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Last year, I had the opportunity to present my company , an AI-powered educational robot for young children, at Alibaba Cloud’s North America contest. My company was selected from hundreds of applicants to be one of the ten finalists to compete at the regional event. This was an exciting experience for me to go on the stage and spread the word about our work in robotics and early childhood education. ROYBI It was particularly a challenging contest because I was presenting an entirely new concept: customizing education through AI and personalizing the learning experience based on every child’s learning ability. It was that exciting moment when the judges announced that ROYBI became the Runner Up and winner of the Alibaba Cloud North America contest. At the contest, I could undoubtedly feel the support Alibaba was providing on education as well as to female founders particularly at the very early stage of our company. Often times, large organizations miss the opportunities startups can bring to this world because they are only focusing on numbers, not the team, their expertise and the long-time vision. This is remarkably different about Alibaba considering that their culture is to bring people up from the earliest or lowest possible stage and give them opportunities to grow, thanks to Jack Ma and his team. August 2018, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA Immediately after the contest, Alibaba sponsored ROYBI to compete in the global finals as well as visiting Alibaba Group in Hangzhou, China. 33 countries, 4000 projects, and only 45 startups were able to make it to the finals. We were thrilled by their hospitality and the great planning for our visit. Over 1000 attendees including investors, media, and industry experts from around the world came to watch our pitch on the stage. November 2018. Hangzhou, China. After these successful events, Alibaba Cloud invited me to give a TED-style speech at the largest conference in the world, Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona. ROYBI stood out because of the impact it is going to make on children’s lives by providing an accessible and personalized education. Not just that, Alibaba Cloud team took the time to truly understand our vision and provide us the opportunity to share ROYBI’s story to the world. This event started as an initiative called #TechForChange. The conference was held at Sabadell Stage in Barcelona and attracted attendees from all around the world who care about initiatives such as education, humanity and social impact. 4YFN, Sabadell Stage. Barcelona, Spain. Through initiative, Alibaba Cloud shed lights on the that we, as the human being, are facing. I am very impressed by their support for ROYBI considering early childhood education is an area that has gone unnoticed by many organizations. Alibaba Cloud’s support has enabled us to spread the word on the importance of early childhood education and making education accessible to any child regardless of where in the world they are or their family income status. TechForChange most pressing issues Our journey started when I moved to the US 11 years ago to follow my dream of making an impact on people’s lives. The dream started by utilizing technology to empower children around the world by giving them access to a personalized learning experience. Every child learns differently and they should be given the opportunity to learn through customized content. Personalized learning has many benefits and utilizing cloud technology has enabled us to provide our technology anywhere around the world. ROYBI’s technology highlights children’s abilities rather than their disabilities. ROYBI empowers children to learn new skills every day and set personal goals. And most importantly, ROYBI can go to places where young children do not have access to education due to lack of having teachers or high cost of education. Below, you can watch my speech at MWC 19 at Alibaba Cloud TechForChange conference and hear how we are changing the world for children. On February 26, 2019, we wrapped up the conference by emphasizing the importance of developing language and educational skills at a young age. Children learn through natural and daily conversations. At this busy and fast-paced era, parents have less time than ever to spend with their children. To avoid speech delays, social, or behavior-related problems, ROYBI talks and practices with young children through daily and natural conversations. This allows children to continuously learn and helps parents and educators to keep track of the development of children at home and school through a shareable learner profile. At ROYBI, we are on a mission to change the way children learn at home, school, or learning centers. Learning should be fun and interactive. Education should focus on children’s abilities and interests. Children should have the chance to learn what interests them not what we want them to learn. ROYBI empowers every child to be the best at what they like. I invite you to support us, work with us, accompany us, and all the children around the world to open the doors to the personalized learning experience and allow every child to shine to their maximum capability. Thanks to Alibaba Cloud for their support through TechForChange Initiative. Read more on CNN .

