Good afternoon dear participants, I hope you have completed your lab assignment and have assembled back into the classrooms. This is an extra hour. We realize that we have some additional useful things to share with you. So I had requested in fact a couple of my colleagues to organize special talks. The first one to have agreed is my colleague Professor Kavi Arya. He is an expert in embedded systems, in fact he drives much of our robotic activities and his penchant is to use these robos as sort of learning equipment. So he is going to talk to us about Robo Enhanced Teaching today. I am very thankful to him for sort of adding value to this workshop. One natural question which might arise in your minds is that in an ISD workshop on databases why are we talking about robos? So let me tell you why I think two important reasons why I think this and this kind of talk are important. First of all while traditionally the databases are supposed to be residing on your regular servers containing data mostly concerning the businesses such as banks or manufacturing industry or whatever increasingly that facet is not true. In fact not only in IIT but at many other places there has been work going on on one side very large databases but on the other side micro databases. You would have heard of for example microchips called smart cards. There has been a lot of activity on smart card databases which will hold variety of useful information for individuals. In fact the unique ID program of the country through its various agencies, user agencies expect to give smart cards to every Indian eventually which will hold not only the pertinent information about user ID but many of these cards when used for financial transactions could hold small databases pertaining to the financial information of the individual. Clearly databases encompass the whole world from micro to macro. Additionally if you notice the spread of information technology in the human society which started with mainframes which continued with the onslaught of small servers which continued further with the onslaught of PCs and laptops which we use is actually continuing in a exponentially increasing fashion through embedded systems. We see these embedded systems every now and then in the real world whether it's a washing machine, whether it's a TV, whether it's a small digital watch on your hand practically everything has a processor, has memory and now increasingly these fellows will have databases. It is important therefore that we are able to connect our knowledge of the exciting field of databases with what are the possibilities with other associated dimensions of ID most importantly the embedded system dimension. The second reason why I think this talk is pertinent is because we are going to see Kavyaari is going to share with us how robots can be used for enhanced teaching. There are in fact attempts here on setting up virtual laboratories, setting up a collaborative learning environment where small robots would be in the hands of participants at remote places and talks and lectures could be conducted from one place where experiments could be done at various places very plumbly falling in the domain of the kind of workshops that we are conducting. So I am happy to welcome Professor Kavyaari here. Thank you Kavyaari, thank you for agreeing to give this talk. I'll just give a brief introduction. Professor Kavyaari did his bachelor's in England and did his PhD from Oxford and worked in the coveted IBM research lab for some time before he came back to India. He was actually working with Tata Research and Development Centre at Pune for quite some time before some of us could sort of lure him to come back to academics. He has been with the School of IT for many years and now with the Merge Department of Computer Science and Engineering and spearheads our activities in the embedded systems specifically on the robotic side. So thank you very much Kavi, all yours. Thank you. Okay, where should I start? Thank you for a very apt introduction to the relevance of this embedded systems talk. You have provided the very important link into what I am going to speak about today. This is very right. There are so many ways to motivate this talk. For instance, I will give you a totally different way of looking at things as to why it is important that we study this area. Robots and embedded systems are basically computers inside devices. Typically, these used to be single functional and the computers used to be very small with very small memories and stuff like that. But now what you used to have in a mainframe in the old days, you are getting on a phone and now as embedded intelligence if you like, even in things like room cleaning robots and other kind of robots that you get. So it is extremely important given the kind of scenarios that we anticipate in the future that we study this area of embedded systems and robotics. Robots and robotics has been cloaked in very, very high tech vineers if you like in the past. But actually, they can range from the very, very simple devices to very, very complex devices. So I will share with you a bit of the excitement that we have here. So I teach a subject called embedded systems and two flavors of this run at IIT Bombay at the same time. In the electrical engineering department, we have this subject taught as building things out of microcontrollers. And in the computer science department, we teach given things, how do you program it? So we call it embedded systems software where we teach a software centric view of an embedded system. So we talk about the vocabulary of embedded systems. We talk about how different they are from conventional systems and the sorts of software that you need, the real-time operating systems that you need, the theory that goes into it and new languages like model-based design languages like Esterel, Luster and Skade to build these kind of systems. So what I am going to share with you here is something much more specific. We have a project from the MHRD called E Yantra where what we have done is we found it very useful to develop an educational robot through which we have taught embedded systems over the last five years. So we have kind of evolved these robots and the robots are now at a point that we can actually deploy them in engineering colleges.  I will give you an example where there is a pressing need for devices like that. Typically many B engineering students in the final year want to do a project and they are very hard pressed for ideas. Many of them I found in engineering colleges want to do a project with robots and robotics. And they find that first of all robots are not available in the market. If they are available they are too expensive and they are imported robots which if you buy there is no support. And if anything breaks you had it and it is too expensive and the next year nobody has got any robots. So typically what they do is that they go about building their own robot and they buy components of the market, build the robot and say that okay fine I will do a project after I build this robot. And they find that by the time the time is up the robot is half built or it is a very cluesy robot and they just write up the report and go away. And next year another student comes wants to do a project in robotics and does exactly the same thing. So you are not able to go beyond that. So what we have done now is that we thought we were creating a robot but what we have actually tried to create is an ecosystem. That means once we put these robots out you should be able to service them, maintain them, buy us pay parts and all that. And we tried to create the entire environment and we have tried to make these robots available at a low cost. So we have licensed these robots to manufacturers outside and the entire design of our robots is open source. So it is up to you to take it and refine it and improve it and so on. So let me get on with the talk and the overview of the talk is this. I shall talk a little bit about the E. Y. Anthra project. Our vision is we want to create engineers who can build complex machines okay that sounds vague. But typically problems in life when you get them don't compartmentalize themselves you know. They don't say I am a database problem, I am a real time systems problem, I am this problem or that problem is just a problem that you need to solve right. And increasingly we find that the most interesting problems are multidisciplinary. That means they don't fall into one domain. Like for instance increasingly we see all these devices around us right. Like for instance an iPod and an iPad and all these kind of things. These were not built by someone saying I want an iPad and this is the specs of it. Now you go away and design me the hardware and you software guys you build the software for this. That's not how it works. It's a team activity. You have the algorithm experts, you have the battery technology experts, you have the display technology experts, manufacturing technology experts, Steve Job's there saying that look this is what I want. So he comes up with this is what I want. It should be this size. This is what I should be able to do about it. And you guys you tell me what I can do right and they sit down and negotiate. Because if for instance he says I want an 8 hour battery life right. You have the choice between putting a very big battery which will make the device very, very bulky or you can make the algorithm right. All the codecs and all that inside much more clever. So they consume less battery. So there are lots of compromises that need to be played out between these engineers. And typically they design these kind of products by sitting across a table and negotiating right what will be the impact of this compromise and so on. So the mindset required to build these kind of products is very different from the typical mindset of an engineer who just is doing some software development and things like that. So this is what we want to create a kind of a tinkerer who can think about needs in the marketplace and they can think of some automation to answer that need. And to build that technology they will need databases, real-time systems or whatever it is and produce a product to put out there in the marketplace right. So we will talk a bit about the Iyantra program. We have a core team at the moment led by our program manager Maltibaru. We have someone in admin and a workshop team. So I will talk a little bit about these workshops that we do. And we have an educational robot that we've developed which has been licensed out and it's available online on the net and we will go into more details. So this is the motivation, this slide. I typically start my embedded systems class with this slide right. So these are metaphorical indicators for various disciplines. Like for instance you have a microscope here which refers to a pathology and medicine science and things like that handcuffs for forensic applications, military applications. There is a tank here, consumer appliances, there is a kettle here, ships, there is a boat here, music, there is a guitar and so on. Can you think of which of these areas of our lives do not have an embedded system in it right? I will pause for a moment here.  