Skills for self employment

This small scale, explorative research study looks at the hitherto relatively under-researched question of the role of skills and training in the development of self employment. It draws on a literature review, data analysis from the Labour Force Survey, and a series of expert interviews. We summarise here the main findings from the research and, where appropriate, we highlight possible policy implications of those findings, although given the small scale, exploratory nature of the study, some of these issues would benefit from further investigation(and the report highlights possible avenues for new research to fill these gaps: see section 6.7). In thinking about policy we do not, for the most part, recommend specific interventions. Rather we highlight the kinds of considerations that policy-makers should be aware of when designing interventions" -- page i (Evidence Report). "This Annex presents an analysis of Labour Force Survey data, to provide descriptive statistics on the nature and extent of self-employment in the UK" -- page 1 (Annex)

A national UK survey of peripatetic support teams for children and adults with intellectual and developmental disability who display challenging behaviour

Background: The service provision model of peripatetic support teams for people with intellectual disabilities who present challenging behaviour has been well established in the United Kingdom, with a small but growing evidence base. The current context in the UK would appear to indicate an ever-increasing role for such teams, in order to support people in their own communities and reduce the reliance on out-of-area placements. This study sought to establish the current position of such teams within the UK. Method and materials: 46 teams were given the opportunity to complete an online questionnaire regarding the team's day to day functioning. Results: 20 services responded to the survey providing a range of data. The results suggested that the services were mainly targeted towards adults, had a range of working practices and therapeutic orientations, with broadly successful outcomes (albeit self reported). The data would also suggest that this type of provision had diminished in recent years. Conclusions: The implications of the survey are discussed within the context of the current policy in the UK. In particular, the lack of provision for children, the use of evidence based practice and what appears to be a diminishing resource just at the time when it is most needed are explored

Data first: turning the digital library "inside out"

At Caltech a variety of systems--Invenio, EPrints, Islandora, ArchivesSpace--are used to manage various components of what would ideally be an integrated Digital Library. Given limited resources and very demanding partners we focus on data first, integration and manipulation tools second, and de-emphasize development within any of our repository environments. Instead, data is harvested nightly from all our repositories and made available through a variety of data feeds and web services, structured data files, as well as through traditional web environments. Our aim is to maintain separate systems insofar as they are useful, but to present a wide variety of services that are data- and user-centric, rather than bound to services defined within a specific system’s set of features. Our approach is to focus on data as the central concern, and to think of nightly metadata harvesting and normalization as “continuous migration.” Our second focus is on tools developments. These are typically lightweight, usually command line tools that enable and encourage our users to engage with the data in ways that are specific to their needs. When needed we are moving to providing traditional web-based access through generic content management systems rather than our underlying repositories. The presentation includes some examples of strategies and services to illustrate the benefits of this approach, including a workflow for an international research group that integrates their specific workflow along with normalizing, publishing and preserving data through the Library, and strategies for automatically enriching locally managed data from external sources

Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation

We have seen much recent progress in rigid object manipulation, but interaction with deformable objects has notably lagged behind. Due to the large configuration space of deformable objects, solutions using traditional modelling approaches require significant engineering work. Perhaps then, bypassing the need for explicit modelling and instead learning the control in an end-to-end manner serves as a better approach? Despite the growing interest in the use of end-to-end robot learning approaches, only a small amount of work has focused on their applicability to deformable object manipulation. Moreover, due to the large amount of data needed to learn these end-to-end solutions, an emerging trend is to learn control policies in simulation and then transfer them over to the real world. To-date, no work has explored whether it is possible to learn and transfer deformable object policies. We believe that if sim-to-real methods are to be employed further, then it should be possible to learn to interact with a wide variety of objects, and not only rigid objects. In this work, we use a combination of state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithms to solve the problem of manipulating deformable objects (specifically cloth). We evaluate our approach on three tasks --- folding a towel up to a mark, folding a face towel diagonally, and draping a piece of cloth over a hanger. Our agents are fully trained in simulation with domain randomisation, and then successfully deployed in the real world without having seen any real deformable objects.Comment: Published at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 201

Digital repository futures at Caltech

Digital repository and asset management options are dizzying in number, providing a wide range of services to meet diverse institutional needs, audiences, and content. At Caltech the Library currently supports five different repository services, hosting published and other scholarly documents, research data, digitized archival collections, archived web sites, and born-digital archives. For institutional, professional, historical and aspirational reasons our information management and repository systems have little integration, and span the gamut of possible repository attributes: curated content and self-service; a variety of metadata schema; both locally hosted and cloud-based software; both open source and proprietary solutions. Sustaining such a disparate variety of systems into the future with limited resources is clearly not sustainable, and confusing for both users and managers alike, especially as the volume and variety of digital content in need of curation and access services expands. The Caltech Library’s Repository Futures Strategy Team is in the process of assessing the various needs we will have going forward, and is working on a plan that will provide repository services that are sustainable and flexible across a wide range of needs, and provide robust management and user services to depositors, curators, and the public. The presentation reports on the work of the team, including a longer term vision for Caltech Library's repository services, a suggested road map for future development, and a discussion of the challenges we face in realizing that vision