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ByMolly Wood and Clare Toeniskoetter

June 08, 2017 | 4:49 AM

Youve probably heard by now: the tech industry is in need of talent. Some companies are looking to veterans of the military to fill those roles.

Amazon has partnered with the Department of Labor, creating the Amazon Veterans Apprenticeship Program. Veterans enrolled in the 16-week program train for positions in cloud computing.

Ardine Williams is vice president of talent acquisition for Amazon Web Services, and she's also a veteran herself. Williams spoke with Marketplace's Molly Wood about the difficulties of finding a civilian job, and Amazon's efforts to help.Below is an edited excerpt of their conversation.

Ardine Williams:The challenge that people have on the tech side is, in many cases, the technology that they've been working with doesn't change as quickly in the military as it does in the civilian sector, and so helping veterans who are a good fit culturally and have good basic technical skills learn that next, more state of the art capability is really what helps bridge them into a role in tech, and then open up other career opportunities.

Molly Wood:What other things about the transition might be hard for veterans coming into the private sector, Amazon in particular?

Williams:You have to be willing to take a stand and say this is what I want to do. We have thousands of job openings at Amazon and I get contacted regularly by veterans who say "I'm really a capable leader and I can do just about anything." And I don't have any jobs like that. I need someone to come and say "Hey, these are three jobs that are a great fit for me" and "I want to be a project manager in supply chain." It's a very different experience in the military where you have a branch officer or someone the career side saying, "Hey Ardine, we're going to send you to Fort X and you're going to do Y."

Wood: The tech industry takes a lot ofcriticism for being in a bubble in a lot of ways. Do you think that hiring from the military, creating a pathway for veterans, could improve the sort of pipeline problem that the tech industry often cites in terms of improving diversity? Or is the military its own bubble?

Williams:While it's imperfect, the military is a relatively good snapshot demographically of the U.S., not geographically perfect, but from a demographic perspective if you look at gender and ethnicity. So in that regard, it's a very valuable pipeline for any industry.

Wood:How will you know if you've succeeded?

Williams: The first piece for me is "are they successful, are we actually able to bring people in?" and then, "can we scale it, can I grow it to be a very robust pipeline?" So late last year, we worked with the Department of Labor to build an apprenticeship program and we're running a number of cohorts this year in different locations. And success to me will be that we have a great graduation rate from those programs and that those graduates go on to roles that continue to increase in responsibility at Amazon.

You can listen to the full interview by clicking the audio player above.

Continue reading here:
How Amazon is helping veterans find jobs in cloud computing - Marketplace.org

C2ROis a new innovative startup company that launched in October of 2016 out of the startup incubator TandemLaunch. Its mission is to introduce a new way for robots to collaborate via cloud computing. The C2RO developed a robot-agnostic software platform that streams in real-time data processing to provide cloud server-based artificial intelligence (AI) -enabled software solutions. This helps the robots by augmenting their perception and collaboration capabilities.

The software increases the intelligence and autonomy of the robots. It enables collaboration between several different robots to perform complex tasks. The robots connect via the software and their sensor data processes in real time in the cloud. This increases the way robots share knowledge, work in a joined network, enhance their sensor perception, and even helps robots that have limited sensing and computational resources.

[C2RO has] developed a software platform that connects robots in the cloudand processes their sensor data in real timein a secure and reliable manner, said Soodeh Farokhi, the companys founder and technology lead, who holds a Ph.D. in cloud computing. Using our software-only solution, robots can share knowledge using the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and computer vision algorithms.

The C2RO platform uses the machine learning and vision systems of robot one to help teach other robots via its cloud connected software platform.

Cloud robotics was coined in 2010 to describe network-connected robots using parallel computation and data sharing. The interconnection with other computer hardware and environments enable data sharing, and these environments are customizable based on customers needs. Connecting robots to the cloud dramatically enhances their efficiency and capabilities because it opens up possibilities for collaboration and collective learning.

