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30 January 2022
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Taco Bell and the reinvention of Drive-Thru concept

Reading Time: 3 minutes

by Lev Hladush

It is safe to say that Covid-19 pandemic changed the way we live forever, but probably the biggest changes affected the restaurants and food consumption. A lot of people prefer taking out to eating in, especially if it is a fast food chain restaurant, not a regular. It leaves them with two options – order food digitally with the help of official or third-party applications like Uber Eats and then wait for the delivery straight to their place. But initial spike in popularity of such method is decreasing, because more and more customers are unsatisfied with the cost of delivery fees. Actually, both customers AND restaurants are unsatisfied – restaurants are charged too, and sometimes their profit is cut by more than two times because of the fees. However, we also have a second option – Drive Thrus. A record breaking 90% of sales in McDonalds USA is made at the drive thru windows. And fast food restaurants are doing a lot to improve the efficiency of this method and to shorten the wait time. Many QSR(quick serving restaurants) are reducing the number of menu items present on the display or invest in permanent structure renovations of their buildings to add more driving lanes and reduce the sitting space in halls. And out of all the companies, Taco Bell are the ones who are embodying the most fundamental changes.

Firstly, they are opening the so-called Taco Bell Go Mobile locations, which will get rid of dining room alltogether, resulting in a building that is 47% smaller than a traditional Taco Bell restaurant.

But much more interesting thing is their first of its kind restaurant Taco Bell hopes to build in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. The franchisee claims that Taco Bell Defy is a concept “so different that it has never been constructed anywhere before.” There is no dining room. There are designated curbside pickup spots for mobile orders. And it has four drive-thru lanes(one lane for over-sized vehicles and three lanes passing directly beneath where the kitchen is, with orders getting lowered to the customers on a special elevator system. What is even more impressive is that Taco Bell is willing to cooperate with other fast food chains, to work as the cooking facility for them to prepare food on the same kitchen for different companies as a ‘ghost kitchen’. If it is successful, then they can enlarge their production capacities simply by prolonging the building itself, thus creating more space for more driving lanes for more customers. So the whole process is like a snow ball, or an avalanche.

It would also lower the costs of delivery, because instead of going to different places for different restaurants, the delivery driver can pick up all the delivery order from one window. Plus if the place becomes large enough it can even launch it’s own app-delivery service and reject third-party delivery apps alltogether.

Other commercial businesses could use this concept as well. The highest cost of delivery for companies like Amazon is the ‘last mile’, when packages are shipped directly to the home address of client. So having such a contactless distribution center capable of serving personal vehicles would come in handy for grocery stores, furniture stores and, in general, multi-purpose companies like Amazon or IKEA.

All in all, even though Taco Bell Defy is yet to open(approximately it will happen this summer), if everything goes the right way, we can expect that once again certain shopping habits and aspects that we were and are used to will transform drastically.

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbuoZYZLipc&t=760s&ab_channel=TheFoodTheorists
https://www.foodandwine.com/news/taco-bell-defy-restaurant-drive-thru-concept
https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/taco-bell-franchisee-plans-2-story-store-with-4-drive-thru-lanes-in-minneso/594928/

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16 January 2022
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Grammarly – a helping hand at improving your English grammar

Reading Time: 3 minutes

by Lev Hladush

Grammarly is both the name of San-Francisco based company and their main product – a communication assistant that helps correct grammar and typos in word processing to any internet user.

What is especially exciting about Grammarly is that the work of their assistant relies heavily on Artificial Intelligence. Thus making it a particular object of interest for us, students of Management and Artificial Intelligence program. Grammarly uses AI to help millions of people worldwide make their communication clear, effective and error-free. Everyone knows that communication is key to both personal and professional success and the mission of the company to improve lives by improving communication. The big vision behind it is to help people articulate their thoughts in a way that’s clear and effective, in a way that makes them understood as intended.

