Mail delivery has been suspended at Mar Vista Gardens, a public housing complex with more than 1,800 tenants in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Del Rey, forcing residents to pick up mail and packages at a Culver City facility over a mile away. Culver City Post Office Postmaster Roderick Strong told officials at the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles this week that mail delivery was immediately being put on hold because of safety issues at the 43-acre housing complex. Strong had previously cited safety issues as a reason to set up centralized banks of mailboxes at Mar Vista Gardens instead of delivering mail to each door, an idea that troubled residents of the complex. Tenant leaders had raised concerns about voting in the upcoming elections and questioned why the same changes were not happening in wealthier areas. An L.A. politico helped select the new postmaster general.

New Delhi: IT services major Infosys on Wednesday announced the launch of its AI-driven'Cognitive Email Workbench' solution that gives enterprises the ability to augment query management and scale their helpdesk operations. Infosys leveraged its partnership with Blue Prism, a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) provider and a strategic partner to develop the solution that promises to significantly enhance productivity and customer satisfaction. Infosys and Blue Prism had joined hands in 2017 to help enterprises drive intelligent automation capabilities across multiple industries. Infosys Cognitive Email Workbench is an AI-based assisted automation solution that allows clients to eliminate manual resolution and build near-touchless contact centres, a statement said. It combines the intelligence of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), with Blue Prism's intelligent automation platform and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities.

Google Cloud Run became Generally-Available (GA) around November of 2019. It provides a fully managed serverless execution platform to abstract infrastructure for stateless code deployment with HTTP-driven containers. Cloud Run is a Knative service utilizing the same APIs and runtime environments that make it possible to build container-based applications that can run anywhere, whether on Google cloud or Anthos deployed on-premises or on the Cloud. As a "serverless execution environment", Cloud Run can scale in response to the computing needs of the running application. Instant execution of application code, scalability and portability are core features of Cloud Run.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy refused requests by Democrats on Monday to restore mail-sorting machines or mailboxes removed from service as part of sweeping operational changes at the Postal Service, despite complaints that the changes are causing lasting damage and widespread delays. Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., told DeJoy at a hearing on Capitol Hill that changes imposed by DeJoy this summer have threatened the reliability of mail service in his state and across the country. "What the heck are you doing?" Lynch asked DeJoy at a sometimes contentious House Oversight Committee hearing. Either through "gross incompetence" or "on purpose," DeJoy is "deliberately dismantling this once-proud institution," Lynch said. DeJoy denied any wrongdoing and accused Lynch and other Democrats of spreading misinformation.

Recent progress in deep learning has led to the development of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems which perform remarkably well. Most research has been around recurrent networks as well as complex gated layers which make the overall solution complex and difficult to scale. In this paper, we present an Efficient And Scalable TExt Recognizer (EASTER) to perform optical character recognition on both machine printed and handwritten text. Our model utilises 1-D convolutional layers without any recurrence which enables parallel training with considerably less volume of data. We experimented with multiple variations of our architecture and one of the smallest variant (depth and number of parameter wise) performs comparably to RNN based complex choices.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on Friday denied any political pressure to undermine mail-in voting for the November election by slowing mail delivery, calling any such suggestion "outrageous." Under questioning before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, DeJoy said he had never spoken to President Trump, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House Chief of Staff or any Trump campaign officials about operational changes he has ordered. DeJoy said at his first election mail meeting, he instructed his organization to redouble their efforts. "I was greatly concerned about all the political noise we were hearing," saying weekly reviews were underway before "all the excitement came out. Any insinuation [about undermining on-time delivery] is quite frankly outrageous."

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy arrives at a meeting at the office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on August 5.Alex Wong/Getty Embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified before the US Senate on Friday that he will not reinstall more than 600 mail sorting machines that have been removed under his leadership. Postal workers say the removal of these machines has contributed to major mail delays that could affect whether mail ballots are counted in the 2020 election. Earlier this week, DeJoy announced that he was halting some planned changes to the USPS until after the election, following public outcry. But he will not reverse steps that he has already taken. "Will you be bringing back any mail sorting machines that have been removed?"

Core Associates, LLC announced the firm has completed the process to gain Sage's product certification of TimberScan Titanium for Sage Intacct. The makers of TimberScan, the only AP automation solution designed exclusively for Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, now offer a cloud-based solution that integrates with Sage Intacct to simplify approval workflows, document management, and related AP invoice processes from virtually anywhere. TimberScan Titanium is a new solution designed for project-intensive businesses, such as builders, contractors, and businesses in other industries, that offers a paper-free AP invoice processing experience while allowing users to stay connected to their Sage Intacct software. TimberScan Titanium reads from Sage Intacct to facilitate better data management without the need for rekeying information. With Smart Extraction Technology based on Optical Character Recognition, OCR, TimberScan Titanium is ideal for companies looking to recognize and automatically code AP invoices.

Renters at the Mar Vista Gardens public housing complex were skeptical as Roderick Strong laid out the plan: Instead of getting mail delivered to their doors, residents would pick it up at new, centralized spots around the 43-acre community in Del Rey, a Los Angeles neighborhood west of Culver City. Strong, the Culver City Post Office postmaster, called the new system "the launch of a new era." He said the shift was being considered to ensure the safety of mail carriers who had been menaced by dog bites and other threats. Few tenants seemed swayed, however, as they listened by phone and the web during a remote meeting on a recent weekday. Daisy Vega, president of the resident advisory council, asked Strong why such a change was being planned for their housing complex and not for "the other side of town."

Recent progress in deep learning has led to the development of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems which perform remarkably well. Most research has been around recurrent networks as well as complex gated layers which make the overall solution complex and difficult to scale. In this paper, we present an Efficient And Scalable TExt Recognizer (EASTER) to perform optical character recognition on both machine printed and handwritten text. Our model utilises 1-D convolutional layers without any recurrence which enables parallel training with considerably less volume of data. We experimented with multiple variations of our architecture and one of the smallest variant (depth and number of parameter wise) performs comparably to RNN based complex choices. Our 20-layered deepest variant outperforms RNN architectures with a good margin on benchmarking datasets like IIIT-5k and SVT. We also showcase improvements over the current best results on offline handwritten text recognition task. We also present data generation pipelines with augmentation setup to generate synthetic datasets for both handwritten and machine printed text.