by nurazaliah | Jan 11, 2019 | HowTo
Assalamualaikum & very good day,
Greetings from UTM Kuala Lumpur!!
You are cordially invited to participate in the Science and Technology for Disaster Risk Reduction (STDRR) Week 2019, 25 February – 02 March 2019 in Kundasang, Sabah
STDRR Week 2019 is organized with the support of Society for Engineering Geology and Rock Mechanics (SEGRM), Department of Minerals and Geoscience (JMG) Malaysia, Department of Surveying and Mapping (JUPEM), Royal Institution of Surveying Malaysia (RISM), Sabah Lands and Surveys Department (JTU), Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI), Kyoto University Japan & Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction Working Group, Global Young Academy.
A series of high impact program will be jointly organized as follows:-
Package 1 (RM800.00*)
Workshop & Forum on Geospatial Technology for Disaster Risk Mapping & Assessment (GeoRisk2019), 25-27 February 2019
Package 2 (RM800.00*)
Workshop and Field Practice on Landslide Assessment (WFPLA2019), 28 February-02 March 2019
Both Packages 1 & 2 (RM1500*)
Expedition to Mount Kinabalu, UNESCO World Heritage Site, 27-28 February 2019 (only limited seats)
Complimentary packages^:-
^Technological Showcase, Business and Industrial Networking, in conjunction to Science and Technology for DRR Week 2019, 28 February 2019
^Post Mt Kinabalu Expedition &
Workshop on Integrated Geohazard Research 2020-2030
02 March 2019
You can choose and pick up your package ASAP !!
RVSP @ https://goo.gl/forms/nQluu74Cs6fyLFNn2
*Cost inclusive of airport transfer, accommodation, meals, ground transportation & course materials.
Looking forward to seeing you @ Kundasang Sabah
Dr. Khamarrul Azahari Razak
UTM Kuala Lumpur
Tel: 0193649495
Khamarrul.kl@utm.my
by nurazaliah | Jan 11, 2019 | HowTo
Facebook plans to integrate its messaging services on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
While all three will remain stand-alone apps, at a much deeper level they will be linked so messages can travel between the different services.
Facebook told the BBC it was at the start of a “long process”.
The plan was first reported in the New York Times and is believed to be a personal project of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Once complete, the merger would mean that a Facebook user could communicate directly with someone who only has a WhatsApp account. This is currently impossible as the applications have no common core.
The work to merge the three elements has already begun, reported the NYT, and is expected to be completed by the end of 2019 or early next year.
What is Facebook’s plan?
By Chris Fox, technology reporter
Facebook probably didn’t want to talk about this in the middle of a privacy scandal, but its hand was forced by insiders talking to the New York Times.
Until now, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger have been run as separate and competing products.
Integrating the messaging parts might simplify Facebook’s work. It wouldn’t need to develop competing versions of new features, such as Stories, which all three apps have added with inconsistent results.
Image caption
WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram are run as competitors
Cross-platform messaging may also lead the way for businesses on one platform to message potential customers on another.
And it might make it easier for Facebook to share data across the three platforms, to help its targeted advertising efforts.
But bigger still: it makes Facebook’s suite of apps a much tighter, interwoven collection of services. That could make the key parts of Facebook’s empire more difficult to break up and spin off, if governments and regulators decide that is necessary.
Shared data
Mr Zuckerberg is reportedly pushing the integration plan to make its trinity of services more useful and increase the amount of time people spend on them.
By effectively joining all its users into one massive group Facebook could compete more effectively with Google’s messaging services and Apple’s iMessage, suggested Makena Kelly on tech news site The Verge.
“We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private,” said Facebook in a statement.
“We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks,” it added.
The statement said there was a lot of “discussion and debate” about how the system would eventually work.
Facebook ignored kids’ spending problems
Facebook fined £500,000 for data scandal
Will Facebook be fined after hack attack?
Linking the three systems marks a significant change at Facebook as before now it has let Instagram and WhatsApp operate as largely independent companies.
The NYT claimed that Mr Zuckerberg’s championing of the plan to connect the messaging system had caused “internal strife”. It was part of the reason that the founders of both Instagram and WhatsApp left last year.
The decision comes as Facebook faces repeated investigations and criticisms over the way it has handled and safeguarded user data.
Comprehensively linking user data at a fundamental level may prompt regulators to take another look at its data handling practices.
The UK’s Information Commissioner has already conducted investigations into how much data is shared between WhatsApp and Facebook.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47001460
by nurazaliah | Jan 10, 2019 | HowTo
Some forecasts project that advances in automation will result in the wholesale replacement of the human workforce. Encompassing the near- or medium-term timeframes, our analysis suggests another perspective: that work currently performed by humans is being augmented by machine and algorithmic labour. Responses from employers surveyed for this report can be interpreted as evidence for the increasing viability of what a number of experts have called an ‘augmentation strategy’. Namely, it has been suggested that businesses can look to utilize the automation of some job tasks to complement and enhance the human workforces’ comparative strengths and ultimately to enable and empower employees to extend to their full potential and competitive advantage. Rather than narrowly focusing on automation-based labour cost savings, an augmentation strategy takes into account the broader horizon of value-creating activities that can be accomplished by human workers, often in complement to technology, when they are freed of the need to perform routinized, repetitive tasks and better able to use their distinctively human talents.
