Hitachi is developing an AI system tasked with remembering the skills of workers who retire so it can train new human replacements.

As Nikkei Asia reports, the Japanese company is planning to use a generative AI to learn and then pass on the "expert skills" required for a number of maintenance and manufacturing jobs carried out by its workforce. Those jobs are spread across industries including railways, power stations, and a whole host of manufacturing and processing plants.

By expert skills, Hitachi means skills it's hard to describe in a manual, such as noticing small irregularities in sound, smell, or the temperature of machinery. In other words, situations that could lead to an accident or serious malfunction occurring and being able to react appropriately before they turn serious.

A representative of Hitachi's Advanced AI Innovation Center explained that the aim is "making it possible for employees to experience past failures and notice in a simulated manner, so that know-how can be passed on to the next generation."

Hitachi's solution for teaching such skills is to project images in a room so as to recreate different working environments. Those environments could be railroad tracks, a nuclear power plant control room, a manufacturing assembly line, or metal processing facility. The AI then projects appropriate malfunctions (smoke, blinking lights, a cave-in) on to the images to simulate a problem and the trainees are tasked with solving the problem. The same system will also be available to use with virtual reality headsets.

Alongside such training, another real-time AI is being developed to help workers troubleshoot problems as they arise. Think of it like ChatGPT, but for very specific Hitachi work situations. For example, if a light is blinking in a power plant, a worker can ask the AI for help in determining its cause and the appropriate actions to take to resolve it.

More companies are turning to AI to help solve problems. Alongisde the chatbots, AI is being tapped to sum up product reviews, map out environmentally friendly flight paths, reduce the cost of making movies, and watch us shop so as to suggest better products.

By Joe Mullich

One of the fastest-growing areas of computing, virtualization provides a big payback that until recently was restricted only to big companies. Over the past year, though, small companies have rapidly embraced virtualization as technology advances made it easier to implement.

Virtualization is simple in concept. Traditionally, companies used one physical server to house one operating system and one business software application. This one-to-one matching meant that 90 percent of a server could go unused — a costly waste. Virtualization decouples the software from the hardware, allowing the workloads to be spread more efficiently among fewer physical servers. Storage and computing devices can be virtualized as well.

Here are five ways virtualization gives small and medium businesses (SMBs) an advantage:

1. Save money no matter what your size

Jonathan Hilland, CEO and president of Mindwave Research, was tired of paying $4,000 a month to a data center to house his company’s underutilized servers. The basic business of the 35-employee Mindwave is synthesizing — it consolidates insights from focus groups, interviews and online surveys. And so Hilland wanted to consolidate the company’s IT infrastructure as well.

Implementing a virtualization plan using Dell PowerEdge R710 servers with Intel® Xeon® processors Series 5500, Mindwave consolidated its 25 physical servers down to seven. With less equipment, the company was able to move its servers from the data center into their own 2,000-square-foot office. In addition to the savings in hardware and floor space, the company was able to slash its power and cooling costs by 50 percent partly because the servers are designed to conserve power, with features like fans that speed up and slow down according to the server’s internal temperature. The 
Intel processor automatically puts servers into the lowest available power state while maintaining performance.

Many small businesses think they’re too small for virtualization, but it can make economic sense for companies with as few as three or four servers. Indeed, a study by Principled Technologies, an IT consulting firm, found that virtualizing with one PowerEdge R710 with Intel® Xeon® processors can replace up to seven PowerEdge 2850 servers, resulting in a payback in less than 17 months.

2. Free up staff and grow your business

Time and money are two of the scarcest resources at any small business. Virtualization can save both, preserving precious IT resources and freeing staff from putting out security fires so they can focus on more strategic activities like growing the business.

Hennecke, a 380-employee manufacturer of polyurethane processing equipment, runs its virtualization infrastructure from a single console, which automatically alerts IT whenever it needs to allocate additional resources to a server. “As a result, we save around 50 percent on routine maintenance, which means that we don’t have to do as much overtime and have more resources available for strategic tasks such as developing new applications and supporting end users,” says Peter Ruttka, the company’s network and server systems administrator.

With virtualization, IT staff can respond to business growth by provisioning virtual servers in minutes. For example, when Hennecke needed two new web servers for its sales and finance function, the IT team had the virtual machines ready with just a few clicks of a mouse.

New virtualization advances also help SMBs prepare for growth. For example, Intel® Virtualization Technology FlexMigration gives you the flexibility to virtualize different generations of Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers within the same virtualization pool, giving you the ability to migrate workloads to fewer servers at night to save energy. And if you’re building a data center from the ground up, next-generation virtualization with Intel® Trusted Execution Technology also provides hardware-based resistance to malicious software attacks before the virtual machine boots.

