Leading universities and major technology companies agreed on Tuesday to back a new project intended to give academics and other scientists access to the computing resources now available mainly to a few tech giants. From a report: The initiative, the National Research Cloud, has received bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Lawmakers in both houses have proposed bills that would create a task force of government science leaders, academics and industry representatives to outline a plan to create and fund a national research cloud. This program would give academic scientists access to the cloud data centers of the tech giants, and to public data sets for research. Several universities, including Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Ohio State, and tech companies including Google, Amazon and IBM backed the idea as well on Tuesday. The organizations declared their support for the creation of a research cloud and their willingness to participate in the project.

The research cloud, though a conceptual blueprint at this stage, is another sign of the largely effective campaign by universities and tech companies to persuade the American government to increase government backing for research into artificial intelligence. The Trump administration, while cutting research elsewhere, has proposed doubling federal spending on A.I. research by 2022. Fueling the increased government backing is the recognition that A.I. technology is essential to national security and economic competitiveness. The national cloud legislation will be proposed as an amendment to this year's defense budget authorization. "We have a real challenge in our country from China in terms of what they are doing with A.I.," said Representative Anna G. Eshoo, Democrat of California, a sponsor of the bill.

Friday IBM Research updated their open source "IBM Differential Privacy Library," a suite of new lightweight tools offering "an array of functionality to extract insight and knowledge from data with robust privacy guarantees."

"Most tasks can be run with only a single line of code," brags a new blog post (shared by Slashdot reader IBMResearch), explaining how it works: This year for the first time in its 230-year history the U.S. Census will use differential privacy to keep the responses of its citizens confidential when the data is made available. But how does it work? Differential privacy uses mathematical noise to preserve individuals' privacy and confidentiality while allowing population statistics to be observed.

This concept has a natural extension to machine learning, where we can protect models against privacy attacks, while maintaining overall accuracy. For example, if you want to know my age (32) I can pick a random number out of a hat, say ±7 — you will only learn that I could be between 25 and 39. I've added a little bit of noise to the data to protect my age and the US Census will do something similar.

While the US government built its own differential privacy tool, IBM has been working on its own open source version and today we are publishing our latest release v0.3. The IBM Differential Privacy Library boasts a suite of tools for machine learning and data analytics tasks, all with built-in privacy guarantees. Our library is unique to others in giving scientists and developers access to lightweight, user-friendly tools for data analytics and machine learning in a familiar environment... What also sets our library apart is our machine learning functionality enables organisations to publish and share their data with rigorous guarantees on user privacy like never before...

Also included is a collection of fundamental tools for data exploration and analytics. All the details for getting started with the library can be found at IBM's Github repository.

An anonymous reader quotes ADTmag: The Eclipse Foundation this week announced Jakarta EE 9 Milestone 1, the final version of the enterprise Java specification before the first Release Candidate (RC). The Jakarta EE 9 release marks the final transition away from the javax.* namespace (which Oracle refused to give up) to Eclipse's jakarta.*. This release updates all the APIs to use jakarta.* in package names. In fact, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, says that transition is really what this release is all about.

"The main purpose...is to provide a release that is very similar to Java EE 8," Milinkovich told ADTmag, "with everything converted to the jakarta.* namespace. We're providing a stable technical conversion platform, so all the tools and frameworks in the ecosystem that are using, say, javax.servlet, can make the change with confidence." Giving the ecosystem solid footing for the transition from the Java EE coffee cup to the Jakarta EE sailboat is the Foundation's way of setting the stage for rapid innovation, Milinkovich said, once the transition is largely complete.

"These technologies have been around for an awfully long time," he added, "and we had to provide folks with a stable platform for the conversion. At the same time, thanks to a contribution from IBM, we have the Eclipse Transformer Project, which is going to provide runtime enablement. If someone has an application they don't want to recompile, and that application is using the javax.* namespace, they will be able to run it on top of a Jakarta-compatible app server. That's going to provide binary compatibility for apps, going forward..."