Importantly, most automation occurs at the level of specific work tasks, not at the level of whole jobs.15 For example, according to one recent study, whereas nearly two-thirds of today’s job roles entail at least 30% of tasks that could be automated based on currently available technology, only about one-quarter of today’s job roles can be said to have more than 70% of tasks that are automatable. A similar recent analysis finds that workforce automation is likely to play out in three waves between today and the mid-2030s, increasing the share of fully automatable manual tasks in the most affected current job roles from less than 5% today to nearly 40% by the mid-2030s, and the share of automatable tasks involving social skills from less than 5% today to about 15% in the same time horizon.17 The most relevant question to businesses, governments and individuals is not to what extent automation will affect current employment numbers, but how and under what conditions the global labour market can be supported in reaching a new equilibrium in the division of labour between human workers, robots and algorithms. Workforce planning and investment decisions taken today will play a crucial role in shaping this process.
Waves of automation have reshaped the global economy throughout history. Since the first and second industrial revolutions, organizations have bundled specific work tasks into discrete job roles, giving rise to distinct occupational profiles and optimizing the process of economic value creation based on the most efficient division of labour between humans and machines technologically available at the time. As technological change and progress have increased workforce productivity by ‘re-bundling’ work tasks into new kinds of jobs, so they have seen the decline of obsolete job profiles and the dynamic rise of wholly new ones, historically leaving the balance of net job and economic value creation firmly on the positive side.
While the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s wave of technological advancement will reduce the number of workers required to perform certain work tasks, responses by the employers surveyed for this report indicate that it will create increased demand for the performance of others, leading to new job creation. The rise of workplace automation in its many forms has the potential to vastly improve productivity and augment the work of human employees. Automation technology can help remove the burden of repetitive administrative work and enable employees to focus on solving more complex issues while reducing the risk of error, allowing them to focus on value-added tasks. Examples of now well-established and almost unremarkable automation-based augmentation technology that hardly existed 25 years ago range from computer-aided design and modelling software used by architects, engineers and designers, to robotic medical tools used by doctors and surgeons, through to search engine technology that allows researchers to find more relevant information. In theory, these technologies take away tasks from workers, but in practice, their overall effect is to vastly amplify and augment their abilities.
The estimates of companies surveyed for this report provide a nuanced view of how human-machine collaboration might evolve in the time horizon up to 2022. In today’s enterprise, machines and algorithms most often complement human skills in information and data processing. They also support the performance of complex and technical tasks, as well as supplementing more physical and manual work activities. However, some work tasks have thus far remained overwhelmingly human: Communicating and interacting; Coordinating, developing, managing and advising; as well as Reasoning and decision-making. Notably, in terms of total working hours, in the aggregate, no work task was yet estimated to be predominantly performed by a machine or an algorithm.
By 2022, this picture is projected to change somewhat. Employers surveyed for this report expect a deepening across the board of these existing trends, with machines and algorithms on average increased their contribution to specific tasks by 57%. Relative to their starting point today, the expansion of machines’ share of work task performance is particularly marked in Reasoning and decision-making; Administering; and Looking for and receiving job-related information. The majority of an organization’s information and data processing and information search and transmission tasks will be performed by automation technology
Based on one recent estimate, the next wave of labour-augmenting automation technology could lead to an average labour productivity increase across sectors of about 30% compared to 2015, with some significant variation by industry.25 For employers, optimally integrating humans and automation technology will require an analytical ability to deconstruct the work performed in their organizations today into discrete elements—that is, seeing the work tasks of today’s job roles as independent and fungible components—and then reconfiguring these components to reveal human-machine collaboration opportunities that are more efficient, effective and impactful. Among other things, success in this domain will require a strategic repositioning of the corporate human resource function and expanded organizational capabilities in data analysis and workforce analytics.
For workers, improved productivity may allow them to re-focus their work on high-value activities that play to the distinctive strengths of being human. However, to unlock this positive vision, workers will need to have the appropriate skills that will enable them to thrive in the workplace of the future. And as discussed in detail in the next section, even for those who currently have these skills, the pace at which tasks are being augmented and skills are changing continues to accelerate.
by nurazaliah | Jan 6, 2019 | HowTo
We are happy to announce a number of funded positions at Razak Faculty of Technology and Informatics, UTM to perform research in the area of Big Data Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction:
– PhD fellowship
– Master fellowship
– Research Assistant
For interested candidate, please contact: PM Dr Mohd Naz’ri Mahrin (mdnazrim@utm.my)
by nurazaliah | Jan 3, 2019 | 100ss
Commercials on TV tell you all the time that you can change yourself.
In thirty seconds, the commercial actors can get smarter,
thinner, prettier, richer. But this fantasy world only sets us up for a
fall.
We hear about the possibilities for wonderful changes people
can make in their lives, and we want to duplicate those results.
When we try and are not quickly rewarded, we actually wind up
feeling worse than we did before we started.
The problem is, of course, that change is possible, but it does
not come immediately. Nobody wants to sell us on a program for
change that will take years because of course no one would buy
it. But it does take years to accomplish the most important
changes.
When you entered the first grade, you didn’t expect to learn a
second language, algebra, and the history of the War of 1812 all in
the first week. You began an education that took more than a
decade and provided you with incredible positive change.
Positive change in your life will not be finished today, but it can
start today.
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