3. Respond to the ebb and flow of business needs

A key advantage SMBs have is their fleet-footedness in responding to changing business conditions. Virtualization enhances this natural agility by creating a flexible IT infrastructure that allows companies to leap on new opportunities immediately and scale back if necessary.

Such flexibility is crucial for Thinkwell Group, a company that designs “immersive entertainment experiences,” like the amusement areas of Snow Dubai, a 24-story indoor ski resort. To create fantastic projects like this, the company’s 70-employee workforce can swell threefold for a short period. Twenty new employees might join a project team for a few weeks to put the finishing touches on, say, the Ice Age Adventure dark ride for MGM’s European theme park, featuring more than 50 animatronic and static characters based on the movie.

Thinkwell relies on virtualization to provide the quick bursts of computing power that its up-and-down workforce needs to meet rigid deadlines. “We can scale to our temporary employment spikes and avoid significant capital expenditures,” says Thinkwell CEO Joe Zenas. “We don’t have to expand our server room every time we have a big project come in. We can get the server power we need by expanding with virtual machines.”

This allows Thinkwell to maintain a lean IT department — just three people — while having global capabilities. With virtualization, small companies have ready access to huge technology resources without paying for a lot of hardware that may not always be needed.

4. Better protection for your crucial data

Virtualization sharply reduces the cost and complexity of disaster recovery (DR), providing peace of mind that key applications and crucial data can be recovered quickly if the worst happens.

Consider HotSchedules, a company that provides tools that helps restaurant managers and employees check schedules, submit requests and exchange shifts using a Web interface, mobile device or toll-free phone service.

“Restaurant managers and their staffs have come to rely on our solutions on a daily basis,” says Ray Pawlikowski, HotSchedules’ president and CEO. “We need to be sure that systems are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

HotSchedules used Dell PowerEdge servers with Intel® Xeon® processors to consolidate its IT 
infrastructure from 50 physical servers to just three. The IT group replicates “snapshot” data (copies of data from a particular point in time) from its virtualized applications and databases and sends it to a secondary site. This helps to ensure customers have continued access to schedule 
information even in the event of a disaster.

With backup happening more frequently and in smaller portions, recovery time can be reduced from hours and days to minutes. Another benefit: HotSchedules can now commit to the stringent service level agreements necessary for attracting and retaining large-scale businesses.

High availability is another key benefit of a virtualized environment that leads to greater customer satisfaction. “Three times in the past month I have had to do maintenance on physical machines. I was able to do it with zero software downtime just by moving a virtual machine over to a host that was running live, and users were never aware of it,” says Jason Snook, vice president of IT for Mindwave. “In the past that was never a possibility.”

5. Untether your business

SMBs whose staff includes road warriors, contract employees and field personnel understand the costs and challenges of a highly mobile workforce. Software updates are a chore to manage across a diverse range of mobile devices. Lost laptops could put critical company data at risk.

Virtualization offers numerous benefits over other forms of remote computing. With software called client hypervisors, which is placed on a tablet or other mobile device, workers can access their desktops and use the same programs on the road as in the office. Meanwhile, IT can control the data and apply patches and other maintenance faster from a centrally managed console.

A major productivity plus: Hypervisor software running on a mobile device captures and stores work locally, which means an employee who loses connectivity can still access his data up to the point that connection was lost. This can be a boon for those who travel to areas with iffy wireless access.

And with more employees carrying crucial data on their mobile devices, virtualization also provides heightened security. Because hypervisor software “encases” data in a protective barrier, people without proper authorization would have difficulty gaining access to the customer files and other important information if a device is lost or stolen.

In turbulent economic times, SMBs need to be ready for anything — from embracing emerging technology that gives you an edge to jumping on new business opportunities. Virtualization allows your IT department to be as flexible and responsive as your business needs to be.

Application virtualization refers to several techniques that make running applications protected, flexible and easy to manage.

Modern operating systems keep programs isolated from each other. If one program crashes, the remaining programs generally keep running. However, bugs in the operating system or apps can cause the entire system to come to a screeching halt or, at the least, impede ongoing operations, which is why virtualization became desirable. Following are several application virtualization methods. See virtualization, network virtualization and storage virtualization.

Terminals to a Central Computer

The oldest network architecture, all applications and data are stored in a centralized mainframe or server cluster. The user's PC functions like an input/output terminal to the central machine. See thin client.

Application Streaming

Rather than installing all applications in every user's machine, applications are delivered to each user as needed. This enables apps to be updated centrally and also provides a way to measure each person's actual usage. See application streaming.

