Hi, my name is Edward Thompson. I'm a program manager for Azure DevOps, and I focus on Git and version control. Today, I'd like to introduce you to Azure Repos. Azure Repos is a best in class experience for hosting your Git repositories. In this video, I'd like to show you the repository navigation in Azure Repos, the rich pull request experience, and a powerful feature called branch policies that helps keep your master branch safe. Here, I have my project in Azure DevOps, and if I hover over it, these icons light up. These will take me to different areas of my project, like Agile boards or continuous integration pipelines. But I want to select this orange one, the one with the branches. That's the logo for Azure Repos, where my source code lives. When I do, you can see that I jump right in to the file navigator for my repository. Here, I can browse my repository structure, and at the top level, you can see that I have a folder that contains an ASP.NET application. I can click through that to navigate through other folders, and I can select a file to view it. Here, I have a markdown file in my docs directory, and when I click on it, Azure Repos will show me a rendered version of my markdown. This is great to include readme's and other documentation in your repository, so you can see it right as you browse. You'll notice that someone has actually made some errors in this markdown. They've put some hash marks at the end of a line, so I want to edit this. For a simple change like this, I can make it right from within Azure Repos, right from within my browser. I can just click this edit button, and this is great for simple changes. I can just update these header lines to remove the trailing hash marks. Now, even for markdown changes, I want to test this before I check it in, so I can click the preview tab to make sure that I've updated everything correctly, and once I'm happy, I can click commit.  I could even create a new pull request on a new branch, but for something this simple, I can commit straight to my master branch. But although committing straight to master is a simple workflow, it's not really a healthy one because the best practice for committing on a Git repository is opening a pull request so that other developers have visibility into your changes and can provide code reviews. And this is where Azure Repos really shines. I can create branch policies to enforce best practices. I just need to navigate to branches in the sidebar, then I'll select my master branch, select this ellipses, and then click branch policies. I can require code reviews so that one of my collaborators must sign off on a pull request before it can be merged. I can't just push a change straight into the master branch like I did earlier. So I'm going to enable that and set the minimum number of reviewers at one. Then I'm going to enforce that there's a linked work item. This makes sure that when I'm changing code, that I have traceability back to a user story in Azure boards. This gives the full context to some change. I'm also going to enforce that comments must be resolved by a reviewer before a pull request can get merged. And finally, down here, what I think is the most important branch policy is build validation. I already have a continuous integration build set up for this project in Azure Pipelines. So all I have to do is click to enable it as a build validation. And now every pull request must go through this pipeline before it can get merged. So now I know that every PR will build and all my tests will pass. So I'm confident that I won't break the master branch when I accept pull requests. I'm going to save this. Then I'm going to navigate to the pull requests page to see it in action. My colleague Dave already has a pull request open and I'm going to look at that. Here I can review Dave's code. I could either look at the changes in the files tab or I can click on the commits tab to review each commit one at a time. And if I have some feedback for Dave on this pull request, maybe I wanted to make some changes then I can enter those here. But in this case, I think it's a great change. And in fact, I'm so excited about it that maybe I want bold. So I could use some mark down here. Maybe even an emoji. And if I thought it was a really great change I could even paste in an animated GIF. Maybe one of my buddy Donovan. There, that's perfect. But just because we've left feedback we're still not ready to merge this branch. The complete pull request button isn't available. And if I look in the policy area you can see that I still need to resolve Dave's comment. So as nice as that animated GIF is what I really need to do is satisfy the branch policy. So I'm going to mark Dave's comment as resolved and now I can click to complete the pull request. So you can see that not only do I have a rich browsing and editing experience and a powerful code review experience with pull requests but I also have branch policies to help keep my master branch safe and secure. So that was a very brief introduction to Azure Repos pull requests and branch policies. If you'd like to learn more about Azure Repos go to dev.azure.com and be sure to follow us on Twitter where we're at Azure DevOps. So again, I'm Edward Thompson. Thanks for watching and I hope that you'll get started with Azure Repos for your next project.


I am Sergeant Tappan and today I'm going to teach you how to start a fire like a marine. See this great fire that we've got going on right here provides warmth, it can provide you with being able to dry your wet clothing and help you cook your food, but it can't get started unless you have one of these. All right, this right here is called a bird nest.  So basically all you're going to do is make a pocket in the center. Inside that pocket you're going to put magnesium block sheddings. The magnesium hopes you'll be able to start your fire once you start sparks with your flint and steel. Your flint and steel create a spark whenever you rub any metal against it.  After that you're going to need your tinder.