Core to this mission has been the work in natural language processing (NLP). They rely on their team’s deep expertise in NLP, machine learning (ML) and AI. The way it works is something like this:

Broadly speaking, an artificial intelligence system mimics the way a human would perform a task. AI systems achieve this through different techniques. Machine learning, for example, is a particular methodology of AI that involves teaching an algorithm to perform tasks by showing it lots of examples rather than by providing a series of rigidly predefined steps.

Grammarly’s AI system combines machine learning with a variety of natural language processing approaches. Human language has many levels at which it can be analyzed and processed: from characters and individual words through grammatical structures and sentences, even paragraphs or full texts. Natural language processing is a branch of AI that involves teaching machines to understand and process human language (English, for instance) and perform useful tasks, such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, essay scoring, and, in our case, writing enhancement.

An important part of building an AI system is training it. AIs are kind of like children in that way. Kids learn how to behave by watching the people around them and by positive or negative reinforcement. As with kids, if you want your AI system to grow up to be helpful and functional, you need to be careful about what you expose it to and how you intervene when it gets things wrong.

The first step is choosing high-quality training data for your system to learn from. In Grammarly’s case, that data may take the form of a text corpus—a huge collection of sentences that human researchers have organized and labeled in a way that AI algorithms can understand. If you want your AI to learn the patterns of proper comma usage, for example, you need to show it sentences with incorrect commas, so it can learn what a comma mistake looks like. And you need to show it sentences with good comma usage, so it learns how to fix comma mistakes when it finds them.

AI systems also need feedback from humans. When lots of users hit “ignore” on a particular suggestion, for example, Grammarly’s computational linguists and researchers make adjustments to the algorithms behind that suggestion to make it more accurate and helpful.

Just like people, AI does sometimes make errors. It’s especially possible when an AI is facing a situation it doesn’t have much experience with. Grammarly is trained on naturally written text, so it’s good at spotting issues that occur naturally when people write. It’s less good at handling sentences where mistakes have been deliberately inserted because they often don’t resemble naturally occurring mistakes.

Sources: Grammarly.com

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31 December 2021
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No users – only “useds”

Reading Time: 2 minutes

by Lev Hladush

Richard Matthew Stallman, an American free software movement activist and programmer, has said that social media sites don’t have users – they have useds. The primary reasons for sites like Facebook to exist is to generate revenue for the company and they have two main ways of doing so. First way is by using their webpage as a terminal for advertisements. Second way is gathering as much data about their consumers or users as possible and then selling to any interested company.

In the first case, to maximize revenue, users are manipulated to stay online, giving as much eyeball time to the ads as possible. Algorithms that allow specific targeting in order to cause strong emotions to keep people engaged, dopamine-inducing things like count of your subscribers or likes on your posts. All of it has the sole purpose – consuming more of your time. Thus, converting your time into profit(don’t forget that 98% of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertisers)

In the second case, things get a bit trickier. Facebook doesn’t sell your data directly. Instead, what they do sell is access to a platform that makes it as easy as possible for advertisers to reach you based on your interests. And creation of Metaverse(which has already been discussed in numerous posts previously on technoblog, so I believe there is no need to explain what is it exactly) allows to gather even more data. And more data makes good business sense. But there are (in my opinion, well-founded) fears that the new data we create in the Metaverse could lead to a privacy nightmare. For example, Facebook made a big deal about the fact that it’s not going to be doing facial recognition on photos that you upload to Facebook anymore. But it hasn’t said it’s not going to do facial recognitions in Metaverse. For sure, generating more data is not necessarily harmful, but it could give companies like Facebook an unprecedented amount of control.

Knowing this all, the scenario shown in this video seems quite believable.

