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Tag: Deep Learning
Flying, driving, gaming, racing… amid the first-ever virtual Consumer Electronics Show this week, NVIDIA-powered technologies spilled out in all directions.
In automotive, Chinese automakers SAIC and NIO announced they'll use NVIDIA DRIVE in future vehicles.
In gaming, NVIDIA on Tuesday led off a slew of gaming announcements by revealing the affordable new RTX 3060 GPU and detailing the arrival of more than 70 30-series GPUs for gamers and creatives.
In robotics, the Skydio X2 drone has received the CES 2021 Best of Innovation Award for Drones and Unmanned Systems.
And in, well, a category all its own, the Indy Autonomous Challenge, unveiled Thursday, will pit college teams equipped with sleek, swift vehicles equipped with ADLINK DLP-8000 robot controller powered by NVIDIA GPUs against each other for a $1.5 million prize.
This week's announcements were just the latest examples of how NVIDIA is driving AI and innovation into every aspect of our lives.
Bringing more gaming capabilities to millions more gamers, NVIDIA Tuesday announced more than 70 new laptops will feature GeForce RTX 30 Series Laptop GPUs and unveiled the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card for desktops, priced at just $329.
All are powered by the award-winning NVIDIA Ampere GPU architecture, the second generation of RTX with enhanced Ray Tracing Cores, Tensor Cores, and new streaming multiprocessors.
NVIDIA also announced Call of Duty: Warzone and Square Enix's new IP, Outriders. And Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach and F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch will be adding RTX ray tracing and DLSS.
The games are just the latest to support the real-time ray tracing and AI-based DLSS (deep learning super sampling) technologies, known together called RTX, which NVIDIA introduced two years ago.
The announcements were among the highlights of a streamed presentation from Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of NVIDIA's GeForce business.
Amid the unprecedented challenges of 2020, "millions of people tuned into gaming — to play, create and connect with one another," Fisher said. "More than ever, gaming has become an integral part of our lives."
Hitting the Road
In automotive, two Chinese automakers announced they'll be relying on NVIDIA DRIVE technologies.
Just as CES was starting electric car startup NIO announced a supercomputer to power its automated and autonomous driving features, with NVIDIA DRIVE Orin at its core.
The computer, known as Adam, achieves over 1,000 trillion operations per second of performance with the redundancy and diversity necessary for safe autonomous driving.
The Orin-powered supercomputer will debut in NIO's flagship ET7 sedan, scheduled for production in 2022, and every NIO model to follow.
And on Thursday, SAIC, China's largest automaker, announced it's joining forces with online retail giant Alibaba to unveil a new premium EV brand, dubbed IM for "intelligence in motion."
The long-range electric vehicles will feature AI capabilities powered by the high-performance, energy-efficient NVIDIA DRIVE Orin compute platform.
The news comes as EV startups in China have skyrocketed in popularity, with NVIDIA working with NIO along with Li Auto and Xpeng to bolster the growth of new-energy vehicles.
Taking to the Skies
Meanwhile, Skydio, the leading U.S. drone manufacturer and world leader in autonomous flight, today announced it received the CES 2021 Best of Innovation Award for Drones and Unmanned Systems for the Skydio X2.
Skydio's new autonomous drone offers enterprise and public sector customers up to 35 minutes of autonomous flight time.
Packing six 4k cameras and powered by the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 mobile supercomputer, it's built to offer situational awareness, asset inspection, and security patrol.
The post Amid CES, NVIDIA Packs Flying, Driving, Gaming Tech News into a Single Week appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Posted on January 15, 2021 Author Brian CaulfieldCategories nvidiaTags corporate, Deep Learning, gaming
AI, Computational Advances Ring In New Era for Healthcare
We're at a pivotal moment to unlock a new, AI-accelerated era of discovery and medicine, says Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's vice president of healthcare.
Speaking today at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference, held virtually, Powell outlined how AI and accelerated computing are enabling scientists to take advantage of the boom in biomedical data to power faster research breakthroughs and better patient care.
Understanding disease and discovering therapies is our greatest human endeavor, she said — and the trillion-dollar drug discovery industry illustrates just how complex a challenge it is.
How AI Can Drive Down Drug Discovery Costs
The typical drug discovery process takes about a decade, costs $2 billion and suffers a 90 percent failure rate during clinical development. But the rise of digital data in healthcare in recent years presents an opportunity to improve those statistics with AI.
"We can produce today more biomedical data in about three months than the entire 300-year history of healthcare," she said. "And so this is now becoming a problem that no human really can synthesize that level of data, and we need to call upon artificial intelligence."
Powell called AI "the most powerful technology force of our time. It's software that writes software that no humans can."
But AI works best when it's domain specific, combining data and algorithms tailored to a specific field like radiology, pathology or patient monitoring. The NVIDIA Clara application framework bridges this gap by providing researchers and clinicians the tools for GPU-accelerated AI in medical imaging, genomics, drug discovery and smart hospitals.
Downloads of NVIDIA Clara grew 5x last year, Powell shared, with developers taking up our new platforms for conversational AI and federated learning.
Healthcare Ecosystem Rallies Around AI
She noted that amid the COVID-19 pandemic, momentum around AI for healthcare has accelerated, with startups estimated to have raised well over $5 billion in 2020. More than 1,000 healthcare startups are in the NVIDIA Inception accelerator program, up 4x since 2017. And over 20,000 AI healthcare papers were submitted last year to PubMed, showing exponential growth over the past decade.
Leading research institutions like the University of California, San Francisco, are using NVIDIA GPUs to power their work in cryo-electron microscopy, a technique used to study the structure of molecules — such as the spike proteins on the COVID-19 virus — and accelerate drug and vaccine discovery.
And pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, and major healthcare systems, like the U.K.'s National Health Service, will harness the Cambridge-1 supercomputer — an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system and the U.K.'s fastest AI supercomputer — to solve large-scale problems and improve patient care, diagnosis and delivery of critical medicines and vaccines.
Software-Defined Instruments Link AI Innovation and Medical Practice
Powell sees software-defined instruments — devices that can be regularly updated to reflect the latest scientific understanding and AI algorithms — as key to connecting the latest research breakthroughs with the practice of medicine.
"Artificial intelligence, like the practice of medicine, is constantly learning. We want to learn from the data, we want to learn from the changing environment," Powell said.
By making medical instruments software-defined, tools like smart cameras for patient monitoring or AI-guided ultrasound systems can not only be developed in the first place, she said, but also retain their value and improve over time.
U.K.-based sequencing company Oxford Nanopore Technologies is a leader in software-defined instruments, deploying a new generation of DNA sequencing technology across an electronics-based platform. Its nanopore sequencing devices have been used in more than 50 countries to sequence and track new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as for large-scale genomic analyses to study the biology of cancer.
The company uses NVIDIA GPUs to power several of its instruments, from the handheld MinION Mk1C device to its ultra-high throughput PromethION, which can produce more than three human genomes' worth of sequence data in a single run. To power the next generation of PromethION, Oxford Nanopore is adopting NVIDIA DGX Station, enabling its real-time sequencing technology to pair with rapid and highly accurate genomic analyses.
For years, the company has been using AI to improve the accuracy of basecalling, the process of determining the order of a molecule's DNA bases from tiny electrical signals that pass through a nanoscale hole, or nanopore.
This technology "truly touches on the entire practice of medicine," Powell said, whether COVID epidemiology or in human genetics and long read sequencing. "Through deep learning, their base calling model is able to reach an overall accuracy of 98.3 percent, and AI-driven single nucleotide variant calling gets them to 99.9 percent accuracy."
Path Forward for AI-Powered Healthcare
AI-powered breakthroughs like these have grown in significance amid the pandemic, said Powell.
"The tremendous focus of AI on a single problem in 2020, like COVID-19, really showed us that with that tremendous focus, we can see every piece and part that can benefit from artificial intelligence," she said. "What we've discovered over the last 12 months is only going to propel us further in the future. Everything we've learned is applicable for every future drug discovery program there is."
Across fields as diverse as genome analysis, computational drug discovery and clinical diagnostics, healthcare heavyweights are making strides with GPU-accelerated AI. Hear more about it on Jan. 13 at 11 a.m. Pacific, when Powell joins a Washington Post Live conversation on AI in healthcare.
Subscribe to NVIDIA healthcare news here.
The post AI, Computational Advances Ring In New Era for Healthcare appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Posted on January 11, 2021 Author Isha SalianCategories nvidiaTags Artificial Intelligence, COVID-19, Deep Learning, Events, Medical Research and Healthcare, NVIDIA DGX, Social Impact
Much of 2020 may look best in the rearview mirror, but the year also held many moments of outstanding work, gems worth hitting the rewind button to see again.
So, here's a countdown — roughly in order of ascending popularity — of 10 favorite NVIDIA videos that hit YouTube in 2020. With two exceptions for videos that deserve a wide audience, all got at least 200,000 views and most, but not all, can be found on the NVIDIA YouTube channel.
#10 Coronavirus Gets a Close-Up
The pandemic was clearly the story of the year.
We celebrated the work of many healthcare providers and researchers pushing science forward to combat it, including the team that won a prestigious Gordon Bell award for using high performance computing and AI to see how the coronavirus works, something they explained in detail in their own video here.
In another one of the many responses to COVID-19, the Folding@Home project received donations of time on more than 200,000 NVIDIA GPUs to study the coronavirus. Using NVIDIA Omniverse, we created a visualization (described below) of data they amassed on their virtual exascale computer.
#9 Cruising into a Ray-Traced Future
Despite the challenging times, many companies continued to deliver top-notch work. For example, Autodesk VRED 2021 showed the shape of things to come in automotive design.
The demo below displays the power of ray tracing and AI to deliver realistic 3D visualizations in real time using RTX technology, snagging nearly a quarter million views. (Note: There's no audio on this one, just amazing images.)
#8 A Test Drive in the Latest Mercedes
Just for fun — yes, even 2020 included fun — we look back at NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang taking a spin in the latest Mercedes-Benz S-Class as part of the world premiere of the flagship sedan. He shared the honors with Grammy award-winning Alicia Keys and Formula One champ Lewis Hamilton.
The S-Class uses AI to deliver intelligent features like a voice assistant personalized for each driver. An engineer and a car enthusiast at heart, Huang gave kudos to the work of hundreds of engineers who delivered a vehicle that with over-the-air software updates will get better and better.
#7 Playing Marbles After Dark
The NVIDIA Omniverse team pointed the way to a future of photorealistic games and simulations rendered in real time. They showed how a distributed team of engineers and artists can integrate multiple tools to play more than a million polygons smoothly with ray-traced lighting at 1440p on a single GeForce RTX 3090.
The mesmerizing video captured the eyeballs of nearly half a million viewers.
#6 An AI Platform for the Rest of Us
Great things sometimes come in small packages. In October, we debuted the DGX Station A100, a supercomputer that plugs into a standard wall socket to let data scientists do world-class work in AI. More than 400,000 folks tuned in.
#5 Seeing Virtual Meetings Through a New AI
With online gatherings the new norm, NVIDIA Maxine attracted a lot of eyeballs. More than 800,000 viewers tuned into this demo of how we're using generative adversarial networks to lower the bandwidth and turn up the quality of video conferencing.
#4 What's Jensen Been Cooking?
Our most energy-efficient video of 2020 was a bit of a tease. It lasted less than 30 seconds, but Jensen Huang's preview of the first NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPU drew nearly a million viewers.
#3 Voila, Jensen Whips Up the First Kitchen Keynote
In the days of the Great Depression, vacuum tubes flickered with fireside chats. The 2020 pandemic spawned a slew of digital events with GTC among the first of them.
In May, Jensen recorded in his California home the first kitchen keynote. In a playlist of nine virtual courses, he served a smorgasbord where the NVIDIA A100 GPU was an entrée surrounded by software side dishes that included frameworks for conversational AI (Jarvis) and recommendation systems (Merlin). The first chapter alone attracted more than 300,000 views.
And we did it all again in October when we featured the first DPU, its DOCA software and a framework to accelerate drug discovery.
#2 Delivering Enterprise AI in a Box
The DGX A100 emerged as one of the favorite dishes from our May kitchen keynote. The 5-petaflops system packs AI training, inference and analytics for any data center.
Some 1.3 million viewers clicked to get a virtual tour of the eight A100 GPUs and 200 Gbit/second InfiniBand links inside it.
#1 Enough of All This Hard Work, Let's Have Fun!
By September it was high time to break away from a porcupine of a year. With the GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs, we rolled out engines to create lush new worlds for those whose go-to escape is gaming.
The launch video, viewed more than 1.5 million times, begins with a brief tour of the history of computer games. Good days remembered, good days to come.
For Dessert: Two Bytes of Chocolate
We'll end 2020, happily, with two special mentions.
Our most watched video of the year was a blistering five-minute clip of game play on DOOM Eternal running all out on a GeForce RTX 3080 in 4K.
And perhaps our sweetest feel good moment of 2020 was delivered by an NVIDIA engineer, Bryce Denney, who hacked a way to let choirs sing together safely in the pandemic. Play it again, Bryce!
The post Sparkles in the Rough: NVIDIA's Video Gems from a Hardscrabble 2020 appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Posted on December 22, 2020 Author Rick MerrittCategories nvidiaTags Artificial Intelligence, automotive, corporate, COVID-19, Deep Learning, gaming, GeForce, GTC 2020, GTC Digital, Machine Learning, NVIDIA DGX, NVIDIA RTX, Omniverse, ray-tracing
Inception to the Rule: AI Startups Thrive Amid Tough 2020
