Developed by WGI and GE, the app teaches letters and words by presenting them on the screen, pronouncing them, and then inviting users to say the letters and words out loud.
Dubai: A new app-based education platform – Lyra, developed by WGI Worldwide Company and GE, aims to make literacy skills more accessible to adults and children.
The app’s 26 modules are based on the evidence-based synthetic phonics approach to literacy and build on the foundation of WGI’s six years of in-person education.
“We realised that while there will never be enough teachers, there are enough mobile devices, and they are already in the hands of people who can benefit from literacy training, Chance Wilson, WGI Chairman, CEO and Founder, said.
“We worked quickly to bring on new teachers and set up programs in new communities, we wanted to do more, given the urgent need.”
Looking at the impact, Nabil Habayeb, President and CEO of GE Global, said the app has the potential to make around the world.
“With so many people isolated and in need of developing new skills, Lyra can help meet a critical demand in underserved communities that have little or no access to literacy resources – a situation made even more dire in the wake of Covid-19.”
The Lyra app features an engaging space-themed interface and user experience. The theme reflects the name of the app – Lyra, which is the brightest constellation in the night sky. The app teaches letters and words by presenting them on the screen, pronouncing them, and then inviting users to say the letters and words out loud.
Powerful voice recognition technology then analyses the response. The app also uses the phone’s touch screen to prompt learners to write the letters or words they are studying, then analyses the results to tell them whether or not the writing is correct.
Reduced controls can create a higher risk of student or teacher impersonation.
Following the reopening of schools in late August, one school in the UAE welcomed only 11 students, as opposed to the expected 5,000 students, proving that parents are still hesitant about sending their kids to school and that they will be depending on e-learning this semester.
Ever since the lockdown earlier this year, schools are using new technologies and programs to guarantee the continuity of education.
For example, schools started using a range of video communication tools, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Additionally, they were urged to monitor their students and teachers by deploying varied technologies that involve the collection, storage and sharing of personal information.
With the increased dependency schools have on online applications and paltforms, there has been a rise in cyber dangers, which can be dangerous to children. The numbers of cyberattacks and hackers are booming.
A study that focuses on the UAE and Saudi Arabia shows that cyber specialists have reported a significant increase in extortion and ransomware attempts. Scammers took advantage of Covid by issuing phishing emails with donation requests and offers to provide relief that appear from legitimate sources.
This consequentially creates a higher risk of student or teacher impersonation due to reduced controls. Moreover, video teleconference platforms have had increasing attacks from online trolls that disrupt online classes with offensive content through the platforms’ screen sharing features.
It is no coincidence that schools are among the most attacked. Schools manage substantial sums of money, store personal information for students and teachers and connect with many external bodies and providers and, of course, parents, who primarily communicate with the school via email. This means schools have a very large attack surface.
Additionally, students make for easy victims of phishing scams. Students’ lack of experience combined with a tendency to use simple passwords across multiple platforms makes them prone to credential harvesting and password-spraying attacks. In addition, the awareness of parents, teachers and faculty regarding cyber risks is often much lower in education than in other sectors.
Further exacerbating the security situation is that educational establishments typically have a limited number of staff dedicated to security. Unlike banks, schools typically do not have dedicated information security personnel who are engaged in 24/7 protection.
Good endpoint security is needed
Having a program of staff education and training in schools is important to create a culture of suspicion and vigilance, sharing real-world examples with staff and testing resilience is important, but even the best of us have the weakest of moments.
The risk can be reduced but cannot be eliminated with training alone. It can be improved with email security with products that include features such as:
Url scanning of inbound or archived email which does not allow clicks on target sites until the site can be checked for malware
Detecting weaponized attachments in the mailbox and redirecting to a sandbox before delivery.
Protection against impersonation, social engineering, typo squatting and masking
Ransomware only has rights to change and encrypt files if the infected user does. Controlling user access to critical network resources is necessary to limit exposure to this and ensure lateral movement is made more difficult.
Therefore, it is critical to ensure privileges are current and up to date and that users can only access appropriate files and network locations required for their duties.
Almost all organisations have endpoint security; however, to prevent ransomware, static detection and antivirus is no longer enough. Having advanced features in your endpoint protection and the ability to perform endpoint management and hygiene from a centralised management system is increasingly important.
Good endpoint security should include multiple static and behavioural detection engines, using machine learning and AI to speed up detection and analysis. It is also important to have exploit protection, device control, access control, vulnerability and application control.