A Japanese supercomputer has taken the top spot in the biannual Top500 supercomputer speed ranking. Fugaku, a computer in Kobe co-developed by Riken and Fujitsu, makes use of Fujitsu's 48-core A64FX system-on-chip. It's the first time a computer based on ARM processors has topped the list. From a report: Fugaku turned in a Top500 HPL result of 415.5 petaflops, 2.8 times as fast as IBM's Summit, the nearest competitor. Fugaku also attained top spots in other rankings that test computers on different workloads, including Graph 500, HPL-AI, and HPCG. No previous supercomputer has ever led all four rankings at once. While fastest supercomputer rankings normally bounce between American- and Chinese-made systems, this is Japan's first system to rank first on the Top500 in nine years since Fugaku's predecessor, Riken's K computer. Overall there are 226 Chinese supercomputers on the list, 114 from America, and 30 from Japan. US-based systems contribute the most aggregate performance with 644 petaflops.

IBM's research blog shares an article about "polyphonic music prediction using the Johann Sebastian Bach chorales dataset" achieved by using "biologically plausible neurons," a new approach to deep learning "that incorporates biologically-inspired neural dynamics and enables in-memory acceleration, bringing it closer to the way in which the human brain works." At IBM Research Europe we have been investigating both Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for more than a decade, and one day we were struck with the thought: "Could we combine the characteristics of the neural dynamics of a spiking neuron and an ANN?" The answer is yes, we could. More specifically, we have modelled a spiking neuron using a construct comprising two recurrently-connected artificial neurons — we call it a spiking neural unit (SNU)... It enables a reuse of architectures, frameworks, training algorithms and infrastructure. From a theoretical perspective, the unique biologically-realistic dynamics of SNNs become available for the deep learning community...

Furthermore, a spiking neural unit lends itself to efficient implementation in artificial neural network accelerators and is particularly well-suited for applications using in-memory computing. In-memory computing is a promising new approach for AI hardware that takes inspiration from the architecture of the brain, in which memory and computations are combined in the neurons. In-memory computing avoids the energy cost of shuffling data back and forth between separate memory and processors by performing computations in memory — phase change memory technology is a promising candidate for such implementation, which is well understood and is on its way to commercialization in the coming years. Our work involves experimental demonstration of in-memory spiking neural unit implementation that exhibits a robustness to hardware imperfections that is superior to that of other state-of-the-art artificial neural network units...

The task of polyphonic music prediction on the Johann Sebastian Bach dataset was to predict at each time step the set of notes, i.e. a chord, to be played in the consecutive time step. We used an SNU-based architecture with an output layer of sigmoidal neurons that allows a direct comparison of the obtained loss values to these from ANNs. The SNU-based network achieved an average loss of 8.72 and set the SNN state-of-the-art performance for the Bach chorales dataset. An sSNU-based network further reduced the average loss to 8.39 and surpassed corresponding architectures using state-of-the-art ANN units.
Slashdot reader IBMResearch notes that besides being energy-efficient, the results "point towards the broad adoption of more biologically-realistic deep learning for applications in artificial intelligence."

Microsoft joined the list of tech giants who've decided to limit the use of its facial-recognition systems, announcing that it will not sell the controversial technology to police departments until there is a federal law regulating the technology. From a report: The move, announced by Microsoft president Brad Smith at a Post Live event Thursday morning, follows similar decisions by Amazon and IBM, and comes as protesters across the nation press for an end to police brutality and racial profiling. Smith said that Microsoft has not sold its facial-recognition technology to law enforcement. "We will not sell facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until we have a national law in place, grounded in human rights that will govern this technology," Smith said. The company also plans to put in place "review factors" that Smith said would "go even beyond what we already have" to determine the use of the technology beyond law enforcement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon on Wednesday said it was implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of its facial recognition software, reversing its long-time support of selling the technology to law enforcement. Civil liberties activists have voiced concern that facial recognition could lead to unjust arrests during demonstrations against police brutality, racial injustice and the death of George Floyd. Critics also have questioned the software's accuracy, pointing to a past study showing Amazon's "Rekognition" service struggled to identify the gender of individuals with darker skin tones. Amazon has taken issue with that research.