Sources used:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daoCwHARvGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bolyiGMcjBs&t=263s

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12 December 2021
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Fab Labs and the wonders of digital fabrication

Reading Time: 4 minutes

by Lev Hladush

In my previous article, UNIT.CITY AND THE FUTURE OF TECHNOPARKS, I briefly mentioned FabLab Fabricator – a lab of rapid prototyping and R&D. At that time I didn’t know that around 2,000 more such laboratories already exist in the world. This topic seemed to be interesting and worthy of further research. And after closer examination, I am ready to say that fab labs can change the way we perceive production of goods completely.

So what is “fab lab”?

The idea of fab labs was conceived by inventor and scientist Neil Gershenfeld, who is a professor at MIT and the director of MIT’s Center of Bits and Atoms. His idea was a simple one: to provide the environment, skills, advanced materials and technology to make things cheaply and quickly anywhere in the world, and to make this available on a local basis to entrepreneurs, students, artists, small businesses and in fact, anyone who wants to create something new or bespoke. The goal is to personalise fabrication.

Neil Gershenfelfd(on the left)

The first ever FabLab could provide the number of most-used tools and processest, including 3-D printing, scanning, and design; laser cutting, machining, molding, and casting; and electronics production, assembly, and programming. 

Nowadays, the range is much wider. Flexible manufacturing equipment within a fab lab may include:

  • Mainly, a rapid prototyper: typically a 3D printer of plastic or plaster parts
  • 3-axis CNC machines: 3 or more axes, computer-controlled subtractive milling or turning machines
  • Printed circuit board milling or etching: two-dimensional, high precision milling to create circuit traces in pre-clad copper boards
  • Microprocessor and digital electronics design, assembly, and test stations
  • Cutters, for sheet material: laser cutter, plasma cutter, water jet cutter, knife cutter.

In his interview with Discover Magazine on the question what personal fabrication might be useful for, Gershenfeld said, “There is a surprising need for emergent technologies in many of the least developed places on the planet. While our needs might be fairly well met, there are billions of people on the planet whose needs are not. Their problems don’t need incremental tweaks in current technology, but a revolution”.

But even for the conventional businesses there are a lot of benefits to use fab labs. From the managerial and economical point of view it includes: reducing product cost, optimizing production process, getting your employees acquainted with modern technologies. Fab lab is a creative environment for startups, entrepreneurs, innovators, enthusiasts, craftsmen, artists, designers, engineers, scientists. While creativity can’t be measured in money, it is certainly a big plus for the company. And these are just the main points, the list goes on and on.

A fine example – FabLab Fabricator

FabLab Fabrcator is a fabrication laboratory located in Kyiv, Ukriane.

They haven’t been on the market for a long time, but they already have a number of customers, mainly innovative and intriguing start-ups(such as nuka, PetCube and RAWR).

nuka – eternal pencil that comes with rewritable notebook, PetCube – smart home camera for monitoring pets and RAWR – smart collar.

The core distinction between FabLab Fabricator and other companies in this sphere is that FabLab Fabricator focuses not only on production. They have three explicit goals:

1. Education

FabLab Fabricator conduct different educational courses, both fee-paying and free-of-charge. Level of complexity also varies, so it does not matter if people who take these courses are familiar with the such processes as 3D printing, laser cutting or wood carving or not. Anyone can find something for themselves.

2. R&D

Even supposing that you don’t have a project ready for production immediately, the R&D team scientists possess skills needed to translate it to reality in a month or two.

3. Small-scale 3D printing

This advantage is not unique to FabLab Fabricator. It is common among many the fabrication laboratories around the globe. Yet, it is still a strong argument backing the choice of this particular type of production facility.

What’s with the vision for the future of fabrication?

More or less, the whole concept is already established. The future steps for Neil Gershenfeld and his team is to beat the last major issue – heavy reliance on a global supply chain for their inputs – fabrication labs can’t yet make things like integrated circuits or precision bearings. The solution they have is extremely simple but very original. Rapid prototyping of rapid prototyping so that a fab lab can make a fab lab. After that, citing the Neil once again: “We’re replacing additive and subtractive processes with assembly and disassembly to create the full range of technologies from a small set of building blocks, as happens in biological systems. And, finally, we’re eliminating the distinction between machines and materials by coding the construction of self-reproducing systems.”

