Makers or breakers?

 The weight of problems being demonstrably attached to heavily used tech services has acquired such a gravitational and political pull that it’s becoming harder and harder for these businesses to sidestep wider societal responsibilities. Read More
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Makers or breakers?

 The weight of problems being demonstrably attached to heavily used tech services has acquired such a gravitational and political pull that it’s becoming harder and harder for these businesses to sidestep wider societal responsibilities. Read More
Read Full Article

Best Cyber Monday Deals From Amazon, Walmart, Target, and More

Cyber Monday starts now. And with stores (and websites) opening their doors earlier than ever, it’s vital that you know the best deals ahead of time (how to prepare for Black Friday). We’ve scoured the early leaks and picked out some of the best Cyber Monday deals. These products are both well-reviewed and come at a solid discount, so set your sights and get ready to shop. 1. Target: 15% Off Store-Wide | PS VR Bundle We start with a great deal. Target is taking 15 percent off everything on its website for Cyber Monday, and you don’t even need...

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The New Wave in IT - RPA & Cognitive Bots

We have been reading and listening a lot on automation, robotic process automation and cognitive “bots” (consider the "bots" as software equivalent of robots) these days. Though there is no clear indication as to which assets falls under which category, I would like to put forward my ideas for a general layman understanding of these keywords.

Automation is the application and implementation of technology so that any job, task, process etc. can function automatically. Automation makes life easier, convenient and increases efficiency in day-to-day operations. Integration of systems, automating workflows so that certain pre-defined actions gets triggered at each level, improving the speed with which business processes takes place. Automation is technology dependent and requires complex integration. For e.g. the automated meters helps consumers when they fill-in gas. Or the time when you had to stand in queue for a long time to withdraw cash, that process has been automated via ATM machines.

Automation, as you can comprehend, is a very wide term. We can classify them as robotic process automation(RPA) or cognitive automation

Now let’s understand robotic process automation.

Think of any business or IT process which was earlier done by humans, for e.g., consider filling up 40 fields in an order placing form. The steps in the order placing process involves copying data from one of the standard templates and pasting it in another standard template. As you would have understood by now, this process is pretty straight-forward and does not require any knowledge worker. Hence, if in some way, we can write a piece of code which can read the field from the source and paste it in destination template, we have achieved automation!

So, in general, robotic automation. And hence, no human intervention is required for that job.

Having set the ground for RPA, let’s now understand cognitive automation.

Cognitive automation allows the “bots” to make decisions based upon inputs, just like humans do. It requires training before deployment as to what it has to do. For e.g. consider the same copy-paste example. From the standard input template, the bot copies the data, but now the output (pasting template) forms’ language i.e. the language of the order placing depends upon certain field of the input template, and hence automation, in this case can be achieved by cognitive bot. The Cognitive bot will translate the whole output form in the required language and then finally place order.

Now, let me take another example to distinguish robotic and cognitive automation. Consider a job which involves putting cashew nuts at the center of hand-made biscuits.

Case in point: Robotic Process Automation

Here the shape of the hand-made biscuit is fixed and hence the “bot” knows where is the center of the biscuits and hence can put the cashew at its center.

Case in point: Cognitive automation

Interestingly, now there is a flexibility on the shape of the biscuit, implying the shape can be circle, rectangle, heart etc. Nevertheless, the “bot” figures out the shape of the biscuit and makes a decision as to where the center of that shape is and puts the cashew there.

Given the current market scenario, it is imperative that you understand what is the underlying definition of RPA vs Cognitive bot and what capabilities you can expect out of them.

OnePlus 5T makes the best deal in smartphones even better

 Three years and seven phones later, it’s hard to argue with OnePlus’s methods. That’s not to say it hasn’t made its share of missteps along the way (it definitely has), but the company has produced quality phones at affordable prices basically since day one. Read More

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‘Substitute Phone’ artfully satisfies your compulsion to swipe and scroll

 Smartphones are inarguably an addictive class of devices, and not just because they put an endless font of information at your fingertips. The experience of holding the phone and touching it is itself associated with that pleasure — so much so that you might wish you were doing it even when you don’t want to actually use the phone. That’s when you need one of these… Read More

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