The International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health (IJCMPH) has recently published a research on Sightsavers India’s RAAHI Programme. RAAHI (National Truckers Eye Health Programme) stands as one of the biggest eye health initiatives in India , catering to the needs of the overworked truck drivers’ community. With over 9 million truck drivers in India playing a significant role in freight transportation, addressing their unmet health needs, particularly concerning vision, has become imperative.

The publication of this research in the International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health (IJCMPH) signifies a significant milestone. Peer-reviewed journals like IJCMPH undergo stringent evaluation processes by field experts, ensuring the credibility and quality of the research presented.

Through a mixed-methods approach, this research delves into the programme’s achievements, challenges, and lessons learned. Having screened over 540,000 beneficiaries across 54 locations, RAAHI has significantly contributed to raising awareness about prevalent health conditions and providing essential eye care services. It primarily focuses on truck drivers, addressing their unmet eye health needs and raising awareness about prevalent health conditions.

Feedback from beneficiaries highlighted overall satisfaction with RAAHI services, emphasizing the programme’s structured approach and immediate access to quality spectacles. Beneficiaries found the registration, screening, and spectacle distribution processes quick and easy.

The programme’s success in providing essential eye care services to truck drivers is crucial for road safety.Correcting even low refractive errors in truckers can help minimize adverse events, highlighting the importance of initiatives like RAAHI in ensuring safe driving practices.

“We are pleased to share the findings of our research, which represents the significance of the RAAHI programme in addressing the unmet eye health needs of truck drivers in India. Our comprehensive study reveals the impact of RAAHI in screening beneficiaries, providing essential eye care services, and raising awareness about the importance of eye health in improving road safety.

Through collaborative efforts and sustained initiatives like RAAHI, we aim to continue enhancing the well-being of truck drivers and promoting road safety across India’s transportation networks. We extend our gratitude to all stakeholders, including implementing partners and funders, for their support in making RAAHI a success.”— Authors behind the Research (Dr Ananta Basudev Sahu, Jatin Tiwari, Prasannakumar P. N., R. N. Mohanty)

Spectrum Instrumentation presents a new open-source Python package (“spcm”) that is now available for the current line of all Spectrum Instrumentation test and measurement products. The new package makes the programming of all 200+ instruments, offering sampling rates from 5 MS/s to 10 GS/s, faster and easier. Python, popular for its simplicity, versatility and flexibility, boasts an extensive collection of libraries and frameworks (such as NumPy) that significantly accelerates programming development cycles.

The new spcm package allows users to take full advantage of the Python language by providing a high-level Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) interface that is specifically designed for the Spectrum Instrumentation Digitizer, AWG and Digital I/O products. It includes the full source code as well as a number of detailed examples. Available on GitHub, spcm is free of charge under the MIT license.

Spectrum’s Python package safely handles the automatic opening and closing of cards, groups of cards and Ethernet instruments, as well as the allocation of memory for transferring data to and from these devices. All the device specific functionality is capsulated in easy-to-use classes. This includes clock and trigger settings, hardware channel settings, card synchronization, direct memory access (DMA) and product features such as Block Averaging, DDS and Pulse Generator.

The package supports the use of real-world physical quantities and units (e.g. “10 MHz”) enabling the user to directly program driver settings in their preferred unit system. This removes the need for tedious manual conversions to cryptic API settings. Moreover, this package also includes support for calculations with NumPy and Matplotlib, allowing the user to handle data coming from, or going to, the products with the vast toolbox provided by those packages. Detailed examples can be found in the GitHub repository.

Installing the package is easy, thanks to its availability in the pip repository. Simply install Python and then the package with a single command: $ pip install spcm

Users can include the Spectrum Instrumentation Python package in their own programs, or fork to the repository to add more functionality. The package is directly maintained by Spectrum engineers and updates are released regularly offering bug-fixes and new features.

The example in the photo shows the opening of the first analog-output card (AWG) and programming of a simple 10 MHz sine-wave output using the DDS option.

The Spectrum Python repository is found under: https://github.com/SpectrumInstrumentation/spcm

Titan Raga, a brand, known for its beautiful collection of timepieces and thoughtful narratives celebrating women, announces the launch of its latest campaign, ‘Beautiful Together’. Featuring the dynamic, Alia Bhatt, the TVC is a heartwarming representation of the enduring bond of sisterhood.