It's gonna be tough. It's been two weeks since the last episode, so I'm sure you've all forgotten the incredible narrative that is Batwoman. What's to remember?  It's all come to this, Rags.  Got a couple things to point out before we get going. First thing of interest, so if the whole thing was like real estate and she said that she wanted to provide homes to like, I don't know, the pit full of Gotham in different ways and shapes and forms. Why was the first thing she built a bar? Gay bar. So she could show that guy, huh? She could show him.  It's like how altruistic it is. Like, I'm gonna provide people shelter.   Because we all know what happened when people protested Chick-fil-A. And we all know what happened when everyone started to protest the Baker people. Well, every time this happens and someone's in the news for something like this, what happens? It gets a whole bunch of attention and everyone goes there and they make a lot of money. You're saying the Batwoman did this to make money? Wow. See, I don't know what her relationship with money is. No, that's true. I don't know if she's rich or poor or where she even lives. Like, right at the beginning, how did she know he was gonna kill that guy in the restaurant? Shoot a man. And how'd she find him? How did any of that happen? It's just not explained. Just hear a daily routine running around town. She bubs into a guy who's trying to assassinate one of the three people who know how to operate an autism gun that could kill Batwoman. Well, she just assumes that all Italian restaurants are owned by the mafia. So she assumes that there's some shady stuff going on there. You know what that makes sense? That makes a lot of sense. If you look at the actual scene, she like grabs the guy with her grapple after he's already fired the shot in the cut. I noticed it when I was editing. And it's just like everyone in the restaurant goes, oh my God.   Yeah, he's just not very good. Amazing. The force of the bat grapple, it was so strong that in mid-air, we did the bullet travel thing. I'm tired.  That was hilarious. 15th away in the middle of the Yants. Yeah, it's cold still. I'm trying to shoot you upon just just checking out the plot of that episode because it was complicated I have managed to figure it out. So gunman was hired by unknown person called like sapphire I think he's what he says or Sophia So that's gonna be our new bad guy as soon as Alice's booted from this show I guess so gunman was hired by her to get Tism gun from Alice Gunman is told to kill three guys in exchange for the gun and some poison by Alice He kills two of them and mouse kills the other one. So he gets the gun He is then hired to kill batwoman by the mysterious person But the gun has been de-tismed by Alice and so gunman is like this is a betrayal to Secret person and Alice says she doesn't care because she loves Kate and the three guys were the only ones who could have fixed the gun Apparently that is the that's what happened Okay It's just because it's very very hard to follow when you're watching it And it doesn't even attempt to explain how did Alice get this mega poison and how did they even steal the gun?   Yeah, why didn't the gun guy just kill Alice and take the gun? Did it was mean was Alice just on good terms with the Sophia person? Maybe before that? I guess I mean I think we pointed this out in the episode But if it wasn't for anti lesbian man that episode would have been completely different She would have told Sophie that she was batwoman and they wouldn't have been the whole batwoman gets captured thing It's just crazy that the addition of anti anti gay man like changed almost the entire plot of this season I guess I mean yeah, it was it was obvious that that scene was meant to derail the plot one of those scenes where it's like We can't have it resolved yet. We still got 30 minutes to go Let's just not write them coming here. We wrote us into this position. It's like no, I don't think that's how it works Sir, we're beholding to our own writing. Sorry. No, we can change the writing You know how when they're in the house and she's like Kate, how are you here and then boom? They're blasted by the Tism gun.  It's like The bat suit is that good. All right out of curiosity The one thing you're not supposed to do when you have broken ribs is wrap anything around them Yeah, like it doesn't actually I was looking into it apparently you don't need to go to the hospital You can just lie down and let them heal apparently, but wrapping anything around them is a big no-no So we'll point out a car top car It's like it's pretty lucky that when she showed up to a shooting rage drug that she wasn't discharged or disciplined immediately Or like we would out just for that alone. It's seen as a point of pride in this show It's like she did it while drug. It's like That ain't good.  It's Alice. Good job No, this one comes back to the base and she's like well, I killed someone with a knife. I threw it at him and everyone's like That's another death on Batwoman by the way, which she's like doubly responsible for all deaths now She's let her go twice five or six.  They're like, okay, we get it She's perfect.   I'd imagine because it's all about him So I don't think where I those complaints are probably not gonna be valid is what I'm trying to say I find it funny that the skin mask makes the dude taller or shorter Body structure on whim pretty convenient. It changed. Yeah, it changes his entire physiology. It's pretty cool Predictions since this is technically the season half season finale because the next episode is gonna be about Jacob does learn that the real Batwoman is Kate and Kate has to save him without her mask on Yeah, I could see them really revealing. She's Batwoman to him. They could do that.  Yes. I think they'll have him for all of season one That would be my guess. I've not actually looked at like any kind of contracts or stuff I think mouse and Sophie's husband about they're both a death door. I don't think Alice will die She'll probably go to welcome by the end of this episode So we can ever in the second season nice Actually, yes seems to me judging from fan reactions that Alice is the most popular thing about this show Well, I guess I don't know low bar. I was gonna say rags if what is the best thing about this show? It's like it's Jacob Kane slamming his What did you bring me unironically like he's probably my favorite probably the best shame He's an incompetent buffoon when he should instead be like the mentor character of Kate But whatever which leads us to the episode is everyone ready three. Well Yeah, I guess I'm so tired of her Choose hope wow narration. Oh, I so generic for superhero.  