C2RO offers a Multi-Robot Collaboration module, which connects multiple robots (regardless of type or manufacturer) so they can work together. There are two main benefits to collaboration: efficiency, such as when multiple robot vacuums are used to clean a large area; and complementary sensing, such as when drones and land robots combine their sensors and viewing angles in a search-and-rescue scenario.

Connected robots also tend to be lighter and cheaper, since they do not require expensive processors or memory localized on board the robot. Inexpensive robots can be made smarter with C2ROs product because intensive processing and computation is partially offloaded onto the cloud platform, which can process the data in real time due to our patent-pending technology.

Speaking with Farokhi, engineers will see benefits from working in the cloud. Programming robots becomes an easier task, even for those without expertise in machine learning or software engineering, because all of the modules have been pre-programmed into the cloud as a software-only solution. According to Farokhi, All the user has to do is install a package on his/her robot, and the platform has a dashboard that acts like an app store or marketplace in a way that the user can choose the modules they want for a monthly, subscription-based fee for each module per robot.

Cloud-based robotic networks can be measured by its response timethe total time it takes from when a request is made by a user until a response is received. Response time is in turn determined by two factors: latency and processing time. Processing time is the amount of time a system takes to process a given request, while latency is the delay incurred in communicating a message.

Soodeh Farokhi

According to Farokhi, the C2RO platform tackles the twin problems of processing time and latency. We have brought down the processing time of any request to mere milliseconds using our parallel computing technology, he explained, and to address latency, we have partnered with PubNuba telecommunication providerproviding a speedy connection, heighten security, and less network delays. PubNub is a data stream network company headquarter in San Francisco.

C2RO has also collaborated with Indiana Universitys School of Informatics and Computing. Professor Geoffrey Fox serves as a technical advisor for the company. With regard to C2ROs software platform, It will allow my cuddly robot, vacuum cleaner, high-speed lawnmowers, and even any smart home devices to share backend services and generate new ideas by linking their data together, Fox said. Our intelligent systems engineering department is uniquely positioned to support C2RO.

C2RO is currently signing up users for its beta release.

Read the rest here:
Learning in the Sky: Collaborative Robots Embrace Cloud Computing - Machine Design

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Greengrass, which enables users to perform tasks on premise while leveraging the processing, analytics and storage of AWS cloud.

The company added that a variety of customers, including Konecranes, Nokia, and Stanley Black & Decker, are using the product for their Industrial IoT efforts.

As the company puts it, Greengrass extends AWS to devices which can act locally on the data they generate. This explains the Industrial IoT angle; for many industries, such as manufacturing and healthcare, not everything can go into the cloud, nor can new projects be built on brownfield developments.

AWS argues there are three laws as to why local data processing is important; the laws of physics it takes time for data to go to the cloud and networks do not have 100% availability the laws of economics, sending only high-value data to the cloud, and the law of the land, which takes into account data sovereignty restrictions.

In a blog post Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, outlined the importance of the release. Before AWS Greengrass, device builders often had to choose between the low latency of local execution, and the flexibility, scale, and ease of the cloud, he wrote. AWS Greengrass removes that trade-off manufacturers and OEMS can now build solutions that use the cloud for management, analytics, and durable storage, while keeping critical functionality on-device or nearby.

We see AWS Greengrass as the enabler for a new set of digital services, allowing us to program and deliver software to equipment in a secure manner and without risking operational safety, said Juha Pankakoski, executive vice president of technologies at Konecranes in a statement. This supports well our aim to build the next generation of lifting as the leading technology company in our industry.

Elsewhere, at the inaugural GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit, in Bellevue, Washington, software as a service (SaaS) technology business management provider Apptio said that more than three quarters (76%) of its customers were using AWS compared with 52% on Microsoft, with a rise in Azure usage noted. At the same event, as reported by GeekWire, Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsofts Cloud and Enterprise Group, said that it was pretty much Amazon and us in every single engagement competing for business, although adding the Google, predominantly third in the analyst rankings for cloud infrastructure, was not to be underestimated.

Read more here:
AWS makes Greengrass generally available to combine local data processing with the cloud - Cloud Tech