Miro Managing Meetings and their Results?

For some time we talked about the desire for enterprises to manage meetings. Their planning, efficient operation and gathering of results.   Next steps.  The integration of needed expertise. Things like who needs to do what and when, and how that fit into the process.  And visually!   We even built such a system, mentioned here.     Especially now after the explosion of remote group interactions has been so improved.   Now the integration AI and Chat AI capabilities could further optimize meetings.    Saw several attempts, demonstrated but they were not adequate.  Could Miro be the right direction?  Investigating Miro.com and will report later.   Thoughts?    Let me know.  - Franz  

UF Planning Invention Awards

From the University of Florida, one of my schools:

Srinivasan and Nawari Awarded 2022 Invention of the Year Award by UF Innovate

More than 200 innovators and entrepreneurs gathered for UF Innovate | Tech Licensing’s fifth annual Standing InnOvation event to honor and celebrate innovators and their work at the University of Florida in fiscal year 2022.

Since its inception in 2018, Standing InnOvation gives a much-deserved “standing ovation” to the UF innovators who disclosed, licensed or optioned technologies in the fiscal year that ended June 30. This year, innovators disclosed 310 technologies, licensed 124 and started 10 companies.

Out of those 310 new technologies disclosed in FY22, each of UF’s six licensing teams chose one Invention of the Year that stood out to them as one with great potential.

One of those Inventions of the Year was Virtual Building Construction Inspection for Permitting by Ravi Srinivasan, director of Graduate Programs and Research in the M.E. Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management, and Nawari Nawari, Professor in the School of Architecture and the college’s Diversity Officer.

The College of Design, Construction and Planning faculty members teamed up to develop AI-based software for automated zoning review, building plan review and virtual building inspection. It performs rapid, uniform, comprehensive and consistent code reviews, often missed by human plan reviewers.

The AI-based plan review is increasing the accuracy of code compliance, reducing errors and creating a more efficient process. One of the nation’s top homebuilders is using the invention for plan reviews in Florida.  

Srinivasan and Nawari are the first members of our college to receive the Invention of the Year Award from UF Innovate in the four years of its existence. ....  '

Learning Long Horizon Planning

 Another interesting piece from Berkeley - BAIR. Now looking at more complex planning.  Long range planning that machines are not necessarily good at.   But humans are also not so good at problems that require many option planning and analysis.  COuld this be something where machines and humans could collaborate well.    Had some supply chain planning models that might have used these directions.  Byond the intro this article is technical.

Learning State Abstractions for Long-Hoprizon Planning

By Scott Emmons*, Ajay Jain*, Michael Laskin*, Thanard Kurutach, Pieter Abbeel, Deepak Pathak 

Many tasks that we do on a regular basis, such as navigating a city, cooking a meal, or loading a dishwasher, require planning over extended periods of time. Accomplishing these tasks may seem simple to us; however, reasoning over long time horizons remains a major challenge for today’s Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. While unable to plan over long horizons, deep RL algorithms excel at learning policies for short horizon tasks, such as robotic grasping, directly from pixels. At the same time, classical planning methods such as Dijkstra’s algorithm and A∗ search can plan over long time horizons, but they require hand-specified or task-specific abstract representations of the environment as input.

To achieve the best of both worlds, state-of-the-art visual navigation methods have applied classical search methods to learned graphs. In particular, SPTM [2] and SoRB [3] use a replay buffer of observations as nodes in a graph and learn a parametric distance function to draw edges in the graph. These methods have been successfully applied to long-horizon simulated navigation tasks that were too challenging for previous methods to solve.  ... " 

Useful Plans vs the Activity of Planning

Below the intro to former IBMer  Irving Wladawsky-Berger article on planning vs plans ...  much more at the link.  I like especially the differences when you meet with different kinds of events and seek cures for them.  Resilience has to address all of them meaningfully,  risk management is one key tool.

Even When Plans Are Useless, Planning Is Indispensable

“As scientists race to develop a cure for the coronavirus, businesses are trying to assess the impact of the outbreak on their own enterprises,” wrote MIT professor Yossi Sheffi in a February 18 article in the Wall Street Journal.  “Just as scientists are confronting an unknown enemy, corporate executives are largely working blind because the coronavirus could cause supply-chain disruptions that are unlike anything we have seen in the past 70 years.”

Sheffi is Director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.  He’s written extensively on the critical need for resilience in global enterprises and their supply chains, - including The Power of Resilience and The Resilient Enterprise, - so they can better react to major unexpected events.  Covid-19 is the kind of massively disruptive event he had in mind when he wrote those books.

While learning from historical precedents is always a good idea, recent supply chain disruptions - the 2003 outbreak of SARS in Asia, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, or the 2011 Thailand floods, - were very different from our current pandemic.  Those events were much more localized, lasted a relatively short time, and they mostly impacted supply, not demand.  The impact of Covid-19 is much bigger, affecting consumer demand as well as supply chains all over the world, and likely to last quite a bit longer.  “Today’s supply chains are global and more complex than they were in 2003,” with factories all over the world affected by lockdowns and quarantines.  Apple, for example, works with suppliers in 43 countries.   ... "    (much more below in the article) 

Show Your Robots How to do Chores

The ultimate desire.  Or perhaps have someone else show a robot how to do your chores better.  And archive the results for use.  Much like the inclusion of 'planning with uncertain specifications' ... the humanlike planning ability to simultaneously weigh many ambiguous — and potentially contradictory — requirements ... '

Showing robots how to do your chores
By observing humans, robots learn to perform complex tasks, such as setting a table.
Watch Video at this post.
Rob Matheson | MIT News Office

Training interactive robots may one day be an easy job for everyone, even those without programming expertise. Roboticists are developing automated robots that can learn new tasks solely by observing humans. At home, you might someday show a domestic robot how to do routine chores. In the workplace, you could train robots like new employees, showing them how to perform many duties.

Making progress on that vision, MIT researchers have designed a system that lets these types of robots learn complicated tasks that would otherwise stymie them with too many confusing rules. One such task is setting a dinner table under certain conditions.  

At its core, the researchers’ “Planning with Uncertain Specifications” (PUnS) system gives robots the humanlike planning ability to simultaneously weigh many ambiguous — and potentially contradictory — requirements to reach an end goal. In doing so, the system always chooses the most likely action to take, based on a “belief” about some probable specifications for the task it is supposed to perform.   .... "