Roybi Robot Launched TechForChange Initiative with Alibaba Cloud

I need to spit it out. I want my friends to hear what I’ve seen and what I’ve learned. To feel it in their stomach. I want the world to know this story. For me it’s not about hype or likes, it’s about the simple truth that everyone can make a difference. Because I hope that my story will inspire others and ignite them to action. And yes, I know that by supporting Ukraine and writing this I can have problems in Russia and I won’t be able to visit my family anymore. 24th of February, 2022 Like many Ukrainians on this day, I woke up to this crazy news — war has been started. I was shocked. What? How? WHY!?!?! In the upcoming days, I was glued to the TV. Trying to be in touch with all my friends from Ukraine. And also — from Russia. I was stuck between two worlds. Friends suffering in Ukraine on one side, and shocked relatives in Russia not knowing how to deal with all of this on the other. And I’m in the middle, tearing myself apart. Not able to work, not able to think about anything but people that are close to me struggling to survive right now. The news showed thousands of refugees trying to escape the war and save their lives. The last drop was a message on 28th Feb. from my cousin, a Russian Jew who was living in Ukraine. He wrote to me that he and his family had successfully driven away from Kyiv to a village, but now were sitting in the basement without electricity. He wrote that the whole village was surrounded by Russian forces and they were being shelled all the time. He sent me a map of where he was and where the Russian forces were. And then, his phone was disconnected. For days… I called and called and there was no answer… I have to do something about it! I drove everyone crazy in my company, saying over and over again that we have to do something. And I felt there should be something that I could personally do. Eventually, our COO, , said: . Ouriel Just fly there and figure out what you can do and how you are going to help Luckily for me, my employer has an entire team dedicated to crisis management. , from this team, was the first to fly there, and I was about to join him the next day. At the time, I was changing groups, moving from Mobile to API. I spoke to , my future manager who is also Ukrainian with many relatives and friends in the region, trying to convince him to come with me — and he agreed! We packed suitcases full of macs, chargers, keyboards, screens, bought plane tickets from Tel Aviv to Warsaw and took off right on the next day. Therefore, on my first day in Vlad’s group, we both happened to be on our way to the Ukrainian border. Anton Vlad All three of us didn’t know exactly what we were going to do. We agreed that in the worst case scenario, we would just rent a car and drive people from the Ukrainian border to the nearest big city. At first, we arrived in , in a huge refugee camp. What we saw there was chaos: a large hangar, few volunteers with megaphones at the center of it, shouting something. Thousands of people arriving every minute on buses from the border. Mainly women and children with a few suitcases. Their entire lives… Just in one suitcase. They had no clue where to go next, what to do next or where to stay. Even at the camp, there were not enough beds for everyone to sleep in… Those first minutes terrified me, I felt numb. How come all this could be happening!? Korczowa camp from inside: Korczowa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkfa4v6QDcw?embedable=true In a few minutes, we pulled ourselves together and went outside to start shaping a plan of how we could help. At the entrance, we noticed some folks with small hand-made signs offering free rides to cities and to other European countries. Some of them even offered a place to stay and work. We spoke to them and found out that they were just regular people, not belonging to any organization. They wanted to help and came to pick a family or two and drive them to a safe place or host them for some time. They were from all parts of Europe. It looked like we could help here by organizing the driver-refugee matching process. We grabbed our macs, bought one big TV and just went into this small island of volunteers in the middle. We explained to them what we wanted to do and … just started doing it. We put a big QR code leading to a form which asked drivers to register with a name, destination and a scan of their driver’s license. When they finished filling the form, we asked them to wait at a certain area. All this information went to a board and we displayed this board on a big TV screen that every refugee could see immediately upon their arrival at the camp. Vlad and I started matching drivers with refugees. https://youtu.be/MTlDlmg5n60?embedable=true While working on the system, I went outside to smoke. Standing in the cold (it was around -10°C) I noticed a woman with a few months old baby in her hands. She was sitting on the freezing ground. Crying silently. Desperation gripped her. It felt like something broke inside me. I rushed to her, helped her get inside