Security life of denver

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc (Photo: VNA)

Hanoi (VNA) – Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc attended and delivered remarks at an open debate of the UN Security Council (UNSC) on addressing climate-related risks to international peace and security, which was held in the form of video conferencing on February 23.

Following is the full text of the Prime Minister’s remarks.

Mr. President,

I applaud the initiative of the UK Government and yourself, Mr. President, to host this important UNSC open debate on “Addressing climate-related risks to international peace and security”. I would like to thank UN Secretary General António Guterres and Chair of the UN Youth Advisory Group Nisreen Elsaim for your insightful and substantive information and recommendations.
Mr. President,

Earth – our blue planet, and our shared home – is suffering from grievous impacts of climate change. 2020 was one of the three hottest years in modern history, and was faced with the constant and severe aftermaths of floods, droughts, bushfires, rising sea level, and the unprecedented COVID-19 outbreak.

Such calamities have placed great burdens on the political and socio-economic life of many countries. They have caused unemployment and poverty, affected the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people, and risked creating instabilities or exacerbating present conflicts in many countries and regions, thus threatening international peace and security. In addition, conflicts and instabilities would further erode countries’ resilience, and rob them of valuable resources that could have been utilised to overcome the challenges of climate change.

Therefore, I propose that the UNSC, with its foremost mission being the maintenance of international peace and security, needs to galvanize collective and persevering efforts of the international community via the following measures:

First, a comprehensive and balanced approach is necessary in handling the connections between traditional and non-traditional security challenges, particularly in addressing the root causes of conflicts, such as poverty, inequality, power politics and unilateral interference and coercion. Strict adherence to the UN Charter and international law must truly become a standard of behaviour for countries in international relations.

Second, for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG-2030), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Paris Agreement (COP-21) to be effectively implemented, the UNSC and the international community should allocate greater resources to support developing countries, least developed countries, small island developing states, and land-locked countries that are most detrimentally affected by climate change, and are also lacking expertise and resources.

Third, I hope that the UNSC will continue to enhance its early warning capacity, and bolster its role in mediating, preventing and resolving conflicts in all regions, including through enhancing cooperation with regional organisations.

Fourth, in order to harmoniously manage the connection between climate change and security, it is necessary to continue upholding the principles of respect for the sovereignty, national ownership and principal responsibilities of states. The shared interests of communities and peoples, particularly vulnerable groups, must be placed at the heart of all national and global climate action strategies and plans.

Mr. President,

According to the World Bank, Vietnam is among the six countries most severely affected by climate change. Thus, active and effective response to climate change is both a major guideline and a strong political resolve by the Vietnamese Government. Vietnam has made great efforts to fulfil its international commitments on climate change (SDG-2030 and COP-21). In this connection, we support all endeavours to address climate-related challenges at the UNSC and other multilateral forums. I hope that the international community will provide Vietnam with further assistance and resources, so that we can better fulfil our commitments. Vietnam will work closely with other ASEAN members and support the cooperation between ASEAN and the UN.

Mr. President,

The world is burdened with the fight against COVID-19. Responding to the appeal of the UN Secretary General in “Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century”, we should take bold actions and enhance international unity. I am confident that the “challenges” stemming from climate change can be transformed into “drivers” for change, contributing to fostering a future of peace and more sustainable development for next generations.

Thank you./.

BIDV MetLife representatives received an AmCham CSR Recognition Award 2020

In the social distancing period of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, BIDV MetLife received a number of claims for insurance benefits under the circumstances of limited travel and difficulties in the verification process. However, with responsibility and the spirit of always putting clients’ interest first, BIDV MetLife overcame such limitations, quickly collected documents, made claim decisions, and paid for the clients’ families as soon as the paperwork had been completed.

One particular client had an accident and died in May, leaving behind their life partner and two school-aged children. BIDV MetLife had its staff quickly verify the information.

After collating the results, the company decided to pay accidental death benefit as in the contract terms with the aim to promptly help the family stablilise after the unexpected event, and ensure future education for the children.

Another client suddenly died while travelling abroad last year. The customer’s insurance contract did not specify the beneficiary – luckily, the client purchased life insurance from BIDV MetLife. After receiving the case, BIDV MetLife’s Benefit Department helped the client’s family complete the estate division agreement so that they could take advantage of the benefits as claimed in the contract.

Over the last six years, BIDV MetLife has paid almost VND36 billion ($1.56 million) in insurance benefits. In 2020 alone, BIDV MetLife successfully resolved 5,790 cases, paying around VND25.2 billion ($1.1 million).

Since its establishment in 2014, the top priority and mission that BIDV MetLife has pursued is to strive to bring the best for customers, and ensure customer service quality in any and all circumstances.

Not only focusing on taking care of and ensuring customer benefits, since entering the Vietnamese market BIDV MetLife has utilised corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes to contribute to the community’s sustainable development and ensure social security in places where the company operates.

General director of BIDV MetLife Gaurav Sharma shared, “The employees, clients, partners, and the community are our top priorities. We pursue the goal of “always with you, building a more confident future”, and turn this goal into a foundation to build a better and more humane future. Therefore, we always do our best to ensure that customers benefit as well as aiming at sustainable social activities, contributing to creating positive change for Vietnamese people.”

BIDV MetLife has coordinated with BIDV branches in various provinces to jointly implement initiatives for the community such as awarding scholarships, gifting bicycles to underprivileged students who had made great efforts to achieve excellent academic, presenting new facilities for schools, and much more.