The campaign draws insight from the evolving role of beauty, a paradigm shift from fueling competition among women in the past; transforming into a shared experience that fosters discreet yet significant support among them, today. From creating connections over beauty hacks to extending support and collaborating with each other to shatter barriers across various domains, sisterhood is a thriving reality.

Taking a light-hearted and buoyant tone, Alia Bhatt is seen interacting with women around her. From complimenting a stranger in an elevator, sharing a tender moment of exchanging a Raga timepiece with a friend to enhance her attire, and to supporting another facing a fashion mishap at a social event. In true spirit, the campaign exudes warmth and emphasizes the value of female bonds. The voiceover captures the core thought with “Humaari khubsurati mein ek dusre ka haath hai,” shining a spotlight on beauty as a catalyst that evokes a sense of camaraderie, comfort, and community among women.

The campaign raises a toast to all the remarkable women who enable, support, and cheer each other on! It is a celebration of sisterhood, because we are ‘Beautiful Together’.

The TVC is now live 

Aparna Ravi, Marketing Head, Titan Watches said, “Raga as a brand has consistently been driving deep and meaningful narratives about women. ‘Beautiful Together’ is our conscious effort to recognize a bond that’s often overlooked – the incredible strength and support women find in each other. We are thrilled to have Alia Bhatt on board, who perfectly epitomizes the spirit of sisterhood. We believe this campaign will resonate with our audience and inspire them to celebrate the amazing women in their lives.”

“Titan Raga has always fronted conversations that genuinely speak to women. Raga watches are designed to evoke beauty and femininity and these are pillars of all our Raga campaigns. Today femininity is evolving from being about individual choices to a collective hurrah. Women feel fulfilment and joy in celebrating each other not just for the big wins but also for the little things that earlier would not be noticed. This beautiful spirit of sisterhood is captured in our new campaign in which we see how the tiniest of moments can also become uplifting when women simply come together.  We have deliberately chosen instances that are highly relatable like lending a helping hand in making wardrobe choices to paying a compliment to another woman in a trial room. The brand platform Beautiful Together resonated with our brand ambassador Alia Bhatt, known for her tightly knit circle of girlfriends and the infectious positivity they collectively generate. The essence of sisterhood she herself embodies made her the ideal candidate to advocate this heartwarming message, stated Tithi Ghosh, President and Head of Office, Ogilvy South.

Cisco today announced a new virtual appliance for its AppDynamics On-Premises application observability offering, enabling customers to use a self-hosted observability solution built on AI-powered intelligence for anomaly detection and root cause analysis, application security, and SAP monitoring. The latest innovations allow IT operations teams to detect application performance anomalies faster and with greater accuracy, protect against security vulnerabilities and attacks, and maintain the performance of SAP applications and business processes, all while retaining full control of their observability deployment. Cisco also announced AppDynamics Flex, a new licensing model that provides optionality for customers to choose between self-hosted and SaaS observability offerings and support them through the transition from self-hosted to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) when the time is right for their business.

While there has been a significant increase in demand for SaaS observability solutions in recent years, for many organizations, self-hosted observability solutions remain in high demand. Self-hosted observability – also referred to as customer-managed observability – includes on-premises deployments or cloud-based deployments where the customer retains control of all the data and associated operations. These needs are typically driven by regulations for data residency and sensitive data protection, and in geographies without a local SaaS point-of-presence. For companies in industries including the public sector, finance, manufacturing, healthcare and retail, the option to have cutting-edge, self-hosted application observability solutions ensures that they can continue to provide end-to-end monitoring of their most critical business systems, in turn, enabling them to deliver market-differentiating digital experiences to their customers and users.

“Many of our customers continue to rely on self-hosted observability to manage business critical applications, and we are thrilled to deliver these AI-powered innovations as part of Cisco AppDynamics On-Premises for the first time,” said Ronak Desai, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability. “Customers can now use this virtual appliance together with our Smart Agent capability to deploy new innovations faster and simplify lifecycle operations.”

