News

Citation

(2013), "News", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 62 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM.07962eaa.002

News

Article Type: News From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 62, Issue 5.

Teaching robots to be team players

Robots are increasingly being used in the manufacturing industry to perform tasks that bring them into closer contact with humans.

But while a great deal of work is being done to ensure robots and humans can operate safely side-by-side, more effort is needed to make robots smart enough to work effectively with people, Julie Shah, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and head of the Interactive Robotics Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory said.

“People aren’t robots, they don’t do things the same way every single time. And so there is a mismatch between the way we program robots to perform tasks in exactly the same way each time and what we need them to do if they are going to work in concert with people”, she said.

Most existing research into making robots better team players is based on the concept of interactive reward, in which a human trainer gives a positive or negative response each time a robot performs a task. However, human studies carried out by the military have shown that simply telling people they have done well or badly at a task is a very inefficient method of encouraging them to work well as a team.

So Shah and PhD student Stefanos Nikolaidis began to investigate whether techniques that have been shown to work well in training people could also be applied to mixed teams of humans and robots.

One such technique, known as cross-training, sees team members swap roles with each other on given days.

To allow robots to take part in the cross-training experiments, the pair first had to design a new algorithm to allow the devices to learn from their role-swapping experiences.

So they modified existing reinforcement-learning algorithms to allow the robots to take in not only information from positive and negative rewards, but also information gained through demonstration.

In this way, by watching their human counterparts switch roles to carry out their work, the robots were able to learn how the humans wanted them to perform the same task.

Smart, sustainable towns

The University of Arkansas’ Office for Sustainability is working with several local towns to increase energy efficiency and expand renewable energy.

Some of those cities are in Central Arkansas, including North Little Rock, Searcy, Hot Springs and Gould.

Arkansas is ranked 38th in the nation for energy efficiency, but the university's applied sustainability centre wants to change that.

The Director says Arkansas could be a leader in solar and other forms of alternative energy, but first, city leaders must understand how to create a strategic plan.

Participants will get a scorecard outlining exactly how much energy it takes to run the city, and then head to the university to learn how to cut that usage.

According to the centre, making a community more sustainable also attracts investment, creates jobs and insulates the local economy from rising energy costs.

Chile's prescription

Chile's steep severance pay, sluggish productivity and the relatively scant number of working hours are holding back GDP growth, according to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report. The organisation made several recommendations Thursday to kick Chile's economy and education system into higher gear.

While a sizable gap still hangs between them, Chile continues catching up to the leading GDP numbers of the 34 OECD nations, all of which have developed economies.

The OECD blames worker productivity for the lingering gap. Productivity fell 0.1 per cent per year between 2001 and 2006 in Chile. From 2006 to 2011 the number slumped an additional 1.3 per cent each year.

To improve, the OECD suggested Chile redouble its efforts to get more women into the labour force, strengthen competition laws, provide better access to a higher-quality education system, cool down its relatively high severance pay and boost unemployment payouts.

The pie is bigger but my slice isn’t

Some time ago, the New York Times published a piece, titled Our Economic Pickle, on the conundrum represented by increasing productivity and declining real wages in Canada. Workers are producing more, yet taking home less of the overall pie: wages now represent only 43.5 per cent of GDP, down from over 50 per cent of GDP in the 1970s. Corporate profits are at an all-time high while wages and median household income have both fallen.

Within that 43.5 per cent, it is the top earners who are doing best – a familiar story from the broader income inequality debate. In 1979 the top one per cent took home 7.3 per cent of total wages. By 2010 this had risen to 12.9 per cent. This makes sense to those who have been following trends in income polarization: the ultra-rich are increasingly self-made and they earn wages, in large amounts, rather than rely on inheritances. The fact that their share of the pie has gone up by 50 per cent is no surprise.

This mismatch is echoed throughout the western world. How have we let the rich take such an “unfair” slice of the pie?

Sleep your way to success

The Huffington Post has installed futuristic nap pods to encourage productivity Arianna Huffington, Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post says, “I think sleep is a performance enhancement tool”. She insisted on having two nap rooms, “for the 300 plus who staff her around-the-clock news operations”.

When increasing sleep at night is not a feasible task, daytime naps can be the answer and the longer the nap the better. Productivity can be further increased by working in 90-minute intervals.

Size matters

The smallest of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore will be receiving greater attention from the government, which plans to improve its slate of productivity-boosting programmes.

Minister of State for Trade and Industry Mr TeoSer Luck recently stressed his ministry's dedication to raising the productivity of these micro-enterprises.

In 2012, more than 5,600 SMEs chose to implement measures to improve productivity with the help of SPRING Singapore.

Kickstarting Australian innovation

Australia is no longer a high wage, high-skill economy competing against low wage, low-skill economies, but rather competing against low wage, high-skill economies, according to Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband, Malcolm Turnbull.

As such, the government must create a judicious support environment to back innovation, research and development (RND), and productivity, he said at the recent Kickstart conference on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland.

There are still numerous impediments to overcome before this is possible, with “access to skilled persons in a particular location” and “lack of access to additional sources of funds” topping the list, Turnbull said.

In addition, the root of the issue is that Australia is a “highly educated country with a non-deferential culture, and does not feel it is doing good enough at innovation, and does not commercialise innovation and RND sufficiently”.