2020 served up a global pandemic that roiled the economy. Yet the startup ecosystem has managed to thrive and even flourish amid the tumult. That may be no coincidence.
Crisis breeds opportunity. And nowhere has that been more prevalent than with startups using AI, machine learning and data science to address a worldwide medical emergency and the upending of typical workplace practices.
This is also reflected in NVIDIA Inception, our program to nurture startups transforming industries with AI and data science. Here are a few highlights from a tremendous year for the program and the members it's designed to propel toward growth and success.
Increased membership:
Inception hit a record 7,000 members — that's up 25 percent on the year.
IT services, healthcare, and media and entertainment were the top three segments, reflecting the global pandemic's impact on remote work, medicine and home-based entertainment.
Early-stage and seed-stage startups continue to lead the rate of joining NVIDIA Inception. This has been a consistent trend over recent years.
Startups ramp up:
100+ Inception startups reached the program's Premier level, which unlocks increased marketing support, engineering access and exposure to senior customer contacts.
Developers from Inception startups enrolled in more than 2,000 sessions with the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute, which offers hands-on training and workshops.
GPU Ventures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIA Inception, made investments in three startup companies — Plotly, Artisight and Rescale.
Deepening partnerships:
NVIDIA Inception added Oracle's Oracle for Startups program to its list of accelerator partners, which already includes AWS Activate and Microsoft for Startups, as well as a variety of regional programs. These tie-ups open the door for startups to access free cloud credits, new marketing channels, expanded customer networks, and other benefits across programs.
The NVIDIA Inception Alliance for Healthcare launched earlier this month, starting with healthcare leaders GE Healthcare and Nuance, to provide a clear go-to-market path for medical imaging startups.
At its core, NVIDIA Inception is about forging connections for prime AI startups, finding new paths for them to pursue success, and providing them with the tools or resources to take their business to the next level.
Read more about NVIDIA Inception partners on our blog and learn more about the program at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/deep-learning-ai/startups/.
The post Inception to the Rule: AI Startups Thrive Amid Tough 2020 appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Posted on December 18, 2020 Author Jeff HerbstCategories nvidiaTags Artificial Intelligence, corporate, Deep Learning, Inception
Scotland's Rural College Makes Moo-ves Against Bovine Tuberculosis with AI
Each morning millions of bleary-eyed people pour milk into their bowls of cereal or cups of coffee without a second thought as to where that beverage came from.
Few will consider the processes in place to maintain the health of the animals involved in milk production and to ensure that the final product is fit for consumption.
For cattle farmers, few things can sour their efforts like bovine tuberculosis (bTB), a chronic, slow-progressing and debilitating disease. bTB presents significant economic and welfare challenges to the worldwide cattle sector.
Applying GPU-accelerated AI and data science, Scotland's Rural College (SRUC), headquartered in Edinburgh, recently spearheaded groundbreaking research into how bTB can be monitored and treated more effectively and efficiently.
Bovine Tuberculosis
Caused by bacteria, bTB is highly infectious among cattle and transmissible to other animals and humans.
It also causes substantial financial strain through involuntary culling, animal movement restrictions, and the cost of control and eradication programs. In countries where mandatory eradication programs are not in place for bTB carriers, the disease also carries considerable public health implications.
As bTB is a slow-developing disease, it's rare for cattle to show any signs of infection until the disease has progressed to its later stages.
To monitor the health of herds, cattle need to receive regular diagnostic tests. Currently, the standard is a single intradermal comparative cervical tuberculin (SICCT) skin test. These tests are time consuming, labor intensive and only correctly identify an infected animal about 50-80 percent of the time.
SRUC's research brought to light a new method of monitoring bTB based on milk samples that were already being collected as part of regular quality control checks through what is called mid-infrared (MIR) analysis.
First, the bTB phenotype (the observable characteristics of an infected animal) was created using data relating to traditional SICCT skin-test results, culture status, whether a cow was slaughtered, and whether any bTB-caused lesions were observed. Information from each of these categories was combined to create a binary phenotype, with zero representing healthy cows and 1 representing bTB-affected cows.
Contemporaneous individual milk MIR data was collected as part of monthly routine milk recording, matched to bTB status of individual animals on the SICCT test date, and converted into 53×20-pixel images. These were used to train a deep convolutional neural network on an NVIDIA DGX Station that was able to identify particular high-level features indicative of bTB infection.
SRUC's models were able to identify which cows would be expected to fail the SICCT skin test, with an accuracy of 95 percent and a corresponding sensitivity and specificity of 0.96 and 0.94, respectively.
To process the millions of data points used for training their bTB prediction models, the team at SRUC needed a computing system that was fast, stable and secure. Using an NVIDIA DGX Station, models that had previously needed months of work now could be developed in a matter of days. And with RAPIDS data science software on top, the team further accelerated their research and started developing deep learning models in just a few hours.
"By running our models on NVIDIA DGX Station with RAPIDS, we were able to speed up the time it took to develop models at least tenfold," said Professor Mike Coffey, leader of the Animal Breeding Team and head of EGENES at SRUC. "Speeding up this process means that we'll be able to get meaningful solutions for combating bTB into the hands of farmers faster and vastly improve how bTB is handled nationwide."
Moo-ving Forward
Using routinely collected milk samples for the early identification of bTB-infected cows represents an innovative, low-cost and, importantly, noninvasive tool that has the potential to contribute substantially to the push to eradicate bTB in the U.K. and beyond.
Such a tool would enable farmers to get access to crucial information much faster than currently possible. And this would enable farmers to make more efficient and informed decisions that significantly increase the health and welfare of their animals, as well as reduce costs to the farm, government and taxpayer.
The success of predicting bTB status with deep learning also opens up the possibility to calibrate MIR analysis for other diseases, such as paratuberculosis (Johne's disease), to help improve cattle welfare further.
The post Scotland's Rural College Makes Moo-ves Against Bovine Tuberculosis with AI appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Posted on December 15, 2020 Author Emily BryceCategories nvidiaTags Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Deep Learning, Medical Research and Healthcare, NVIDIA DGX, NVIDIA in Europe, RAPIDS
NVIDIA Chief Scientist Highlights New AI Research in GTC Keynote
NVIDIA researchers are defining ways to make faster AI chips in systems with greater bandwidth that are easier to program, said Bill Dally, NVIDIA's chief scientist, in a keynote released today for a virtual GTC China event.
He described three projects as examples of how the 200-person research team he leads is working to stoke Huang's Law — the prediction named for NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang that GPUs will double AI performance every year.
"If we really want to improve computer performance, Huang's Law is the metric that matters, and I expect it to continue for the foreseeable future," said Dally, who helped direct research at NVIDIA in AI, ray tracing and fast interconnects.
NVIDIA has more than doubled performance of GPUs on AI inference every year.
An Ultra-Efficient Accelerator
Toward that end, NVIDIA researchers created a tool called MAGNet that generated an AI inference accelerator that hit 100 tera-operations per watt in a simulation. That's more than an order of magnitude greater efficiency than today's commercial chips.
MAGNet uses new techniques to orchestrate the flow of information through a device in ways that minimize the data movement that burns most of the energy in today's chips. The research prototype is implemented as a modular set of tiles so it can scale flexibly.
A separate effort seeks to replace today's electrical links inside systems with faster optical ones.
Firing on All Photons
"We can see our way to doubling the speed of our NVLink [that connects GPUs] and maybe doubling it again, but eventually electrical signaling runs out of gas," said Dally, who holds more than 120 patents and chaired the computer science department at Stanford before joining NVIDIA in 2009.
The team is collaborating with researchers at Columbia University on ways to harness techniques telecom providers use in their core networks to merge dozens of signals onto a single optical fiber.
Called dense wavelength division multiplexing, it holds the potential to pack multiple terabits per second into links that fit into a single millimeter of space on the side of a chip, more than 10x the density of today's interconnects.
Besides faster throughput, the optical links enable denser systems. For example, Dally showed a mockup (below) of a future NVIDIA DGX system with more than 160 GPUs.
Optical links help pack dozens of GPUs in a system.
In software, NVIDIA's researchers have prototyped a new programming system called Legate. It lets developers take a program written for a single GPU and run it on a system of any size — even a giant supercomputer like Selene that packs thousands of GPUs.
Legate couples a new form of programming shorthand with accelerated software libraries and an advanced runtime environment called Legion. It's already being put to the test at U.S. national labs.
Rendering a Vivid Future
The three research projects make up just one part of Dally's keynote, which describes NVIDIA's domain-specific platforms for a variety of industries such as healthcare, self-driving cars and robotics. He also delves into data science, AI and graphics.
"In a few generations our products will produce amazing images in real time using path tracing with physically based rendering, and we'll be able to generate whole scenes with AI," said Dally.
He showed the first public demonstration (below) that combines NVIDIA's conversational AI framework called Jarvis with GauGAN, a tool that uses generative adversarial networks to create beautiful landscapes from simple sketches. The demo lets users instantly generate photorealistic landscapes using simple voice commands.
In an interview between recording sessions for the keynote, Dally expressed particular pride for the team's pioneering work in several areas.
"All our current ray tracing started in NVIDIA Research with prototypes that got our product teams excited. And in 2011, I assigned [NVIDIA researcher] Bryan Catanzaro to work with [Stanford professor] Andrew Ng on a project that became CuDNN, software that kicked off much of our work in deep learning," he said.
A First Foothold in Networking
Dally also spearheaded a collaboration that led to the first prototypes of NVLink and NVSwitch, interconnects that link GPUs running inside some of the world's largest supercomputers today.
"The product teams grabbed the work out of our hands before we were ready to let go of it, and now we're considered one of the most advanced networking companies," he said.
With his passion for technology, Dally said he often feels like a kid in a candy store. He may hop from helping a group with an AI accelerator one day to helping another team sort through a complex problem in robotics the next.
"I have one of the most fun jobs in the company if not in the world because I get to help shape the future," he said.
The keynote is just one of more than 220 sessions at GTC China. All the sessions are free and most are conducted in Mandarin.
Panel, Startup Showcase at GTC China
Following the keynote, a panel of senior NVIDIA executives will discuss how the company's technologies in AI, data science, healthcare and other fields are being adopted in China.
The event also includes a showcase of a dozen top startups in China, hosted by NVIDIA Inception, an acceleration program for AI and data science startups.
Companies participating in GTC China include Alibaba, AWS, Baidu, ByteDance, China Telecom, Dell Technologies, Didi, H3C, Inspur, Kuaishou, Lenovo, Microsoft, Ping An, Tencent, Tsinghua University and Xiaomi.
The post NVIDIA Chief Scientist Highlights New AI Research in GTC Keynote appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Posted on December 15, 2020 Author Rick MerrittCategories nvidiaTags Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, GTC, Inference, Jarvis, Machine Learning, NVIDIA Research, NVLINK, ray-tracing, research
Stuttgart Supercomputing Center Shifts into AI Gear
Stuttgart's supercomputer center has been cruising down the autobahn of high performance computing like a well-torqued coupe, and now it's making a pitstop for some AI fuel.
Germany's High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), one of Europe's largest supercomputing centers, has tripled the size of its staff and increased its revenues from industry collaborations 20x since Michael Resch became director in 2002. In the past year, much of the growth has come from interest in AI.
With demand for machine learning on the rise, HLRS signed a deal to add 192 NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPUs linked on NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand network to its Hawk supercomputer based on an Apollo system from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Hawk Flies to New Heights
The GPUs will propel what's already ranked as the world's 16th largest system to new heights. In preparation for the expansion, researchers are gearing up AI projects that range from predicting the path of the COVID-19 pandemic to the science behind building better cars and planes.
"Humans can create huge simulations, but we can't always understand all the data — the big advantage of AI is it can work through the data and see its consequences," said Resch, who also serves as a professor at the University of Stuttgart with a background in engineering, computer science and math.
The center made its first big leap into AI last year when it installed a Cray CS-Storm system with more than 60 NVIDIA GPUs. It is already running AI programs that analyze market data for Mercedes-Benz, investment portfolios for a large German bank and a music database for a local broadcaster.
"It turned out to be an extremely popular system because there's a growing community of people who understand AI has a benefit for them," Resch said of the system now running at near capacity. "By the middle of this year it was clear we had to expand to cover our growing AI requirements," he added.
The New Math: HPC+AI
The future for the Stuttgart center, and the HPC community generally, is about hybrid computing where CPUs and GPUs work together, often to advance HPC simulations with AI.
"Combining the two is a golden bullet that propels us into a better future for understanding problems," he said.
For example, one researcher at the University of Stuttgart will use data from as many as 2 billion simulations to train neural networks that can quickly and economically evaluate metal alloys. The AI model it spawns could run on a PC and help companies producing sheet metal choose the best alloys for, say, a car door.