The new innovations include:

• AI-Powered Detection and Remediation with Cognition Engine: Improve the accuracy of anomaly detection by leveraging dynamic baseline performance to understand what normal looks like against historical trend data, in turn reducing the mean time to identify (MTTI) for application performance issues. Performance issues can then be resolved faster with root cause analysis and automated transaction diagnostics – analyzing a continuous stream of transaction snapshots that capture events used in proactive performance troubleshooting. This enables IT operations to home in on the problem area and make use of intelligent suggestive issue identification.
• Application Security: Cisco Secure Application allows customers to locate and highlight application security vulnerabilities with application context, and then leverage an automated business risk score that combines application intelligence and security intelligence, allowing them to prioritize their response by business impact. The addition of Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) enables organizations to defend the business from exploits that target application vulnerabilities.
• A Resilient SAP Landscape: Customers can ensure service availability and performance with full-stack observability for on-premises SAP and non-SAP environments, surfacing insights to address performance issues before they impact the business. Cisco brings resiliency into the SAP landscape with application performance, augmented by AI-powered intelligence for the Java stack, enabling SAP developers and BASIS admins to ensure service availability, align performance with SAP business outcomes, and discover SAP related security vulnerabilities to mitigate risk.
• Self-Hosted Offerings in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure: In addition to on-premises deployments, customers can manage their own observability deployments in AWS or Microsoft Azure by using the Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) or Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) images of the virtual appliance. This is valuable when a SaaS instance is not available in the country where a sensitive workload needs to be monitored, or when a customer wants to retain full control of the observability solution.

The Transition to SaaS
As digital transformation strategies mature and the nature of observable workloads change, some IT teams will find themselves looking to garner operational efficiency by moving some or all of their observed workloads from the purview of a self-hosted observability solution to a SaaS solution. To help customers on this journey, Cisco is introducing AppDynamics Flex Licensing, designed to simplify the transition to AppDynamics SaaS. Cisco AppDynamics Flex Licensing allows organizations to value-shift their chosen on-premises observability investments to the corresponding SaaS offer as their requirements evolve, while reusing the same agent fleet.

“Many workloads today remain on-premises due to low-latency requirements, high cost, or higher-security requirements of performance-intensive computing workloads, especially for the government and finance sectors,” said Stephen Elliot, Group Vice President for IDC. “Many technology executives are interested in on-premises, self-hosted observability solutions.  Incorporating AI to automatically detect anomalies and suspected root causes in application performance is a huge step forward for on-premises customers who prefer to retain full control of their observability deployment.”
“As a partner for Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability, SG Solutions is committed to helping our joint customers with observability solutions for their applications wherever their business regulation requires,” said Jindřich Kasal, CEO, SG Solutions. “As many of our customers continue to have requirements for self-hosted observability, we are excited for the new virtual appliance for Cisco AppDynamics On-Premises and the value it brings to our customers in AI-driven intelligence and security.”

• Employs AI in self-hosted observability deployments to automatically detect anomalies and suspected root causes in application performance, significantly reducing the time required to identify and resolve issues.
• Detects and protects against application vulnerabilities and attacks, while business risk observability allows prioritization of the most significant software threats based on their likelihood of impacting business.
• Builds greater resiliency into on-premises SAP landscapes ensuring service availability, application performance and improved business outcomes while also addressing SAP security risks.

New AI-Driven Capabilities Automate Anomaly Detection, Accelerate Root Cause Analysis and Secure Business-Critical Applications

CrowdStrike (Nasdaq: CRWD) announced an expanded strategic partnership with Google Cloud to power Mandiant’s Incident Response (IR) and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services leveraging the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform and the Google Cloud Security Operations platform. The partnership focuses on CrowdStrike’s market-leading Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) and Exposure Management solutions.

Cloud intrusions have grown 75% in the past year and adversaries are faster than ever, breaking into customer environments in as little as two minutes. To protect against modern cloud threats, customers need a holistic, intuitive managed security solution that eliminates complexity and serves as a force multiplier for security and DevOps teams. The combination of AI-powered Google cloud services and Google Cloud’s Security Operations platform with proactive threat hunting capabilities alongside CrowdStrike’s industry-leading protection delivers the outcomes customers need to stop breaches across multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments.

