetry and communications, electro-optics, Cybersecurity, process measurement and control, sensors, wireless applications, systems integration, test measurement, and many, many more.

Think about the cell phone and computer you use every day to do your job. Think about the car you drive to take to work. Think about the food you eat; water you drink; clothes you wear; and appliances you use to store, prepare, and clean them. Think about the television you watch, video games you play, or music system you listen to. Think about the buildings you visit. Think about any modern convenience or necessity. Just about anything you can think of is the result of complex processes. Without talented individuals to design, build, improve, and maintain these processes, these technological advances would never have occurred and future innovations would be impossible. Without automation professionals, our world and our future would be very different.

Automation professionals are responsible for solving complex problems in many vital aspects of industry and its processes. The work of automation professionals is critically important to the preservation of the health, safety, and welfare of the public and to the sustainability and enhancement of our quality of life.

The U.S. government, among many others, recognizes the unsung value of automation professionals. Support for the importance of automation to industry comes from the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations. On 30 June 2009, the committee submitted report language (including the excerpt shown below) to accompany the bill: H. R. 2847 (Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010) emphasizing the importance of automation to industry:

Supporting the Nation's manufacturers, especially small businesses, is critical to keeping America innovative in a global marketplaceMEP, NIST, and its partners are directed to consider the importance automation plays in accelerating and integrating manufacturing processes. The topic of automation cuts across all levels of industry, rather than serving as a stand-alone technology, and particularly affects the fields of control systems cyber security, industrial wireless sensors, systems interoperability, and other basic automation technologies necessary for the success of industrial enterprises. NIST is encouraged to consult and collaborate with independent experts in the field of automation to support the agency's efforts in working with industry to increase innovation, trade, security, and jobs."

Automation professionals do and will continue to play a crucial role in protecting us from cyber-attack; enhancing our quality of life; and ensuring the reliability, efficiency, safety, constant improvement, and competitiveness of our electric power systems, transportation systems, manufacturing operations, and industry as a whole. Without these individuals, we cannot advance into the future.

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What is Automation?- ISA

The Information Technology has never had it so bad as it has since a year ago when job cuts and summary dismissals have been the order of the day. No matter which blue chip IT firm an individual works for, the jobs they are hold at risk, irrespective of seniority.

Reuters

A survey by Simplilearn, How Automation is Changing Work Choices: The Future of IT Jobs in India, says that the future of IT is in Cyber Security, Big Data and Data Science, Big Data Architect, Big Data Engineer, Artificial Intelligence and IoT (Internet of Things) Architect, and Cloud Architect .

The jobs that will disappear will be anything in the next five are those that are repetitive and can be taken over by Artificial Intelligence (AI) such as manual testing, infrastructure management, BPO and system maintenance will massively decline over the next five years.

Core development jobs will not feel the impact of job loss, said Kashyap Dalal, Chief Business Officer. The IT industry is seeing the impact of two major trends - one, that of AI and machine learning. And second, that of legacy skill-sets going out of date. While there is risk to jobs due to these trends, the good news is that a huge number of new jobs are getting created as well in areas like Cyber Security, Cloud, DevOps, Big Data, Machine Learning and AI. It is clearly a time of career pivot for IT professionals, to make sure they are where the growth is."

The report further provides insights into the preferred technology skills based on a survey of 7,000 IT professionals from key metros. Over 50 percent of IT professionals with work experience of 410 years have invested in courses and training programs to help them build new skills.

Big Data & Analytics, Project Management, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Agile & Scrum, and Digital Marketing are among the top domains in which professionals are investing for online training programs.

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Automation, Artificial Intelligence to make many IT jobs obsolete over next 5 years, says survey - Firstpost

There is widespread concern these days that robots and automation will soon be permeating much of the American workforce -- taking over factory floors, performing hospitality jobs, becoming ubiquitous in the casinos of Las Vegas. Even Silicon Valley worries about automations effects, although they likely wont be as severe there as elsewhere.