Write Once, Run Everywhere

An interpreted programming language enables the same program to run on different hardware, with Java being the major example (see Java Virtual Machine). The applications are said to be "virtualized" because they run on any platform that has a runtime engine for that language.

Dynamic Application Assignment

This approach treats servers in the datacenter as a pool of operating system resources and assigns those resources to applications based on demand in real time. The pioneer in this area is Data Synapse Inc. (see FabricServer). The applications are said to be "virtualized" because they can run in any server.

There are various Virtualization software for trying out Windows 11/10 on a machine without affecting your machine setup as it can be run from within the present setup. We have already seen this in the article on how to install Windows on VirtualBox.

Many of these Virtualization software require Hardware-Assisted Virtualization or HAV. This is available in processors that include a virtualization option specific processors with Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) or AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology.

1] How to check If Virtualization is Enabled in Windows 11 without BIOS?

You can see the Task Manager CPU details to find out if your PC supports Virtualization.

• Use Ctrl + Shift + Esc to launch Task Manager
• Switch to Performance Tab, and select CPU
• On the bottom right of the section, check if you have Virtualization as enabled

2] Use Securable software

Securable is a free tool that can query the system processor and find out three major things. ^4-bit support, hardware support to prevent malicious code and virtualization. It is a standalone executable file. All you need to do is run it.

3] Use Hardware-Assisted Virtualization Detection Tool

Microsoft has provided a tool called Hardware-Assisted Virtualization Detection Tool (HAV) which checks if the computer processor supports HAV and if this setting is enabled.

When you run this tool and if your system supports virtualization and the setting is enabled in BIOS then you will see this:

And if your PC supports it, but it has not been enabled in BIOS, you will get this:

Then you have to enable HAV from BIOS.

This screenshot shows the BIOS option. This may be different on your system depending on the BIOS.

And if your PC doesn’t support virtualization, then you will get to see this:

So if you want to try Windows 111/10 on your PC using Virtual machine, or simply check if your Windows computer supports virtualization, get and run this tool. Of course, one can always clean install or do a dual install, if your PC doesn’t support virtualization and if it meets the minimum requirements for that OS to run.

Download Microsoft Hardware-Assisted Virtualization Detection Tool from CNET. Microsoft appears to have taken down this tool.

How do I know if my BIOS supports virtualization?

To check if your BIOS supports virtualization or not, you need to open BIOS first. For that, you can follow the official method of your motherboard manufacturer. Following that, you can open the Advanced settings panel and check the status of the Virtualization setting. If there is a setting named after that, you can use virtualization on your computer.

Related reads:

1. Check if your Intel or AMD processor supports Hyper-V.
2.  How to find if your computer supports Intel VT-X or AMD-V?
3. How to enable or disable hardware virtualization.

Who should attend?

Teachers, adminstrators, literacy certified and coaches, and paraprofessionals.

What is the format?

Courses are online with live synchronous sessions and weekly self-paced activities.

When are the courses offered next?

Courses are offered in the Summer, Fall, and Spring.  For information about upcoming offerings, please see the "Courses" section below. 

Can schools or districts pay by purchase order?

To pay for multiple registrants via purchase order, please email lynchschoolpce@bc.edu.

Will participants receive Professional Development Points?

Participants who complete all required coursework will receive 15 PDP's.

In 1726, the English poet Nicholas Amhurst quipped, there is nothing “more uncommon in the world than common sense.” True then, true now.

One example: A accurate Inside Higher Ed / College Pulse survey found that over half (55 percent) of all the students reported that bad teaching was a barrier to their academic success.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, most college professors have no formal training in teaching, aren’t generally hired or evaluated on the basis of their teaching skills, and aren’t incentivized to teach in innovative ways. Nor is there much frank and rigorous evaluation of teaching by skilled observers or objective efforts to assess student learning.

We do what we value. When my university delegates many of its “service” courses to graduate students, we know what the campus truly prizes. It ain’t undergraduate teaching.

As Jonathan Zimmerman, a leading authority on the history of education, has noted, most colleges and universities make few efforts to determine how well faculty are teaching or how much students are learning. And yet, better teaching could bring many students to success, especially in the most challenging, high demand fields of study.

The simplest, most straightforward way to address campuses’ financial problems and advance social justice and equity is to Strengthen retention and graduation rates at the broad-access institutions that educate the most students.

We know what that would take: Better advising. Providing every entering student with a degree plan, a designated adviser, and ready access to required courses. Placing students in a learning community. Requiring fewer courses that students consider irrelevant or boring. Reaching out proactively when students go off-track. Encouraging students to take advantage of supplemental instruction, learning centers and tutoring.