They wanted to have it's like a GoPro Okay, yeah, we that was a great prologue for the half finale Check it for fingerprints. It just means it's old GPS the track Alice Why don't you always know where she is anyway? There's a problem. It only exists because I didn't take care of it earlier I see you broke the staff into sorry, so it doesn't actually come apart. She just broke it for no reason, okay It's a warehouse in the battery, and that's where she is. It's just like that. Hi. I'm here I hear a secret layer for like the second third time. Why are you not in your bat suit? Does your gang get tired of Respawning that is a multi-million dollar piece of technology that allows the coil accelerator to penetrate your suit That's the only one that exists on the planet. What did he shoot right?    I went into the barn as the bartender. What'd you bring me? Slabs over the saloon dolls. What'd you bring? Oh, there you go These guys actually find it's gonna say that they allowed they allowed him to hurt them before he was captured Thank you show. I appreciate that would have liked it that he'd fired his gun at least once well Yeah, there we go setting up for the standard finale. How you don't know how to run a bar You don't know how to run a real estate. How are you gonna pay your cleaning glasses out of the box? Don't you have to hire people to do this grant work? Here's your general manager Do you need a license for all of this not after what Catherine did she leave Alice a second chance and a third and a fourth Yeah She's my family You are the crazy one we got a crank the drama. Sorry for thinking that you would do the same I have to run two businesses now that I don't know anything about. I'm busy Also about women skin man Are you getting back with her? You've been my son for a decade and a half.  I guess she nearly killed him in the other episode. What's the plan now? I am so tired of this character. I stabbed you last time we met.  They were tested. She paid someone off to tell him What would the difference be? Unreasonable Alice trying to sleep every night with a broken heart Oh, he's trying so hard You can do it. Oh, man. I should have had the DNA tested myself Except that I was told the D.  Oh, I'm allergic to that too Also, do you see his face toward the end of that little sequence?  Can you just kill me? She hates Catherine more than Alice Alice was brainwashed against her own will. This is different. My daddy's choosing He's brainwashed against her will Alice was brainwashed against her will. What is the proof for this? It doesn't make sense This is not him. This isn't him This isn't him. Okay, you're calling with a lecture. I don't have time I remember their wedding big snowstorm and I just kept wishing that maybe if we got snowed in you wouldn't have to get married Well, there's no storm. We're our biggest hurdle There was no snowstorm She's gonna reveal that to us. It's gonna be so clunky to the year. Why aren't you doing this to like everybody at all time? You know what mouse can do. I was gonna say they're aware. Uh, whatever What is up with you? Got a case of the white male's got a case of the I'm so irrelevant. I could be killed and no one would give shit If this is going to be a thing, we should talk about it. Do you guys talk at home like ever?  He's got more than vocal fried.  Oh my god They're still good despite the murders the kidnapping the torture. You're still good. How many times do we have to have this conversation?  Oh My god Of the Gotham humanitarian of the year Catherine Hamilton came They were just locked in there. Thank goodness. Nobody wants to knock on his door Jones why don't they just like shot Okay, but there's doors I thought Alice was more of a slit open our necks and poses for a tea party type murder Yeah, remember those are the things that she did after that woman let her go if they can move all you To do is bang on the glass or the door.  It's not my fault I have no idea. What about you any idea how you feel? I like her like we're like friends, you know I don't understand rags. She is in love with Kate. Oh No, God that looks so terrible. So I have like hackers and everything She is wanted throughout the entire city, how come she could walk around with total impunity audience overpower her My company makes millions by putting weapons of war in the hands of Gotham's criminals She puts them in the hands of criminals So she's selling to criminals directly more like Alice the true villains of Gotham don't go by the name Joker Oh Shit, she's murder. Gotham's true enemies are great in front of you.  Oh She's dying. Oh And nothing of value was lost. I'm so sure also lucky they timed that that way and stay in your seats There's no cause for a lot, please. Oh God alarm. Okay, panic So where are the real crows right now?  It's like daredevil.  Yeah, they don't seem to kids means you're thought your father's in mortal danger You guys need to get going get going right now all my life. I followed the rules my family's rules the army's rules Oh my god. No, you broke those rules. Yeah, I hope you've learned a lesson. That's why I lied Didn't answer my question. I know I hate it how people do that man. I'm with you Let's go get some help. Oh, right. Oh, thank you. Yeah, that's very very nonchalant By the way, it turns out Jim Cades captured out. She's infiltrated the crows. If you breach, we're all dead We're good. Where are the real crows? You do not look so well I just have a knife there. I guess I guess she had a knife. Yeah, you should have first looked to see whether It's marked poison or not Okay, oh, that's what it was. Oh my god.  All right, I'm sorry. Give me that Gimme yeah, it's like I'm not exactly like my most lucid right now. My organs are liquefying. Hey, how much do you want to bet? That's not ruby rose.  I drop off I enjoy watching a daughter lose her mother Yes, this fits in perfectly with your character from my own mother's severed head after our car plummeted off the bridge Sorry, that wasn't me When I saw Kate grieving, I saw my own daughter.  What a take is so long It's here. Not you too. Ah, they can only save one. Yeah Drink half the drink each you'll be fine. There's only enough antidote for one Oh, I guess that's just how it works. What a horrible circumstance I mean, that's really convenient that she only showed symptoms at that exact second Yep, if she hadn't shown symptoms for another five minutes Katherine would have drank it. Yep.   I didn't time this right. Let's just wait. Just yeah, just say it for a sec I swear. Uh-huh. Now we here we go Maybe we'll buy enough time Have you seen the show house in totally of account for that? Oh gosh, that was really old very it's very strange how selfless you're acting right now in this scene It's it's actually really it's strange of you It's kind of weird how alice wanted to show you this kind of misery because you yeah This just lost to talk about You're too late. It's late. He killed another person. Good job. Where's my dad? Where's my dad?   