Some recent studies add to these fears, predicting sizable job displacement from numerous forms of automation and artificial intelligence in virtually all corners of the economy. But just as automation will alter industries differently, its effects will be much more intensive in some regional economies.

To estimate the potential effects of automation in those areas, Governing utilized definitions in a University of Oxford study assessing the automatability of individual occupations, then compared them with the Department of Labors most recent occupational employment estimates for the 100 largest U.S. metro areas. About 65 percent of Las Vegas area jobs were found to be susceptible to automation, the highest in any metro area. Much of that stems from the regions large armies of servers, food preparers, cashiers and other occupations thought to be highly automatable. El Paso, Texas, and Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., similarly employ many of these workers, and registered the next-highest shares of potential automatability.

Professors Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, who conducted the Oxford study, assigned a probability to each occupation by evaluating the extent to which its work activities require creativity, social intelligence and perception, and manipulation. Retail sales accounted for the single largest number of possible job displacements as a result of automation in most regions. The New York metro area, for instance, employs more than 500,000 retail salespersons and cashiers. Predominantly low-wage food service jobs are susceptible to drastic change as well, both in the United States and overseas. Robots will start delivering Dominos pizza orders in Hamburg, Germany, this summer.

Regions with higher education levels should fare better. But the Brookings Institutions Mark Muro points out that theres more to it than that. Physical jobs that are more complex or personalized -- the kinds you wont find on assembly lines -- may actually be less vulnerable to automation than routine office jobs. Often, lower-skill but physical, personal or direct-caring occupations seem quite durable, Muro says.

Middle-class, white-collar jobs, on the other hand, can be significantly liable to automation. A forthcoming report from Brookings reviews hundreds of U.S. occupations, finding use and knowledge of digital skills doubled between 2002 and 2016 and led to a wide array of jobs being digitized, including those of office clerks, customer service representatives and accounting workers. The middle is where there will be some of the most disruption, Muro says.

Some well-paying jobs in demand today arent off-limits from automation, either. A McKinsey Global Institute study concluded that some of the jobs most at risk involve data collecting and processing. Around a quarter of the activities of attorneys and physicians were deemed to be potentially automatable.

Large regions with jobs least susceptible to computerization, using the Oxford studys definitions, are high-tech centers, such as San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif., and Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C. Other metro areas with highly educated workforces such as Washington, D.C., and Boston similarly appear to have fewer jobs vulnerable to displacement. Regional economies relying heavily on education and health care may be less prone to automation because jobs requiring a high degree of human interaction are thought to be among the most resilient.

(Larger markers represent regions more susceptible to automation based on a University of Oxford study. View an interactive map here.)

Of course, widespread automation wont happen overnight. McKinsey projected that half the work activities across the economy today could be automated by 2055. An analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers concluded that 38 percent of American jobs were at high risk of automation by the early 2030s. McKinsey studied prior cases of technological upheaval, finding that the time between initial commercial availability and peak adoption ranged between eight and 28 years.

The biggest unknown at this point is whether automation will eliminate more jobs than it creates. Automation itself isnt new, and prior advances in technology and industrialization havent brought about higher overall unemployment over the long term. But a growing number of academics are concluding that automation this time around could, in fact, wield noticeably more harmful effects on the workforce. One highly cited paper by economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo forecasts lower overall employment resulting from the introduction of more robots into the workplace.

Other researchers, notably ones at the Economic Policy Institute, argue that automation has not led and will not lead to higher joblessness. Experts appear to be divided almost evenly on this question: A 2014 Pew Research Center survey of experts found 48 percent agreeing that automation, robots and artificial intelligence will displace more jobs than they create by 2025.

While many unknowns remain, it wouldnt hurt for policymakers to start thinking about how to respond.

Some state workforce boards are looking at the issue. States already typically maintain labor market information divisions that project which occupations will be in demand in future years. Preparing farms and their workers for automation was the subject of a recent meeting of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture. While there arent yet many programs that specifically address automation, some states are engaged in activities that could help alleviate the impact of job losses. Apprenticeships are gaining a lot of attention and are expanding to health care, finance and other fields where they havent been common before. The model is being modified and theyre really trying to ramp it up, says Scott Sanders, executive director of the National Association of State Workforce Agencies.

