A precision arm for miniature robots

Until now, microscopic robotic systems have had to make do without arms. Now researchers have developed an ultrasonically actuated glass needle that can be attached to a robotic arm. This lets them pump and mix minuscule amounts of liquid and trap particles.

‘Artificial intuition’ delivers better answers to thorny parking-lot optimization problem

Assessing the optimal location for parking lots is surprisingly mathematically challenging, and a subset of a classic computational complexity problem with far wider applications. A team of data scientists has combined quantum annealing with a process that attempts to mimic the underlying processes of human intuition in a technique that delivers a solution accuracy that’s …

Smart approaches to allocations in enterprise financial and operational planning

An allocation is the process of shifting overhead costs throughout an organization. One company might want to distribute costs across business units or departments. Another might want to assign costs to individual products or projects. Fundamentally, the smartest approach to allocations is about properly assigning costs to the areas that benefit from those costs. When …

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Multilingual customer support translation made easy on Salesforce Service Cloud using Amazon Translate

This post was co-authored with Mark Lott, Distinguished Technical Architect, Salesforce, Inc. Enterprises that operate globally are experiencing challenges sourcing customer support professionals with multi-lingual experience. This process can be cost-prohibitive and difficult to scale, leading many enterprises to only support English for chats. Using human interpreters for translation support is expensive, and infeasible since …