The company, which sells cloud computing technology via its Amazon Web Services division, said in a statement it has pushed for regulations to ensure the software was used ethically. "We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested," Amazon said. The company said it would continue to permit use of its technology by customers Thorn and Marinus Analytics to help law enforcement find human trafficking victims. The decision follows IBM's announcement earlier this week that it was getting out of the facial recognition business entirely. It's also urging Congress to enact reforms to advance racial justice and combat systemic racism.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna called on Congress Monday to enact reforms to advance racial justice and combat systemic racism while announcing the company was getting out of the facial recognition business. CNBC reports: "IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency," Krishna wrote in the letter delivered to members of Congress late Monday. "We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies."

IBM decided to shut down its facial recognition products and announce its decision as the death of George Floyd brought the topic of police reform and racial inequity into the forefront of the national conversation, a person familiar with the situation told CNBC. IBM's facial recognition business did not generate significant revenue for the company, the person familiar with the situation said, but the decision remains notable for a technology giant that counts the U.S. government as a major customer. The decision was both a business and an ethical one, the person familiar with the situation said. The company heard in the past few weeks concerns from many constituencies, including employees, about its use of the technology, the person added.

"Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool that can help law enforcement keep citizens safe. But vendors and users of Al systems have a shared responsibility to ensure that Al is tested for bias, particularly when used in law enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported," Krishna wrote. The letter was addressed to sponsors and co-sponsors of a sweeping police reform bill unveiled by Democrats Monday -- Black Caucus Chair Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).

New submitter IBMResearch shares a report from ZDNet: IBM's new toolkit aims to give developers easier access to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a nascent technology with significant promise for a number of security use cases. "Today, files are often encrypted in transit and at rest but decrypted while in use, creating a security vulnerability," reports ZDNet. "This often compels organizations to make trade-offs and go through long vetting processes in order to ensure they can keep their valuable data protected while still gaining some value out of it. FHE aims to resolve that issue."

"While the technology holds great potential, it does require a significant shift in the security paradigm," the report adds. "Typically, inside the business logic of an application, data remains decrypted, [Flavio Bergamaschi, FHE pioneer and IBM Researcher] explained. But with the implementation of FHE, that's no longer the case -- meaning some functions and operations will change."

The toolkit is available today in GitHub for MacOS and iOS, and it will soon be available for Linux and Android.

Slack is partnering with Amazon in a multi-year agreement that means all Amazon employees will start to use Slack. The Verge reports: The deal comes just as Slack faces increased competition from Microsoft Teams, and it will also see Slack migrate its voice and video calling features over to Amazon's Chime platform alongside a broader adoption of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon's roll out of Slack to all of its employees is a big part of the deal, thanks to an enterprise-wide agreement. It's not immediately clear how many of Amazon's 840,000 employees will be using Slack, though. Up until today, Slack's biggest customer has been IBM, which is rolling out Slack to its 350,000 employees.

While Slack has long used AWS to power parts of its chat app, it's now committing to using Amazon's cloud services as its preferred partner for storage, compute, database, security, analytics, machine learning, and future collaboration features. The deal means it's unlikely we'll see Slack turn to Microsoft's Azure cloud services or Google Cloud to power parts of its service in the foreseeable future. [...] Slack and Amazon are also promising better product integration and interoperability for features like AWS Chatbot, a service that pushes out Slack channel alerts for AWS instances. In the coming months, Slack and AWS will improve its Amazon AppFlow integration to support bi-directional transfer of data between AWS services and Slack channels.

May 23rd marks the 25th anniversary of the day Sun Microsystems introduced Java to the world, notes InfoWorld.