For workers displaced by automation, community and technical colleges will play a crucial role in the pursuit of new careers. The federal government, however, has historically focused little on workforce training, spending much less than other wealthy nations do. We dont do training in America, we do education, says Anthony Carnevale, who directs the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Our policy is: Go to college.

It was only a few short decades ago that computers began revolutionizing the American workplace. Regions and employers that were early adopters with skilled workforces are well ahead today, and its likely they will continue to be in the years to come.

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Is Automation Anxiety All a Hype? - Governing

MANILA - The shift to automation can displace 40,000 low-skilled workers in the business process outsourcing industry, but will open up job opportunities for nearly 700,000 higher-skilled counterparts, an industry official said Tuesday.

Low-skilled workers include receptionists and clerks. Job demand will shift to medium and high-skilled jobs that offer higher compensation, said Alex Tined, program director of the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines.

"We need to teach them the new jobs. The challenge now is to make sure that we have people to do the mid and high skill jobs," Tined said.

Tined said some 388,000 jobs would be added to the middle level and another 309,000 to the high skill level, bringing the industry workforce to 1.8 million by 2022 from the current 1.14 million.

The BPO industry is a key job generator and source of dollar earnings that help strengthen the peso.

Tined said the Philippines had fallen to third place among the world's top BPO destinations, as India and China lure companies with more advanced technologies.

China is a relative newcomer to the race, previously dominated by India and the Philippines.

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BPO automation may displace 40000, add 700000 jobs - ABS-CBN News

For most of this decade, call center automation efforts involving voice technologies have focused on speech analytics to monitor agents' interactions with customers. That is changing.

New voice tools provide the ability to initiate CRM contacts through voice interfaces, such as with Google Home and Amazon Echo. They can also divine new insights about customer experiences through voice analysis of calls that supplement traditional consumer surveys, and may even replace them in the future.

But these voice tools can help only to a point, as software vendors and their customers await better natural language processing (NLP) support.

"It's at a point where it's really accepted -- you talk to your car, you talk to your phone," said John Joseph, CEO of Scribe Software, a company based in Manchester, N.H., that focuses on CRM data integrations. His team demonstrated at the Salesforce World Tour stop in Boston in May a Salesforce-Amazon Echo implementation that enables voice-activated report generation.

"There's still a long way to go in terms of natural language [processing technology] understanding everything -- but it's remarkable where we are," he said.

The reason voice recognition or virtual assistants are still kind of dumb -- despite massive cloud compute power that can run circles around humans -- is that they are very literal, and they often over-simplify a human's request to the point where they miss the original premise. This can lead to off-topic suggestions or some variation of "Sorry, I don't understand."

On top of that, humans have powers of comprehension computers don't: We instinctively understand tone and emotion, and we can hear the syntactic nuance of clichs and other local idioms (such as the interchangeable use of soda, pop, tonic or Coke).

There's still a long way to go in terms of natural language understanding everything -- but it's remarkable where we are. John JosephCEO, Scribe Software

Think about this statement: Police help dog bite victim. How is NLP likely to interpret that? An NLP system has to work hard to figure out what you're saying (think I scream versus ice cream) before it can tackle context and hazard a guess as to what a customer is asking.

All that being said, companies hope to integrate more call center automation tools built around NLP as it improves, according to Deloitte customer operations leader Andy Haas, who co-authored a report analyzing the results of a survey of 450 call center executives earlier this year.

Business leaders are considering and even experimenting with next-generation voice recognition feeding into NLP, which, in turn, feeds into analytics systems that can automate customer service through the insights the analytics glean from the conversation, Haas said. While simple, targeted tasks can be completed now, operations executives pretty much agree that adequately reliable automation technology is a long way off from digitizing customer interactions; as in, decades.

"There might be a tipping point in the future, but it's not there yet," Haas said. "I don't think my clients think it's in the next five years, just like operations managers don't think interactions will be all-digital in the next five years. Will it happen in the next 20 years? Maybe."