Of my own, I would also add that it is important to expand the network of laboratories. Ideally having one in each major city. All in all, it is not hard to understand that all business are part of interlinked system, forming the local and global economics like a clockwork. Access to instruments, knowledge and teaching of practical and technical skills provided by fab labs will boost local makers and start-ups courage to think and create their own projects, which in return will promote economical growth.

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24 November 2021
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Unit.City and the future of technoparks

Reading Time: 3 minutes

by Lev Hladush

Logo is very simple, yet practical

Unit.City is the first innovation park(also known as technoparks, science parks or technopoles) in Ukraine. As description from the official website says:

UNIT.City is a prototype for the city of the future. An ecosystem that promotes innovative entrepreneurship and research. As well as the creation of companies successful in the global market.

Advanced technologies of urban infrastructure are tested and implemented here, in particular in such areas as transport and micromobility, unmanned logistics, energy efficiency, automated security, telecommunications, landscaping, and the like. By collaborating with promising startups, we create an innovative environment where the best ideas about comfort and functionality are brought to life.

The key difference from the most of technoparks around the world(which, because of strong bonds with governments and universites, are rarely interested in actual demands of market) is that Unit.City is completely private initiative created by Vasyl Khmelnytsky – a Ukrainian businessman and founder of holding company UFuture. Unit.City is specifically targeting two types of customers: Firstly, ambitious start-ups made by young entrepreneurs with the prospects of their development and possible future profits, thus improving the economical situation in the country and preventing “brain drain”. Secondly, the people who work in such compaines themselves. The idea is to create a space, where they can learn and work, create and invent, interact witch each other, spend spare time and live life to the fullest without the need to leave the technopark.

The architectural concept of UNIT.City was developed by the Polish company Wojciechowski Architekci in collaboration with the Dutch landscape architect Hiroki Matsuura.

Examples of companies

The two examples of companies, which are already using the services of Unit.City are Sensorama and FabLab Fabricator.

Sensorama specializes in creating virtual and augmented reality applications. They are working on a educational solutions for industrial firms to help their employers be more effective and involved in a working process. The company is able to provide online trainings with new equipment to make sure that workers know how to deal with it before letting them to use real analogues and much more.

FabLab Fabricator is a lab of rapid prototyping and R&D. They develop and produce prototypes, mainly for small start-ups, with technologies such as 3D printing, laser cutting, textile lab and CNC milling. The terms are short, the price is relatively cheap, and the scale of production can be really small, which is important if your company is not financially big enough to manufacture prototypes in large quantities.

How Unit.City will affect the concept of technoparks?

The experience of Unit.City shows us that technoparks serve as great opportunity both as business project to make money and as strategically vital element of developing country’s prosperity. It also boosts the commitment of youth, encouraging them to either becoming entrepreneurs or creators – scientists, engineers, programmers etc. Sooner or later the case of first ukrainian technopark will be noticed by other nations, and similar facilities will be established. The perfect outcome would be international cooperation of such institutions. If this happens, I can not even imagine the resulting growth in technology and overall prosperity of humanity, but I am sure it would be very impressive.

“It’s not that we use technology, we live technology.” – Godfrey Reggio

What can go wrong?

Despite all it’s sweet promises, there are some possible drawbacks for Unit.City.

Foremost, it is the country – Ukraine. The political and economical situation in Ukraine is quite unstable. This can scare off potential foreign investors, and even kill the desire of local businessmen to finance such projects, because instead of risking of all your funds they can relocate their assets to more stable countries in western world.

But even the idea of commercial technopark might not be as promising as in theory. The success of the whole concept relies heavily on the large number of participating companies and the good relationships between them. And this is not something you can be entirely sure of.

So, all in all, there is more positive than negative in Unit.City, but will it be triumph or failure – only future will show.

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