In which of these fields do embedded systems not occur? So if you think about it a little bit, actually they are in every aspect of our lives. In a car almost 30 to 40 percent of the cost of the car is in the electronics inside a car right. Electronics, steer by wire systems, your engine control unit, your anti-lock braking system, your transmission control unit, especially the higher end cars about 40 percent at least of the cost of a car is in the electronics. And wherever we see electronics, I just see software right, software which is running on some hardware. So this is increasingly as you can see the scope and the size of the entire market of devices which need embedded systems, the programmers right and there is a distinct change which is happening from the use of computers to computers which are embedded everywhere right in your devices, in your clothes, in your appliances and at your workplace, home everything. And there is a complete change in the interaction of these devices, growing number of critical applications and they are infiltrating our lives. So we need to know more about how to look at these things and how to build these things. So that is the basis of our embedded systems course and what we are trying to do is sensitize people to the kind of changes which are happening around them right. Changes, computing without computers, what does that mean? Tremendous changes in how we design and deliver computer power. In the old days you had main frames, a few main frames could do all the jobs that you want. Now computers are everywhere right, you have reconfigurable computing where through just a few commands and in microseconds you can load a new hardware onto an FPGA and get essentially new hardware right. And everything is speeding up because we are turning software into hardware right. And there is no computer there to slow us down anymore. My PhD student Sameer Sasarapudde has just completed a PhD where he takes a C program, you give him a C program and he gives you hardware right. So he converts that C program code if you like into an automaton which he can burn on to an FPGA or you can build an ASIC out of it or what have you. And that totally changes the way you think about software and hardware, the new ways of designing and delivering computer capability right. Like for instance originally we had main frames and we had PCs, now mobile phones right. And increasingly you have the cloud, the network is the computer right. Nobody wants to play around or fiddle around with their PCs and desktop, there is too much of a pain, anti-virus software and the OS and machine becoming slow, why can't we rent out computing power from the cloud as much as we need right. The entire structure of the electronics and the computing industry is changing, now many of you will know the answer to this, who is the largest manufacturer of cameras right. The largest manufacturer of cameras right, some will say Canon, some will say Nikon, some will say what Panasonic, Sony right, but would you know that the largest manufacturer of cameras is actually Nokia at the moment ok, Nokia the number of cameras that you have in the phone that people use as a primary device. And things are changing right, it is changing the products that people buy, the way they buy and use them. Like for instance we had tape recorders, now we have Walkman, then we had digital players, then we had the iPad and iPod and God knows what will come next. Books are becoming redundant with these new iPad like devices right and Kindle from amazon.com and so on. And mainframes are becoming smaller, many computers, PCs, becoming servers and now they are all moving back into the cloud right. And this is all changing how money is made from delivering products to customers, typically electronic products right. In the old days it is physical things which made money, now it is basically vaporware and ideas that make money. In fact a colleague of mine who was the head of marketing in TCS, this is about 6 years ago told me Kavi it is amazing right, in the old days it used to be money which used to make money, now it is ideas that make money right. So we need to think about all these things and we need to consider what our place will be in addressing the kind of challenges that come out of these things right. We need to think about devising products for the local market place. So one challenge we throw to the faculty who visit our workshops here is that we tell them that once we have shown you how to use these robots and we have shown you how you can incorporate it into your curriculum. You must be stimulating students to work on interesting projects. You should look at your industrial catchment area, the industries which are in the vicinity of your college and think of what kind of automation you can build for them right and hatch these as student projects and maybe become a consultant to the local industry in automation and things like that. So these are the kind of changes we are hoping because the society that you are living in is going to distinctly change. In India we might not have the burden of legacy, we can skip several generation of technology to jump into the latest as has happened with mobile phones right. We could never have thought of the of the huge deployment of mobile phones that we have in this country 10 or 20 years ago. I suggest that we look at robotics in a kind of similar way right. Like you find PCs now you are going to find robots now but they would not be like the star wars kind of robots that you see.  Buys are becoming very expensive you do not get buys anymore right. Do your dishes and to clean your houses and so on and if they come they are very unreliable and increasingly with the better state of education in this country they would not want to be buys anymore or maids and things like that. So you will have to think of automation now much of the automation that comes from abroad is suited to two situations abroad environments abroad they do not suit our requirements right small houses lots of clutter, wetness around, humidity all these kind of things. We need to think of ways to build these kind of devices for our own uses at cost points which suit our requirements and typically we will not be able to import these devices right. So we need to build up these skills so that is what our goal is in this e-anthrop project every child needs to be equipped with this kind of knowledge for the future okay. So here is our object our objective to trigger a robotic revolution right rather grandiose right aim high and you reach somewhere interesting and how do we achieve our goal we share our knowledge and we encourage you to share your knowledge with others. So we have started giving workshops we have covered some 120 colleges where we call two faculty from each of those colleges we train them in the use of the robots we introduce them to all the cost material here we show them how to run run and embedded the systems project and things like this and then we equip them with two robots each and they go back to start exploring and then incrementally I will share with you now how we can have a greater engagement with the colleges. So we design deploy robots for teaching and engineering colleges we conduct workshops for faculty and for students and we partner with more colleges right if we find some enthusiastic faculty in places we would like to partner with them and see what we can do with them we create and encourage you to create open source content based on the robots right which we share with others on our e-anthrop website and then we will our job is to keep on evolving these robots come up with new kind of robots and to and to just make all this whole thing happen typically what happens treat these robots as a pen right the pen is not interesting in itself what is much more interesting is a story that you write with the pen and the story that you write with the pen in this case will require knowledge of artificial intelligence databases real-time systems engineering knowledge engineering skills embedded systems design skills all sorts of skills but typically what happens are students do not have access to this pen in the first place. So this robot that we have is just a pen and at this point let us share with you what this initial robot is this is a robot which we have developed over the last few years and it is reasonably low cost it is 15,000 rupees and is based on an Atmega 2560 processor the design is open source is a reasonably modular and the documentation is very high quality is there on the website for you to download and support through various agencies including a company which manufactures and sells these and is very good for teaching and research and there is lot of software that we built on this robot right. So I will just describe this robot to you it is got 5 proximity sensors which can sense up to 1.5 meters 2 millimeter accuracy right. It is got an LCD display it is got touch sensors and it is got 3 white line sensors at the bottom with which it can sense whether it is on a white line or not to help it navigate and all the all this signal conditioning is done on the lower board and the upper board here is a daughter board on which you can use various processors like if you are teaching an 8051 based course you can put an 8051 daughter board and you can write 8051 code or you can have an Atmega 2560 daughter board or you can have an arms 7 based daughter board or we are creating new boards with FPGAs on it and things like that ok. So this project tries to address the weakness of our education system especially in computer science where there is a lack of experimental skills right. So we will come to that we have used these robots very successfully in courses like microcontrollers, embedded systems in computer science it is been used to teach a mechatronics course in aero, control systems course, sensors and actuators, instrumentation, measurement and calibration and so on ok. This slide just shows you the situation that we found on the ground about 5 to 6 years ago where the cheapest robots were about 30 to 40 thousand rupees on the net and even if we bought them they would not come with support and things like that. So that is when our initial versions were about 12000 rupees and 15000 rupees and since then we have developed these robots to be reasonably rugged right as we will discuss. So this is a slide that just shows you the various kind of kluji robots that we built along the way in arriving at our nice robot. And the ecosystem that we have which you folks can use is we have 3 different flavors of robots at the moment with different processors. We have documentation for each of these we have an extensive hardware manual and a software manual and things like that. We have teaching material which is lecture slides, course notes, assignments, quizzes, how to set up and administer this lab, lots of project videos and more importantly the code right. So you can take somebody else's story and build on it ok. I will give you a small demo of the sorts of projects that the students have done. There is support for this on a website called eientra.org and there is a company which manufactures these robots and there will be more now and it supports it with spare parts and all this also. Lots of participants till date like for instance national institutes of technology and other colleges ok. This is the first workshop that we had in December 2009 where there was one professor Nagla there who took all these things and very enthusiastically deployed it at NIT Jalandhar and we were very happy to see a few months later that he sends us back an update saying that our students have been have learned the basic skills of this embedded program and mobile robot in a workshop that we came back and conducted under eientra at our college. And after that these guys the students actually bought components locally and built a very interesting robot and then got written about in the local newspapers because this little robot of theirs goes and cleans up a barber shop right. So it is the same robot but with the little vacuum cleaner it goes and picks up all the hair in a