I don't care.  What did you do? Why is little alice was not going to do that in a hurry? Oh Batwoman's like, can you speak english? Catherine poisoned Catherine when she slithered into our family Presenting the woman you've let go free several times batwoman. Good job. You did it. Everything alice does is on your hands To watch daddy go down with her Oh god, that looks so awkward. Oh my goodness. Oh, jeez.   What? Okay Oh, wow, they're just laying there.   I don't care about any of these people Literally any of these people. It'd be funny if it had like went through to organs and jelly at this point It's like This program is brought to you by pathways to education All right, give me back my episode.   I haven't watched tv in ages. This is kind of exciting. Oh, no. No, it's like it's like a thousand Oh, this is black christmas we messed with the wrong sisters starting to wonder if it's just ads left That's big stick. He's just dropping his money everywhere.  Yes I'm said Yay, we're back. Oh, here we are. Oh, this is where he was put after being trapped in that room. Oh, it's my old Ford van What is this? It's a vehicle. It's a car pulls Kate fist. All right, Kate. Who is this? What why are you trying to verify who I am when I know damn well?  Oh, they're framing him. I guess call you right back It's gonna be double as policeman Jesus that's not necessary. They got planted something on him. Jacob Cain. You're under arrest.   No, he gets to know what he's being arrested for that's like that thing Nope I'm sure that you can get released from prison if that I tell you exactly what it is and you're right So, um, Mary's gonna be able to tell them what happened. This is a very bad plan Also, we're back here. You're not like chasing them down or something. This is the hook for the next Also, you changed out of your vatsuit.   Why isn't she in like hospital? Yeah, why are the police there? How did she leave? Are the police not surrounded the building? Where are the real crows? I have so many questions because she is not the horrible person that you and I Claimed she is I don't think anyone claimed that she would kill you to save herself You are literally the last person who can bring me comfort right now But I changed out of my vatsuit and let the criminals go free to come and see you here I'm a good man. Just put me on with the commissioner. He's got the wrong guy because I've got a dart hole in my neck to prove it He said dart hole. How can they think he actually did this? People believe what they're told. We have all this evidence What do you love me? Yes. Are you in love with me? No Lip quiver though. I don't know. Wow rip, dude I don't know. I'm going through a lot of emotional trauma right now. My father's missing. Yeah. Yeah I think you need to figure yourself out. Maybe I'll still be here. Maybe I won't Guys, there you need to be doing things. Yeah, there's things to do I am broken We all make choices bruce.  It's a dump. Beth is gone. Oh my god. You could have figured this out from episode one I really wasn't after like all the murders where that happened. Wow.  Oh god. That was so awkward.  Oh, all right. He's a flash person, isn't he? Submit And begin your life anew What He's becoming Something what are those lights hooked up to?  Oh, what's the what's the what'll change? Oh, it's true We're gonna be like on the third of five episodes totally out of context for a big crossover It's gonna be great. So I'm gonna be the controversial one to say that episode's probably one of the best ones from the whole season You know like a solid three out of 10, maybe even two it's what insane nonsense I mean the fight that's the only fight that looked like they even tried to give a crap about Which would make sense because it's the last they would have initially like good No, no, uh, wow. So in that episode two two and a half times Let's say that woman let Alice go. Yes.  Bye Also, yeah, I guess the infiltration of the crows was like absurd power was then no normal crows who were like Hey, so didn't we have like a gig tonight? What's going on? Yeah, like oh apparently the crows have been placed into this gala or whatever But all of us are here. So that's weird Yeah, I don't he was able to hire a bunch or bring in a bunch of new crows And all of the old crows didn't have any issues or problems with this So did he completely hire and bring in an entire new crow security force and only have the new people go to the party While all the people who would work there were just not there They think they're at the office. They're all at the office and all of them would have seen Sophie and her husband go into the office. Jacob leave and then for hours nothing happened They were like kind of weird whiz whiz Sophie and uh husband, where are they? Yeah, it's maybe we should check on them and so yeah that poison or potion or whatever It was it was from some distant island and it was meant to it just has healing powers and it just works for uh Well, yeah, and I really love that line where she says we could have half each and she says Think you would have accounted for that. You're like, okay That's possibly the weakest throwaway line you could have where it's just like, no, it doesn't work that way Okay, what would have happened to the plan if like she was as bad as she thinks she is and she just drank it Like she drank the antidote. It's like, well, just that's the end of that I don't understand what Alice wants to do with Jacob. It's like, ah, I framed you. It's like that's not gonna last long There's loads of proof. You're in Gotham. Crazier things have happened You just have to prove that a guy who impersonated Jacob Here's an easy one if you use this credit card at that hotel. He stayed out Then that's the end of that Well, talk to any witness that he went on that extra mission for and then talk to people in the office. Jacob was home It's like so there's clearly two jacobs. Talk to Kate. It's very very obvious that there's two jacobs In fact, how how would she even think this would hold up for a second? There's clearly two completely different jacobs not to mention all the cameras all over the place Mary Mary can just vouch for the fact that yeah, uh, this was all Alice Alice did all of this she actually sat there and watched us nearly die They have all those passed out crow security guys who were just all happened to be hired by this one jacob Yep, no, they all got up and left. That's why Alice still has a gang because they well, I don't know They just magically refill in between sessions Also, this is not just a problem for batwoman, but just tv shows in general instant knockout dark guns.   