Looking at both the present and the future, they write that currently Java remains popular "with enterprises even as a slew of rival languages, such as Python and Go, now compete for the hearts and minds of software developers." Java continues to rank among the top three programming languages in the most prominent language popularity indexes — Tiobe, RedMonk, and PyPL. Java had enjoyed a five-year stint as the top language in the Tiobe index until this month, when it was overtaken by the C language, thanks perhaps to the combination of C's wide use in medical equipment and the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nevertheless, Java represents a huge ecosystem and source of jobs. There were an estimated nine million Java developers worldwide in 2017, according to Oracle. A recent search of jobs site Dice.com found nearly 12,000 Java-related jobs in the USA, compared to roughly 9,000 jobs in JavaScript and 7,600 in Python. Plus, Java has spawned an enormous ecosystem of tools ranging from the Spring Framework to application servers from companies such as IBM, Red Hat, and Oracle to the JavaFX rich media platform.

The developers behind Java — including Oracle and the broader OpenJDK community — have kept the platform moving forward. Released two months ago, Java 14, or Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, added capabilities including switch expressions, to simplify coding, and JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) Event Streaming, for continuous consumption of JFR data. Up next for Java is JDK 15, set to arrive as a production release in September 2020, with capabilities still being lined up for it. So far, the features expected include a preview of sealed classes, which provide more-granular control over code, and records, which provide classes that act as transparent carriers for immutable data. Also under consideration for Java is a plan dubbed Project Leyden, which would address "longterm pain points" in Java including resource footprint, startup time, and performance issues by introducing static images to the platform.

"Having re-open-sourced MS-DOS on GitHub in 2018, Microsoft has now released the source code for GW-BASIC, Microsoft's 1983 BASIC interpreter," reports ZDNet, adding that GW-BASIC "can trace its roots back to Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's implementation of Microsoft's first product, the BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 computer."

"Interested to look at thousands of lines of glorious 8088 assembly code for the original 1983 GW-BASIC...?" writes Slashdot reader sonofusion82, adding "there are not Makefiles or build scripts, just a bunch of 8088 ASM files."

Or as Hackaday jokes, "Microsoft releases the source code you wanted almost 30 years ago." In the late 1970s and early 1980s, if you had a personal computer there was a fair chance it either booted into some version of Microsoft Basic or you could load and run Basic... Now you can get the once-coveted Microsoft Basic source code...

They put up a read only GW-BASIC repository, presumably to stop a flood of feature requests for GPU acceleration...

From what we understand, GW-Basic was identical to IBM's BASICA, but didn't require certain IBM PC ROMs to operate. Of course, BASICA, itself, came from MBASIC, Microsoft's CP/M language that originated with Altair Basic... We did enjoy the 1975 copyright message, though:

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975

BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF.
PAUL ALLEN WROTE A LOT OF OTHER STUFF AND FAST CODE.
MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE (F4I.MAC).
Bill Gates was 19 years old, Paul Allen was 22.

IBM cut an unspecified number of jobs across the U.S., eliminating employees in at least five states. The company declined to comment on the total number, but the workforce reductions appear far-reaching. From a report: "IBM's work in a highly competitive marketplace requires flexibility to constantly add high-value skills to our workforce. While we always consider the current environment, IBM's workforce decisions are in the interest of the long-term health of our business," company spokesman Ed Barbini said Thursday in a statement. "Recognizing the unique and difficult situation this business decision may create for some of our employees, IBM is offering subsidized medical coverage to all affected U.S. employees through June 2021." Based on a review of IBM internal communications on the Slack corporate messaging service, the number of affected employees is likely to be in the thousands, said a North Carolina-based worker who lost his job along with his entire team of 12. "This was far ranging -- and historical employment ratings, age and seniority did not seem to matter," he said. The person asked not to be identified on concern that speaking publicly may impact his severance package.

Lots of developers really want to learn Go, a programming language for large systems created by Google, meanwhile most developers are sick of attending meetings, and most of those working at multinational corporations aren't happy there. From a report: That's according to the results of a survey of over 16,655 developers from 76 countries carried out by HackerEarth, a company with offices in India and San Francisco that provides tools for recruiters to remotely assess developer coding skills. Go comes out top of the languages most developers want to know. The survey finds that 32% of experienced developers pick Go as the programming language they want to learn, well ahead of Python, which 24% say they want to learn. The desire for learning Go lines up with the results of a similar survey by remote developer hiring firm HackerRank. Go is used at Google, Netflix, American Express, Salesforce, IBM, Target, Twitch, Twitter, Uber, and Dropbox.