“When it comes to stopping breaches in the most critical moments of attack, CrowdStrike is the proven and recognized technology of choice. Our single platform, single agent architecture delivers the industry’s best protection while being the easiest and fastest to deploy,” said Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer, CrowdStrike. “Our expanded strategic alliance with Google Cloud is a watershed moment for cybersecurity: powering Mandiant’s industry-leading Incident Response and Managed Detection and Response services with Falcon in concert with Google Cloud’s Security Operations platform – integrating the best technology with world-class expertise, giving organizations access to the protection they need to stop breaches.”

“CrowdStrike has been a strategic technology partner for both Mandiant and Google Cloud for many years,” said Dom Delfino, VP Global Sales, Google Cloud Security. “We’re excited to deepen the collaboration across Google Cloud Security with enhanced threat intelligence sharing, a tighter integration between CrowdStrike and Google Chronicle, our Hyperscale Security Operations platform and Mandiant Managed Defense, and the ability to deploy CrowdStrike Falcon to support Mandiant Consulting.”

Lighthouse Learning (formerly known as EuroKids International), India’s leading Early Childhood and K-12 Education Group, and University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland, announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a 5-year partnership today. This partnership marks a significant milestone in facilitating cross-border collaboration, signifying a pivotal moment in advancing shared academic endeavors.

The partnership aims to launch the collaborative program facilitating a comprehensive exchange of knowledge and expertise between Lighthouse Learning and University College Dublin (UCD), fostering a dynamic environment conducive to mutual learning and communication. Through this program, administrators, faculty, staff, and students from both the institutions will engage in collaborative endeavors, promoting cooperation and enabling invaluable cross-cultural exchange. Moreover, the program is meticulously crafted to equip students with the essential skills and knowledge required to thrive in the dynamic landscape of the global economy, while also preparing them for higher education pathways.

The MoU was signed by Prajodh Rajan, Co-Founder and Group CEO, Lighthouse Learning, and Professor Orla Feely, President, University College Dublin (UCD). University College Dublin is one of the Europe’s leading research-intensive universities and is recognised for its renowned expertise in advanced fields such as AI and cancer biology, among others. It is also known for its guided research projects, which will be extended to the students of Lighthouse Learning as a part of this partnership. Additionally, UCD will also conduct Summer School programs for the students to further enhance their academic growth and exploration.

Through this partnership, Lighthouse Learning students will benefit from a diverse array of opportunities aimed at enriching their academic journey. These include occasional guest lectures, workshop activities, and masterclasses delivered by esteemed faculty from University College Dublin (UCD). Additionally, UCD’s Recruitment & Admissions representatives will conduct sessions across all Lighthouse Learning schools network, offering guidance and promoting UCD as a premier study destination among students and parents. Furthermore, an annual knowledge workshop will be conducted, tailored for all Lighthouse Learning school counselors, aimed at equipping them with the necessary tools to guide students through their transition to university abroad. This workshop will also highlight program and scholarship opportunities offered at UCD.

Speaking about the partnership, Prajodh Rajan, Co-Founder and Group CEO, Lighthouse Learning, said, “We are extremely delighted to announce our partnership with University College Dublin, one of the most renowned and prestigious universities in Ireland. This partnership marks a pivotal moment for Lighthouse Learning, underscoring our commitment to providing unparalleled educational opportunities for both faculty and students. As we navigate an ever-evolving global landscape, this collaboration not only enriches our academic offerings but also equips our faculty and students with invaluable resources, cutting-edge research opportunities, specialised programs, and global perspectives. Together with UCD, we are committed to fostering a culture of innovation, inclusivity, and excellence in education.”

Professor Jeremy Simpson, Dean of Science at University College Dublin, present at the signing in Mumbai, added, “We are thrilled to embark on this transformative partnership with Lighthouse Learning. This collaboration represents a significant step towards fostering global educational excellence. By joining forces, we can leverage our collective expertise to create enriching opportunities for students and faculty alike, particularly focused in the STEM areas. Together, we are committed to nurturing a vibrant academic community, fostering innovation, and making a lasting impact on the educational landscape. This partnership signifies our shared dedication to pushing the boundaries of knowledge and preparing students to excel in an increasingly competitive world.”