"This is extremely helpful in situations where experimentation is difficult or costly," he said.
And it's an apropos app for the center situated in the same city that's home to the headquarters of both Mercedes and Porsche.
In the Flow with Machine Learning
A separate project in fluid dynamics will take a similar approach.
A group from the university will train neural networks on data from highly accurate simulations to create an AI model that can improve analysis of turbulence. It's a critical topic for companies such as Airbus that are collaborating with HLRS on efforts to mine the aerospace giant's data on airflow.
The Stuttgart center also aims to use AI as part of a European research project to predict when hospital beds could fill up in intensive-care units amid the pandemic. The project started before the coronavirus hit, but it accelerated in the wake of COVID-19.
Tracking the Pandemic with AI
One of the project's goals is to give policy makers a four-week window to respond before hospitals would reach their capacity.
"It's a critical question with so many people dying — we've seen scenarios in places like Italy, New York and Wuhan where ICUs filled up in the first weeks of pandemic," Resch said.
"So, we will conduct simulations and predictions of the outlook for the pandemic over the next weeks and months, and GPUs will be extremely helpful for that," he added.
It's perhaps the highest profile of many apps now in the pipeline for the GPU-enhanced engine that will propel Stuttgart's researchers further down the road on their journey into AI.
The post Stuttgart Supercomputing Center Shifts into AI Gear appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Posted on December 14, 2020 Author Jens NeuschäferCategories nvidiaTags Artificial Intelligence, COVID-19, Deep Learning, high performance computing, Machine Learning, NVIDIA in Europe, NVIDIA Mellanox, science, supercomputing
How GPUs Can Democratize Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics Development
It can take a puppy weeks to learn that certain kinds of behaviors will result in a yummy treat, extra cuddles or a belly rub — and that other behaviors won't. With a system of positive reinforcement, a pet pooch will in time anticipate that chasing squirrels is less likely to be rewarded than staying by their human's side.
Deep reinforcement learning, a technique used to train AI models for robotics and complex strategy problems, works off the same principle.
In reinforcement learning, a software agent interacts with a real or virtual environment, relying on feedback from rewards to learn the best way to achieve its goal. Like the brain of a puppy in training, a reinforcement learning model uses information it's observed about the environment and its rewards, and determines which action the agent should take next.
To date, most researchers have relied on a combination of CPUs and GPUs to run reinforcement learning models. This means different parts of the computer tackle different steps of the process — including simulating the environment, calculating rewards, choosing what action to take next, actually taking action, and then learning from the experience.
But switching back and forth between CPU cores and powerful GPUs is by nature inefficient, requiring data to be transferred from one part of the system's memory to another at multiple points during the reinforcement learning training process. It's like a student who has to carry a tall stack of books and notes from classroom to classroom, plus the library, before grasping a new concept.
With Isaac Gym, NVIDIA developers have made it possible to instead run the entire reinforcement learning pipeline on GPUs — enabling significant speedups and reducing the hardware resources needed to develop these models.
Here's what this breakthrough means for the deep reinforcement learning process, and how much acceleration it can bring developers.
Reinforcement Learning on GPUs: Simulation to Action
When training a reinforcement learning model for a robotics task — like a humanoid robot that walks up and down stairs — it's much faster, safer and easier to use a simulated environment than the physical world. In a simulation, developers can create a sea of virtual robots that can quickly rack up thousands of hours of experience at a task.
If tested solely in the real world, a robot in training could fall down, bump into or mishandle objects — causing potential damage to its own machinery, the object it's interacting with or its surroundings. Testing in simulation provides the reinforcement learning model a space to practice and work out the kinks, giving it a head start when shifting to the real world.
In a typical system today, the NVIDIA PhysX simulation engine runs this experience-gathering phase of the reinforcement learning process on NVIDIA GPUs. But for other steps of the training application, developers have traditionally still used CPUs.
Traditional deep reinforcement learning uses a combination of CPU and GPU computing resources, requiring significant data transfers back and forth.
A key part of reinforcement learning training is conducting what's known as the forward pass: First, the system simulates the environment, records a set of observations about the state of the world and calculates a reward for how well the agent did.
The recorded observations become the input to a deep learning "policy" network, which chooses an action for the agent to take. Both the observations and the rewards are stored for use later in the training cycle.
Finally, the action is sent back to the simulator so that the rest of the environment can be updated in response.
After several rounds of these forward passes, the reinforcement learning model takes a look back, evaluating whether the actions it chose were effective or not. This information is used to update the policy network, and the cycle begins again with the improved model.
GPU Acceleration with Isaac Gym
To eliminate the overhead of transferring data back and forth from CPU to GPU during this reinforcement learning training cycle, NVIDIA researchers have developed an approach to run every step of the process on GPUs. This is Isaac Gym, an end-to-end training environment, which includes the PhysX simulation engine and a PyTorch tensor-based API.
Isaac Gym makes it possible for a developer to run tens of thousands of environments simultaneously on a single GPU. That means experiments that previously required a data center with thousands of CPU cores can in some cases be trained on a single workstation.
NVIDIA Isaac Gym runs entire reinforcement learning pipelines on GPUs, enabling significant speedups.
Decreasing the amount of hardware required makes reinforcement learning more accessible to individual researchers who don't have access to large data center resources. It can also make the process a lot faster.
A simple reinforcement learning model tasked with getting a humanoid robot to walk can be trained in just a few minutes with Isaac Gym. But the impact of end-to-end GPU acceleration is most useful for more challenging tasks, like teaching a complex robot hand to manipulate a cube into a specific position.
This problem requires significant dexterity by the robot, and a simulation environment that involves domain randomization, a mechanism that allows the learned policy to more easily transfer to a real-world robot.
Research by OpenAI tackled this task with a cluster of more than 6,000 CPU cores plus multiple NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs — and required about 30 hours of training for the reinforcement learning model to succeed at the task 20 times in a row using a feed-forward network model.
Using just one NVIDIA A100 GPU with Isaac Gym, NVIDIA developers were able to achieve the same level of success in around 10 hours — a single GPU outperforming an entire cluster by a factor of 3x.
To learn more about Isaac Gym, visit our developer news center.
Video above shows a cube manipulation task trained by Isaac Gym on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU and rendered in NVIDIA Omniverse.
The post How GPUs Can Democratize Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics Development appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Posted on December 10, 2020 Author Gavriel StateCategories nvidiaTags Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Machines, Deep Learning, Explainer, research, robotics
Talk Stars: Israeli AI Startup Brings Fluency to Natural Language Understanding
Whether talking with banks, cell phone providers or insurance companies, customers often encounter AI-powered voice interfaces to direct their calls to the right department.
But these interfaces typically are limited to understanding certain keywords. Onvego, an Israel-based startup, is working to make these systems understand what you say, no matter how you say it.
Before starting Onvego, the company's founders created a mobile speech apps platform to assist blind people. Now they're creating pre-built AI models for such use cases as accepting or requesting payments, scheduling appointments or booking reservations.
Onvego is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program that accelerates AI and data science startups with go-to-market support, expertise and technology.
The company's AI enables enterprises to easily build their own conversational interfaces in 10 different languages, with more on the way. Its technology already powers Israel's toll road payment systems, enabling drivers to pay with their voice.
"Say the customer said, 'I want to pay my bill.' The system has to understand what that means," said Alon Buchnik, CTO and co-founder of Onvego. "Once it does, it sends that information back to the speech machine, where logic is applied."
The system then walks the driver through the payment process. Onvego's AI also powers two emergency road services providers in Israel, providing AI-powered answers to drivers in need.
"The speech machine understands exactly what the problem is," said Buchnik. "It understands if it needs to send a tow truck or just a technician."
In Search of Ubiquity
Road-related applications are just the tip of the iceberg for Onvego. The company envisions its technology being inside everything from coffee machines to elevators. Along those lines, it's forged partnerships with GE, GM, Skoda, Amazon and numerous other companies.
For instance, Onvego's AI is being incorporated into a line of elevators, enabling the manufacturer to provide a conversational voice interface for users.
With the COVID-19 pandemic raging around the globe, Buchnik believes the company's no-touch technology, such as activating elevators by voice only, can deliver an added benefit by reducing transmission of the virus.
But Onvego's most-ambitious undertaking may be its contact call center technology. The company has developed an application, powered by NVIDIA GPUs, that's designed to do the work of an entire call center operation.
It runs as a cloud-based service as well as enterprise on-premises solution that would provide real-time natural language call center support for IoT devices at the network's edge, even where there's no internet connectivity.
GPUs at the Core
Buchnik said that while it would be possible for the Onvego call center application to answer 50 simultaneous calls without GPUs, "it would require a huge CPU" to do so. "For the GPU, it's nothing," he said.
Onvego also uses a CUDA decoder so developers can access decoding capabilities on the GPU.
Training of the company's automatic speech recognition models occurs on NVIDIA GPU-powered instances from AWS or Azure, which Onvego acquired through NVIDIA Inception.
Aside from its efforts to expand the use of its technology, Onvego is focused on the standalone container for locations at the edge or completely independent from the network. They plan to run it on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano.
The idea of providing intelligent natural language interfaces to people wherever they're needed is providing Buchnik and his team with all the motivation they need.
"This is our vision," he said. "This is where we want to be."
Buchnik credits the NVIDIA Inception program for providing the company access to the best AI experts, top technical resources and support, and access to a large marketing program with strong positioning in different market verticals.
By using the NVIDIA resources and platforms, Onvego is hoping to promote its intelligent voice solutions to markets and industries that it has not yet reached.
The post Talk Stars: Israeli AI Startup Brings Fluency to Natural Language Understanding appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Posted on December 9, 2020 Author Tony KontzerCategories nvidiaTags Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Inception, Jetson
NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally to Keynote at GTC China
Bill Dally — one of the world's foremost computer scientists and head of NVIDIA's research efforts — will deliver the keynote address during GTC China, the latest event in the world's premier conference series focused on AI, deep learning and high performance computing.
Registration is not required to view the keynote, which will take place on Dec. 14, at 6 p.m. Pacific time (Dec. 15, 10 a.m. China Standard time). GTC China is a free, online event, running Dec. 15-19.
Tens of thousands of attendees are expected to join the event, with thousands more tuning in to hear Dally speak on the latest innovations in AI, graphics, HPC, healthcare, edge computing and autonomous machines. He will also share new research in the areas of AI inference, silicon photonics, and GPU cluster acceleration.
In a career spanning nearly four decades, Dally has pioneered many of the fundamental technologies underlying today's supercomputer and networking architectures. As head of NVIDIA Research, he leads a team of more than 200 around the globe who are inventing technologies for a wide variety of applications, including AI, HPC, graphics and networking.
Prior to joining NVIDIA as chief scientist and senior vice president of research in 2009, he chaired Stanford University's computer science department.
Dally is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery. He's written four textbooks, published more than 250 papers and holds over 120 patents, and has received the IEEE Seymour Cray Award, ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award and ACM Maurice Wilkes Award.
Following Dally's keynote, four senior NVIDIA executives will describe how the company's latest breakthroughs in AI, data science and healthcare are being adopted in China. The panel discussion will take place on Monday, Dec. 14, at 7:10 p.m. Pacific (Dec. 15 at 11:10 a.m. CST).
GTC China Highlights
GTC is the premier conference for developers to strengthen their skills on a wide range of technologies. It will include 220+ live and on-demand sessions and enable attendees to ask questions and interact with experts.
Many leading organizations will participate, including Alibaba, AWS, Baidu, ByteDance, China Telecom, Dell Technologies, Didi, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Inspur, Kuaishou, Lenovo, Microsoft, Ping An, Tencent, Tsinghua University and Xiaomi.
Certified instructors will provide virtual training for hundreds of participants in the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute. DLI seats are currently sold out.
NVIDIA Inception, an acceleration program for AI and data science startups, will host 12 leading Chinese startups in the NVIDIA Inception Startup Showcase. Attendees will have the opportunity to see presentations from the 12 CXOs, whose companies were selected by winning a vote among more than 40 participating startups.
For more details and to register for GTC China at no charge, visit www.nvidia.cn/gtc/.
The post NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally to Keynote at GTC China appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.
Posted on December 8, 2020 Author Sheryl HuynhCategories nvidiaTags corporate, Deep Learning, Events, GTC 2020