The addition of endpoint detection and response (EDR) into the mix, provides forensic analysis and root cause and immediate response actions like isolation, transfer to sandbox and rollback features to automate remediation are important considerations.
Having these features in one platform and one agent capable of protecting all devices and servers will ensure centralised visibility and control for your cyber security team across your entire endpoint estate.
As we have seen, schools and academia are in the crosshairs of cyber criminals and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. But educational institutions can also offer some hope of future relief. Policy makers understand that cyber education should start at an early age.
The importance of protecting our education system from cybercrime cannot be overstated. Not only do schools, colleges and universities provide vital services to our society and economy, they are rich treasure troves of sensitive data.
From personal information like birth records, educational history, social security numbers and financial data to intellectual property and cutting-edge research, the data held by these organizations is among the most useful to cyber criminals and advanced threat actors. And yet, these storehouses of precious data are perhaps among the least well-defended and under-funded in terms of cybersecurity.
As a result, it’s imperative that administrators and policy makers address these shortcomings as a matter of urgency.
Tamer Odeh is the Regional Director at SentinelOne in the Middle East.
Techgenstia getsmost of the enquiries from government agencies, including the Middle East
With patent-pending communication components like Software MCUs, Protocol Gateways, SFUs and Endpoints among others, the firm is expected to increase its workforce by ten times within the next six months.
Bengaluru: Techgentsia, the Kerala-based IT firm that emerged as a frontrunner in India for developing a secure on-prem solution for enterprise video conferencing solution, is expanding its workforce to spread wings abroad and be a strong competitor to Zoom.
Vconsol, the video conferencing solution of Techgentsia, is currently being deployed at government organisations in India and will be opened to the public soon but through a paid model.
Techgentsia emerged as the winner of the “Grand Innovation Challenge” conducted by the Indian government in search of a homemade alternative to Zoom.
Joy Sebastian, the CEO of Techgentsia Software Technologies, speaking to TechChannel News said its roadmap to the future has changed ever since it won the competition.
Joy Sebastian, CEO of Techgentsia Software Technologies
“We have transformed from a research and development firm to helping clients to enhance their products and developing our own products,” he said.
Road ahead looks very promising
Techgentsia today has several patent-pending communication components like software MCUs, protocol gateways, SFUs and endpoints among others.
“We have about 63 engineers working with us today and are hiring more. We are expecting the numbers to grow to about 1,000 soon,” he added.
The company has been getting a lot of enquiries and the road ahead looks very promising, he says.
“Enquiries are coming from across the world, mostly from governments, including the Middle East,” says Sebastian.
Techgentsia has been mainly providing software assistance to its clientele across the US and Europe, assisting with software-based solutions.
“We specialise in video conferencing products and solutions. When we heard about the Indian competition, we thought of giving it a try as this is what we have been doing for years, says Sebastian.
Techgentsia beat 2,000 other competitors, including major tech firms such as HCL.
The advantage of Vconsol, he says, is that it provides end-to-end AES-256 GCM encryption, which is practically unbreakable by brute force based on current computing power, making it the strongest encryption standard.
The Vconsol solution follows a compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated integer-DCT coding provides good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than most of the other standards.
It offers a superior video quality of up to 1080p Full HD and can auto adjust the video quality at the client-side, based on client’s bandwidth conditions.
The audio and video streams from all the participants get collected and mixed in the server-side and sent back to the participants as a single stream for enhanced performance and reliability.
“Our product fits perfectly into government institutions, which already have invested in creating infrastructure to handle on-prim storage and own cloud storage facilities. They have also invested heavily into installing legacy devices that support the software solution that we provide,” he said.
The solution will soon be made available to other corporates and organisations.
Sebastian said that a free video-conferencing facility for individual users, such as Zoom and Google Meet, may not be immediately on the card.
“We are working on a solution aimed at educational institutions. It will be released in a phased manner, ” says Sebastian, the son of a fisherman, who has now become an inspiration to many across the state of Kerala.
Techgentsia is currently based out of the picturesque Alappuzha district, more known for its houseboats and backwaters.
The market grew about 24% year on year to reach 11.9m units compared to 9.63m units a year ago.
Education will continue to have a strong impact on tablet performance in the third quarter as the number of projects to digitise schools expands.
Bengaluru: Samsung retains its position as the top tablet PC vendor in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) in the second quarter of this year due to work-from-home and e-learning initiatives.
According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), Samsung held 28.3 per cent compared to Apple’s 21.5 per cent. Huawei was third with 15 per cent and Lenovo was fourth with 12.1 per cent.