Tessolve, a global provider of silicon and systems solutions for next-generation products, has collaborated with Renesas to advance their systems solution offering in Industrial market segment by introducing a new addition to its SMARC module portfolio based on Renesas’s high performance RZ/V2H MPU, enabling vision AI and real time control abilities.

Tessolve’s SMARC SOM compatible with SMARC standard 2.1 version is based on RZ/V2H MPU which incorporates four Arm® Cortex®-A55 CPU cores along with two Cortex-R8 cores, one Cortex-M33 and a dedicated AI Accelerator: DRP-AI3 capable of 8 TOPS/dense and 80 TOPS/sparse, runs on Yocto Linux and supports up to 16GB Low power DDR4 RAM and up to 64GB flash. Additionally, the module features high-speed interfaces including PCIe®, USB 3.2, SDIO, MIPI CSI, MIPI DSI and Gigabit Ethernet. The module is available in Industrial temperature grade.

The combination of these powerful cores enables efficient management of both vision AI and real-time control tasks. With lower power consumption and the elimination of the need for fans and other cooling components, the RZ/V2H is an ideal solution for autonomous robots, smart cameras, and machine vision in factory automation.

“Tessolve’s SMARC SOM, based on Renesas RZ/V2H MPU, aims to deliver an AI-powered computer vision system with a 360° surround view solution to the Industrial, robotics, and transportation markets, accelerating OEMs’ time to market. The computer vision system solution supports up to 4 camera inputs, enabling 360° surround view capabilities, making it ideal for demanding applications with AI requirements of the future. Built using Tessolve’s 3-D product engineering principle, which stands for Development platform, Deployable system, or Derivative solution, our system solution can be adopted by OEMs either ‘as is’ or can be customized for their needs. Tessolve accelerates OEMs’ time to market with exceptional ODM abilities, offering white labelling as well,” said Kiran Kumar Nagendra, AVP- Embedded Systems, Tessolve.

Technology collaboration delivers ready-to-integrate system on module & computer vision system solution for OEMs, streamlining product realization cycle

Amazon.in, with Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled, a leading non-profit organization committed to empowering persons with disabilities organized a unique cricket match for the persons with visual impairment in Bengaluru, today. The event was held as part of Amazon’s Global month of volunteering being observed in May, demonstrating the spirit of inclusivity and empowerment.

As part of the initiative, the team participated in two matches where the first featured a mix of Amazon volunteers and visually impaired players, while the second was between Amazon volunteers and persons with visual impairment. Samarthnam team was awarded the winning trophy and a cash prize of INR 1 lakh for their exceptional performance, sportsmanship and refined skills demonstrated throughout the matches.

Among others, one of the distinguishing features of this match was the use of a specially designed cricket ball embedded with sound-generating components to aid players with visual impairments, making the game more accessible and engaging for them.

While Global Month of Volunteering is being observed in May 2024 through multiple volunteering engagement initiatives across various geographies in India, Amazon remains dedicated to fostering a culture of volunteerism and community engagement throughout the year. The spirit of giving back continues to thrive within company’s culture, and are committed to making an enduring positive impact in the communities it serves.

The Global Month of Volunteering (GMV) is an annual global event where Amazon’s leaders, employees, partners and even some customers all over the world come together to support causes that can make a difference. In its third year in India, GMV 2024 focuses on Amazon’s key themes of education, food security, sustainability, and women empowerment.

With its three-fold mission of educating, inspiring and connecting, GMV 2024 will run through May 2024. Amazon has curated over 150+ volunteering events across India in partnership with over 40+ non-profits including DonateKart, Rosy Blue Foundation, Way For Life, GIVE Foundation, Bhumi, Robin Hood Army, CRY, Helping 2 hands, Indian Roots Foundation, Ramp My city, Vedanshi Foundation and KHUSHI.

• A cash prize of INR 1 Lakh was awarded to the team of Samarthanam Trust on winning the match
• Innovative use of sound-generating cricket ball to guide the visually impaired players on the field
• The match was held as part of Amazon’s Global Month of Volunteering being observed in May 2024
• Amazon India in collaboration with Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled spotlighted empowerment of the PWDs through sports