Today's the day for the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards! Catch them on IFC at 2p pst/5p est or on AMC (edited and rebroadcast) at 10p est & pst. They are also streaming live on the Spirit Awards Web site. Indie films that have excelled in 2008 are nominated in various categories, like the Oscars, and given a platform for well-deserved accolades. Click here for a list of the nominees.
All submitted films must be at least 70 minutes long.
Eligible films must have either: a) Been shown at least one week in a commercial theater between January 1 and December 31, 2008; or b) Been shown in 2008 at one of the following six film festivals: The Los Angeles Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, New York, Sundance, Telluride, or Toronto. Films that have or will have domestic theatrical distribution should be submitted the year of their theatrical run.
The film is set in the United States and fully financed by a company whose principal office is in the U.S.
So now that you are knowledgeable on how the films made their way to the nomination, tune in and see who wins!
I'm really excited to see that a number of films (Frozen River, Rachel Getting Married, The Visitor, Milk, The Wrestler, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Man on Wire, Encounters at the End of the World, and The Betrayal) are in the running for both an Independent Spirit Award and an Oscar. All in the same weekend! Those filmmakers must be very happy and it's a great boost to the credibility of indie filmmaking. I'll be cheering for them all.


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A Conversation with Jeff Carter
After hearing about the plans Hoyos has to install an iris-scanning device in Madrid's airport, we sat down with Jeff Carter, the company's chief development officer, to talk about how the device works and how it could possibly bring a paradigm shift to airport security.
Q. You used to work for Bank of America. Why the switch to the security industry?
A. There's a lot of customer information out there in banking, as well as a huge problem with identity theft – the numbers are absolutely staggering. I started noticing that the risk profile is so high that usernames, passwords and PINs aren't going to cut it anymore to keep people's identities and information safe. I always try to look five to 10 years out, and my sense was that everything's going to be about identity – your ability to prove and control all your information is going to be the core of that.
Q. How does this iris-scanning technology work?
A. The iris has roughly 2,000 points that are variable from person to person, so it is very stable as a biometric template – its rate of error is one in 100 million squared. Your iris forms in the womb, and so that template stays very stable from the time you're born until you die. A fingerprint, on the other hand, has 100 points, and courts require only eight to convict, because getting fingerprint data can get tricky depending on how the person rolled their finger, the environment and other factors.
With an iris, though, we capture all 2,000 points in each eye with every scan. So every time we do a scan, we compare all 4,000 of those points. The technology creates a 16,000-point identification template that's encrypted at a final size of 2kb, and it also verifies that the subject is alive, ensuring that there is actually a live person their, having his or her eye scanned. Even if someone were to compromise the database, they couldn't simply submit a template because the liveness verifier would see that there is not a live person there and would deny access. The capture itself happens at a distance, and it can happen when the person's in motion.
Q.So how will this work with airport security?
A. There is a class of devices that provides perimeter security against threats: X-rays, millimeter wave technology and the sniffing technology that detects the scents of narcotics and explosives. Those are all defense mechanisms, not identification mechanisms. There's a term in airport security called provenance, which refers to maintaining a state of security and history as a traveler makes their way through an airport security, ensuring the right person is at the right place at right time. Scanning people's irises makes that provenance more secure by linking people's identities to their irises.
Currently, all the identity checks at airports are manual. At the security checkpoint, someone makes sure you have a ticket and a matching ID. If you pass that, you go in the security zone, which makes sure you don't have weapons. You pass through that to a waiting provenance area, to board a plane. Officials check when you board the plane that you have a boarding pass that matches the boarding manifest.
The way that iris-scanning technology works is that it handles the provenance from the time you come in until you board the plane. Your ticket and your identity are fused to your iris. Coming through that first stage, if you're enrolled in the system, it passes you through to boarding. You do go through security X-rays and everything, and it matches you to the manifest as you're boarding, too. Essentially, the technology handles the chain of custody of a person who is going through the chain of provenance in an airport. And it does it all without documents like boarding passes that can be forged.
It would be possible for a government to create a watch list through this identity management technology. A lot of problems come up now with watch lists because names are so similar. With iris scanning, there are no problems with the misidentification of names because your identity is sealed into your iris.
We've done testing and trials on the Mexican border, and officials have given us keen insights as to how to handle the workflow management to handle large volumes of people. The Madrid airport is the 11th-biggest airport in the world. If this technology can work in the Madrid airport, it can work anywhere else.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Dublin & Ireland's Ancient East
Ireland's Ancient East is brimming with attractions, culture and stories of a truly fascinating region of Ireland. On this wonderful break we have a chance to explore some of Dublin's fantastic attractions and as we head just a little further afield you are at the gateway of Ireland's Ancient East - a remarkable story-filled area where you can wander through 5,000 years of history - our tour includes Malahide Castle, Belvedere House & Gardens and of course - Irish Whiskey!!
Malahide Castle & Gardens Guided Tour | Howth | Dublin Bay Circular Cruise | Belvedere House & Gardens | Tullamore Dew Distillery Guided Tour | Dublin
Ireland's Ancient East is brimming with attractions, culture and stories of a truly fascinating region of Ireland. On this wonderful break we have a chance to explore some of Dublin's fantastic attractions and as we head just a little further afield you are at the gateway of Ireland's Ancient East – a remarkable story-filled area where you can wander through 5,000 years of history - our tour includes Malahide Castle, Belvedere House & Gardens and of course – Irish Whiskey!!
We depart from your home with our exclusive door to door pick-up service, join your tour coach and head to Holyhead for our crossing to Dublin. Upon arrival we continue our journey to our hotel in County Meath, tea/coffee await us on arrival whilst your luggage is taken to your rooms. Time to relax before dinner.
This morning, we visit Malahide Castle and Gardens where we enjoy a 45 minute guided tour of the castle and get a glimpse of life of the Talbot family who resided there for some 800 years. King Henry II gifted Richard Talbot the lands and harbour of Malahide for his services to the crown in 1185. From that point on, the Talbot family became intertwined with Malahide's history and development. From setting down roots in the medieval era, generations of the Talbot family have now called Malahide Castle home. Hear their stories, explore the private rooms and collections, explore the gardens and discover the central part this castle played in Irish political and social life on a guided tour.
We then head for the pretty seaside village of Howth where we have free time to enjoy lunch before making our way to Howth harbour to embark on a 1 hour circular cruise of Dublin Bay. A very chilled and relaxing way to experience Dublin from an entirely new vantage point. The Dublin Bay Cruise takes in a variety of landmarks along the way, including the James Joyce Tower, a Martello tower where James Joyce once spent six nights, and the idyllic Dalkey island, which is home to, among other things, colonies of adorable grey seals. Other landmarks include the gloriously untouched Ireland's Eye and Howth Head. The mini trip brings you not only around the beautiful vista of Dublin Bay, but it also helps you to travel through time and to understand how and why the modern city of Dublin developed to become the capital city of Ireland.
Today we travel to neighbouring Belvedere House & Gardens, a magnificent 160 acre lakeside estate with a fully restored Georgian Villa, Victorian Walled Garden and 18th century parkland punctuated with Romantic follies including the largest in Ireland the Jealous Wall. In the afternoon we pay a visit to the Tullamore Dew Distillery where we enjoy a guided tour to learn about the art of Irish Whiskey making and tasting at the end. Set in the heart of Ireland, the Old Bonded Warehouse sits on the banks of Tullamore's Grand Canal. Since 1829, Tullamore whiskey has been exported to the world. Savour almost two centuries of the distillery's history and experience the art of Irish whiskey-making and discover the secret that gives Tullamore D.E.W. its unique complexity. Hear tales of the characters who made the whiskey world famous and see how they trick the barley into growing and find out why the angels always get their share.
After breakfast we head to the vibrant city of Dublin where you can explore the many attractions it has to offer, including The Guinness Storehouse, St Patrick's and Christchurch Cathedrals, The Book of Kells and Trinity College, Dublin Castle and EPIC – The Irish Emigration Museum.
This morning we leave our Irish hosts and head to Dublin for our crossing to Holyhead and home.
Welcome tea/coffee
Live music with Irish dancers on last night
Guided tour Malahide Castle & Gardens
Dublin Bay Cruise
Admission Belvedere House & Gardens
Tullamore Dew Distillery guided tour & tasting
Brown bread & Irish coffee making demo.
HAMLET COURT HOTEL, Enfield Co. Meath
This family run hotel is a real gem, located in the small village of Johnstownbridge; the hotel offers exceptional service, personal touch and a warm Irish welcome. Bedrooms are decorated in a homely style and have excellent facilities including tea/coffee making facilities. The traditional restaurant serves home cooked food whilst the traditional authentic Irish bar is a welcoming space where guests can enjoy a drink. The hotel also has a lift.
Beginning with our exclusive home pick-up service, join your tour coach and head to Holyhead for our crossing to Dublin. Upon arrival we continue our journey to our hotel in County Meath, tea/coffee await us on arrival whilst your luggage is taken to your rooms. Time to relax before dinner.
This morning, we visit Malahide Castle and Gardens where we enjoy a 45 minute guided tour of the castle and get a glimpse of life of the Talbot family who resided there for some 800 years. King Henry II gifted Richard Talbot the lands and harbour of Malahide for his services to the crown in 1185. From that point on, the Talbot family became intertwined with Malahide's history and development, from setting down roots in the medieval era, generations of the Talbot family have now called malahide Castle home. Hear their stories, explore the gardens and discover the central part this castle played in irish political and social life on a guided tour.
We then head for the pretty seaside village of Howth where we have free time to enjoy lunch before making our way to Howth harbour to embark on a 1 hour circular cruise of Dublin Bay. A very chilled and relaxing way to experience Dublin from an entirely new vantae point. the Dublin Bay Cruise takes in a variety of landmarks along the way including the James Joyce Tower, a Martello tower where James Joyce once spent six nights and the idyllic Dalkey island, which is home to among other things colonies of adorable grey seals. other landmarks include the floriously untouched Ireland's eye and Howth Head. The mini trip brings you not only around the beautiful vista of Dublin Bay but is also helps you to travel through time and to understand how and why the modern city of Dublin developed to become the capital city of Ireland.
Today we travel to neighbouring Belvedere House & Gardens, a magnificent 160 acre lakeside estate with a fully restored Georgian Villa, Victorian Walled Garden and 18th century parkland punctuated with Romantic follies including the largest in Ireland the Jealous Wall. In the afternoon we pay a visit to the Tullamore Dew Distillery where we enjoy a guided tour to learn about the art of Irish Whiskey making and tasting at the end. Set in the heart of Ireland, the Old Bonded Warehouse sits on the banks of Tullamore's Grand Canal. Since 1829, Tullamore whiskey has been exported to the world. Savour almost two centuries of the distillery's history and experience the art of Irish whiskey-making and discover the secret that gives Tullamore D.E.W. its unique complexity. Hear tales of the characters who made the whiskey world famous and see how they trick the barley into growing and find out why the angels always get their share.
After breakfast we head to the vibrant city of Dublin where you can explore the many attractions it has to offer, including The Guinness Storehouse, St Patrick's and Christchurch Cathedrals, The Book of Kells and Trinity College, Dublin Castle and EPIC - The Irish Emigration Museum.
This morning we must bid farewell to our Irish hosts and head to Dublin for our crossing to Holyhead and home.
This family run hotel is a real gem, located in the small village of Johnstownbridge, the hotel offers exceptional service, personal touch and a warm Irish welcome. Bedrooms are decorated in a homely style and have excellent facilities including tea/coffee making facilities. The traditional restaurant serves home cooked food whilst the traditional authentic Irish bar is a welcoming space where guests can enjoy a drink. The hotel also has a lift.
Brown bread & Irish coffee making demo
Hamlet Hotel, Enfield
Bray, River & Rail
Flavours of Ireland