Samsung led the segment in the first quarter with a market share of over 24.5 per cent, followed closely by Apple at 23.8 per cent and Huawei with 12.3 per cent market share.
Tablets performed positively for the first time in six years in EMEA and posted the strongest growth since 2013, when the market had not yet reached maturity.
The consumer segment was the main driver, with 27.1 per cent year on year growth, triggered by the Covis-19 pandemic and the sudden need to acquire devices for leisure and education purposes during lockdown.
In the second quarter, the market grew about 24 per cent year on year to reach 11.9 million units compared to 9.63 million units.
“Demand in Western Europe remained healthy throughout the whole quarter as tablets emerged as a reliable and affordable alternative for consumers to meet their needs for content consumption and provide access to remote schooling during the lockdown,” said Helena Ferreira, research analyst, IDC Western Europe Personal Computing Devices.
“Backlogs created in the first quarter of the year, due to severe constraints in the supply chain, also contributed to the large volume of shipments,” she said.
The Western European tablet market grew 28.3 per cent year on year in the second quarter of the year, while Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Middle East and Africa (MEA) increased 26.9 per cent and 10.8 per cent year on year respectively.
Strong impact
Stefania Lorenz, Associate Vice-President for EMEA, said that the spike in consumer demand for tablets was driven by the lack of notebooks in the market.
In fact, tablets were not expected to be the first choice for home-schooling or home-working, but younger students and children were equipped with tablets instead of notebooks.
“The ‘forced’ working and schooling from home has pushed demand to high volumes in both CEE and MEA,” she said.
The tablet market is expected to jump 10.9% year on year in the third quarter and close 2020 with 3.7% year on year growth.
Contrary to expectations three months ago, the market did not slow down from June. The growing number of devices per household is expected to help maintain a buoyant third calendar quarter.
“Despite the easing of lockdown restrictions throughout the region, public behaviour remains cautious in general,” said Daniel Goncalves, research manager, IDC Western Europe Personal Computing Devices.
Education will continue to have a strong impact on tablet performance in the third quarter as the number of projects to digitise schools expands.
The outlook for the fourth quarter and beyond remains conservative after two quarters of strong shipments and the imminent impact of the economic downturn on consumer spending.
McKinsey says that one-tenth of all potential use cases under exploration could benefit the automotive industry, with a high impact noticeable by about 2025.
McKinsey estimates the overall market value of quantum computing services at $32b to $52b in 2035.
Dubai: Automotive players are exploring the potential of quantum computing as it comes closer to reality.
Much of the excitement relates to recent scientific leaps in the field as well as the development of the first industrial use cases, including those in the automotive and transportation sectors.
Instead of using traditional bits as information-processing units, quantum computing depends on quantum bits or “qubits”. A qubit can either be zero, one or both at the same time to perform amazing feats like slicing through encryption in seconds rather than millions of years.
However, experts at consultancy firm McKinsey & Company pointed out that OEMs and other stakeholders in the automotive sector could face some obstacles amid quantum computing translating into billions of dollars in value.
“The novelty of this technology combined with the relatively small market that has emerged thus far has prevented many automotive players from developing a clear strategy,” Ondrej Burkacky, partner at McKinsey, said.
Currently, he said that one-tenth of all potential use cases under exploration could benefit the automotive industry, with a high impact noticeable by about 2025.
“We also expect a significant economic impact of related technologies for the automotive industry, estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion, by 2030. Most of the early value-added will come from solving complex optimisation problems, including processing vast amounts of data to accelerate learning in autonomous-vehicle-navigation algorithms,” he said.
In the long term, quantum computing has the potential to have a positive effect on many areas such as vehicle routing and route optimisation, material and process research, and the security of connected driving, apart from accelerating research and development of novel technologies such as electric vehicle transition (between 2020 and 2025).
HPC is here to stay
Even though quantum computing is on its way, Lorenzo Pautasso, Consultant at McKinsey, said that the adoption at scale will not occur until five to ten years from now.
The first pilots on quantum advantage, such as Volkswagen’s traffic optimisation, are emerging today. “Complex problem solving that requires many qubits working together will become feasible in 2035 or later. Even over the long term, quantum computing will not likely replace existing high-performance computing (HPC), nor will the first attempts at value creation rely on at-scale devices that solve full problems,” Pautasso said.
McKinsey believes that successful use cases will rely heavily on hybrid schemes (using HPC for the bulk of the work and quantum computing used for analysing a subset of data) over the next decade.