One possible way new voice tools could advance call center automation is through analytics to determine customer sentiment for the purpose of future sales and customer retention efforts. For decades, the post-call follow-up survey has been the main method fueling such initiatives, but voice analytics are starting to supplement surveys.

There could be a point down the road where these audio mining systems replace surveys, and they could actually offer deeper insights about customer sentiment than the blunt instrument of the three-question, multiple-choice survey few take the time to fill out.

Haas said his survey showed that while call center volumes are going down in general, the interactions which escalate to calls are make or break in terms of the customer's relationship to the company. Call analytics tools, therefore, will become more and more important vehicles for customer retention.

"As you apply analytics, it will make an easier ROI [for investing in the technology]," Haas said. "It's going to be less pure volume, but more meaningful interaction."

Greg Hirschi, director of customer service operations at smartphone and tablet case manufacturer OtterBox, runs a 270-agent call center based in Colorado. The company regularly conducts customer surveys, which get 30% to 40% response, and the rich information they yield has led directly to eight-figure redesigns of customer experience processes, one example being warranty service, he said. Analytics can extend those insights to offer product teams feedback for future OtterBox models.

"From a consumer insight standpoint, for us, it's deeply valuable to understand how they use our products and what we can do to better design them," Hirschi said. "There's a knowledge gap between perceived customer use and actual customer use, and we use voice analytics to bridge that gap."

Terry Leahy, president and CEO of call analytics software vendor CallMiner, said he believes the old-school customer survey as a service tool should be replaced, and the funds companies invest in them would be better spent elsewhere. That being said, customer surveys will never go away he added. Call analytics can offer insight to marry with the results of surveys and to deepen a company's knowledge about its customer experience.

"We are now selling to marketing more than we ever did before, and that's where the budget for the survey usually is," Leahy said. "I think it's safe to say that you'll be seeing budget for surveys being diverted [toward] a better way to understand the actual voice of the customer than a derivative of it, which is the survey ... But surveys are never going away."

Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones have, for years, extended call center work to employees who want to work at home. But even the old-dog VoIP technology is teaching call centers new tricks.

Ryan Nichols, general manager of Zendesk Talk, said CRM systems are creating deeper and deeper VoIP integrations, such that service agents can escalate calls from channels to voice while in a customer's recording, without interruptions. This reduces call times dramatically because there's no cold-call script to launch into the discussion -- it's already going on via text, and the voice call is a continuation of that.

"Conversations don't need to come in via PSTN [public switched telephone network] anymore," Nichols said. "Someone doesn't have to dial in a 1-800 number they found on the website and navigate down to an agent."

These VoIP integrations have become so tight, he said, call centers are either no longer using traditional phone systems or they're skipping them altogether when equipping new facilities. Customer agents are the better for it because, when they can see context in the customer record, as well as the chat history, agents can perform more effective service.

Nichols is watching with interest how companies such as Uber and Lyft integrate voice into their smartphone apps, as well as home voice assistants such as Amazon Echo. Still, he said, there's a long way to go before we read a lot of CRM success stories tied to voice recognition and the NLP those types of implementations require.

"The question is, what happens when people have problems?" Nichols said, echoing what analysts have said all year: NLP is unreliable enough that the biggest challenge is understanding when and how to escalate service to better channels before losing the customer.

"How do you build a bridge between this conversation that's happening around your core service and your traditional support channels?"

Guide to buying call center speech analytics

The benefits and negatives of real-time speech analytics

Best and worst call analytics practices

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Call center automation advances, but only as far as NLP can take it - TechTarget

To help ensure the cybersecurity of self-driving cars, General Motors Co. has hired two well-known security researchers who hacked into a Jeep SUV.(Photo: Stan Honda / Getty Images)

To help ensure the cybersecurity of self-driving cars, General Motors Co. has hired two well-known security researchers who hacked into a Jeep SUV.

Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have been hired by GM subsidiary Cruise Automation, an autonomous vehicle software tech startup GM bought last year, Cruise founder and CEO Kyle Vogt confirmed in a tweet Friday.

A GM spokeswoman said Monday that Miller and Valasek also would be integrated into GMs cybersecurity team led by Jeffrey Massimilla, chief product cybersecurity officer since 2014. They will work as software engineers.

Miller and Valasek will be focused on the many challenges related to securing the autonomous vehicle ecosystem, a GM spokeswoman said in an email. Our cybersecurity mantra recognizes that in order to prevent the worst, you need to engage the best. We believe we can build more secure systems by bringing on the people who excel at defeating them. Protecting the safety and security of our customers is of utmost importance.

The security researchers are known for their remote hack of a 2014 Jeep Cherokee that included disabling the SUVs engine functions and controlling interior features such as air conditioning, locks and the radio.

The hack was detailed in a 2015 Wired magazine article and led to Fiat Chrysler recalling 1.4 million vehicles that were shown to be vulnerable to computer hacking. Owners of Jeeps, Chryslers, Dodges and Rams with vulnerable entertainment systems were sent a flash drive to upgrade vehicle software.

Valasek most recently was security lead at Uber Technologies Inc., according to his personal website. The Pittsburgh resident said on the website that hes interested in automotive security research and reverse engineering, among other things. Miller most recently worked for Chinese ride-sharing company Didi Chuxing.

All automakers, including GM, have been ramping up cybersecurity efforts as self-driving vehicles inch closer to reality. Some, including Fiat Chrysler, have started to pay outside security experts bounties for their hacking information. Fiat Chrysler last year began to offer up to $1,500 bounties for information through a partnership with Bugcrowd Inc., a crowdsourced security-testing company.

GM in early 2016 bought San Francisco-based startup Cruise Automation to help it with autonomous vehicle software development. The Cruise team has grown from about 40 people in California to more than 100, and GM plans to hire 1,100 over the next five years.

The Detroit automaker has said it is giving Vogt responsibility for operations and financial performance of GMs autonomous vehicle business.

GM and Cruise are testing more than 50 self-driving Chevrolet Bolt EVs in Metro Detroit, San Francisco and Scottsdale. The company recently built 130 more self-driving Bolt EVs that GM said in June would recently be deployed for testing in the three sites.

mburden@detroitnews.com

(313) 222-2319

Staff Writer Ian Thibodeau contributed.

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GM hires Jeep hackers to join Cruise Automation - Detroit News - The Detroit News

NEW DELHI: Automation is bringing about changes in work choices like never before as some profiles get obsolete and new job roles make their way to cyber security, cloud and Big Data, among others, says a report.

According to a recent research by Simplilearn Career Data Labs, some of the job roles that may soon go off the radar include those of software test engineer, system engineer, data entry operator and the like.

New IT jobs that will be in demand are expected to be in segments like Big Data and data science, artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things, cloud computing and cyber security, among others.

"The IT industry is seeing the impact of two major trends -- one, that of AI and machine learning. And second, that of legacy skill sets going out of date," Simplilearn Chief Business Officer Kashyap Dalal said.

Dalal further said that "while there is risk to jobs due to these trends, the good news is a huge number of new jobs are getting created as well in areas like cyber security, cloud, DevOps, Big Data, machine learning and AI. It is clearly a time of career pivot for IT professionals to make sure they are where the growth is".

Automation is gaining prominance in sectors like engineering, manufacturing, automobiles, IT and banking. With increasing adoption of automation, labour-intensive jobs are expected to take a hit.

According to a report by digital economy training company Simplilearn, roles such as data analyst and project manager will continue to generate interest, but the skills required to perform these roles will witness a shift.

The report noted that automation can never replace people. That said, to make themselves relevant, employees should evaluate the career choices of future and start bridging skill gaps to fit into the evolving business world.

Based on a survey of 7,000 IT professionals from key metros, the report said that over 50 per cent of IT professionals with work experience of 4-10 years have invested in courses and training programs to help them build new skills.

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Automation shaking up work choices, upskilling key - Economic Times