Nepal’s first robot waiter is ready for orders

“Please enjoy your meal,” says Nepal´s first robot waiter, Ginger, as she delivers a plate of steaming dumplings to a table of hungry customers.

The poor Himalayan nation is better known for its soaring mountain peaks than technological prowess, but a group of self-taught young innovators are seeking to change that.

Local start-up Paaila Technology built Ginger, a 1.5 metre (five-foot) tall robot, from scratch and programmed her to understand both English and Nepali.

The bilingual humanoid robot — named Ginger after a common ingredient in Nepali cuisine — can even crack jokes like Apple´s Siri or Amazon´s Alexa.

Three ´Gingers´ work at Naulo restaurant in the dusty capital Kathmandu, where pot-holed roads and crumbling buildings still bear the scars of a powerful earthquake that hit more than three years ago.

“This is our testing ground. We are fine tuning it with responses from our customers,” Binay Raut, CEO of the company, told AFP.

The team of 25 young engineers — Raut is the oldest at 27 — worked for months to build the robot, welding and moulding the prototype by hand in their tiny three-roomed office.

What Nepal lacks in tech infrastructure the engineers made up for in ingenuity — Ginger´s sleek-looking plastic body was painted in a neighbourhood car workshop.

Naulo opened its doors four months ago and their robot waiters have been a big draw, attracting curious customers of all ages.

Ginger, who is able to sense movement and obstacles, deftly navigates the crowded restaurant carrying trays laden with food.

Customers order via a touch screen menu fitted into the tables, and Ginger is called to the kitchen when dishes are ready.

“It was a completely new experience,” said 73-year-old Shalikram Sharma, who was born before televisions were available in Nepal.

Ginger has become quite a selfie-star and is often distracted from her work by children keen to get a photo with the sleek robot.

“They look so good. I could not believe they were made in Nepal,” said Neelam Kumar Bimali, a diner enjoying an evening meal with his family.

With its eyes on the global market, Paila Technology is in the process of patenting its design to sell at home and abroad.

The World Economic Forum recently predicted that by 2025 more than half of all jobs will be performed by robots — almost twice as many as today.

That is a trend Ginger´s creators are banking on.

At present, a few human waiters help Ginger but an upgrade is in the works that should make Naulo entirely robot-run.

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Facebook denies hiding Russian sabotage, but fires lobbying firm

WASHINGTON: Facebook on Thursday denied allegations in the New York Times that it tried to mislead the public about its knowledge of Russian misinformation ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, but severed links with a Republican consultancy.

The Times detailed obfuscation by Facebook’s top bosses on the Russia front, said the company has at times smeared critics as anti-Semitic or tried to link activists to billionaire investor George Soros, and also tried to shift public anger away toward rival tech companies.

In a statement in response, Facebook disputed “inaccuracies” in the story, but said it was ending its contract with a Republican lobbying company named in the article, Definers Public Affairs, which specializes in opposition research.

The Times, in a lengthy investigative piece based on interviews with more than 50 people both inside the company and with Washington officials, lawmakers and lobbyists, argued that Facebook’s way of dealing with crisis was to “delay, deny and deflect.”

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Cheryl Sandberg were both so bent on growing Facebook that they “ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view,” the report said.

On Russia, Zuckerberg declared in the fall of 2016 that it was “crazy” to think Facebook had been used to help Donald Trump win the US presidency, but the report said in-house experts knew this not to be the case.

In fact, the Times said, Facebook had amassed evidence for over a year of Russian activity through an investigation led by its former security chief, Alex Stamos.

But it was only belatedly that the company’s board was informed of the full extent of the meddling, the Times said.

In its statement, Facebook said it had ended its contract with Definers as of Wednesday night. It did not explain why, but insisted it had long taken the Russia factor seriously and was committed to fighting fake news.

“We’ve acknowledged publicly on many occasions -– including before Congress -– that we were too slow to spot Russian interference on Facebook, as well as other misuse,” it said.

“But in the two years since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve invested heavily in more people and better technology to improve safety and security on our services.

“While we still have a long way to go, we’re proud of the progress we have made in fighting misinformation, removing bad content and preventing foreign actors from manipulating our platform.”

– Going on the attack –

The Times said that when criticism of its belated Russia admission grew, Facebook mounted a lobbying campaign led by Sandberg, pushing negative stories about its political critics and making rival companies like Google and Apple look bad.

In July of this year, as a Facebook executive testified before a congressional committee, anti-Facebook demonstrators barged into the room and held up a sign depicting Zuckerberg and Sandberg — who are both Jewish — as the twin heads of an octopus with its tentacles around the world.

Facebook responded by lobbying a Jewish civil rights group — the Anti-Defamation League — to publicly label that criticism as anti-Semitic, the Times said.

Facebook was also said to have employed Definers to discredit activists, partly by linking them to the liberal, Jewish Soros, who has become a favored target of Trump supporters and far-right conspiracy groups.

The company’s statement said any suggestion that its own counter-offensive embraced anti-Semitic tactics was “reprehensible and untrue.”

Before and since this month’s midterm elections, which saw the Democrats retake control of the House of Representatives, Facebook has shut down dozens of accounts on its own platform and on Instagram which it said were aimed at influencing the vote.

The world’s most popular social media platform has been on the back foot for months, including over the allegation that data from millions of Facebook users was abused by the consultancy Cambridge Analytica to help drive Trump to the White House.

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