barber shop right. So this is what they were able to do through a participation in the eientra program if you like. This is what our undergraduate lab looks like at IIT Bombay where we have everything on a laptop and we have a robot which they program through the laptop and they do some very interesting projects right. I will give you I will show you a video actually of this ok. So what I will do now is that let me show you a few videos. We have a problem with rooting the laptop video directly into the video feed but what we have done is that each of the faculty who come here we have recorded them giving their feedback. So you can share with your colleagues what you believe this workshop was like. So I am sure you cannot hear this too well. So what I will do is that I will show you some interesting visuals actually ok. This is more interesting. This is some of the lab projects which my last class had done. So this is the project where the students have taken a version of the robot which has got six legs. So this processor can drive something like 18 servo motors. So we have a robot called a hexapod which can write on paper. So here is another variant. These students have made this robot climb stairs and then once it reaches the stairs right it does something interesting ok. This is something interesting that the students did they thought let us make it dance ok. Here is another project where the students have captured an image a sketch then they have written some image processing software to skeletonize the drawing and from that they vectorize the drawing and then they have made that they have made the robot draw that sketch on a sheet of paper right. So this is how for instance it was drawing the sketch. What they did is that they mounted pen on a servo motor right and this robot can also wirelessly talk to the PC. So wirelessly they are giving it commands to move and raise and lower the pen for instance ok. Then there is another lot who wanted to use a sensor inside a mobile phone to drive a robot. So I bought them a we bought them an android phone a Motorola android phone and they use the tilt sensor inside the mobile phone to control the robot through Bluetooth right. So they also had to first of all wrote software to run inside the phone and they also had to create a small board a Bluetooth interface board which would receive signals on the robot. Another lot built a hand gesture control wireless vehicle where they built a little board with sensors inside it and by turning the hand right you can guide the robot around a course. Another bunch of guys built a tennis ball collector robot which has a little video camera mounted in the front and the image processing is happening on the PC. So it is it is seeing an orange ball then it goes close to it and picks it up with arms that these guys have made. So the robot looks for a blue basket and goes and dumps the ball inside there. These guys have tried to try to emulate an automatic toll tax collection system with two robots. So first the robot stops at a black patch and then it starts and then when it reaches the camera which is here right on the third black patch it stops and we have written the registration number on a white sheet on the side of the robot. So the image processing is done to capture the image of the registration number they process it and then they debit that value from the database and the vehicle owner also gets an SMS on their mobile phone the fact that their account has been debited right. Here is the last one that I will show here because of shortage of time farmer assistant robot. So these guys want to sort of to emulate a fruit picking exercise where they see ripe fruits which are red and on the first pass this will go and identify where the fruits are and on the next pass it will actually go and pick up the fruits right. So these guys have taken the basic robot and they just made the mechanisms with which to just actuate and to grip the the the objects and stuff like that. So the robot is reasonably versatile. So what we have shared with you here is just about four or five of 20 20 very interesting projects that students have done over a course of about five to six weeks right. So we have an embedded systems course called CS 684 which runs for the mtech students and over a semester they first go through the theory and in the last five weeks or six weeks of the course they actually speck out a project and they build a project and what you saw were examples of what they did in about four to five weeks. Now you too can do these kind of projects very simply by plugging into the e-anthro program right all you have to do is a couple of faculty have to come to IIT Bombay get trained we show you how to use the robots you go back with a couple of robots and see how you can use it on your B engineering projects if there are some lab staff that need to be trained we can accommodate them also in a next workshop and these workshops are running throughout the year. So once you have this gyan there are various ways that we can engage you more deeply into this entire exercise. So this e-anthro website e-anthro.org it is actually right is an open source website where we have courseware how to set up the entire embedded systems lab and it has got various assignments and all that on it you can go and register on this website if you want to attend a workshop or you want to host a workshop but there are specific ways that we have. So I will talk more about now the partner program model that we have here okay how can colleges take part in this program right. So we have step one you come and participate. Participate means that two of your faculty have to come and attend an IIT Bombay workshop for two days you just have to get here and get back we will look after you here for two days and after that you will be able to take these these two robots which we give you and start seeing what you can do with it in your college. If you want to participate more deeply right then you can become an associate where you can arrange the workshop at your college and our team will come and train the people at that workshop right and we will also fund that exercise. So it will be at our cost and the third is that we have an e-anthro hub or a remote center that means if faculty are enthusiastic enough then we will treat you as a center which we will help you build we will help you build the work the lab and all that and you can host the workshops there and eventually we bring you up to becoming a partner where we can actually fund interesting R and D that you do there if your students want to build an interesting robot they will need components they will need devices they will need to buy things of the market 30,000 rupees 40,000, 50,000 rupees or whatever it is we can give you money to buy those kind of things if faculty is enthusiastic enough to want to develop courseware based on these robots we can pay an honorarium also as far as that goes and better still for this we will have to introduce you as partners to MHRD right to be able to fund you at a deeper level it can be a few lakhs or whatever it is depending on the need and you can come up with your own robotic proposals which you can submit then to MHRD if you like and we will help you do that so details of this right step one is participation send to faculty to us they get exposure they take back to robots with them we give you a certificate that you have taken part in this intelligent robotics workshop there are no fees involved we provide you accommodation and boarding and lodging you can send back key students who you feel will help the program on the next workshop and now the college has to fill up a questionnaire right giving us information about yourselves and indicating a commitment to deploy these robots in an appropriate way then an associate is where you host the workshop and our team comes and delivers the workshop and we are hoping that after this you will become a hub that means that you will conduct these workshops so we will equip you with the robots and all that that you need to conduct the workshops right and in the process the host faculty will get trained and the workshop cost will be borne by us by the ENTRA project right the third grade of engagement is where you are conducting your workshop on your own at your location by yourselves without the IIT Bombay team you target audience from surrounding colleges but the costs will be borne by us right we will pay for it and certification will be by us that means that we say this is the ENTRA project and certificate and the faculty has attended a workshop okay and the robots that you need to conduct these workshops will be provided by us right final is where you turn into a partner where we will then have to take you with us to MHRD you will sign an MOU and we can we are then in the position to give you more money for things like R and D and an honorarium for developing courseware and stuff like that and you can be given grants to buy research robots depending on the kind of enthusiasm and the resources and the faculty that you have and this can lead to more interesting things where you can directly then interact with MHRD right to write proposals and things like that okay so the social impact we feel of this will be to spread the study and the use of robotics in colleges we think it is extremely important create a kind of multidisciplinary manpower right which is not just good at this or that but they can think in terms of solving a problem like for instance once you have learned to play with these robots and you understand how these robots are built there is nothing stopping you from building say a machine which can go and work in a field which can do seeding for instance right or then there is nothing stopping you from building say a small military application right I was just discussing with a colleague from the army this morning that many of the problems that we have to solve when we build interesting applications on the robot can apply to military applications they can apply to civilian applications they can apply to agricultural applications or what have you like for instance based on this experience we have actually built and delivered an autonomous vehicle for a campus which essentially what we have done is that we have built a control system into an autonomous vehicle which is like an electric golf cart and it can autonomously navigate around campus so what we have done is that whereas our robots they follow a white line based on sensors these have this this vehicle has got the magnetometers built into the bumper and we embed small magnets one foot apart on the road slightly below the ground and this vehicle it follows this and takes a number of it takes up to about five people passengers so it starts it starts motivating you to study much more many other interesting areas okay so the game is to excite and motivate the study of engineering right and provide opportunities for entrepreneurship that means you might your students might see openings for building various devices and automation equipment for local industry or for other uses and they can actually build with this knowledge these kind of devices and so we are providing manpower for healthcare automobiles large number of industries right to show that engineering is not only about you know just solving this kind of problem or that kind of problem or writing software for this system it can be really fun right and we find that these robots they really excite the students right so especially when you are doing say a B engineering project half the problem is in exciting your students once they are excited they can do amazing things on their own okay so this was