Steve Denning was director of knowledge management at the World Bank from 1996 to 2000, and now consults with organizations around the world on management and innovation. And in 2018 he wrote the book The Age of Agile. Now he's arguing in Forbes that "As the global coronavirus crisis is forcing many organizations to act with unaccustomed speed, organizational agility has suddenly become a necessity.

"The crisis is also making obvious that institutional agility means much more than having lots of agile teams scattered around the organization." "To create a truly agile enterprise," as the article, "The Agile C-Suite", by Bain consultants Darrell K. Rigby, Sarah Elk, and Steve Berez in the May-June 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR) points out, "the top officers — most, if not all, of the C-suite — must embrace agile principles too." Agility of course isn't new. What's new is to see the C-suite embracing it.

The contrast in stock market performance between firms that have been embracing Agile principles at the senior level for a number of years — such as Microsoft and Amazon — and two firms that have spurned Agile principles at the senior level — such as GE and IBM — is dramatic...

It is important that Harvard Business Review is highlighting the role of the C-suite in business agility. Wall Street has already got the message. Although the U.S. economy shrank at a 4.8% annual rate in the first quarter and suffered from 30 million unemployment claims, the stock market finished its best month in years. Why? The answer to the paradox is simple. After a devastating collapse the previous month, investors poured into the "chosen few." Firms that have demonstrated business agility by taking advantage of technological possibility — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — have become the largest and fastest growing organizations in the world, while many others struggle.

"Two research groups say they've independently built quantum devices that can operate at temperatures above 1 Kelvin — 15 times hotter than rival technologies can withstand," reports IEEE Spectrum. (In an article shared by Slashdot reader Wave723.)

"The ability to work at higher temperatures is key to scaling up to the many qubits thought to be required for future commercial-grade quantum computers..." HongWen Jiang, a physicist at UCLA and a peer reviewer for both papers, described the research as "a technological breakthrough for semiconductor based quantum computing." In today's quantum computers, qubits must be kept inside large dilution refrigerators at temperatures hovering just above absolute zero. Electronics required to manipulate and read the qubits produce too much heat and so remain outside of the fridge, which adds complexity (and many wires) to the system...

"To me, these works do represent, in rapid succession, pretty big milestones in silicon spin qubits," says John Gamble, a peer reviewer for one of the papers and a senior quantum engineer at Microsoft. "It's compelling work...." Moving forward, Gamble is interested to see if the research groups can scale their approach to include more qubits. He's encouraged by their efforts so far, saying, "The fact that we're seeing these types of advances means the field is progressing really well and that people are thinking of the right problems."
Besides Microsoft, Google and IBM have also "invested heavily in superconducting qubits," the article points out. And there's also a hopeful comment from Lee Bassett, a physicist focused on quantum systems at the University of Pennsylvania. "Each time these silicon devices pass a milestone — and this is an important milestone — it's closer and closer to the inflection point.

"This infrastructure of integrated, silicon-based electronics could take over, and this technology could just explode."

Paul Cormier became Red Hat's new CEO this week -- while the entire company was working from home. He had to make his inaugural address to over 12,000 employees around the world using BlueJeans videoconferencing tools, reports a North Carolina newspaper: In some ways, Red Hat was well prepared to work through the disruptions of coronavirus. For years, the company has encouraged and accepted employees who have wanted to work from home. It's been a big part of its recruiting efforts, Cormier said. "Especially in engineering, our strategy has always been hire the best person, we don't care where they are."

That doesn't mean it has been unscathed. The company has had to change its sales and product conference this year into a virtual event and social isolation obviously puts a strain on relationships with customers. And while the company wouldn't give out an exact number of employees who have be infected by COVID-19, a spokeswoman for Red Hat said, "We have cases around the globe -- people who are presumed to be sick, people who are sick and, happily, people who have recovered."