As a joint venture between MetLife Co., Ltd. (belonging to MetLife, the US’ leading life insurance corporation with 150 years of operation) and leading Vietnamese lender BIDV, BIDV MetLife participates in various CSR activities in the country with the budget mainly stemming from MetLife Foundation.

Since 2017, the Foundation in collaboration with partners including Trick up, Plan International, Habitat for Humanity, CEP, Room to Read, and the Special Olympics have supported $5 million through 10 initiatives and projects related to comprehensive finance.

Responsible to the utmost, BIDV MetLife has been honoured with a Corporate Excellence Award by Enterprise Asia – the leading non-governmental organisation on the continent in entrepreneurship – for pursuing the mission of providing the best service to customers, even in tough times like the current pandemic.

In addition to that, BIDV MetLife won the American Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam CSR Recognition Award 2020 in Hanoi last December. This was the fourth consecutive time that BIDV MetLife was bestowed the honour.

Derek Ong, Electronic Industrial Software Solutions manager, Keysight Technologies

Squeezing every last drop of productivity from invested manufacturing equipment on the factory floor was the goal, and hence a lot of focus was on downtime and throughput. Predictive maintenance and asset utilisation are important business outcomes from any successful Industry 4.0 implementation.

Then COVID-19 happened. Other than the race to 5nm chips, 5G, and cloud computing, some sectors of the electronics manufacturing industry have seen a drastic drop in volume, leading to a surplus of production assets on the floor. For some, machines have idled. For others, COVID-19 has caused massive supply chain disruptions.

The necessary steps taken by governments around the globe to manage and halt the spread of this epidemic, has restricted movement of factory employees and subsequently lowered productivity and output. The trade situation between the US and China has forced manufacturers to shuffle operations for business continuity. There are everlasting shifts in manufacturing paradigms as a result of COVID-19. The new “norm” needs a rethink on how Industry 4.0 technology enablers will be used to address the new challenges.

Quality over quantity

Before COVID-19, Industry 4.0 adoption mostly revolved around asset utilisation. In the current situation, it may be better to ensure that every single manufactured product is of the highest quality the process allows. Due to shortages of materials and parts, rising logistics costs and restricted factory employees, manufacturers will have to minimise Return Merchandise Authorizations (RMA) even more than before. Better quality may also prove to be a compelling value differentiator to win more business.

Quality has always been one of the most important manufacturing performance metrics but rather than the usual narrative of adopting Industry 4.0 technologies such as big data analytics, AI, and the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIOT) to maximise asset utilisations, will need to pivot to adding more focus on improving the quality of the product being manufactured. Keeping machines up and running with minimal downtime gives less Return of Investment (ROI) if product recalls are happening or assets are loaded only half the time most days.

Manufacturing analytics is quickly rising to prominence

Qualitative and quantitative data on products – usually from test and measurement equipment on the floor – is an important source of insights for any big data analytics implementation. They allow engineers to maintain process parameters that yield the highest quality and they provide a real-time barometer of gross reproducibility and repeatability of equipment and processes, which is important for the predictable quality standard of the products.

This means that lower Cost-of-Poor-Quality (COPQ) is going to be something Industry 4.0 technology adoption has to address quickly.

Dangers of anomaly detection and things to look out for

Since the launch of Keysight’s PathWave Manufacturing Analytics in 2018, more manufacturers are embracing the new “normal” and using big data advanced analytics on test and measurement that are generated every second on the production floor.

A core fundamental analytics insight from the platform is being able to predict potential quality issues before they happen. The machine learning tool usually used to do this is around anomaly detection. We have seen a lot of examples of factories investing in setting up a generic big data platform and using publicly available open-source anomaly detection algorithms in production.

What is eventually evident is that these algorithms tend to be low in accuracy when dealing with test and measurement data, as opposed to continuous signals from sensors. This is what drove us to develop our own anomaly detection machine learning model at Keysight, which is tuned to provide the highest accuracy on test and measurement data from the floor.

We also identified “Alert Fatigue” in manufacturing industries that use anomaly detection as a predictor. Hundreds of thousands of measurements are taken in real-time in productionand a large number of anomalies are being alerted to operators or engineers every minute of the day. It is an impossible task for the users to decide which anomaly is most important and what are the most urgent actions to take.

Ultimately, this fatigue leads users to ignore the alerts, and the slow but sure demise of the entire advanced analytics project begins. If the right actions to prevent losses cannot be taken, then the ROI cannot be realised. This is important as, in order to make any investments in big data advanced analytics implementation in the factory worthwhile, it has to directly correlate with business outcomes.

Last year, we put together a team of data scientists and test and measurement experts in Keysight to develop an alert scoring machine learning model that works seamlessly with our anomaly detection algorithms to score measurement anomaly alerts in real-time, and we are planning the release of the new Alert Scoring feature in our upcoming PathWave Manufacturing Analytics 2.4.0 release in the spring of 2021. Alerts are labelled and sorted by the machine learning model as either high, medium, or low severity. The interpretation of the machine learning model of severity required supervised learning that Keysight’s test and measurement were able to provide.

With this first-in-industry alert scoring model, we were able to reduce the number of alerts sent to users for disposition by 90 per cent, in real-life testing. Instead of a hundred alerts, the engineer or operator will only receive ten of the most severe or important alerts.

The ability to combine domain knowledge and data science, sets companies such as Keysight, apart from generic big data platform partners, and we look forward to helping manufacturers achieve more tangible business outcomes with our 2021 roadmap.

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