Above all, better teaching. Teaching that’s engaging, inspiring, thought-provoking and genuinely helpful.

In a hot-off-the-press opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer entitled “The best DEI program: better college teaching,” Professor Zimmerman writes:

“With the end of affirmative action, which never made a difference to most Black and brown students anyway, let’s renew our focus on what does: classroom instruction.”

In his pointed words:

“Weak instruction remains endemic in American higher education. Poorly designed classes, with no clear objectives. Dull assignments and tests, which measure memorization rather than understanding. And yes, disengaged professors, who have received little or no formal preparation for teaching.”

I couldn’t agree more strongly.

Of course, we mustn’t minimize the structural and systemic barriers to student success. Funding inequities mean that the institutions that serve the undergraduates with the greatest needs have the fewest resources. Those students, in turn, are the most likely to experience financial or other life disruptions and to suffer from bias and the soft bigotry of low expectations. They’re also the students most likely to juggle work and caregiving responsibilities with academics and to worry about higher ed’s opportunity costs.

Campus climate, too, can impede learning. Commuter campuses find it hard to provide the sense of belonging and connection that contributes to student persistence and engagement.

At broad-access campuses, student learning needs, on average, are greater. Many arrive on campus with less background knowledge in subjects such as history and literature and are less well prepared in math, science and writing.

The challenges don’t stop there. Too many are diverted into remedial classes that don’t count toward a degree. The classes they take are too large to provide much individual attention.

Still, well-taught classes can make a big difference.

These are classes with:

Clear, explicit learning objectives. In every class session, students need to understand the essential knowledge and skills they are expected to acquire.

Effective organization. A logical sequence of syllabus and content to be covered, a roadmap or signposts to help students understand the class’s organization, and the use of visual aids to reinforce understanding of complex concepts.

The division of content, activities and pedagogies into chunks. Breaking class sessions into manageable subsections, each with different pedagogical approaches, prevents cognitive overload and helps sustain student engagement.

Frequent formative assessments. Frequent quizzing or other assessments modes helps the instructor monitor student engagement and learning and the students to measure their mastery of the course material.

Lots of active learning activities that requires students to process and apply information actively rather than absorb information passively. Examples include:;

• Active inquiry and problem solving: Researching and finding a solution to a question or authentic problem.
• Concept mapping: Creating diagrams, charts and other visual representations of concepts and causal relationships.
• Discussion and debate.
• Peer instruction: Giving students opportunities to introduce a class session, lead discussions or help others solve a problem.
• Problem solving: Finding a solution to a question or authentic problem.
• Role playing: Acting out a role or an event in order to see different perspectives.
• Simulations: Application of knowledge to a case study or a real-world scenario.

Metacognitive activities that promote self-awareness among learners. Metacognitive activities—like asking students to describe their problem-solving process or summarize points made in class or explain concepts to classmates or reflect on their learning—can help students transfer knowledge and skills into long-term memory, strengthen their problem-solving abilities, adjust their learning strategies, and enhance their ability to learn independently and apply knowledge and skills in new contexts.

You might ask: isn’t teaching “too ineffable, too idiosyncratic, too ‘personal’” to evaluate systematically? And doesn’t my laundry list of pedagogical skills omit precisely those things that set the most memorable classroom teachers apart: their charisma, for example? We can’t all be gifted lecturers, engrossing story tellers, or entertaining, witty, or urbane discussion leaders with incredible improvisational skills. But all of us can be more effective in the classroom and bring more students to success.

I was struck by the title of a accurate article: “Teaching Evaluations Are Racist, Sexist, and Often Useless.” Of course, I agree: “It’s time to put these flawed measures in their place.” But it doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t strive to evaluate teaching more seriously and to take steps to Strengthen its quality.

A big problem with student teaching evaluations is that we ask the wrong questions. There is certainly information that students can provide that is otherwise unobtainable. Whether, for instance, the instructor arrives in class on time. Or responds to questions in a helpful and encouraging manner. Or tests what is taught. Or grades assignments promptly. Or provides detailed, actionable feedback. Or makes effective use of new technologies.

The fact is that students can tell us a great deal about a class’s structure and organization, classroom climate, style of delivery, use of instructional tools, emphasis on active learning, and the level of student engagement and participation.

Then, there is quantitative information that we possess but fail to analyze. Does an instructor have an unusually large number of students who drop the class? Or who receive a grade of D or F? Or who do or do not take another course in the discipline? Such information must, of course, be used with great care, but it can be revealing.