the camp, got some warm tea for her and found her a bed with a blanket. This really hit me hard — I became so furious and so determined to build the best solution out there and help refugees like her. In the beginning, we were doing everything by ourselves, but when the process had begun to work and a few matches had happened, we trained some volunteers that were around. With a spark of excitement that our system seemed to be working, we decided to let the volunteers manage the system and went to visit another refugee camp that was close by — . Przemyśl My friend, was volunteering there, so we decided to give it a shot and see how we can collaborate. Oleh Zasadny, The situation at the camp was the same: mess, chaos, a lot of refugees, few volunteers running back and forth. All logistics at the camp were managed by using paper and megaphone. But.. There was a gleam of light: Oleh said that the organizer from the event-management company would be arriving tomorrow, so it was worth it to come back again and meet him. So we returned to Korczowa — and what we saw there was discouraging. Volunteers that we had trained left the camp, and new ones weren’t using the system. All our macs were closed and the TV was shut down… Bummer. Frustration. Chaos again. Then it struck me that in all the noise and density of the crowd, almost no one was crying. I was amazed. Despite all the shit that was happening, they kept going, fighting their own battle of survival. Quietly, bravely. Getting back to our matching system, we knew that the next challenge was to make the system work without us being involved. And for this we surely needed a local partner. The next day, we met the organizer of the Przemyśl camp and explained what we did in Korczowa. Even though the organizer didn’t believe much in the success of our initiative, she gave us one of the local volunteers and a permission to work at the camp. Everyone was very skeptical and even suspicious like “what do they want from us?” But Vlad and I were determined to make it work. We organized the same flow with volunteer drivers and built a separate room for driver registration together with other volunteers. https://youtu.be/rRaMaI2d7sE?embedable=true Then we trained local volunteers how to use the system. We saw immediately how they started to spread the knowledge and explain the process to each other. The barriers built by skepticism were broken as soon as they saw what they were capable of with our tech. We had this special feeling that it might work. Next, we organized the same process for refugees registration and management. Volunteers filled out our form for refugees: who they are, where they want to go, do they need a place to stay and calm down, how many children they have with them. We didn’t have enough laptops and we saw that this process created a huge queue. So we bought and started using tablets and smartphones, and then volunteers were able to work not only on laptops, but also on those handset devices in the queue itself https://youtu.be/wgmHk2iqrzg?embedable=true The system started to work. It was amazing to see how, slowly but surely, chaos turned into some order. During implementation, we faced some issues in the system: missing functionality, errors on EU server. And this was a moment where I really felt the magic of wonderful people at my organization. Vlad and I wrote on our slack channel and immediately, all RnD were working on solving it. It was amazing to see how many people jumped right ahead and were ready to help. For the first time, at the field, we were building a flow to manage refugee camps and we were real users of the system. We normally develop our systems from a warm office with snacks in the fridge. And only after a single day of using it, Vlad and I were talking and sharing tons of improvements and suggestions that both of us had. I remember it was such an amazing feeling! Late at night, when sitting together with organizers of the camp, for the first time, we were able to see : how many refugees passed through the camp in one day what the requested destinations were: how many volunteer drivers we had: and how many volunteers per language we had in general As one of the organizers said, it was mind-blowing and insightful. For the first time, he realized that they were missing rides to Warsaw. And he rushed out of the organizers’ meeting immediately to find more volunteer drivers to Warsaw. The system worked. And we faced more and more challenges. One of the biggest ones was “human traffic”. It turned out that there were some volunteer drivers that were using this situation for their own profit… So, we decided to battle it. We set up a meeting with a few devs and product managers and the next night they already came up with a solution — to add to the form the driver’s license validation using the 3rd party API in monday.com. At the same time, our Mobile team — within one night — built an app to match refugees & volunteer drivers using QR code scanning. And all this turned out to be just the beginning of a huge effort. While Vlad, Anton, and I were at the Ukraine/Poland