Cormier said he's committed to taking care of the thousands of employees affected by work-from-home orders across the globe. Red Hat, he said, will pay all of its employees during this time regardless of whether "you're 140% productive or 40% productive."
Cormier also emphasized he's committed to keeping Red Hat a "totally, totally separate company" from IBM, saying that was agreed upon from the beginning with IBM's new CEO Arvind Krishna. "If we're not independent, then the other cloud guys won't feel safe working with us... Intel, for example, shares their road map, which is super top secret, with us five years in advance, because we have to build the OS to support all their features...." He also noted that Red Hat's finance, legal, communications and human resources teams are all separate from IBM. "IBM doesn't set our road map. We set our road map," he said.

Where the company has seen a lot of success together, though, is in combining sales efforts. In its last earnings call, IBM said Red Hat was seeing an increase in large deals worth more than $10 million after joining IBM. One of them was with Verizon, for example.

As millions file for unemployment benefits in the United States every week, states' aging computer systems simply cannot keep up. States like New Jersey and Connecticut have said they are desperate for programmers who are still familiar with COBOL, a programming language that debuted in 1960 and is still used in critical computer systems like unemployment databases and banks. But there aren't many who know COBOL programming anymore. IBM, the leading provider of mainframes typically used to compile and run COBOL code, is trying to help bridge that gap. From a report: On Friday, IBM announced it was launching a free training program to teach coders COBOL as well as new forums to match those who know the language with those who need help maintaining their critical systems. The COBOL course will teach coders how to use the language in Microsoft's popular VSCode software and will be available next week. Next month, IBM says it will release a more fully fledged video COBOL course on online learning platforms like Coursera. The two forums that IBM has launched live on the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe Project website. One of the forums, Calling all COBOL Programmers, has had dozens of engineers sign up in the last 24 hours from around the world. The other forum is more technical in nature, where coders can pose specific COBOL questions and work through projects with experts.

The Pentagon is teaming up with some of the biggest names in tech to combat hacks designed to mess with the automated systems we'll rely on in the near future. From a report: In February, DARPA issued a call for proposals for a new program. Like most DARPA projects, it had a fantastic acronym: Guaranteeing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Robustness against Deception (GARD). It's a multimillion-dollar, four-year initiative that's aiming to create defenses for sensor-based artificial intelligence -- think facial recognition programs, voice recognition tools, self-driving cars, weapon-detection software and more. Today, Protocol can report that DARPA has selected 17 organizations to work on the GARD project, including Johns Hopkins University, Intel, Georgia Tech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, SRI International and IBM's Almaden Research Center. Intel will be leading one part of the project with Georgia Tech, focusing on defending against physical adversarial attacks. Sensors that use AI computer vision algorithms can be fooled by what researchers refer to as adversarial attacks. These are basically any hack to the physical world that tricks a system into seeing something other than what's there.

Digital Trends reports: IBM's question-answering Watson A.I. is most famous for whooping the butt of human champions on quiz show Jeopardy. Now, IBM has repurposed its famous creation to help government agencies, health care organizations, and academic institutions around the world cope with the massive overload of questions that citizens have about the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is the first time that Watson has been used to help in a pandemic scenario.

A coronavirus-focused version of the Watson A.I. has been called into service as a virtual agent in places including Arkansas, California, Georgia, New York, and Texas in the United States, as well as the Czech Republic, Greece, Poland, Spain and U.K. It is capable of answering locally relevant questions, ranging from those about coronavirus symptoms and testing specifics to queries on things like social distancing. These consistent and accurate responses can be provided to citizens via voice calls or text chat...

Watson Assistant for Citizens pulls data from a range of external sources — local, national, and international.
Digital Trends got an interesting response from one consultant at IBM Watson Health who's an expert on digital health for the World Health Organization. "Our team is currently adding responses to psychological questions, by which a virtual nurse can help people to deal with their fears and emotional problems and provide comfort to them in these times."