What's not to love about learning from others' mistakes in life? That's what I aim to help you do in this post.
Why? I'll tell you why. Because campaign tagging is the number one cause I see for serious issues in Google Analytics audits.
Yeah, I don't really have an answer for that one.
Anywho, let's kick off with mistakes I've seen from publishers.
I keep a note in my Evernote of campaign tagging issues I see as I'm out and about roaming the web. I've been holding onto it for a few years, so some of the examples were dated. But I pulled up each of the site's Facebook pages, and if they corrected the errors of their ways, I didn't use them as a cautionary tale.
With each link, I'll share what's wrong with it and how I would recommend fixing it. Of course, these sites might have already implemented the fixes I recommend, but that would be rare. And publishers are the worst offenders I've found to date of campaign tagging disasters. However, I'll share some examples of campaign tagging disasters I've found on other sites.
Gawker is now defunct, but before it went under, their social team made plenty of gaffes of their own.
Campaign feels like a lost opportunity in that 'facebook' is already included in the source. It's up to a social team to decide how granular they want to get with their campaign names, but none of these elements scream campaign to me.
Customize Social channel to include 'socialflow'. I demonstrate how to accomplish this fix in the gif below.
I would tag the source as 'facebook.com', not 'Facebook'. The reason is you should ideally mimic how sources naturally appear in Google Analytics. For referrals it's just the domain, with the exception of Google Plus. Then it shows up as plus.google.com or plus.url.google.com.
If you're using a campaign tagging resource like the Google Doc I've made publicly available, force mediums to lowercase.
Add a line item in your channel definitions that use 'matches regex' to make them not case insensitive, as I've demonstrated in the screenshot below.
It's missing the most important parameter: medium! This traffic will show up in BuzzFeed's (Other) channel because there's no medium telling Google to send it to their Social channel.
utm_source should be set to a real source: facebook.com.
Any extra details (like what they have in source) should be put into the content parameter.
There should be a campaign name.
Customize Social channel to include sources that match 'bffbbuzzfeed' to future proof the channel.
Create a custom channel grouping that they can use to see how their historical data would be impacted. I've demonstrated how in the gif below, which is easier than the process I shared in my channels guide. H/t to Mark Traphagen for the streamlined process!
Google doesn't recognize 'owned' as a social medium.
'facebook' isn't how this referral shows up in GA reports.
'bustle' isn't a very useful campaign name.
Consider using a campaign name a little more insightful than the name of your organization.
Publishers aren't the only ones messing up their campaign tagging. Let's pick on learn from some other sites' mistakes.
'twitter' isn't a medium; it's a source.
'dlvr.it' isn't a source; it's a social media automation tool.
Add dlvr.it to content if you want to include that detail.
Include an intuitive campaign name.
This link was shared on Facebook so the medium should set to 'social', not 'Video'.
'Facebook' isn't how this source shows up in Google Analytics.
Campaign name seems pretty vague.
Consider creating a more intuitive campaign name.
You don't want to use the same value for multiple parameters.
Google doesn't recognize 'browser_notification' as a medium.
I actually like browser notification as a medium. I would use a plus sign instead of an underscore so that it shows up as a space in your GA reports. (Again, I demonstrate this technique in my campaign tagging guide and my most recent post on channels. But that's just a styling preference on my part.
Google doesn't recognize the medium 'search_partnership'.
'cnntravel' isn't a valid source. Source should be the domain the link lives on. Additional details can be dropped into the content parameter.
'cnn' isn't a good campaign name.
Create a custom Partner channel for links of this nature. Include any other mediums you want to use to populate this channel, separating them with a pipe character (above the backslash character on the keyboard).
Use 'cnn.com' as the source. Drop travel into the content parameter.
Give the campaign a more intuitive name, like 'travel link' or whatever makes sense to the team.
You'll want to click on that line item and then change the primary dimension in the subsequent report to Medium by clicking on Other and typing "med" in the filter to pull it up. If you're a visual learner, follow the animated gif below.
Hangouts: Grab an hour or two to pepper me with your campaign tagging issues. I use a conferencing service that also allows us to share screens easily. So I can make changes while you watch or vice versa. Then I send you a copy of the video of our session.
Analytics Audit: These are comprehensive deep dives into your analytics issues that include an investigation of your campaigns and channels.
Analytics Tuneups: These are pared down analytics audits that include the most common issues I see in audits. Not a guarantee these will be your account's biggest issues, but it's a good option for startups and smaller sites.
Analytics Audit Template: On a really tight budget or want to learn to do your own DIY analytics audit? It doesn't get less expensive than this. For $295 you get a 200+-page illustrated template that walks you through how to perform your own analytics audit. You can also use it to train new analysts on how to customize (or fix) your Google Analytics implementations.
I'm wondering: do you think it would be valuable to also put nginx / apache rewrite rules on a server to fix these campaign tracking mishaps. It seems like a lot of these are pretty simple fixes that could be automated as an nginx module. For years I've been harping on people about tagging correctly (I'm a developer not a marketer) but it still happens.
I've also seen some pretty awful tagging campaigns like the one time I saw 1k of text in utm_* parameters :-D.
It's a really creative idea, but … I wouldn't recommend it. Only because there wouldn't be any transparency around it. I mean you'll know you set it up, but months or years down the road someone else might come along and be completely flummoxed by the disparity between your tags and your data. At minimum, I'd add an annotation to your account (in each of the views that would be impacted by this change) alerting marketers downstream of the change. But most marketers don't look in the annotations to see changes. So it's still a risky move, even if it would work well. My $0.02.
That said, my inner scientist is DYING to know if it works. DY. ING. So if you DO set this up, even as a test, I'd love to know the result!
I think I can give some insight on why tracking codes might be setup like your examples (to some extent anyway).
I usually see tracking like these examples because the data is being pulled from GA to a database to be sorted and organized later. For instance, I can see Bustle using the medium as owned so they can sort all of their owned vs paid social traffic separately in a third party reporting tool or an analysis tool.
When this happens, I usually create a custom channel grouping (I don't like to edit the default grouping because other users may not realize it has been edited) that reorganized this data to how it is reported in any third party tool. But, the best solution IMO is to create a custom parameter with a unique ID that can be connected to an unlimited number of variables in a third party database.
Thanks for stopping by! I agree that there could be any number of reasons sites use custom mediums. But my experience is that they usually DON'T create custom channels for it. Publishers typically have robust (Other) channels with a lot of their tagged traffic and don't know to check it to rescue that data. Using 'owned' is a particularly bad option, imo, b/c it's very broad. Owned is anything that's not paid, so organic search traffic falls into that category. In any case, they just need to make adjustments to ensure it's in the proper channels in their reports.
One huge disadvantage to relying on custom channel groupings is that they're not available in the API. That's fine for mom and pop shops who typically aren't using dashboards to track their traffic. But most publishers are. So I use them for forensic purposes, but for anything that needs to show up in their dashboards, modifying the DCG is a must.
Doesn't traffic from Facebook without UTM tags get sorted into "facebook.com / referral"? Your advocate using "social" for the medium, is that to sort out tagged Facebook traffic from non-tagged?
Yes, exactly. This way you can segment organic social from social traffic that's a result of your social shares.
Do you have any advice for tagging Google my Business links with UTM tagging? I've seen some folks claim a lot of GMB listing traffic gets dumped into direct / none.
I know bigger companies like PetSmart have been doing it for years (link to screenshot: https://www.screencast.com/t/PQ3n4HJr0oo). Personally, I would create a custom channel for it (google / local for source / medium). But I understand why they used google / organic for source / medium. But I'm a huge fan of custom channels.
Annie, what are your thoughts on using a GA filter to force the utm_medium to lowercase?
Google uses the raw, prefiltered campaign data, so a lowercase filter has no effect. I was very surprised to find this out a few years ago doing an analytics audit.