border, every day we posted our progress on our slack: reports, pictures, videos. This created so much visibility and alignment on what was going on, that many folks were willing to join and help. As a result, every week new folks from my company flew to different camps to replicate the flow that we had built and to create many new solutions: medicine inventory, bed management system, supply, and more. We all can help You can call me romantic, optimistic, but I believe in the good part of humanity. During this journey I met so many wonderful and inspiring people. They told me crazy stories of what had happened to them — the stories you wouldn’t believe could happen in a civilized world in the 21st century — and despite all this, they found the courage and strength to help others. For example, we found people in Ukraine who agreed to drive to the village from where my cousin connected me last time — they found him and his family in the basement, gave them food and books, and later, after the bombing stopped, they drove him out of that place. Also there was a young woman, a refugee, who had just arrived at the camp, and a few hours later, she approached us and asked how she could help. And she is just a regular person, like me and many of my friends. And if she can help, we all can help, too. Especially us — developers, we have that super power: with a few lines of code we can make a difference for so many! https://youtu.be/r2r5J0dy-bg?embedable=true So, I beg you, don’t distance yourself, don’t close your eyes and pretend that the problem doesn’t exist. You can help in so many ways. You can do more. We can do more. We have to do more. How? There are many option. As developer you can start here and build a tech that can change a life of many: https://www.techtotherescue.org/ I truly want this message to reach as many people as possible. ❤️ Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. If you enjoyed it, I would be incredibly grateful if you could share it with others.

Unleashing the Power of Technology and Kindness: the Moving Tale of Volunteering

You can find for this article in the repository, in which we will add new controls and accept contributions for controls as they are made available. the code of the [TreeView](https://github.com/nventive/Uno.UI.Toolkit.SL/tree/master/Uno.UI.Toolkit.SL/Controls/TreeView) Uno.UI.Toolkit.SL In this blog post series, we’re going to cover the migration of the code for the to UWP and the , a control widely used in many line of business applications still in use today. Silverlight Toolkit TreeView control TreeView control Uno Platform This includes parts of the features that may or may not work initially, as well as modifications that will have to be made in the Uno Platform to conform to UWP if required. While the Uno Platform includes all the APIs of the Spring Creators Update (17134), many of these APIs are not implemented yet and there may be some that are used by the Silverlight control. TreeView Also, the point of this exercise is to walk through a migration process from a Silverlight code base, as there is already an existing control API in UWP. As of the writing of this article, the UWP is not implemented in the Uno Platform and migrating this Silverlight control is not an option, as the APIs are significantly different and not directly compatible. TreeView TreeView Importing the Silverlight TreeView control source To migrate a control from Silverlight, there are a few things to do: Create a cross targeted project using the Cross-Platform library template from the Uno Platform VS Addin Replace Silverlight namespaces with UWP namespaces and selectively import the source files and dependencies TreeView Adjust the code for slightly changed APIs Temporarily comment out code for APIs that have significantly changed. Adjust the XAML Cross targeted project creation To be able to build the control is a reuseable way, in a NuGet package, we need to create a Cross-platform library using the Uno Platform VS Addin, which does all the configuration to target Windows (uap10.0), iOS, Android and WebAssembly. This project will contain all the XAML files and C# source files required for the to function properly. It uses the excellent msbuild extensions to cross targeted library with minimal efforts, using the new and improved project format, and simplifies the creation of NuGet packages. TreeView MSBuild.Sdk.Extras sdk-style It will then possible to create an installable NuGet package using the context menu on the project. Pack option Importing the source The process of importing the source is somewhat straightforward. Microsoft, in all its XAML variants, kept many of the APIs signature-compatible. This means that in a large majority of cases, from to is making the code compatible with UWP. simply changing the namespaces System.Windows Windows.UI Here are some examples: -> System.Windows.Controls Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls -> System.Windows.Input Windows.Devices.Input -> System.Windows.Media Windows.UI.Xaml.Media One tip here to simplify the migration is to