the first lot of robots that we deployed we had about 100 of them and this is what they look like it looked very nice and these have gone out to all the various engineering colleges which came and attended our workshops and the if you want to know more about our project these are the important emails the project email is eantra at cac.itb.ac.in buvna looks after our admin so if you have some initial inquiries you mail to buvna at cse program manager is malty so malty at it.itb.ac.in and malty will take a call with us on things like getting people for workshops for ranging workshops at your college and things like that so I have written some important phone numbers also down and there is a website page for registration which is given at the bottom the eantra.org slash ci slash workshop slash participate okay so this is what I wanted to say and I think I am well within time we are in a position here to take some interaction or questions. Meanwhile I can also show some interesting videos this is the vehicle that moves around this is the vehicle that moves around following the magnets in the ground some of the older project this is with these robots this adaptive cruise control where a number of robots are following each other maintaining a safe distance right using the infrared proximity sensors right and this is an interesting project done by systems and control student where he built an inverted pendulum right where there is a potentiometer the base of this of this dandy if you like through which he controls a robot to balance a stick. So this is the principle behind things like the segue machine which is the people transporter which is two wheels right so here is this again as you can see we like to video everything because typically what happens after the project is done everything is disbanded and you cannot reconstruct the old device again so we like to video everything and documented well and everything is up also on the eantra.org website here is another interesting project instead of two motors we actuate six legs right so we get this kind of walking action with an insect so this is the same robot but the actuation is not by two DC motors the actuation is through servo motors which are moving legs here is another one this is we were exploring lane merging where two vehicles are merging lanes on to an in an automated way so we are thinking about intelligent highways and we found that we were able to get a couple of papers in very respected real-time systems journals based on this work because the problems were quite interesting so my colleague professor Krithi Ramamritham had done this work with a couple of m tech students right so these these vehicles are doing adaptive cruise control and also automatically well merging on to a highway okay show you some more okay here is another one where this is a soccer playing robot this is about four years ago and we have a camera on top a webcam which is looking at an image of the top of this robot based on which it can sense the orientation and position of this robot and is using that to move the orange ball into the goal right as you can see all these are four to six week projects basically that students have done on the embedded systems course this is another project where we have the same same robot but actuation now is through three wheels and each of the wheels has got a bunch of small wheels which run in a perpendicular axis and by differentially driving these wheels you can get a left right and front back motion also okay fine so to put everything in a nutshell we have got some interesting experience we would like to share with you we find that robots are a great way to motivate students to do some interesting projects and it motivates them to learn anything that you want you can have database also on robots where we find for instance what is a database actually it is storing a large amount of data and processing it interestingly so when you find that robots are negotiating say a large space with lots of obstacles and things like that they need to store store interesting information in interesting ways so that they can use it to determine what to do next right so there are lots of interesting applications which can be built on this and the interesting thing is that these robots we consider them as as a pen and it is up to your students and yourselves to develop interesting applications and write interesting stories with this pen and to share these stories with other people right so I have just shown you a small number of projects other students have done other interesting projects and the nice advantage is that now we are in the process of uploading the documentation the video the source code everything onto our website so your students can tomorrow take the same project and build on it right they can build on it that means that that is the starting point they do not have to build a robot they can just acquire the robot take the code and build a more complex application out of it and when we are at this stage then it the computer science aspects of the problems that need to be solved become much more interesting you get problems in networking then in communication in image processing in databases all sorts of things right but you can use the robots to motivate the teaching of whichever area that you have okay so I would like to pause here there are some questions I would like to give the the floor to waltz and the college of engineering hello sir sir one question is which programming tools are used with this hardware and second question is can can we interface these hardware with the programming tools directly over to you sir typically these are open source c compilers to be used with the precise microcontrollers that we use and we provide you with the compilers and depending on the processor which is available there are ways simple ways to just upload your code right onto the robot and and execute it these things become very mechanical right so one is that you write your your programs in c so when you come and attend the two-day workshop we teach you how to do that we teach you how to take the take control of the various resources on the on the microcontroller right like how to how to take the control of ports use ports to drive the motors and to sense the various sensors on the robot and so on and then we show you how to do pulse width modulation of the motors to increase and decrease speed and things like that show you how to use the interrupts and all that on the robot to to to do interesting things that you need to do like even control velocity and all that so what essentially happens is that typically we find with students computer science students they have typically heard of of interrupts and things like that they learned about it in theory but they have never used interrupts so it was quite heartening to see their excitement in actually having to write an ISR and execute it on the robot for instance so having said that one of the languages that you can use on the robot is c but we also have tools which can take astral programs for instance you can take an astral program and use our tool chain to convert it into c program which can go and run the robot so you can program the robot at a higher level of abstraction then you can write matlab code if you like to control the robot and now we are in the process of porting all this into sci lab so you can do visual programming these robots are also available inside the proprietary robot programming environments like microsoft robotic studio the cto of microsoft was kind enough to give us a project here to port our robot into a microsoft robotic studio so you can do a visual programming of the robot also in that you can do a simulation of the of the robot in that and so on before you actually deploy the code on the robot having said that I have a number of mtec students who are doing interesting projects on how to harness open source robot programming languages like player and stage to actually program these robots so there is some research work also going on and that can be a separate discussion but the main programming language that we use to program these robots is c and we use well off the shelf compilers to address the processors any other questions thank you sir okay okay that was useful so what we are trying to do is that we are trying to create a lot of software around these robots so the important thing is that if you want to get started it becomes very easy for you because all the documentation is there videos are there of the various projects and you can also buy the robots off the shelf right and you can buy it on the net also now and if you come to a workshop we will give you the initial two robots and if you show that you are interested in hosting these kind of workshops then we will help you to set up a lab with these robots and all that way you can host these workshops and also run student projects and things like that so we are very keen to find enthusiastic faculty very keen to find enthusiastic students who can help us spread this excitement that we have to other places in the country right and we are most happy to help if if anybody is interested we have a query from Jaipur Engineering College yes I want to organize the robotics workshop in in our college so how can I approach to you and what is the whole processor to organize this workshop in our college and also we want to include all these nearby colleges in Jaipur and in others in other cities so what is the processor to collect these all colleges faculties and different participants in our college good question which I am sure is on the mind of of of other colleagues also start with registering yourself on the ianthra.org website that you are interested in in either attending it will start with two faculty from your college coming and attending a workshop at IIT Bombay and then we will get you started with everything else right that is the initial well initiation if you like right two people from your college come here and then we will we will train them up and we will send them back with two robots and the whole story will start from there you can also contact through email our program manager Malti Bharu I have put her address up on the last slide and she will get you started and there are a couple of phone numbers also that you can call there is a mobile number so there lots of ways just right to us and we will get you started. So, we have scheduled some workshops starting from January and once we hear from the various participants of this program we can start scheduling workshops accordingly. There is a question from from Amritha Engineering College in Column who want to develop some home cleaning robots how a good way to start is you can take the firebird robots that we have developed here and again send people down to us we will train them send you back and then you can develop a home cleaning robot the interesting thing is the algorithms that you will use right. So, there is no one best algorithm there are a number of home cleaning robots out there in the market and they and they deploy a variety of algorithms right one I have seen which which goes zigzag and covers a space the other I have seen like the Roomba it goes in a spiral kind of direction and covers a space. The interesting problems that need to be solved in in in room cleaning robot is a number of things how do you how do you localize yourself right do you want some localization algorithm like do you want to be able to know where in the room you are do you want to be able to map the room and then clean it or do you want to just blindly just go on spiraling and clean the room whichever it is. So, these these things throw up a number of interesting questions because each of these techniques of room cleaning impact the nature of the robot the nature of the algorithm and the cost of the robot right like if you want to have very sophisticated positioning and mapping of a room right then you need something like a GPS kind of thing, but you cannot use GPS inside a house a GPS global positioning system only works outdoors. So, how do you position yourself in an in an enclosed space then it is up to you to choose various ways one is that the way we do it is that we mount a little webcam at a height it looks down on the floor and you can do image processing to identify where you are right or somebody else did the flip thing they use the webcam on the robot itself and it would look at the ceiling and by looking at the ceiling it would try and localize itself. So, it is like you are lying down on the robot and you look at the fan and based on the fan you know where the center of the room is because the fan typically is in the center of the room and then you localize yourself you find the walls and all that. In fact, I have not shown you some other projects which have happened where a robot goes inside a space with obstacles and it tries to map out the room. So, you have this notion of slam simultaneous localization and mapping where through its sensors it tries to figure out where it is moving around and it tries to reconstruct the boundaries of the room. So, again there are some very interesting algorithms that come out of this lots of algorithm issues and stuff like this.  