One in four people plan to work longer hours in the next six months, with one in eight intending to take a second job despite rising stress levels.
According to research from Friends Provident, two-thirds of Brits say they feel more stressed, rundown and prone to sickness than they did three years ago.
Mark Jones, head of protection at Friends Provident, said: "These are tense times and working longer – often for little or no financial reward – will add to people's stress levels."
He added that poor diet and lack of exercise were likely to exacerbate the problem, which could lead to long-term health issues.
Today (November 5th) is National Stress Awareness Day, which is supported by the Health and Safety Executive.
Companies and employees are being encouraged to work together to reduce levels of work-related stress, which cost 13.8 million working days in 2006/07.


Join us at the 2019 Annual GOBfest Board Game Convention!
GOBfest's mission is to support, grow and diversify the Alberta board gaming community.
Tabletop.events does not yet support Canadian currency (CAD). All credit charges are made in US dollars (USD). Please follow this link for a more detailed explanation of badge prices.
Once you've purchased your badge, you can buy tickets to these events which reserve your seat on game day. If the event is fully pre-registered, you will be wait-listed until a seat opens.
Our GOBfest Game Hosts are on hand to help select and teach games from our convention library.
New this year. Mobile Escape is here with two of their tabletop games. Games can be played in groups of up to 6. Tickets can be purchased here.
New this year!! We expect to have room for about 200 games for sale. Important, it's CASH ONLY!
The Flea Market will be held at 12:30pm on Sunday in the Gym. Remember it's CASH ONLY! If you want to sell games at the Flea Market, tickets for a flea market table are on a first come, first served basis. For more information and to buy Flea Market tables, follow this link!
Every year we're proud to feature yet to be published games from aspiring local game designers! Drop by the Alley to test out a new game or talk some serious shop with some of Edmonton's most innovative creative minds. Click here to see some of the prototypes that will be at this year's convention!
From the Gamers' Lodge, you can buy a mystery box for pickup at GOBfest. The catch is, you don't know what is in the box until you open it. Check out merchandise for more detail.