temporarily remove all non-windows targets in the cross-targeted projects to keep only . This helps in keeping the compilation errors limited to the UWP apis, and avoid some of the API differences that may happen including iOS/Android/Wasm targets. Once the Windows target builds, adding back the other targets will allow for special adjustments, if any. uap10.0 Most of the exercise of the code import is about making an heavy use of the Intellisense by importing files one by one, starting by and removing all the red squiggles. The controls uses , which in turn uses , etc... TreeView.cs TreeView TreeViewItem HeaderedItemsControl After the first pass of changing namespaces, and importing dependent files, we end up with a self-contained set of C# source files, but not yet compiling. Adjusting for slightly changed APIs When trying to resolve the API differences when moving from UWP, after adjusting the namespaces, the first low hangings are the ones that are slightly different. For instance, it can be member visibility differences, or just name updates. Some examples: has been moved from to FrameworkElement.OnApplyTemplate public protected The does not have constructor that only contains a parameter PropertyMetadata PropertyChangedCallback is called GeneralTransform.Transform GeneralTransform.TransformPoint does not contain a constructor taking a string path as a parameter Binding now requires a parameter Control.Focus FocusState Those a pretty easy to adjust, and the UWP runtime behavior has a great change of being identical to the one Silverlight had. The case of ItemsControl.OnItemsChanged There’s one significant change with where the method is not present anymore. This is a pretty important part of behavior of the control, used to create manipulate instances and link them to the instance. Removing the code of this method would make the control unusable. ItemsControl.OnItemsChanged TreeViewItem TreeView This method can be replaced by the event, but not completely. in Silverlight was based on which provided the property, whereas the in UWP is based on . This new implementation notably does not provide the action and it's raising then instead. ItemsControl.Items.VectorChanged ItemsControl ObservableCollection NotifyCollectionChangedAction ItemsCollection ObservableVector Replace ItemRemoved ItemInserted In this case, we must remove the part that dealt with , keeping only , and . The new API also does not provide the items being notified for, which means we have to use the property directly instead. NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Replace Remove Reset Insert Items Temporarily commenting out incompatible features In other cases, the APIs are significantly different and we’ll for now comment those out for the sake of chewing a comfortable piece of code. Parts of this include keyboard support, parts of the mouse support, localization and Peer Automation related support. UWP provides support for those features, not as virtual methods but rather as events that are not directly compatible with the Silverlight implementation. We will take a look at those features in a later part of the series. Adjusting the XAML Another part of the migration to UWP is the adjustment of the XAML. The syntax is the same, but parts differ : The custom namespace syntax is now using instead of , and in many cases simply replacing one by the other is enough using: clr-namespace: The related classes are now in the default xml namespace, meaning that the namespace is not required anymore. VisualStateManager vsm: The namespace is now part of the namespace system x: We’ll also comment out the support for adjustments, as the property is not directly mapped to UWP. Cursor Creating the sample app To be able to test the imported code, we can create a sample application using , reference our imported project and add a simple sample like this one: the Uno Platform VS Addin <controls:TreeView Margin="5"><controls:TreeViewItem Header="Controls"><controls:TreeViewItem Header="AutoCompleteBox"><controls:TreeViewItem Header="Properties" /></controls:TreeViewItem><controls:TreeViewItem Header="Expander" /><controls:TreeViewItem Header="NumericUpDown" /></controls:TreeViewItem><controls:TreeViewItem Header="Layout"><controls:TreeViewItem Header="DockPanel" /><controls:TreeViewItem Header="WrapPanel" /><controls:TreeViewItem Header="Viewbox" /></controls:TreeViewItem><controls:TreeViewItem Header="Charting"><controls:TreeViewItem Header="ColumnSeries" /><controls:TreeViewItem Header="LineSeries" /><controls:TreeViewItem Header="PieSeries" /></controls:TreeViewItem></controls:TreeView> and test it first on Windows, then iOS, Android and WebAssembly. Next steps When running the sample, a few things stand out: The is displaying content properly TreeView The nodes expand and collapse properly The glyph next to the nodes changes state once, but does not animate back There are some exceptions regarding the which has been deprecated in UWP. ItemContainerGenerator We’ll take a look at those the next parts of this series.

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