Yeah. Oh, but magpie's one. Oh, what do you? Well, what do you guys reckon? I don't know. Oh, they're all so bad. Yeah Like it's legit. Like I don't know. They're all so terrible at this point I think we've just accepted the nonsense Stockholm syndrome, but for batwoman I love that they have that back and forth with batwoman and kate near the climax of the episode with it She's like, yeah, you laughed me. I was at the blow up for a laugh It's like you said this like seven times like this is not new This is part of why we said you should reveal the motivation.  It's just like Well, you have to keep reiterating it. Also, you keep telling us this sob story for like once every for every person I was lucky when we got the half season finale and she just lets Alice go again She's really good at that.   My mother's dead. Jacob's been framed. Mary's missing. I don't know where Kate is Do you know about me? Discuss the emotional aspect of our relationship. I like how Luke had nothing to do with that episode Oh, yeah He only checked the coat and then he checked the face of that one card. Hang on. Yeah He knew about that. Shouldn't you have like immediately called the police? No, you can't call the police. They are just not are the real crows or Well, yeah, Gotham pd are more useless in the crows, but still they may as well Gotham pd did board this episode that the crows did. Yeah, they finally did something. They arrested someone. They arrested the wrong person But they did something. Yeah, they arrested the wrong person. Yeah, and so the rest Oh, no, they fucked up because they didn't read him as Miranda writes We got the infinites thing and then we got to wait for a while before we get to see the next half of the season Where we're gonna have to resolve Alice is still on the loose. I was wrong about that. Nobody died except Catherine I don't think did anyone even call that we kind of forgot to I probably would have said she'd probably die if I Thought about it. I've been waiting for Alice to kill her for ages. She just keeps not doing it And why would she do it in a way that gives her a selfless death?  There's two there's two cups one gives life one takes life Blackbeard selfishly grabs the one with life and wants to kill his daughter to save himself But jack had switched the cups so he dies like the exact same thing except blackbeard was an asshole Like I thought they were gonna go with that but um, no, she was just a straight up decent person I mean elizabeth's a weird character if i'm completely honest with you You can understand sort of that she wanted a good thing to happen as a result of saying the daughter is dead She's like no, i'm pretty sure she's dead. She's been going for age She's dead. She's dead and that the family can move on But then you've also got all these scenes where she's like maliciously creating all these horrible weapons in the hopes of like Then she sends people after Alice to have her killed.   I don't know if she's built her business on blood I have no idea like there's nothing wrong with being a weapons manufacturer Yeah, that's what we're at.  I'm so excited for infinite. It's gonna make no sense at all It'll be great.  I'm just going frame by frame. I think it's like only like 10 frames or something Really weird. What do they think that look good? I don't know it doesn't Do you think the people who made this show could identify quality if they saw but they they would have had a shot That looked okay, and then they fucked it Like that's what I mean Maybe the regular shot she like awkwardly slowly landed and she was like oh at one point.  Like I guess this is in case they hit her in the jaw Didn't they say in the beginning that the staff doesn't come apart or was it just a joke by luke? Maybe they he created one that does come apart for her between scenes in the episode. Yeah, what a good guy Well, that was fantastic. I can't wait to see what happens next. Goodbye everybody Bye. Goodbye. We'll see you next tisms We messed with the wrong sisters Would you bring me?


You have made a name for yourself on being the go-to voice increasingly in the anglophone world on Marx. You come from a geography background, but now you're, I think, the preeminent voice, it's fair to say, on the writings of Marx. After 30, 40 years of teaching Marx, of reading Marx, do you not get bored of it? Or is there always something new that you're learning? Is the thinking that deep and that important? Well, one of the great things about Marx is he's a very complex writer, and so you're always finding new wrinkles in what he's doing. But the other thing is, of course, the world is changing. When I was teaching Marx in 1970, volume one of Capital was pretty hard to make relevant to Davey Life, because you still had a welfare state around, a lot of state intervention, and Marx doesn't cover all of that. But of course, since then, we've had a kind of, well, we've got to have more market, more market, more market. And by the time you get to the 1990s, actually, Marx's Capital, volume one, was beginning to tell a story which was right on your doorstep. And right now, it's right on the money in terms of explaining what the hell is going on in the world. Right, so that's a retaught that you often hear critics of Marxism, they say, well, look, that was relevant to the 19th century. They have a chronological understanding of relevance, right? But what you're saying is the complete opposite, that actually... Yeah, it's more relevant because we're back in the sort of story that Marx tells about what happens in competitive market economies. But it's also more relevant because when Marx was writing, Capital was dominant only in a very small corner of the world, you know, sort of Britain, Western Europe, and maybe east of the coast of the United States, but the rest of the world was untouched by it, except through merchant trading. Now, of course, Capital's everywhere established. I mean, there it is in China, there it is in Russia, there it is in India, there it is in Indonesia. So in some ways, geographically, it's become far more widespread. So I think right now, I'd argue that reading Marx is far, far more significant now than it was in 1957. Couldn't agree more, yeah.


The proposed method is advantageous because it can reveal a robust and continuous level of patient distraction. This facilitates its successful application to the rehabilitation systems that use computerized technology, such as virtual reality, to encourage patient engagement. This article was authored by Hayani Lim, Sun Min Kim, and John Han Koo.