I'd ask you how you moderate your social media scrolling time. Once collapsing into bed for the night I usually decompress by catching up on Instagram, Snapchat, blogs, etc. And despite being exhausted and desperate for a good nights sleep I often stay up way past my bedtime scrolling past people I don't know, outfits I can't afford, recipes I'll never make, homes that make me envious, and more! I don't know how this even happened (cough, Nordstrom loop giveaways, cough), but somehow I found myself trying to keep up with hundreds and hundreds of accounts — many of which I didn't really even care about. So I recently did a little spring cleaning as a baby step towards hopefully spending less time on social media. Because if there's less content available then maybe I'll spend less time on my phone, sleep more or maybe even just spend more screen-free time with my husband — because he's pretty freaking spectacular. The second step was setting a 30 minute scroll limit once I dive into bed. One of my besties is doing this with me too which is nice for accountability!
Anyway, I am happy to report that I am loving my less busy social media feeds. Instead of seeing the same dress over and over I see more moments of my friends' kids being adorable and (for the most part) am following people who I would absolutely be excited to see in the same aisle as me in Target. I still have a good variety of content to scroll though but it's just scaled back tremendously to people, stores, bloggers, etc. who I love and never want to miss a post — and I've found I can do it in 30 minutes!
Now tell me how you manage your scrolling time. Do you check your social media feeds throughout the day? Or do you limit it to certain times? Or certain amounts of time? Tell me. Tell me! (Judgment free zone here, I promise)!
Such a good topic! I work from home so I'm with my kids all time and it seems that when they're having a lot of tantrums or fighting, I end up looking at my phone more (maybe to escape?!) but I've tried to put my phone away and charge it for the most part when they are around. Usually my husband is the one to put our youngest to bed and sit in her room for 15 minutes till she goes to sleep so I usually do my quick social media update then and then I try to put it away for the night after that. I started to charge my phone downstairs away from our bedroom about 2 months ago and that's been really helpful. I just have my iPad upstairs (which I only use to read) for an alarm. It's definitely a struggle for me though, not to be checking my phone a lot so I've found if I keep it out of sight, I'm less likely to gra it and start scrolling!
Yes to keeping the phone out of the room as Jessica said! That helped me big time. I love that 30 minute idea too.
Since I'm home with my kids I try my hardest to stay off social media when they're around so I usually use my down time to catch up Instagram and Facebook. I need to do a clean out though, I am following way too many people right now and with instagram's new algorithms I never see the people I want to any more!
I try to limit the same 30 min. I also go to bed a little earlier to allow for wind down time. As for social media, I don't follow anything that uses like it to know or loop giveaways. I don't agree with the sneaky tactics and it clogs my feed. I also go through my social media pretty often and purge accounts I don't like. It's helped keep the junk off my IG and pintest as well as FB and the crazy videos that are junk. I don't have FOMO and I get to spend quality time with my husband.
You will be AMAZED how much more time you have in your life without as much social media. I know its bad form for a blogger to say, but I've gotten to the point where I rarely check instagram, facebook, etc and I don't miss it a bit. Once you get out of the habit, you'll be SO glad its not sucking up your time.
Great topic and question! I've been thinking about this a lot lately too. One thing I've heard is super helpful is to delete the apps on your phone. So you have to log onto an actual computer (gasp!) to check in. I might try this since it'll make it more purposeful, less convenience. If it works I'll let ya know!
Such a good post! I need to limit screen time more too. I feel like I don't really do anything productive, so I've been trying to spend less time and do other activities instead (like hanging out with my husband, tidying up, making things)!
I LOOOOOOOVE THIS! Great idea! I need to do some spring cleaning on my Instagram feed as well! I love the 30 minute time limit, too! I have gotten WAAAY off track going to bed much later than I should be…so this should help. Happy hump day!
I'm currently trying to grow my Insta following so I spend a lot of time on there engaging with everyone. It's starting to get exhausting, though, so I have been backing off a bit. As for spring cleaning who you're following, that's a great idea! There are way too many people who show up in my feed that I don't even know who they are and I feel like I miss all of the stuff from the people who I do want to see. I think I feel a purge coming on!
This post inspired me – I spent my bus ride to work this morning cutting down the number of accounts I follow on Instagram. It's been a long time coming – my fiance occasionally asks "who is that?" out of curiosity as I'm scrolling and almost every time I say "A blogger/former blogger/celebrity/etc" and it always confused him why I followed so many people I don't actually know. Now the list is shorter and easier to manage so hopefully I can keep up with my friends/favorite blogs. We've both been trying to be better about limiting screen time when we're home on work nights – watching a show together without also being on our phones, leaving our phones in another room, etc. It's amazing how easy it is to fall into the habit of being glued to your phone all the time. What a world we live in haha!
I'm so bad at doing this first thing in the morning. Time really gets away from me when I do that, too!! I've been trying to clean out my social media feed, too.
I was so bad that I was checking facebook at redlights. Nothing has happened to keep me that busy on facebook! I started listening to podcasts so when I have down time, I throw my earphones in and listen to those. I just try to stay busy doing more productive stuff.
I use an app called Moment which logs how much time you spend on your phone–it's pretty eye opening!


text:
Sites & Buildings
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Celebrating Economic Development Week 2021
May 10, 2021 | Blog Posts
Communities worldwide are celebrating Economic Development Week May 9-15, 2021, and FCEDC is kicking off #EDW2021 with some of our announced projects over the last year!
The pandemic didn't slow industry interest in moving to Fayetteville and Cumberland County. 2020 brought us some of our busiest quarters yet at FCEDC. Our community has witnessed immense growth in economic, community, and workforce development projects, and we wanted to give a special shout-out to our newest additions and expansions: Amazon, Dansons, We Pack Logistics, MetroNet, and Cargill.
An Amazon delivery station was welcomed to Fayetteville, Cumberland County on May 6 at 1005 Dunn Rd., near the MJ Soffe Headquarters. The facility will power Amazon's last-mile delivery capabilities to speed up deliveries for customers in the region. It is expected to launch sometime next year and will create hundreds of new jobs, paying a starting wage of $15 per hour and offering a variety of benefits on the first day of employment. Read more about Amazon's presence in Cumberland County here.
Dansons, a leading manufacturer of BBQ pellet grills and products, selected Cumberland County as the location of a new distribution and customer service facility. Located at 800 Technology Drive in Fayetteville, this project resulted in the creation of 118 full-time jobs and an investment of $27.7M. To secure this important project, the State of North Carolina awarded a $400,000 "One NC Grant" and Cumberland County approved a $175,000 job creation grant. Read more about Dansons arrival here.
We Pack Logistics moved into a 208,000 SF space within a multitenant building at 107 Tom Starling Rd. They share the property with home textile distributor Keeco and logistics and transportation company Landair Logistics. The addition of We Pack brought 25 new jobs and a capital investment of $2M to Fayetteville and Cumberland County. Read more about We Pack's move to their new industrial space here.
MetroNet's 100% fiber-optic internet, television, and phone services came to Fayetteville and Cumberland County residents in January 2021 with a $70M capital investment. As their first North Carolina deployment, their impact will provide affordable and accessible services to those in Fayetteville, the towns of Hope Mills, Linden, Wade, Stedman, Godwin, Eastover, Falcon, Spring Lake, and much of unincorporated Cumberland County, as well as portions of Hoke County, such as the communities of Raeford and Rockfish. Amid COVID-19, the community's need for increased broadband access has become even more apparent, with virtual learning and remote work at the forefront. So far, they have deployed 30.5 miles of underground conduit and pulled 7.6 miles of fiber. Additionally, MetroNet plans to hire local market management positions, sales and customer service professionals, and service technicians to support the Fayetteville area. Read more about the addition of MetroNet here.
Cargill has had its Cumberland County location since 1970 and last month, the soybean oil manufacturer announced their $25M industry expansion here. With plans to increase production capacity at its facility, the company has reinforced its position in the community as a long-standing employer. The $5M investment in real estate and $20M in new personal property will help maintain the 70 jobs currently at the site, which have average salaries of $70,000 a year—well above Cumberland County's average wage.
FCEDC is proud to help strengthen our economy, diversify our tax base, prepare sites for new business, and support our existing industry. We would not be successful without the backing of our elected officials, community partners, private sector businesses, and enthusiastic residents, and we look forward to new project announcements in the future. Don't forget to follow our latest news and successes on our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages.
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Description: Don't trust lust at first sight. One woman chooses reality over fantasy in this friends-to-lovers romance, a steamy standalone by "an author to keep your eye on" (Katee Robert).
I actually loved Eye Candy!!! I went into this one thinking it would be come kind of trite insta-love, tug-of-war situation, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was anything but. Friends-to-romance is one of my favorite tropes … and this was no exception! Jackie and Vince were a fun duo who knew how to have fun together and bolster each other in the best kind of ways.
As ever, Loveswept, an imprint of Random House Publishing, continues to stand strong, not as a curator of overdone and tripe love affairs, but of light-hearted and fun romances that will certainly keep you entertained, and help you forget that stack of bills – if only for a few hours.
This is the kind of novel you devour while sun bathing. On a lake, in the sand, hammock-ing, or sitting in a chair in the middle of your backyard – this book will keep you occupied, warm and is certainly one I would recommend you one-click immediately.
Are you interested in winning a copy of Eye Candy?
Comment below and include an asterisk (*) to signify you are interested in winning.
Make sure your comment is actually thoughtful, not just an asterisk or a couple-word response.
The ebook will be gifted via Amazon or Barnes and Noble only.
This isn't required, but I highly recommend signing up for the Smitten Word Newsletter – you can sign up here!
May the odds be ever in your favor!! Good luck!!!