It won’t be easy to recenter the university around high-quality, impactful teaching. It will require a multipronged approach:

• Incentivize faculty to work with instructional designers, educational technologists and assessment specialists.
• Redesign high DFW courses.
• Create more small supplemental instruction sections in high DFW courses.
• Make graduate or undergraduate assistants available to help faculty make courses more interactive and immersive.
• Take concrete steps to encourage faculty to create more integrated, coherent, synergistic course sequences.

It’s high time to recognize that undergraduate teaching needs to be our top priority. We need to position teaching and skills building at the very center of our focus.

A biology professor filed a religious discrimination charge with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Monday against a Texas community college after administrators allegedly fired him for teaching students sex was determined by X and Y chromosomes. 

St. Philip's College in San Antonio, Texas allegedly fired biology professor Dr. Johnson Varkey in January for teaching his students that sex was determined by X and Y chromosomes and that reproduction must occur between a male and a female to continue the human species. Despite the fact that Varkey taught from school-approved and science-based curriculum, St. Philip's College claims his teaching was religious.

"I also explained that when a sperm (which has 23 chromosomes) joins with an egg (which also has 23 chromosomes), a zygote (which has 46 chromosomes) is formed, and it begins to divide, and after 38 weeks a baby is born," Varkey wrote in the charge to the EEOC. "Because no information is added or deleted in those 38 weeks, life starts when the zygote begins to divide, not when the baby is born."

The college  failed to respond to a demand letter sent by the professor's lawyers asking he be reinstated for what they believe to be wrongful termination, according to a copy of the charge obtained by Fox News Digital.

 UCF PROFESSOR FIRED FOR REJECTING NOTION OF SYSTEMIC RACISM SPEAKS OUT: ‘DIVERSITY IS PRETTY MUCH ANTI-WHITE’

In his notice of termination letter, St. Philip’s College said the complaint against him contained several reports of "religious preaching, discriminatory comments about homosexuals and transgender individuals, anti-abortion rhetoric, and misogynistic banter." The college claim he violated "the highest standards of academic honesty and integrity," but provided no explanation or reasoning for its accusation.

First Liberty Institute (FLI), a law firm that defends the religious liberty of Americans, sent a letter to the community college on behalf Dr. Varkey in June, asking that he be reinstated in his role and that St. Philip's College admit his termination "was not for cause but in fact violated federal and state law." 

FLI said the college is participating in unlawful religious discrimination in employment under the First Amendment and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, arguing Varkey "believes that he is obligated as a Christian and as a professor to teach accurate, true concepts that comport with his many years of research and study in the field of human biology."

NYU PROFESSOR FIRED AFTER STUDENTS SAID CLASS WAS TOO HARD URGES ‘TOUGH LOVE’ FROM COLLEGE, END TO ‘CODDLING’

Varkey's lawyers argue his teachings are supported by his education and experience in the field of biology, as well as his religious beliefs, but added that "throughout his employment, he never discussed with any student his personal views—religious or otherwise—on human gender or sexuality," but argued that his faith and his as integrity as an academic, forbid him from teaching or affirming statements that he believes to be false. 

"The actions of St. Philip’s College also have a disparate impact on religious employees," Varkey wrote in his charge with the EEOC. "The pattern and practice of terminating professors because of in-class statements that reflect their beliefs has a discriminatory effect on religious professors like myself."

"It saddens me that we have come to the place where, in an institution of higher learning, the feelings and opinions of the students are allowed to usurp the facts of science," Dr. Varkey told Fox News Digital. "The law protects Americans like me from being punished by their employers for holding or expressing their religious beliefs. St. Philip’s College is sending a message that the facts of science don’t matter and that religious people are not welcome and need not apply."

PENN STATE PROFESSOR SAYS SCHOOL FORCED HIM TO TEACH ENGLISH LANGUAGE IS ‘WHITE SUPREMACY’: ‘RELIGIOUS CULT’

As an adjunct professor, Varkey taught the same principles he was fired for this year in his Human Anatomy and Physiology to more than 1,500 students during the two decades he taught at St. Philip’s College, according to First Liberty. On November 28, 2022, four of Varkey's students walked out of his class when he stated that sex was determined by X and Y chromosomes, just as he always had during his 19 years teaching at the college. 

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"No college professor should be fired for teaching factual concepts that a handful of students don’t want to hear," Keisha Russel, Counsel for FLI and the lead attorney on Dr. Varkey’s case told Fox News Digital in a statement. "When public universities silence their own professors from teaching true concepts to students, education has been turned on its head."

Alamo Colleges District, which includes St. Philip’s College, told Fox News Digital it does not comment on personnel issues. 

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