So, all this code is available to your students if they want to pick up where these students have left off. So, there lots of other interesting issues that come if you use a very sexy algorithm which is very high bandwidth processing and things like that you will need a very big processor on the robot. So, that increases the cost. So, typically what happens is that most of the image processing that we do here is done by having a video a wireless video camera on the robot these things are not very expensive and it beams an RF signal to the PC where it has a receiver. So, you are getting real time video from the robot, but all the processing is done on the PC and the robot is just told how to move through the wireless communication right. So, typically most of the image processing algorithms that we have on the robot presume a PC on which the real time video feed is being received, processed and the robot is being told what to do. But we are also working on a generation of a robot which has the processing capability also built into it right and we are hoping that once colleges jump on to the bandwagon you might have some specific skills where you can build some interesting algorithms which others can use. And we were really heartened to see in the faculty who visited us people who would make very good partners they got we have specialists in instrumentation in control systems in electronic design power electronics. So, I am hoping that the more and more people come into the program the more and more interesting code you will get to build on right presuming these robots. So, maybe I should stop here I have run out of time there is one more question. So, this is IPS Indore yeah let us have your question. Okay the question from what I can hear is how can we contribute to the robot design is there some basic mechanical engineering and so on. See the robot is kind of has already been designed for you initially. So, the basic robot is available you can just buy it and deploy it and once you start working with it then you can start extending the robot now there are various ways to extend it. As you can see from the few videos that I showed the students have taken servo motors and just integrated them into the robot. So, typically what they will use is that there was one pod that we have it is a kind of servo mounted pod which is typically used to mount a camera and you can zoom pan tilt the camera and you can control it through one of the ports the expansion ports which are there on the robot right. All these things are documented in the hardware and software manuals and it is reasonably straightforward. And so using this servo motor these guys built a device with which to do pen down and pen up when doing the drawing application. Similarly, others used another motor to control a gripper arm to open and close the gripper arm others have used have made out of mechanical kind of components a gantry with which a gripper arm can be raised up and lowered down. All these things are very simply interfaced with the microcontroller that we have. Once you got used to these robots and you study the design of these robots you can build your own robots and you can contribute your designs on to the iantra website. So, there is there is nothing stopping you from making your own designs and putting it up on the website. But we would like to have detailed diagrams we would like to have detailed information as to how to reconstruct what you have built. So, there is nothing stopping you this is all open source it is to be shared with everybody it is to help others also do what you have done and take it from there. So, I think what you are also asking if I might say is how do we basically build these robots? Most the workshops that we give here at the moment are on how to use these robots and program these robots and take control of the microcontroller. But the question you will well ask is how do you build these robots? So, we will address that in other workshops that we plan to have. At the moment we are adding an image processing module into our workshops because we have noticed that most of the interesting projects that the students have done have an image processing component to it. So, we are adding an image processing module to this and like for instance typically we can cover this in about 2 hours. So, we are just adding this into our existing workshop. So, it is amazing what we can do in 2 days with you right you can go with a lot of knowledge right. And then there are so many other things to do like we want to know more about AI artificial intelligence and how we can use AI to control robots. So, this is only a start watch this space we will come up with more content that we will deploy on the workshops. And we are hoping that you faculty out there once you get into the program you want to develop special skills. Hopefully you will share them with us and help us build specialized modules like say control systems modules or maybe even an AI module right with which we can illustrate AI algorithms on these robots. So, this is only a start and I shall stop here unless there are any more questions. So, I think we will we call it a day here and if you have any inquiries please address them to the email addresses at the end of the presentation we are happy to get you started. And this program is going to be greatly expanding this year. So, the best time to talk to us is now. And once we have responses from at least this lot of engineering colleges we will be in a position to schedule workshops to which we can invite you starting from January. So, I strongly urge you to go to our website register yourselves whoever is interested and write to us and we will get you plugged into the system. So, I shall stop here. Thank you.


Vermont PBS in cooperation with Orca Media and the Vermont Press Bureau presents Capital Beat, the Week in Review, from the Vermont Statehouse. Here's host, Neil Goswami. Welcome everyone to Capital Beat. We're very pleased to have you join us this week. I'm Neil Goswami with the Vermont Press Bureau. The Vermont House this week passed a resolution that disallows an executive order that Governor Phil Scott was seeking. And that would have merged the Lottery Commission with the Department of Liquor. Joining me today this week to talk about the merger and why it didn't move forward is Jason Gibbs, Governor Scott's Chief of Staff. Welcome. And Representative Helen Head. Thank you so much for being here. Good to be here now. Jason, let's start with you. In January, the Governor proposed three executive orders that dealt with merging different elements of the executive branch. One of those was liquor and lottery. Two elements of state government that are really the only purposes to sort of generate revenue for state government. Maybe you can give us sort of a brief overview of why the Governor wants to bring these two entities together. I think it's important to acknowledge that in addition to being valuable revenue generation tools, entrepreneurial public enterprises, for lack of a better phrase, they also serve an important regulatory purpose. We have a great interest as a state in making sure that alcohol is carefully regulated so that it's not being marketed or sold to children. Similarly, there's an interest in making sure that gambling isn't exceeding what we would consider socially acceptable bounds and that we're not encouraging problem gambling or the abuse of individuals who may not be fully equipped to make the best choices, etc. So there's an important regulatory role that these departments play. They are, to the best of my knowledge, the two smallest departments in state government combined. They would, I think, be the second smallest in state government, but they do generate an enormous amount of revenue. Our reasoning for proposing this particular unification is that, number one, it's been proposed a number of times in the legislature. It's been discussed. It's been studied. Number two, some members of the chairwoman's committee have proposed legislation that's very similar to the concept that we offered, if not identical in some ways. Number three, and this really speaks to the bigger strategic issue, we are looking across the enterprise, the enterprise of state government and looking for opportunities to unlock revenue generation that is not in taxes and fees, opportunities to create efficiency, not just operationally, but efficiency that reduces the value of the products that state government provides in those areas where it's selling something like alcohol, like lottery tickets and so on. So this is just one piece. And frankly, we thought it would be the low hanging fruit, that it would be the easiest of what are always challenging conversations around rethinking reforming state government, making it more modern, making it more entrepreneurial in this case in a publicly responsible way. And so those are the core reasons why the governor offered the idea. When you talk about efficiencies that might be available between liquor and lottery, what are they? You know, I think a lot of viewers probably go to their corner store and maybe buy lottery tickets or they go to the state run liquor store and they get their liquor or perhaps a lottery ticket there too. But you know, they're probably not thinking about merging those two or that they're even separate departments. So what would the average Vermonter get out of this? I think it's important to understand and most Vermonters don't think of this stuff because it's not what they think of. But we have a distribution system that's modeled off of the distribution system that Al Capone crafted during prohibition. I'm not making this up. These are the systems that control states implemented coming out of prohibition because they looked at what the mob was able to do in terms of the yield that it was able to generate and said, well, if we did something similar to that we would be able to regulate the flow of the product and capture our fair share of the revenue and isn't that the best of both worlds. It's a really classic example of how the systems that we're operating in state government are