Live music, and even jazz - is a real breath of fresh air that helps to recover, to live up to the weekend in good creative mood. Evening Jazz do jazz "dials" - is not only a good laytovaya music, but it currently jam session. The cost of the event on Tariffs places.


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Energy Industry Magazine
by WebAdmin July 30, 2021 August 2, 2021 01705
Providing renewable energy as a catalyst for development cannot be achieved without including women
Liliane M. Ndabaneze Chabuka
Despite the fact that the story of the need for 'empowering women' is being told time and time again, tangible progress is yet to be achieved. We have about 759 million people around the world that have no access to electricity. In Zambia, the national access to electricity averages at 31 percent, 67 percent of which is made up of the urban population and only 4 percent of the rural population.
Renewable energy is an affordable path to electrification especially in a country like Zambia given its low density that makes rural electrification a huge challenge.
Given the significant role of the woman in African societies and Zambia in particular (whether she is employed in the formal or informal sector), at Widenergy we believe that providing renewable energy as a catalyst for development cannot be achieved without including women. There is a need to identify and remove structural gender-specific barriers that females face, alleviating energy- poverty, and increasing their participation and leadership in developing gender-responsive energy policies.
Reducing gender gap is key
Empowering women in rural Africa is achievable if the government makes an intentional decision to reduce the huge existing gender gap in the renewable sector. Women represent 32 percent of workers in renewables, according to a new survey and analysis conducted by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). This compares to 22 percent reported in traditional energy industries like oil and gas and over 48 percent in global labor force participation. Involving women in the renewable energy sector will bring systematic change and will significantly improve their quality of life. Empowering women at community levels will strengthen economic, equitable pace and social progress. It goes without saying that such progress will need a strong commitment from governments.
At WidEnergy, we pride ourselves in our unique last mile distribution operation structure: We conduct direct sales in local communities, done by our door-to-door sales agents that we recruit and train. In an effort to make diversity and inclusion a reality, which have proven to significantly contribute to both great customer experience and women empowerment, 40 percent of our sales agents are women – they own the sales and the on-boarding process. This strategy has enabled our female sales team to leverage their natural ability to relate with the social context of our customers, gain confidence in their contribution to building better communities and establish solid and long-lasting relationships with our customers. Our female agents benefit from the fact that they become known and respected in both their neighbourhood and communities. They have reported feeling empowered by the work they do coupled with the fact that they also get to empower fellow females in their communities – a leadership attribute that gives them tremendous satisfaction.
Similarly, in most of the rural off grid areas in Zambia, where we operate, women are the real agents of change: they promote the use of renewable energy by explaining to their fellow neighbours who are still using unclean energy, often times through lived experiences, how such energy is harmful to their health and has long-term consequences on the environment.
They showcase the use of solar home systems within cooperatives, saving groups and other already existing female-led structures in their communities. Considering the majority of households are run by women, with the man as main provider (i.e. hardly involved in the day-to-day home nitty-gritties), having female agents explain how using the solar home system enables longer hours of study for the children, better health for the whole family and better quality life is more relatable and allows the customers to freely engage while they might have been shy and unable to fully engage with a male agent. This gives our female agents a platform and ability to inspire their communities. In addition to earning money for their households, the newly empowered women also increase the usage of clean energy. Household by household.
Leading from the front
As WidEnergy we value gender equality of our beneficiaries. We provide them with affordable and quality access to renewable energy. Since our Solar Home System kits are bundled up with mobile phones, it gives our beneficiaries (56 percent of which are female) more opportunities to access other digital platforms such as Mobile Money, recently classified as one of the catalysts of sustainable development by the GSMA and the UN. Access to renewable energy has given our female beneficiaries an opportunity to sustain and scale up their small business activities.
Such is the case of our customer turned Sales Agent—Patricia, from Chibombo who runs a small shop selling fast moving products. She narrates how with the savings she made from operating longer hours at the shop and at the small tavern she owns, she has been able to send her kids to school and built herself and her two children a better home. Patricia says that the best reward is being able to provide for her family. Being empowered has given her a voice, and she has seen first-hand the effect it has on her as well as her community.
Rachel was our first female sales agent for our Solar Home System kits, back in 2018: She is a mother of 9 who took up the challenge of becoming a sales agent, defying the belief that it is a 'male' job. Rachel has purchased a solar home system for her home enabling her to improve her life and that of her household from the commissions she receives from selling Solar Home System.
Women in the rural areas face the brunt of all the challenges associated with energy poverty. Prior to becoming a sales agent, Rachel explained to us challenges she had such as time management, having to waste long hours gathering wood and preparing dinner for the family in the dark. This Entrepreneurship opportunity allowed her to change her story– it allowed her to be the talk of the town—In a good way as she quickly became the focal point where people could access clean energy. She easily tells the story of an empowered woman, and the ripple effects of it, in terms of savings in the households, improvement in her children's education, better health, and family quality time.
Advocating renewable energy through direct consumption
In my opinion, empowering women is enabling them to tell the story themselves: it's allowing them to become advocates for sustainable energy, empowering them with knowledge and employment.
Renewable energy can empower women in rural off grid areas. These women are in most cases, the direct consumers and beneficiaries of renewable, clean energy. To achieve this, we need to create an environment that would enable the industry to create better employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for women in off grid rural communities.
At WidEnergy Africa, we are empowering women with our last mile distribution model of clean, reliable and affordable energy solutions, one household at a time. We do believe that improving the lives of the many who have no access to electricity and enabling them to have better health and better education for their children will allow us to change the narrative on the African continent.
Liliane M. Ndabaneze Chabuka, co-founder and CEO of WidEnergy Africa Ltd. Passionate about women empowerment. Working hard in a male-dominated industry, towards making women the champions in clean energy distribution and active agents for climate change.
AfricaAfrica renewable energyrenewable energyWidEnergyZambia
Sustainable bond issuance reach a record $850 bn in 2021
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// Template Source: BaseMethodRequestBuilder.java.tt
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All Rights Reserved.  Licensed under the MIT License.  See License in the project root for license information.
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

package com.microsoft.graph.requests;
import com.microsoft.graph.requests.RiskyUserDismissRequest;
import com.microsoft.graph.models.RiskyUser;

import com.microsoft.graph.http.BaseActionRequestBuilder;
import com.microsoft.graph.models.RiskyUserDismissParameterSet;
import com.microsoft.graph.core.IBaseClient;
import com.google.gson.JsonElement;
import javax.annotation.Nullable;
import javax.annotation.Nonnull;

// **NOTE** This file was generated by a tool and any changes will be overwritten.

/**
 * The class for the Risky User Dismiss Request Builder.
 */
public class RiskyUserDismissRequestBuilder extends BaseActionRequestBuilder<RiskyUser> {

    /**
     * The request builder for this RiskyUserDismiss
     *
     * @param requestUrl     the request URL
     * @param client         the service client
     * @param requestOptions the options for this request
     */
    public RiskyUserDismissRequestBuilder(@Nonnull final String requestUrl, @Nonnull final IBaseClient<?> client, @Nullable final java.util.List<? extends com.microsoft.graph.options.Option> requestOptions) {
        super(requestUrl, client, requestOptions);
    }
    private RiskyUserDismissParameterSet body;
    /**
     * The request builder for this RiskyUserDismiss
     *
     * @param requestUrl     the request URL
     * @param client         the service client
     * @param requestOptions the options for this request
     * @param parameters     the parameters for the service method
     */
    public RiskyUserDismissRequestBuilder(@Nonnull final String requestUrl, @Nonnull final IBaseClient<?> client, @Nullable final java.util.List<? extends com.microsoft.graph.options.Option> requestOptions, @Nonnull final RiskyUserDismissParameterSet parameters) {
        super(requestUrl, client, requestOptions);
        this.body = parameters;
    }

    /**
     * Creates the RiskyUserDismissRequest
     *
     * @param requestOptions the options for the request
     * @return the RiskyUserDismissRequest instance
     */
    @Nonnull
    public RiskyUserDismissRequest buildRequest(@Nullable final com.microsoft.graph.options.Option... requestOptions) {
        return buildRequest(getOptions(requestOptions));
    }

    /**
     * Creates the RiskyUserDismissRequest with specific requestOptions instead of the existing requestOptions
     *
     * @param requestOptions the options for the request
     * @return the RiskyUserDismissRequest instance
     */
    @Nonnull
    public RiskyUserDismissRequest buildRequest(@Nonnull final java.util.List<? extends com.microsoft.graph.options.Option> requestOptions) {
        final RiskyUserDismissRequest request = new RiskyUserDismissRequest(
                getRequestUrl(),
                getClient(),
                requestOptions);
        request.body = this.body;
        return request;
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub