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4 Trends Shaping Infrastructure
Peggy talks about the biggest trends shaping how we build infrastructure in 2025 and beyond. She says we need to bring curiosity to construction to spark new innovation to help build more resilient and secure infrastructure. She also discusses: A U.S. infrastructure history lesson. Four areas shaping infrastructure today. How to spark innovation in 2025.…
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Manufacturing: The Future of Work
Peggy Smedley and Brian Baker, president and CEO, Sentry Equipment, talk about some of the greatest lessons learned running a 100-year-old company. He says he is proud of being a leader of an organization that has stood the test of time. They also discuss: Employee ownership and how it helps serve customers, communities, and workers.…
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Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification
Peggy Smedley and Ty Witmer, president and founder, ProjectTeam, talk about the CMMC (cybersecurity maturity model certification) and why it is critical. He says since 2017 there have been rules in place for contractors working with the federal government to protect sensitive government data—and often it hasn’t been enforced, but that enforcement starts now. They…
What's Trending
The services sector has been having a hard time finding labor ever since the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent Great Resignation—or as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce actually calls it: the Great Reshuffle. The leisure and hospitality industry has experienced the highest quit rates of all industries, with the accommodation and food services subsector of this industry experiencing a quit rate consistently around or above 4% since July 2022. Restaurants are short of servers and cooks. Assisted living facilities need nurses. Amusement parks need summer staff. The list goes on and on. Enter robots. As one example, RobotLAB is developing robots for multiple industries, including restaurants, hotels, assisted living facilities, manufacturing, education, hospitality, healthcare, retail and more. Through partnerships with companies such as LG Electronics and SoftBank Robotics, as well as major hospitality chains such as Hilton, Marriott, Disney, and Universal Studios, robots are helping improve the services sector. Of course, this is only one example. There are so many cases of robots coming to market to help fill in the labor market gaps that exist in many industries, including the services sector. Here is how robots can help in the services sector: Help with food delivery in restaurants. Deliver supplies, linens, and more in hotels. Prepare foods. Clean restaurants, hotels, and more. Mow properties at service facilities. Perform inventory management. Entertain and communicate in museums and exhibitions. Provide customer service and concierge at hotels. Do check-out at stores. Help with customer service in call centers. Serve as police patrol. Attracting—and retaining—workers to these industries is harder than it has ever been before. And while the hiring rate is picking back up, service industries cannot exist without in-person work. Or can they with the help of robots? But keep in mind the only way this will be successful is if man and machine team up and work together to provide better service for…
Satellite offers many opportunities for greater connectivity in all walks of life. To help, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Astrolight, are collaborating to advance satellite connectivity. The partnership involves integrating Astrolight’s ATLAS-1 optical terminal into PeakSat, a CubeSat mission that must enable laser communication from low Earth orbit to ground stations in Greece. PeakSat aims to establish optical communication links between LEO satellites and ground stations and is scheduled for launch in the fourth quarter of 2025. Here we see a transition from traditional radio frequency-based communication to more advanced laser technology. In this case, the main objective is to consider the operational performance of the Holomondas OGS, which will be done by testing various scenarios, elevation angles, weather conditions, and illumination environments. Here is how this can help: Ensure precise alignment. Develop a scalable, secure, and efficient communication infrastructure. Enable higher data rates. Achieve better security. Have better resistance to interference Reduce spectrum licensing challenges. Looking to the future, we may see more similar partnerships. Currently, technology transfer from academia to industry takes approximately up to five years. Such collaborations as one with Astrolight can speed this process…
The opportunities gen AI (artificial intelligence) brings to most industries are significant—dare we say remarkable? But let’s be clear, there are still some challenges. For example, most LLMs (large language models) are trained on publicly available data and the vast majority of enterprise data remains untapped, and much work needs to be done to address this. And again, dare we say address this sooner, rather than later? Enter Granite 3.0, IBM’s third-generation Granite flagship language models, which was announced earlier this week at IBM’s second annual TechXchange event. By combining a small Granite model with enterprise data, especially using the…
We have come a long way with safety. If you journey back to the year 1960 and walked a construction jobsite, you would see very different work conditions than you see today. Hard hats were not mandatory yet and PPE (personal protective equipment) wasn’t the common three-letter jobsite acronym that it is today. Workers would be hanging from the top of buildings, with little gear to protect them. We have certainly come a long way, right? Yes and no. The reality is every year, one in 100 construction workers still get hurt bad enough to need time off work. We…
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