Over the long-term, from 2030 onward, Pautasso said that quantum-computing applications will build on at-scale access to universal quantum computers.
Furthermore, he said the focus will likely move toward digital security and risk mitigation as players try to prevent the quantum hacking of communications in autonomous vehicles, on-board electronics, and the Industrial Internet of Things.
“The cloud-hosted navigation systems of shared-mobility fleets will improve their coverage algorithms through regular training enabled by quantum computing,” he said.
McKinsey estimates the overall market value of quantum computing services at $32 billion to $52 billion in 2035, with about 10 per cent of the value will come from spending by advanced-industry players, including automotive companies, which want to capture the benefits.
Niko Mohr, Partner at McKinsey, said that it is still unclear which companies will emerge as the top players at each step of the quantum computing value chain.
100 companies in the fray
Currently, there are about 100 companies in the space, including D-Wave, IBM, Microsoft, and Rigetti Computing, building hardware. Around 80 per cent of companies are start-ups that aim to bridge the gap in the value chain between hardware manufacturers and end-users by translating conventional problems into quantum logic and by building hybrid architectures.
Many stakeholders will shape the QC market, including hardware and software players and their enablers, Mohr said.
He added that one-third of QC companies focus on hardware development while about half of the participants developing software and one-fifth providing enabling solutions.
BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen are all investigating quantum simulation for material sciences, aiming to improve the efficiency, safety, and durability of batteries and fuel cells while Bosch focusing its research on solving partial differential problems.
Already, Mohr said that OEMs have demonstrated successful pilots in some areas, such as vehicle routing.
“With the hardware industry making rapid progress, it seems unlikely that even the world’s largest automakers will have their physical systems, at least initially. Instead, they will probably develop their algorithms and run them on the cloud-based systems of their partners,” he said.
Given the uncertain pathway forward, Burkacky said that companies must understand their full range of options regarding the technology over different time horizons.
While quantum computing will not be commercially viable at most businesses for at least ten years, he said that automotive players should still look for opportunities over the short term (the next one to two years) to scout for a position in the value chain, build research partnerships and intellectual property, assemble a small team, and establish routines.
In the short, medium, and long term, he said that companies should also scout for potential opportunities for investment or joint ventures, keeping in mind that the market has many investors focused on only a few targets and that the stakes are high.
Over the medium-term (five to ten years from now), he said that players should prioritise application development and build focused capabilities.
In the longer term, over ten years from now, he said that businesses should gain a technological edge, build a competitive advantage in focus fields and begin to expand their core capabilities.
Company is investing in both talent and infrastructure to achieve similar growth results in a much larger market opportunity.
Aims to hire more than 300 people in Saudi Arabia over the next 18-24 months.
Dubai: UAE-based online auto marketplace for used car sales – SellAnyCar – is spreading wings into Saudi Arabia with its Kayishha online platform.
The startup, in February this year, raised $35 million “Series C” round, led by Saudi Arabia’s Sanabil Investments, a subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), Gulf Investment Corporation (GIC), a sovereign financial institution-owned equally by the six GCC states, and Olayan Financing Company.
It has so far raised $50 million in the last seven years.
Kayishha will integrate the SellAnyCar.com core value proposition and advanced technology engine with an international dealer buying network and auto inspection locations to enable people across the country to sell any make, model or year car in any condition within 30 minutes at fair market value.
“We see tremendous opportunity for Kayishha to redefine how used cars are bought and sold in Saudi the same way SellAnyCar.com totally disrupted the UAE used car marketplace,” Saygin Yalcin, Founder and CEO of SellAnyCar.com and Kayishha, said. With Kayishha, the company is investing in both talent and infrastructure to achieve similar growth results in a much larger market opportunity.
Creating a level-playing field
Kayishha is investing heavily in job creation through an expansion plan that calls for hiring more than 300 people across the country over the next 18-24 months.
“We’ve taken the pain points out of the process for both the seller and buyer and effectively levelled the playing field so both parties get what they most want and need. Dealers can get a daily list of available cars to keep their lots well stocked. At the same time, the sellers get a simple, stress-free and transparent way to immediately get fair market value for their cars. Everybody wins,” Yalcin said.
In addition, the company is building its headquarters and customer service centre in Riyadh.
While Kayishha will employ both Saudi nationals and expatriates, the company will emphasise the hiring of local citizens, particularly in the customer service centre which will be staffed entirely by Saudi nationals. “We even chose the name Kayishha due to its unique meaning and popularity in local slang for pay me cash now,” Yalcin said.
