Balluff Leuze has invested in a custom-built automation centre in Bayswater, located 40 minutes east of Melbourne’s city centre, as part of its continued Australian expansion plans. The German company, which specialises in technically innovative products for the Automation industry has been working in Australia for 15 years and is considered a leader in sensor technology. They also build a range of safety products that are used in the Victorian manufacturing sector.

Airtron Canada announced that it has been selected to perform HVAC and building automation systems (BAS) maintenance services for more than 600 Ontario government buildings. That translates into 21 million square feet of facilities in buildings such as office buildings, laboratories, and correctional facilities.

As AI turns labor into software, the opportunity to productize external professional services has become a hot topic. However, we believe there is also substantial opportunity in productizing internal work within organizations.

Asendia USA has announced significant improvements to its operational capabilities with the expansion of its Chicago area facility.

Revelwood, BlackLine to Help Midsize Companies Transform their Finance & Accounting Operations into True Modern Finance Organizations

Entrepreneurs and small business managers are hands-on folks. They are often involved in nearly every aspect of the business — from marketing to fulfillment to accounting to website design. At some point, however, all of that special attention may actually inhibit growth, so that the business leaders need to step back and let some processes happen automatically.

The term business automation is broad. For some businesses, it might mean automating physical processes like product assembly. For others, it might mean setting up automated emails to occur when a customer takes some action.

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2019 Marketing Automation Trends

If you want to use marketing automation to help your business succeed in 2019, your approach to automation will predetermine much of your success. To start out strong, consider bringing the following marketing automation trends into your strategy for the year ahead:

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Running a small business may not seem too challenging from a distance. After all, it is a small business, so how much operational and management work could there be? But since I started my own agency, I’ve realized that running a small business or firm is not as easy as it looks.

The good news is that there are plenty of best practices small businesses can follow to save time and manage their tasks more efficiently with the help of automation.

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(EMAILWIRE.COM, November 07, 2024 ) The home automation system market was valued at USD 57.67 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 73.49 billion by 2029; it is expected to register a CAGR of 5.0% during the forecast period. The increasing demand for convenience and comfort in homes, the...

At NC State University Libraries, the Special Collections Research Center leverages an integrated system of locally developed applications and open-source technologies to facilitate the long-term preservation of digitized and born-digital archival assets. These applications automate many previously manual tasks, such as creating access derivatives from preservation scans and ingest into preservation storage. They have allowed … Continue reading ""Scaling Up Digital Preservation Workflows With Homegrown Tools and Automation""

Aim/Purpose: This paper presents some of the issues that academia faces in both the detection of plagiarism and the aftermath. The focus is on the latter, how academics and educational institutions around the world can address the challenges that follow the identification of an incident. The scope is to identify the need for and describe specific strategies to efficiently manage plagiarism incidents. Background: Plagiarism is possibly one of the major academic misconduct offences. Yet, only a portion of Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) appear to have well developed policies and procedures aimed at dealing with this issue or to follow these when required. Students who plagiarize and are not caught pose challenges for academia. Students who are caught pose equal challenges. Methodology: Following a literature review that identifies and describes the extent and the seriousness of the problem, procedures and strategies to address the issue are recommended, based on the literature and best practices. Contribution: The paper alerts academics regarding the need for the establishment of rigorous and standardized procedures to address the challenges that follow the identification of a plagiarism incident. It then describes how to streamline the process to improve consistency and reduce the errors and the effort required by academic staff. Recommendations for Practitioners: To ensure that what is expected to happen takes place, HEIs should structure the process of managing suspected plagiarism cases. Operationalization, workflow automation, diagrams that map the processes involved, clear in-formation and examples to support and help academics make informed and consistent decisions, templates to communicate with the offenders, and data-bases to record incidents for future reference are strongly recommended. Future research: This paper provides a good basis for further research that will examine the plagiarism policy, the procedures, and the outcome of employing the procedures within the faculties of a single HEI, or an empirical comparison of these across a group of HEIs. Impact on Society: Considering its potential consequences, educational institutions should strive to prevent, detect, and deter plagiarism – and any type of student misconduct. Inaction can be harmful, as it is likely that some students will not gain the appropriate knowledge that their chosen profession requires, which could put in danger both their wellbeing and the people they will later serve in their careers.

Yuan LI,Tingting HU,Ryuji FUCHIKAMI,Takeshi IKENAGA, Vol.E107-D, No.11, pp.1396-1407
1 millisecond (1-ms) vision systems are gaining increasing attention in diverse fields like factory automation and robotics, as the ultra-low delay ensures seamless and timely responses. Superpixel segmentation is a pivotal preprocessing to reduce the number of image primitives for subsequent processing. Recently, there has been a growing emphasis on leveraging deep network-based algorithms to pursue superior performance and better integration into other deep network tasks. Superpixel Sampling Network (SSN) employs a deep network for feature generation and employs differentiable SLIC for superpixel generation. SSN achieves high performance with a small number of parameters. However, implementing SSN on FPGAs for ultra-low delay faces challenges due to the final layer’s aggregation of intermediate results. To address this limitation, this paper proposes an aggregated to pipelined structure for FPGA implementation. The final layer is decomposed into individual final layers for each intermediate result. This architectural adjustment eliminates the need for memory to store intermediate results. Concurrently, the proposed structure leverages decomposed layers to facilitate a pipelined structure with pixel streaming input to achieve ultra-low latency. To cooperate with the pipelined structure, layer-partitioned memory architecture is proposed. Each final layer has dedicated memory for storing superpixel center information, allowing values to be read and calculated from memory without conflicts. Calculation results of each final layer are accumulated, and the result of each pixel is obtained as the stream reaches the last layer. Evaluation results demonstrate that boundary recall and under-segmentation error remain comparable to SSN, with an average label consistency improvement of 0.035 over SSN. From a hardware performance perspective, the proposed system processes 1000 FPS images with a delay of 0.947 ms/frame.
Publication Date: 2024/11/01

Activist investor Elliott Investment Management has taken a more than $5 billion stake in Honeywell International and is calling for the conglomerate to split into two separate companies.

Biodiversity data are sparse, biased and collected at many resolutions. So techniques are needed to combine these data and provide some clarity. This is where downscaling comes in. Downscaling predicts the occupancy of a species in a given area. That is, the number of grid squares a species is predicted to occupy in a standard grid of equally sized squares. Downscaling uses the intrinsic patterns in the spatial organization of an organism’s distributions to predict what the occupancy would be, given the occupancy at a coarser resolution.

Groom et al. (2018) tests different downscaling models on birds and plants in four countries and in different landscapes and shows which models work best. The results show that all models work similarly, irrespective of the type of organism and landscape. However, some models were biased, either under- or overestimating occupancy. However, a few models were both reliable and unbiased. This means we can automate calculation of species occupancy. Workflows can harvest data from many sources and calculate species metrics in a timely manner, potentially delivering warnings so that interventions can be made.

Species invasions, habitat degradation and mass extinctions are not a future threat, they are happening now. Understanding how we should react, and what policies we need should be underpinned by solid evidence. Imagine if we had systems where we could monitor biodiversity just like we monitor the climate in easy to understand numbers that are both accurate and sensitive to change.

For some in the construction industry, automation has become synonymous with job-killing robots.

Most residential and commercial models from Honeywell’s VISTA series of alarm panels now support lighting, shade and temperature control technology from Lutron Electronics, giving security and home-automation professionals a greater range of options when designing connected-home systems for their customers.

Alarm.com, Vienna, Va., a provider of interactive security and connected home services, announced key enhancements to its Geo-Services offering, including location-based thermostat automation and video recording options.

The intelligent building automation technologies market is anticipated to reach more than $118.7 billion by 2026, according to a new research published by Polaris Market Research. 

Features like Auto Discover/Auto Configure ensure quick installation for the integrator, and complete integration with the Nice Home Management platform provides the homeowner with reliable surveillance access across multiple devices.

According to Parks Associates’ consumer study “360 View: Residential Security,” remote monitoring and no long-term commitment are key factors to attract new security customers.

The system was designed around the IQ Panel 4 and the range and reliability of PowerG to ensure wireless communication with each device across the property, including the heavily wooded areas.

Motors and drives run the food and packaging production lines that processors rely on, and they are a major consideration of any automation strategy.

Buying online is growing, and FPL Food LLC in Augusta, Ga., has been leaning into this trend while also selling large volumes of beef to retail stores, foodservice and food manufacturing partners.

While we've looked at the key issues - including COVID-19 - facing food processors and A&E/Cs this year in FE's 2020 Annual Plant Construction Survey, there's a lot more to discuss.

Processors are turning to automation to fill jobs where people are unavailable.

A long list of concerns continues to keep businesses in the food processing industry on their toes. Inflation. Supply chain issues. Hiring challenges. The pandemic. However, a connective thread runs through these four: automation.

The shift toward automation has radically changed the infrastructure requirements for food manufacturers.

How to decide where you need to start is key to unlocking success.

Regional craft breweries and independents are investing in automation and plant upgrades to increase production, improve maintenance and move toward bigger volumes.

AI, machine learning and robotics not only improve product flow, but also can attract young talent that’s grown up with computers and easily adapts to new technologies.

SPI will remain a standalone brand and continue to support its existing customers.

Check out some of the latest packaging and processing solutions exhibitors plan to debut or showcase at PACK EXPO, set for Nov. 3-6 in Chicago.

This paper addresses the impact of using automated flagging devices in road construction instead of using construction workers. To examine the efficacy of automating this construction activity, a group of drivers with diverse characteristics/demographics was involved in the study. The diverse characteristics included gender, age, years of driving experience, and level of formal education (e....