antiquated 20th century systems when there's very significant value captured in them that we could free up if we made them 21st century system. So for example, liquor and lottery both looking at new point of sale systems. We can't bring new lottery vendors on because our point of sale system can't accommodate it. We can't give retailers the flexibility that they need to run promotions that are going to ultimately increase our revenue and yield without actually increasing the total volume sold without a more modern point of sale system. So there's an old warehousing system and this is a subject of a little bit of sensitivity. People are concerned about what it means when we talk about updating our warehousing system. It could mean any range of options from a managerial perspective. But there's a lot of value caught up in the old way of of managing our product. And the reality is is that, you know, I was joking with the governor this morning and I said if the legislature wanted to give us the flexibility that we need to run this as an entrepreneurial public enterprise just like they gave me and the Department of Forest and Parks in 2009 and 10 the flexibility to run the park system from an entrepreneurial perspective. I would be willing to work for zero salary and just a fixed percentage of the net increase in revenue we were able to generate and then I'd have some skin in the game. And my point there is that that's how confident that with the right managerial leadership and the right vision and the right attitude that we could modernize and increase yield. And I don't think and I don't want to monopolize the time. I don't think that there's any disagreement about the opportunity. I think the disagreement is about the pace. And if we have a sense of urgency it's because the liquor and lottery discussion is not happening in a vacuum. It's happening in the context of a broader discussion about state government and about the fact that for 10 years we've been losing. Every day when we wake up we lose six workers from our workforce. We lose three kids from our public education system and there's almost a baby being born addicted to opiates every day. And if we're not looking for ways to change the way government's doing business we're not going to find the solutions that we need to reverse those statistical trends. Okay. State law allows the executive branch which you represent to craft executive orders representative head. You chair the House General Housing and Military Affairs Committee perhaps the longest name of committees. And state law allows the legislative branch to reject some of these executive orders particularly the ones dealing with the reorganization of government. You and your colleagues in the House have chosen to do just that with this particular merger plan. Can you spell out for us the reasons why you didn't think merging liquor and lottery as the administration proposed was the best idea right now? The executive order process is a very prescribed and unyielding in some ways type of process. The legislature has the option to either vote up or down an executive order. We can't amend it, change it in any way. We are very interested in working with the administration on modernization of these departments and believe that merger may be a very good idea. We want to work together with the departments themselves, the administration over the next few weeks to come to a merger plan that would come to the legislature in January for our approval. The executive order was signed in mid January. Had lawmakers done nothing it would have begun to take effect on April 17th, I believe. By passing a resolution essentially disallowing it it stops the clock, it stops the process and now there was a very interesting floor debate in the house as this was voted on or before this was voted on. And there were a lot of different people standing up, particularly Republicans saying that even Democrats have proposed this sort of merger in the past but never acted or followed through on it. So why not allow the executive branch to take a crack at it and see what they come up with? It has been proposed and never fully explored. We think it's very important to do that and we took the step of not only voting down the executive order but proposing a bill that will look at how we examine this over the next few months to try to kick the tires, make sure that we fully understand what the savings are, what the process is for moving forward in terms of the collaboration and eventual merger of these agencies. In your committee as you reviewed the executive order what were the concerns that sort of rose to the top about allowing it to move forward? Were there particular issues or things that you became concerned with? The big issues were that while we saw that there was promise in the idea of these two controlled agencies working together it wasn't yet clear what the savings would be versus the costs of merger and sharing space, how to work on the customer service level, what would be achieved by actually pooling staff. We need more detail about how this would happen before we authorize what could be a costly venture. We need to make reasonably certain that it will succeed. As Jason mentioned these are really important departments. Their combined revenues are about $200 million a year. They were last year with a contribution to our state coffers of about $48.5 million between the ED fund and the general fund. And we have hundreds of businesses that are involved, thousands of remanters and visitors who benefit from them. We need to be ensured that this process moving forward is in everyone's best interests. Jason, those are the legislative concerns that have been brought up again and again. And yes, Wednesday on the floor debate, do you have answers to costs? How much it would cost to do the merger? How much savings there might be through efficiencies? There's no immediate cost. I think it's really a function of leadership. And the way that we look at this is in an ideal world, the legislature would do two things when the executive branch offers an idea other than just to prove them, would look at them in two ways. One is from the point of view of say a board of directors, particularly when we're talking about something entrepreneurial.  But it's also not appropriate for the legislature to micromanage an executive branch that is ultimately going to accept accountability for the operations of state government. And that accountability is not just political, it's also prescribed in the state constitution. It's one of the reasons that the state constitution calls on the legislature to act together in both bodies in response to a proposal or an action by the executive. And Representative Olson on the floor debate or in the floor debate on Wednesday raised a really interesting question around these executive orders. And that is, what is necessary to complete a statement of the legislature in opposition to a process that the law allows? There's a little bit of really interesting law around it. The law that allows the executive branch to propose the executive orders is really clear. Any one chamber can act to disallow them. However, the state constitution and some Supreme Court cases are in conflict with that law. And so our lawyers are looking at whether or not that's, you know, whether or not maybe we all got the process wrong from one point of view or another. That's not to say that this is going to get forcefully implemented by FIAT, but it is to say that there's some ambiguity in what constitutes a legislative action on an executive order like this. Well, let me ask you, this is an interesting point here because independent Representative Oliver Olson of London Dairy did try to raise constitutional questions with the process used to reject an executive order like this that merges executive branch departments. But the Speaker Mitzi Johnson ruled that it is not the purview of the body to make such determinations. So the issue of being constitutional or not only comes up now if somebody challenges it. Are you indicating that the administration might challenge the process to reject this? Well, where I was going with this was to make the point that we care enough about this idea and we feel confident enough in our ability to execute it. And, you know, it's unfortunate that we were unable to persuade one committee of our 180 board of directors that that's the case. But we feel confident enough in the idea to be looking at whether or not the governor has executive authority, constitutionally prescribed executive authority to move forward with these executive orders in the absence of both chambers taking specific action. It's also worth noting that we've got a few weeks at least left in the legislative session and, you know, there may be an opportunity for us to reconcile the difference of opinion that exists between the Senate on this issue which has signaled its support for the idea and the House which is preferring a slower approach. And maybe there's some middle ground there that we can achieve. Maybe there's something that resembles more of an action plan as opposed to a study where, you know, there's clear milestones along the path and it's not just a typical legislative study. Because, I mean, I think it was just two years ago that there was a study done that addressed some of these issues. It was the basis of the proposal that we put forward. So there's a lot of moving parts. I wouldn't, we certainly don't look at this as being the end of the discussion. We're getting near the end of the legislative session and maybe there's an opportunity to take the concept that's emerging from the House and make it something that everybody can feel good about. I do want to just, I know you want to jump in here, but it sounds like you're making a bit of news here and saying that you are considering challenging a process that has been used all along, as far as I can tell, to reject an administration's executive order. That would be fairly large news if you were to move forward in some type of challenge. What we're doing is we're evaluating the argument that Representative Wilson presented on the floor. We find it to be very compelling to be frank. The initial reaction of our lawyers was, whoa, and we'll see what the case law, what the constitutional analysis ultimately shows. My point in offering that is that we feel very comfortable and confident in our ability to deliver and the politics of this are kind of bewildering because we're inviting accountability. We're saying we know we're proposing to do something differently. We're willing to assign targets to it and we know that if you approve it, you now have all of the political high ground to hold us accountable to do that work and I have no doubt that they would, particularly in an election cycle in Vermont that's every two years. I mean, in fact, I would be shocked if they gave it to us and then next year they weren't like, show us the money, which would be well within their prerogative and authority and responsibility to do. So the dynamics on this one that we thought were the low-hanging fruit really bewildering to be frank. I do want to let you jump in here now because you look a little bewildered yourself here. I am a little bewildered. I understand that executive orders have been used fairly infrequently although there's some question in my mind about the appropriateness of them generally because we work together with the administration, of all administrations, have over the years to effectuate change for Vermonters. In this case, we, my committee has worked hours and hours on modernization of alcohol statutes this year and are looking forward to working with the