Well, it's quite a big day for us. It's really exciting for us to celebrate the end of the robotic CTA, and I've had the pleasure of leading this for the last couple of years, and I'm really excited to be here today. I want to thank everyone for coming, especially our distinguished visitors, all my friends and colleagues that I've known across academia and industry, and the government is fantastic to see you here today. So I'd like to start off with what is our vision, right? So simply stated, what are we trying to do? We're working on trying to develop a robotic teammate. So imagine if you will with me robots that I can task to go into the real messy world, they can intelligently plan where to go, they understand for the first time the world more than obstacles or things that just take up space, but begin to see human relevant meaning. They communicate with team members in human understandable terms, are transparent and build trust, and ask for clarification when they get stuck. They do all this without having to rely on a server farm in Iceland. All the while, their human team member are free to pursue their own goals, and do not have to be glued to a screen and a controller, but can communicate through gestures, speech, and tactical signals. So as we celebrate today, part of our goal here is to look at what does a teammate look like? We want robots that can see like soldiers, talk like soldiers, move like soldiers, and do work with soldiers. So in order to accomplish this, we need to have systems that can understand the environment in the same manner that soldiers do. And also, soldiers are fantastic at adapting to new things that they haven't seen before, and we need robots that can be on par or at least be able to be working with them in those environments. And in order for them to communicate, just as we communicate as we met this morning or when we meet with another human, we possess a common worldview. We have a general understanding of what's unique, what's common in the environment, and we are able to communicate that naturally. So we have to be able to overcome the forced interaction with joysticks and heads down, and we have to get to thinking about where we can be heads up and operating in that environment as a teammate. So the environments that we're talking about doing this in in order to address the Army's problems are much more challenging than, for example, what the current industry is focusing on. They're focusing on robots in factory floors, in structured environments, and focused on driving on roads and cars, autonomous cars, but the multi-domain operations and the Army has to operate and ask us to be able to accomplish these types of objectives in this complex terrain, whether it be for next-gen combat vehicles, OMFV and RCV, where we have vehicles that are operating in cluttered environments that are complex in their own right, but also include the complexity added by a peer adversary, have to operate in caves and strategic bunkers, canopies in a complex and urban terrain. This Army modernization, which the CTA has been working on, technologies to support this for long before this current cycle came out, but we're looking at being able to conduct in the middle there, we're talking about being able to conduct independent maneuver in order to enable the objectives that the NGCV priority strategy is looking for us to address. Also need to be able to isolate and defeat enemy maneuver forces and be able to manipulate or maneuver on the ground to secure terrain and consolidate gains, all requiring capabilities and combat vehicles that can rapidly learn and adapt and reason in that complex environment and fight and win against a near peer adversary. So this is quite a daunting task, Dr. Prakanti alluded to, we're asking a lot, and so how do we really get there? So the way we're focusing on this is the CTA, which is what we're celebrating today. So this is a huge problem, it's a huge task, so no one can really go at this alone, so it's key that we've been able to establish this collaboration to work with the best in the world across academia, industry, and in the government to achieve this. So you can see at the bottom, the foundation for this CTA is the collaboration that we've developed over the last 10 years, where we won't list all the names of my partners there, but you can see them here, you'll hear from many of them today, you'll get to talk to many of the researchers from these organizations in the poster sessions, and you'll see them demonstrating their capabilities. I want to take you on a little bit of a history lesson for a couple of slides here and talk about where we started. So Dr. Prakanti alluded, we've been doing this for a while, so this all started with Robotics CTA, which was actually the first version, if you want to call it 1.0, we didn't call it that at the time. It was led by Chuck Shoemaker, who's in the back here, and I'm glad to have Chuck here today to bring this all full circle. We were focusing on autonomous mobility, intelligent planning, and multi-agent control, and we had a lot of achievements, and you can see a video of some of the capabilities that were demoed in that program. We were able to have achievements such as Gen 3 LADAR, which evolved into the importance of LADAR for a lot of the work that we do, which spawned industry development in that area. But we also learned a lot of lessons that weren't sufficient to operating in the way we wanted to, such as building an autonomous navigation built on just a point cloud wasn't giving us the richness that we needed. So we were working largely developing tools in a metric world. These systems lacked resiliency, were brittle, they were slow, and weren't able to keep up with the op-tempo that we really need them to get to if we want to really operate with soldiers. They're generally limited to a static world where the heavily reliance on a priori data. So we built on that, and also under Chuck's leadership, we kicked off the original, the second R-CTA, which we're currently celebrating the end of today, where we focused on developing capabilities to address those challenges that we learned in the first CTA, such as perception, intelligence, human-robot interaction, and dexterous manipulation, and unique mobility that Dr. Bracconi already addressed. And we had lots of early accomplishments. We did some of the seminal work in semantic perception and anytime learning, which allowed us to understand the world in more human-like terms. I'll talk about that more today, and you'll see a lot of that fruits of that labor in the demonstrations that we'll have throughout the day. We also learned that we had to operate more tactically and interact with soldiers in a more meaningful way to be able to do multi-agent teaming and manipulate things in a human-scaled world. So you can see the example from Boston Dynamics when they were part of the program in the early years at the bottom. What I wanna talk about today is I wanna hone in on this slide, which will be the foundation for where we go for the rest of today's agenda. So back in 2016, we focused on recognizing that we had a lot of capabilities indicated there on the left-hand side of the screen. We had these fourth research thrust areas led by a lot of the people in the front row and other partners working with ARL and leading those efforts, but we recognized that we needed to bring all these together and we needed to have capabilities that were the combination of the research efforts of many people. As I indicated on the pillar slide, this takes a credible amount of talent and people working together to achieve these goals across multiple disciplines to make this happen. And so we also wanted to revisit the progress that had been made in the civilian sector and industry, and so we devised these three thrust areas to focus our research efforts over the last three years of the program, which you'll see today. So the first thrust is operational maneuvers in unstructured environments. So as the name implies, we need to get faster and we need to work in an unstructured world. A pretty daunting task, but