Avantra, provider of AIOps and automation solutions for SAP environments, was a prominent participant at the recent SAP Sapphire events held in Orlando and Barcelona. The company unveiled its latest AI capabilities and highlighted its pivotal role in enabling organizations to transition from manual operations to advanced automation.

The demand for powder X-ray diffraction analysis continues to increase in a variety of scientific fields, as the excellent beam quality of high-brightness synchrotron light sources enables the acquisition of high-quality measurement data with high intensity and angular resolution. Synchrotron powder diffraction has enabled the rapid measurement of many samples and various in situ/operando experiments in nonambient sample environments. To meet the demands for even higher throughput measurements using high-energy X-rays at SPring-8, a high-throughput and high-resolution powder diffraction system has been developed. This system is combined with six sets of two-dimensional (2D) CdTe detectors for high-energy X-rays, and various automation systems, including a system for automatic switching among large sample environmental equipment, have been developed in the third experimental hutch of the insertion device beamline BL13XU at SPring-8. In this diffractometer system, high-brilliance and high-energy X-rays ranging from 16 to 72 keV are available. The powder diffraction data measured under ambient and various nonambient conditions can be analysed using Rietveld refinement and the pair distribution function. Using the 2D CdTe detectors with variable sample-to-detector distance, three types of scan modes have been established: standard, single-step and high-resolution. A major feature is the ability to measure a whole powder pattern with millisecond resolution. Equally important, this system can measure powder diffraction data with high Q exceeding 30 Å−1 within several tens of seconds. This capability is expected to contribute significantly to new research avenues using machine learning and artificial intelligence by utilizing the large amount of data obtained from high-throughput measurements.

A group of three deep-learning tools, referred to collectively as CHiMP (Crystal Hits in My Plate), were created for analysis of micrographs of protein crystallization experiments at the Diamond Light Source (DLS) synchrotron, UK. The first tool, a classification network, assigns images into categories relating to experimental outcomes. The other two tools are networks that perform both object detection and instance segmentation, resulting in masks of individual crystals in the first case and masks of crystallization droplets in addition to crystals in the second case, allowing the positions and sizes of these entities to be recorded. The creation of these tools used transfer learning, where weights from a pre-trained deep-learning network were used as a starting point and repurposed by further training on a relatively small set of data. Two of the tools are now integrated at the VMXi macromolecular crystallography beamline at DLS, where they have the potential to absolve the need for any user input, both for monitoring crystallization experiments and for triggering in situ data collections. The third is being integrated into the XChem fragment-based drug-discovery screening platform, also at DLS, to allow the automatic targeting of acoustic compound dispensing into crystallization droplets.

Organizations that leveraged AI and automation in security prevention cut the cost of a data breach by $2.22 million compared to those that didn't deploy these technologies

A young US-returned robotic engineer is making waves with his experiments in agriculture.

In this exclusive interview with ETCIO, Derek Gittoes, Vice President of Supply Chain Management Product Strategy at Oracle, shares valuable insights into the current trends shaping the future of supply chain management.

Picking robots, automated storage and retrieval, and software that predicts future demand are among a host of technology, equipment and strategic changes that snack food and wholesale bakery companies are undertaking in their warehousing and logistics functions.

A leader from the company discussed automated tech and ongoing labor challenges.

Companies that make belts, conveyors, and associated equipment like motors have a wide array of customers in the snack food and wholesale bakery industries, because every food production facility relies heavily on these technologies throughout their processes.

There is nothing like a pandemic to test a company's limitations. While food producers received official designation as "essential" businesses as the COVID-19 pandemic descended on the American food industry, continuing operations during the pandemic did not equate to business as usual.

As the dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic descended upon America in early 2020, the American population began reacting to their new reality, and it was clear that snack and bakery production across the country would face a clear challenge. People were stocking up on supplies at an alarming rate, and the rush was on to keep grocery store shelves stocked.

Snack food and wholesale bakery companies in the market for machines that help prepare, store, transport, and otherwise handle ingredients are most focused on qualities like automation, ease of maintenance, and the ability to deliver higher performance in throughput and accuracy.

Energy efficiency, automation, and ensuring a robust return-on-investment have been top-of-mind for snack food and wholesale bakery companies in the market for ovens and proofers, according to companies that make those machines, who say sales have been strong.

Snack food and wholesale bakery companies had been steadily adding automation to their plants and equipment contained therein for a number of years—and then the pandemic hit, accelerating the process due to both the difficulty in finding qualified people to hire, and the need for social distancing that accompanied at least the early stages of COVID-19. Ovens, proofers, and associated equipment have been among the candidates for automation.

Snack food and bakery companies in the market for mixers want machines that provide qualities like ease of sanitation, food safety, automation, airtight seals, and consistent operation that guards against product degradation during the mixing cycle.

Mixers serve essential functions for snack and bakery companies creating their own dough. We ask a lot of this category of heavy-duty equipment, including reliability and efficiency, to maintain established product quality-control standards.