Senate on some possible changes, not so much to the underlying statute but in some economic development pieces for alcohol. And now we're proposing a way forward to work with the administration over the next few months on coming to grips on this merger. So I think what's really, what I'd like to see us do is roll up our sleeves and get to work on getting this done so that we'll know just what the parameters are, what the opportunities are. So you do plan to move forward with what you termed a companion bill? Yes. So maybe you can explain what that companion bill will do, the timeline it lays out for moving forward on a merger if that is exactly what you intend to do. Well, the companion bill, which follows the resolution that we passed yesterday, and by the way, that resolution is very clear that we support the intention of exploring merger between these departments. We think it's very important and that we will support this companion bill which establishes a working group, not a study, but a group that will actually work toward this concrete goal of merger that would include the director of liquor control, the soon to be hired director of the lottery, an appointee of the governor and a couple of representatives from the House and the Senate to really, over the course of six meetings in the last half of this year, come together with a specific proposal about how to get to merger. And in the process put together legislation that would come before the General Assembly in January to make that change happen. So there are some concerns with that, obviously, as we have this discussion today, there's about three weeks left of the legislative session, at least in terms of the target date that legislative leaders have put out there, and you've all been known to miss from time to time. We're heading for three weeks. So three weeks seems like a pretty tall task to move a bill through the House, through the Senate and send to the governor. That's an ambitious plan. If we all want to work together to achieve the merger of these two departments and ensure that it has a smooth ride, it can happen. So you're confident that the two chambers of the legislature can move this thing through in three weeks or less? It's very possible. Do you share that confidence? I think it's possible. I mean, there are multiple vehicles on which this idea could be included, multiple legislative vehicles. And what path the legislature ultimately chooses to make an effort to resolve this with us is really up to the legislature. It's worth noting that the governor feels very strongly about this is unlikely to support a study that spends money to do something that we know will save money. So, you know, I think the ultimate solution between where we are today and where the governor wants to be tomorrow is probably from a legislative perspective, someplace in the middle. We'll see if over the next three weeks we can get there. I do want to just make the general observation that we, as an executive branch, we feel really strongly that this is a classic example of legislative micromanaging and overreach. We are willing to accept the accountability of the proposal that we're putting on the table. We feel that it's very well thought out. And it is an illustration of a general concern that we have as we approach our modernization work, our efficiency work, our productivity enhancement work, our customer service, our culture of continuous improvement efforts within the executive branch with a tremendous sense of urgency. You know, six, three ones, six fewer workers, three fewer children in our public education system, one baby, nearly one baby being born, addicted to opiates every day. That's what drives me. That's what pulled me back into government service. And one of the things that we're trying to do in as non-adversarial way as possible, and I understand that there are elements of this process that are inherently adversarial, but is to push back against the instinct to be adversarial in those environments and to make it about sharing a sense of urgency. And when we study things that have been studied before, sometimes multiple times, not just in this case, when we delay taking action that we agree in principle the executive branch should be able to carry out, it is policymaking of the past. And it's process of the past. And I feel like just like we need to modernize our delivery of service, our colleagues in the legislature need to be thinking about how to be more nimble in their policymaking in the legislative process. Before I let you respond, you yesterday we had a conversation after the vote and you called it a partisan psychology that they didn't want to advance an idea from the governor. So, I mean, this is some pretty heavy stuff here. Is there a partisan psychology at work here? I don't see it. The structure of government and the broad parameters of operation of departments that serve thousands of remonters is really the parameter of the legislature to look at that. Once that is established through legislation, it is very much the province of the administration to operate that system. And I'm, again, very hopeful and confident that we can work through this issue. One question or point you brought up was the cost of a study. I think we had a conversation with reporters at a conversation with you yesterday about that. And I believe you said $5,000 or so is what it would take to do this. That was the initial suggestion from the Joint Fiscal Office to our Appropriations Committee and they are looking at this issue within the companion bill right now. So, that would be about $5,000 for something that affects a budget of $200 million. Yeah, so that seemed reasonable too. Would that be a reasonable cost to make sure it's done right? I think it's highly unlikely that the governor's gonna sign a piece of legislation that spends money to do something that we know will save money. And we have three or two or three or four weeks, perhaps, to iron out the wrinkles here. And we're really hopeful that we'll be able to get to something that everybody can feel good about. So, this might be an insider-y reporter question, but a law can become a law without the governor's signature. Are we talking letting that happen or a veto? No, I think if a bill comes to him, that is to study this issue and it will not become law. Okay. Again, this is not a study bill. It's a very specific bill that works toward this particular goal. So, perhaps there is room there to find that common ground. All right. We are just about out of time today. So, I want to thank you, Jason Gibbs, for being here and Representative Helen Head as well. And we hope you'll join us again next week for Capital Beat on behalf of Orca Media and Vermont PBS. I'm Neil Goswami with the Vermont Press Bureau.


Capacity Development is a major pillar of the Arab Land Initiative. It is key to enable land governance in the Arab region. As a co-founder of the Arab Land Initiative, I'm most looking forward to a new commitment culture, sharing experiences, exchanging knowledge. Well, I'm really thrilled about the great engagement of younger generation professionals related to land, women and men. Get involved!


Hey everybody, welcome to this video on swing trading mastery. Today is April 2nd, it's Monday morning and I wanted to talk about swing trading because as we know markets have been very volatile in the last few weeks and the general belief is that this kind of volatility is going to persist and in these kind of conditions we have to be very careful with the trades and in particular a certain type of swing trades is actually quite ideal in these market conditions. So let me back up first a little bit, if you saw my emails from a week or two ago I had sent out some emails about various mentoring that many students may require and what I got in response was that swing trading happened to be one of the most popular categories of responses and so rather than try to address it on a one-to-one mentoring basis, at least for swing trading, I thought it would be better to have a sort of a class on swing trading itself. Now there are many many advantages with swing trading which is why by default it's actually one of the most popular trading strategies for options traders. The most appealing characteristic of swing trading is probably the approach itself to trading because this is a style where constant monitoring is not required and the most incredible opportunities actually are found in volatile markets as we are seeing right now when markets and stocks take a dive and which make them ideal for swing trading opportunities. You don't have to have perfect timing in your trades even if you get in a little late a day or two later that's fine and most importantly it's ideal for people with other jobs or if you have time zone or geography issues in your trading the US markets. Swing trading is also relatively uncomplicated because we can start off with call sports and just move move them over to spreads either for hedging or for profit protection purposes and not really go too much more than that in terms of the complex strategies involved. So given this level of popularity and response to my earlier email I thought it would be a much more cost effective way to structure a mini trader max style swing trading class which will then be much more cost effective to everybody and it will also serve the purpose because it happens to be one of the most popular categories within options trading. If anybody is familiar with the old trader max sessions this was a live webinar based session which was pretty much all day in the sense that there was a morning session of about two and a half hours and there was an afternoon session of perhaps one to one and a half hours. So this is going to follow a similar style but we don't need to do the entire day so to keep everything a little bit more controlled we're going to have a mini trader max style session for four weeks daily but this daily sessions will be about one to one and a half hours in the morning because the swing trading approach really doesn't require much more attention than that. Based on the overnight action for various stocks or indices we'll review all our positions perhaps enter new trades make some adjustments do everything that we need to in the first one to one and a half hours of the day and also leave in all your risk management principles and your trade management principles. So in a sense this is going to mirror what many people might face in real life which is they don't have the time all day and perhaps they need a little bit of time in the morning or you can choose your own timing if it's in the afternoon then that's fine but keep a regular check on what's going on with your positions and that I think is a more realistic approach to swing trading anyway. So some details on this the trades may last a few days to a few weeks but we look at a two month expiry cycle for all our option trades we look at stocks we look at indices ETFs and as well as earning season because now we are heading into earning season right now so we'll take advantage of that perhaps put on some earnings season trades as well the webinar sessions will start at 9 30 in the morning and it'll go up to 10 30 11 or depending on what the action is it may go for more as well we'll keep that part open as we go into each trading day and we expect about 12 to 20 trades during this four week process and my goal is to be able to set a consistent approach to creating a 10% income from your capital just using swing trading on a monthly basis we do this in a very safe and risk-controlled manner and if you can get this approach then you can consistently repeat it across all markets now the volatile markets produce some incredible opportunities but if you can get a very good performance in volatile markets then you can imagine in calm markets you can obviously do a lot better it's obviously going to be much much more easier to replicate this kind of performance in calmer markets so these are the logistical details for this class it starts Monday April 16th and it'll go till Friday May 11th there'll be daily webinar sessions anywhere from 9 30 to 11 a.m eastern for this class there'll be a maximum size of 25 and a minimum of 15 and so this is obviously will be on a first come first serve basis for registration the early bird special is valid until April 12th for 297 and then the price goes up to 497 but I can accept only about 25 people for this class also you'll receive all the relevant materials that are required so all the technical analysis the swing trading courses swing trade max charts and customization and all of that as part of this material for this particular course and this is the paypal link you can go to paypal.me slash option tiger slash 297 and that'll give you an opportunity to register for this class and this 297 is valid until April 12th so if you have any questions you can email me at info at optiontiger.com otherwise I look forward to seeing you there thank you very much this is Hari Swaminathan from optiontiger.com