that's the one that ARL is wanting to tackle. So you'll see the results. We broke that up into two capabilities. One is operational mobility in dynamic scenes. So the first CTA in the early years we worked on mostly a static world and we recognized that the world world's not static. I don't know why that was such a surprise to us, but we realized we needed to get better at that. So we really focused on how can we predict and understand agents in the world, for example, pedestrians, other at movers and that type of thing, operating the world and do a better job of predicting where they're gonna do that I can predict the movements of the robot. And similarly, in order to be a teammate, we needed to have robots that could keep up with the soldier. So we needed to have robots that could operate at speed in rough terrain. Something that we recognized that wheels and tracks weren't gonna be able to do alone. So we undertook this effort to continue to work in operating in rough terrain. And you'll see some of those demos today as well. The second thrust is human robot execution of complex missions. This, I think, is one of the highlights of the program. To me, it's a quite astonishing accomplishment in the sense that I can't count the number of researchers across the program that were involved in this effort. But let's just say there are many, many dozens, maybe close to 100 researchers working on this area alone. To really try to get at understanding how can we get better situational awareness in unstructured environments. Imagine, if you will, we want robots to be able to go out and conduct a reconnaissance in an area that they've never been before and we'll be able to come back and report just like a soldier would. Quite a task that we feel that we have made a lot of progress on and you'll see some of the results of that today. And to be able to do this in a distributed manner, humans and robots working together, we recognize one of the things that I really learned over the last couple of years is we don't have to solve all the problems ourselves. We're not deploying robots on their own on Mars, for example, my apologies to JPL. We're looking at working together so we can take advantage of how the humans can help us adapt and reason about the world and use those to foster better teaming. And then finally, the thrust in mobile manipulation. We recognized that we needed to be able to manipulate the cluttered world and that meant we didn't have models of every object that we were gonna manipulate and we didn't have a pristine, structured environment that we could operate in. So as we undertook those three major thrust areas we compared this, looked at the state of the art and we assessed the scientific challenges that we needed to tackle. For thrust number one, the up-tempo maneuvers and unstructured environments, we recognized we really needed to get better at building systems that weren't quite so brittle. We needed the robustness built in. We had to have a better understanding of what the robot was doing and thinking about. We also needed to get faster. And then we also, as I mentioned, we needed to focus on our roots, which is the Army's problem of being able to go anywhere in the world, complex environments, complexity from either the natural terrain, from the weather, from an adversary. Thrust two is focusing on that human robot execution of complex missions.  So we did a lot of work in natural language grounding. So this isn't just talking to Siri but actually having Siri understand what the heck you really are talking about. Probably drives a lot of you crazy, especially if you understand how Siri works. It's very frustrating to me. We also needed to have distributed mission execution and provide that situational awareness in those unstructured environments that we've never been before. And then as I mentioned, how do we manipulate the world on a mobile platform in a complex 3D world with real objects, not just things that we've modeled and taken pictures of extensively? And I'm really excited to have Sid here today. He's gonna talk a lot about that from University of Washington in his presentation. I'm gonna highlight four areas and talk about some of the accomplishments we made just briefly in my opening remarks and hopefully wet your appetite for where we wanna take things. The rest of today, you'll see demonstrations on this. You'll be able to talk to all the experts and researchers that have made these things happen. So one of the key accomplishments that we did in T1C1 which is our op-temple maneuvers and dynamic scenes is maximum entropy, inverse reinforcement learning. So this enables soldiers to be able to demonstrate behaviors with just a few examples. And then the robot can then learn those behaviors and emulate them. So it's kind of hard to see, but on the graphic you can see on the upper left-hand side, the robot. And there's a green line coming out of it. And the green line is shown on the edge of the road. So in this case, a very simple case, we had those humans demonstrate that they wanted the robot to drive along the edge of the road as opposed to in the middle of the road, just a toy task, but you get the idea. And then shifting into red, you see at the bottom right hand of the screen where they're trying to get to the star location. They recognize something else, which triggered another mode which they trained to how to operate when you want it to be covert or stealthily act and not be seen from a certain way point. So this is an opportunity for us also. We did a lot of this online too. We will learn how to train robots online so that the soldier can actually correct the robot's behavior. So if they don't get it quite right the first time, just as you might imagine with your child, you can say, well, I know what I said, but this is what I meant. You get to kind of correct them a little bit. It's an opportunity for us to do that. And it doesn't take us having to go offline and do that, it takes a long period of time. So the next is optimal mobility and rough terrain. So this is all about going where soldiers need to go. How do we get the robots to be able to go where tracks and wheels can't get us? So along the left on the bottom there, there you can see the spear acronym that we've developed where we talk about trying to address problems beyond what the current state of the yard is. Speed, we need to go faster. We need to be able to carry larger payloads. If you wanna do something on the robot, you actually have to carry something. We need to be more efficient. Obviously energy is always a problem for the military. We had to have the agility to go where the soldiers needed to be able to go and they had to be robust to failure modes. So we undertook these three center, in this Venn diagram you see the three center areas that we focused, the scientific areas that we focused on to address this, looking at improving energy density solutions, first still controls and being able to come up with new approaches for local motion at high op tempo. So I'm excited for you to be able to see this work in a demo we have behind you later today. So the next area is T2. As I mentioned, this is one of our areas that involved a lot of people. And I just wanna highlight one of the many that I could highlight accomplishments that we achieved in this area and that is in the area of natural language grounding. So the impact here is that we developed the technology for the robot to be able to have a semantic understanding of the world similar to a human so they can understand the commands given to it by a soldier and not just roughly repeat them but actually understand and have meaning and then execute complex tactical missions. As we know, when we talk with each other we have a commons understanding and we do things that are somewhat commonsensical based on the situation that we're in. And so we needed to build that into our world model that we could interact with the system to be able to achieve those. And so I'm really excited to be able to have you guys see that demonstration today. You'll see that outside. The last area that I wanna highlight is the work we've done in mobile manipulation of unknown objects. So you can see in the center there are all the tasks that you have to be able to do. And the key here that I want you to take away is we were able to do this all autonomously. So the human says where it wants to go and the robot has to be able to reason about something that's preventing it from being able to get to that location. Something that it's not, doesn't have a model of. Something that it has to reason about that it can either lift it up because it's not too heavy or assess that it's too heavy and it has to try to drag it and be able to then conduct a counter mobility type of operation which would be applicable to the army or be able to conduct a breach or navigate in an environment that doesn't have all open spaces, which is an assumption that a lot of roboticists we make. So I'm really excited to show you this. This is first time we've shown this. This is the ARL Robotics CTA stack, autonomy stack that we took and we worked with our partners at Texas A&M. We have a cooperative agreement with as well through the Army Futures Command. And we gave them our software stack and we gave them one of our robots, our larger platforms which is called a Warthog, but essentially it's an RCV autonomy surrogate vehicle that we're developing these capabilities for their application. And you can see here it's running, this is within just a month of trials and I wanted to show you this just to highlight that we're already transitioning the work that we're doing in the CTA to focus on specific army applications. I was glad to see that it was going fast enough that the Wranglers were trying to keep up with it within just the first week or so. So we're really excited about that and happy to have Sri here. He's here from Texas A&M. We're really excited about working with that partnership which is relatively new to us. We've been working with them for a couple of years but it was really great to bring them and have them be able to show the validity of the transition opportunities we had by just giving them access to our stack. So this is the foundation for where we're gonna be going in the near future. Another transition point is transitioning the work I talked about in semantic labeling that we developed in the CTA to the robotics technology kernel which is from our partner friends at GVSC, formerly known as TARDEC, for some of you who are not up to speed with the AFC new naming changes. So here we're taking the semantic labeling work that we've done and transitioning this into their RTK autonomy stack so that they have the opportunity to transition and test and do the 6.3 research that's necessary to get this into the capability state that it needs to be in for transition into NGCV and the capabilities that they desire. And then it would be remiss if I didn't talk about all of the technology transitions that have happened through our colleagues that we've trained or we've worked with, some of who are represented here today where we've transitioned a lot of the talent into the autonomous car industry and other industries as you can see here. The list is too long to name but we've had a huge impact on our national society and our industrial base and I think that's a true testament to the problems that we've put forth to the community and the talent of the people that come from the institutions that we partner with. I also wanna just highlight four academic investments and transitions to give you a sampling of how this collaboration and ecosystem has evolved over time. So one of the, his first is Dr. Krishna Schaefer who is now an Army Research Laboratory employee and she got her PhD at UCF under the guidance of Florian Yench and so she was trained in the RCTA, learned a lot on a problem and then we were able to hire her so we strengthened the tech base at ARL. We also had Dr. Elizabeth Phillips who similarly came from UCF. She got her PhD under the RCTA and then she did her postdoctoral fellowship at Brown and then after she was at Brown then she was just recently appointed last year as a faculty member at the Air Force Academy. So again, strengthened the intellectual base of the military. We've also had industry folks come to ARL so Mike Powers, for a while he came from General Dynamics Land Systems, robotic systems at the time to ARL for a while and then just recently he's moved on to financial industry. I'm not sure what that is saying about robotics in general but and then of course I really wanted to highlight Tom is a representative example. Tom's been a fantastic partner. He worked with Nick Roy at MIT and then is now a professor at University of Rochester. He's been a fantastic partner and leading and spiriting a lot of the work in collaboration with Ethan Stump from ARL and the whole team across both organizations and pulling in different entities to make this similar grounding demo happen and all the work that went into making that happen. So I'd like to wrap up and talk about the influence the RCTA has had on autonomy evolution. We started years ago where tools were operating in a metric world and then the self-driving car industry was spawned. We've started transitioning into developing teammates to operate in a semantic world and we're hoping to that this will inform and affect positively the tactical behaviors in multi-domain operations that the Army is looking for us to achieve over there on the last epoch. And I just wanted to say that reinforced what Dr. Bracconi said where he talked about ARL and working with our collaborative partners has the opportunity to take this long-term view to make big bets and take the risk. And then I think this is an example of how a lot of this technology paved the way for industry to be able to pick it up and run from there and solve unique problems. So with that, I end my remarks and we'll look forward to enjoying the rest of the day and interacting with you. Thank you.


Today is the two-year anniversary of the horrifying Boston Marathon bombing, but it is being remembered as a day of service and kindness. BUTV reporter Nikita Sampap is live near the finish line of the Boston Marathon with more on how the Boston Mayor and the public are observing this day. Early this morning Mayor Marty Walsh unveiled this honorary banner at 755 Boylston Street. The Richard family was with him, people are still coming by and leaving flowers at the base of this lamppost. The Mayor himself spent all morning visiting first responders and donation drives all around the city. Today marks two years since the Boston Marathon bombing. It also marks the beginning of a new tradition, one Boston Day. Well, today is the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings which was an incredible tragedy in this community and people want to do something good. One of the ways you can help others and give back to the community is by rolling up your sleeve and giving blood, so we find that our donors look forward to this day because it's a day to just celebrate Boston strong and to come together for a good cause and that's helping save lives. Mayor Marty Walsh announced that today will be a day for giving back to the community, a day that will stand for the strength, generosity and the resilience of the city of Boston. It's been unbelievable so far, I mean of the hotels and everyone's really been very excited about it and I've seen a lot of activity out there so it's good so far and everything I've read or heard about so far it's still early in the morning but people are really happy doing things. The American Red Cross were able to provide 600 units of blood to the victims of the 2013 bombing. We want to do something nice to the community to reward and appreciation to the people of Boston and people in Cambridge and MIT and also our first responder so we want to dedicate to them to show them the positive thing, that's the most important way. At 2.49pm this afternoon the exact moment that the bombs went off two years ago, the city of Boston will observe a moment of silence to remember the victims and the survivors of the bombing. Back to you Keiko.