This really gets under the narcissist skin. This really winds them up. It irritates and frustrates them. It's a relatively new concept. It's not something I've seen anyone talk about before. But it is something that I have noticed in my observations. In my studies of narcissistic groups and individuals. There is something that really gets to the narcissist. There is something that is causing them to experience feelings of suffering or disgust. And that is your sense of pride. Your feelings of deep pleasure and satisfaction derived from your own achievements. The things that you have done successfully with effort, skill or courage. The consciousness of your own dignity. Your self-worth and self-esteem. Your quality of having a high opinion of yourself and your importance. Your feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment. Which may come from some relationship, association, achievement or possession. That is seen as a source of honor and respect. That feeling of happiness you get when you've achieved something difficult or good. That feeling that you like and respect yourself. And that you deserve to be respected by other people. Yes, this is a trigger for narcissists. It causes them to feel upset and frightened. Because they are made to remember something bad that has happened to them in the past. So it may even set off an emotional flashback in them. Which transports them back to the traumatic event. But for a normal healthy person, pride is a beautiful and attractive thing. It draws us in. It makes us want to belong and be a part of something. Because it feels safe and comfortable. It feels like an environment in which there could be growth and development. But for narcissists it will cause a narcissistic injury. It will make them very angry. And the reason why is because they know that they will never have something like that. Or that they can't be a part of that. And the reason why it irritates them so much is because they secretly desire to have it. They secretly desire to be a part of it. But instead of consciously recognizing that lack, that deficiency within them and that desire, they will instead try to pull you down to their level. By trying to get you to feel exactly how they feel. Which is why whenever you've achieved something or you've done something well. Or you just feel good about yourself because you know you're progressing and you're on the right path. They will try to trigger you. They will try to make you feel like you're missing something. To try to get you to feel the same way as they do. To try to get you to feel that desire. By making you want or need something from them.  They will dangle a carrot on a stick and make you chase after it. So that they can see you going through it because it feeds them. It makes them feel alive. It makes them forget about their desires for a moment. Because now they can watch you going through it. They want you to go through the exact emotions that they're forced to experience. But these are also the emotions that they deny and refuse to process. So they're left and resolved. But they use it as a form of self-medication in the moment. By watching you go in through it.  And experiencing that spark of interest and excitement if I curiously food you. They will give you something and then they will take it away. Or they will make you believe that you could have something but then they will never actually give it to you.  And wait for your emotional response. They will wait for your feelings of anger grief and despair. Which are feelings that they're very familiar with. Because in their past they wanted certain things. They had a burning desire. But they never actually got what they wanted. And because they don't self reflect they never process the emotions that result from these traumas. So all they can do now is try to self-medicate by orchestrating these situations. So that they can watch you going through it. The irony is That these things they manipulate you into wanting or needing. Were never what you initially desired anyway. They just brainwashed you into wanting those things. They just used them as tools or weapons. So that they could get the reaction that they wanted. So that they could feel better about themselves. But you have to remember that narcissists are not grounded in reality. They created a fake world inside their heads a long time ago. Because they realized that reality wasn't serving them. But this world needs the attention and validation of other people and things for it to function and exist. So they need to pull people into it. And they do that by manipulating them. By giving them the illusion of what they think they want. Or what they think they could want. If they are susceptible to the indoctrination. And it's just a world which they use to harness other people's energy. So that they can feel better about themselves. That's the sole purpose of it. Because they can't generate it from within. They have no inner sense of value. So they have to get it from you. By destroying your sense of pride and taking you down a notch. By deflating, humbling and humiliating you. By making you feel small. By reducing or damaging your ego and pride. By calming down your high spirits. And decreasing your effort in something. Because then it regulates their own emotions.  Which is why when they target you. The first thing they have to do is study you and find out what it is that you want. What it is that you don't already have. Just so they can deny you of that or keep it away from you. Because then they can sit back and watch you going through it. They can experience it by curiosity through you. And then they can get off and your pain suffering them as fortune. Even though the irony is that most often. That wasn't what you really wanted or needed anyway. But even if it was. They most likely didn't even have it. If they did they would have given it to you to get you addicted to them.  So that they could watch you experience those feelings of anger, grief, despair and loss. Because that's typically what they like to do. They like to put their victims on a pedestal initially. They love bomb them just so they're further away from the ground. When the narcissist is ready to knock them off. Because when they're ready to devalue you. They want to cause as much pain as possible to you. Because they've got so many unresolved traumas from their past. And they need you to experience that. So that they can regulate their emotions. Because their trauma never goes away. Because they're weak and lazy they lack the power to perform. So they don't want to do the work. They'd rather have it easy.  But it never gets them the result they're looking for. They will remain dissatisfied. And they will continue to abuse people. It's an endless cycle until the day they die. And they will never know what true happiness is like. Because they can't generate it from within. They have to get it from other people. But once you've identified this problem in the narcissist. You should use it to motivate yourself to become a better person. To recognize that you do have the power to regenerate yourself. And to recover the energy that you have lost. Which is why in most situations they will keep coming back. Because they can't generate it from within. So they're always hungry for more. They constantly feel like they're starved of supply. So they're always in survival mode. And you will always feel like you're deficient in something. Because they're always feeding from you. Which will put you in a state of desire. Because now you need something to replenish yourself. And that will give them more power to manipulate you. Unless you put a stop to it. By recognizing that you can get your power and energy from within. And when you do that. You will have more power to give to other people. People that you love and care about. People who are more deserving of it. Because narcissists are selfish and greedy. Even though they know all too well that other people would be far more deserving of your love and energy. They will still go out of their way to take it from you. Because they don't care about anyone or anything but themselves. A lot of them act self-righteous. As though they're totally correct and morally superior. But it's all fake. It's an illusion.  Because they can't generate their power or energy from within. Which is why they have no moral compass. They will cheat, lie and steal and they won't even feel guilty about it. Because even if you catch them or confront them on it. They will project and deflect. They will deny it or shift the blame onto you.  But the truth is that they are very desperate needy people and desperate people do desperate things. They feel like their situation is so bad that it's impossible for them to deal with. They feel like life is unfair to them. And they have a great need and desire for something. They're urgently requiring something from you. Which is why they will go out of their way to get it. And it will impair their ability to judge what is right and wrong and act accordingly. Because they lack discipline and self-control.  So they feel like they're inherently deserving of privileges and special treatment. Things that they haven't even worked for or earned. But because of their disorder. They don't see it that way. They look at it like you're the one who is undeserving. Because all they see is the finished product. They don't see all of the work that you put in to get there. They're not thinking about all of the pain, suffering and misfortune that you had to endure. That doesn't even cross their minds when they're cheating, lying or stealing from you.  That means their cup is full. Because they're quite clearly satisfied with what they have and what they've achieved. They're conscious of their own dignity. And that is what triggers them to take you down a notch. Because you look happy and healthy.  Because they feel inferior to you in comparison. Thank you for watching. If you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up. Share your thoughts in the comment section. Hit the subscribe button to receive the notifications. If you would like to support the channel you can donate at paypal.me-naarxivver.com You can book a one-on-one with me on my website. It's Naarx Survivor the Cuddy UK. Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon.