IT professionals launch new education website

BHUBANESWAR: A group of young IT professionals has launched a new software-based website intending to enhance the quality of the education system and to enrich campus life in an innovative way.

"(http://www.backyard.in) is an online educational cum social networking service like Facebook. It will help everyone in an educational institution — including the principal, administrators, faculties and students — in enhancing the quality of education and the software will tie the whole college in a logical thread," Sarathi Sabyasachi Sahoo, the leader of the group, said.

Sahoo, an IT professional who worked with Yahoo for five years said: "We have taken 40 technical and management colleges and two colleges in the city into consideration at the initial stage. Before developing the software, a survey was conducted by our team members in various technical colleges in the city and we got a good response to the idea." 

Stating that the software/website will provide various services to the students, Sahoo said each individual will be given login id and password to access his/her ID, provide a dashboard with separate login-in access to all students along with teachers, various modules of the software will take care of all processes of an institution like- student-teacher interaction, senior-junior interaction, doubt clearance, regular e-attendance, buying and selling of goods like draft, apron and others.

The software has the module to manage the hall of fame, notice board, and the library. 

Various feature of this website include advance search bar, genuine id for students, user friendly interface, performance graph for students in terms of subjects, latest news update on the dashboard, question and answer section (where a student can ask any question on any subject under the courses of study and this can be answered by the concerned teacher or any other student).

The website also provides facilities like in-built chat and message, unlimited photo upload and information about the college events, news and holidays, he said.

Source | Times of India | 20 January 2014

Coming soon: Machines with a mind of their own

Subodh Varma | TIG 

    This new year promises to be big on digital technologies, with many things that got started earlier coming together finally. Here are some example of how ‘coming together’ can lead to a big bang… 

THE DATA TRAIL 
    Big data has been around for some time. It is being collected through a swathe of sources — from satellites to software codes, from gigantic machines like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to aggregates of small datasets like Amazon’s back office operations, and of course from your mobile devices and RFIDs. One estimate puts the total data produced every day in 2012 at a mind boggling 2.5 exabytes, that is, bytes that number 25 followed by 17 zeros. 
    But how does it affect you and me? Among all the data being generated, there is a small but very significant subset of personal data. This could be by Twitter, Facebook or your email, or even by wearable devices like your Google Glass. Then there is your shopping activity, in fact all your activity on the Net. 
    Link all this big data generated by everybody to a cloud based computing machine, which links it to the “internet of things”, and there you have two products. One is the environment tracking you all the time, telling you your location, nearest places you can visit if hungry, physical parameters like temperature and updating you about cricket (or football) scores, even as you track the traffic situation. And the other is companies tracking you. Whether you like this or not, this is what is coming this year. 
    But, isn’t all this happening already? It is – but in advanced industrial societies. Now, with the mobile and tablet revolution, it is destined to enter the big bad third world too. 

GETTING INTERCONNECTED 
    Just to give an example, consider the smartphone. Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled 455.6 million units in the third quarter of 2013, according to Gartner, Inc. But what is noteworthy is that smartphones accounted for 55% of this, notching up sales of 250.2 million units. Where are sales growing strongest? In Asia/Pacific in both markets — the smartphone segment with 77.3% increase and the mobile phone segment with 11.9% growth. “Sales of feature phones continued to decline and the decrease was more pronounced in markets where the average selling price (ASP) for feature phones was much closer to the ASP affordable smartphones,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner in a statement. 

MACHINES GET SMARTER 
    Machine learning is another thing to watch out for. We are used to the technological limit of machines — they will perform as much as the programmer has fed them, no more, no less. But there are signs of a new wave of machines that will interact with humans, other machines and the environment and learn new things. All the big data companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook have hired top experts to develop ‘cognitive’ systems of this kind. One specific application is smart devices, another is natural language processing, especially spoken natural language. This will help machine understand and respond to verbal commands more and more – tying up with the internet of things. 
    Another field poised for take-off is the brain-machine interface — how to control machines with your brain and nerves and conversely, how to receive inputs from machines. Using brain waves (recorded as EEG) to control computers or wheelchairs and implanting chips in brains to do the same has been already demonstrated, Nitish V. Thakor, professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University told TOI. But, these are a one way street: brain sends signals that are decoded to control a computer or a robot. The big challenge is how to get information back to brain? 
    “Early results reported this year open doors to achieving bidirectional BMI. We are not there yet, as it requires considerable engineering and scientific work,” Thakor said. 

ROBOTS GET BRAINER 
    Finally, this coming year may see the rise of better more intelligent, more human robots. A recent robot Olympiad held in Miami, US, displayed the rather limited capabilities of some of the most advanced robots in the world – they were clunky, barely managed to walk and fumbled around with basic tasks that any human could do in a jiffy. One indication that things are going to change is that Google, Amazon and Apple have all spent millions this year on robotics. Google bought eight robotic companies, Amazon announced plans to deliver packages through drones and Apple invested heavily in factory robots. 
    So, get ready for a future full of machines.

SMART PHONES GET SMARTER

Source::: The Times of India, 01-01-2014, p.21,   http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=TOIM/2014/01/01&PageLabel=23&EntityId=Ar02301&ViewMode=HTML

World’s first data storage system’ discovered

New York: Prehistoric CDs! Scientists have discovered the world's "very first data storage system" - 5,500-year-old clay balls unearthed in Iran that were used for record-keeping in Mesopotamia.

The clay balls, often called "envelopes", excavated in the 1960s, were made about 200 years before writing was invented.

The balls were sealed and contain tokens in a variety of geometric shapes, varying from golf ball-size to baseball-size.

Researchers used high-resolution CT scans and 3D modelling to look inside more than 20 examples that were excavated at the site of Choga Mish, in western Iran, in the late 1960s, 'LiveScience' reported.

The clay balls were created about 5,500 years ago at a time when early cities were flourishing in Mesopotamia.

The clay balls may represent the world's "very first data storage system," said Christopher Woods, a professor at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, in a lecture at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum.

Researchers have long believed these clay balls were used to record economic transactions.

That interpretation is based on an analysis of a 3,300-year-old clay ball found at a site in Mesopotamia named Nuzi that had 49 pebbles and a cuneiform text containing a contract commanding a shepherd to care for 49 sheep and goats.

But, how these devices would have worked in prehistoric times, before the invention of writing, remains a mystery.

How people recorded the number and type of a commodity being exchanged without the help of writing is also not known.

Researchers have found that the tokens within the balls are in 14 different shapes, including spheres, pyramids, ovoids, lenses and cones, the report said.

These shapes, instead of representing the whole words, would have conveyed numbers connected to a variety of metrological systems used in counting different types of commodities, Woods said.

For instance, one ovoid could mean a certain unit, say 10, which was used while counting a certain type of commodity.

Source::::  http://www.ndtv.com

World’s first nanotube computer built

New Carbon-Based Transistors Use Less Energy & Run Faster Than Silicon Chips

Palo Alto (California): A group of Stanford researchers has moved a step closer to answering the question of what happens when silicon, the standard material in today’s microelectronic circuits, reaches its fundamental limits for use in increasingly small transistors. In a paper in the journal Nature on Wednesday, the researchers reported that they had successfully built a working computer — albeit an extremely simple one — entirely from transistors fashioned from carbon nanotubes. The nanotubeshave long held the promise of allowing smaller, faster and lower-powered computing, though they have proved difficult to work with. 
    The computer can right now perform only basic functions at speeds likened to a 1950s computer, but the tiny machine was hailed as a breakthrough in the search for an alternative to silicon transistors. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are rolled-up, single-layer sheets of carbon atoms — tens of thousands can fit into the width of a single human hair. They are pliable and have the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any known material. Silicon is a good semiconductor but cannot be reduced to such a thin layer. Experts believe the structure of CNTs may make them better at carrying currents — thus yielding transistors that are faster, more energy efficient and smaller than silicon. 
    “People have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond silicon,” said Stanford professor Subhasish Mitra, who led the research. “But there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using this exciting technology. Here is the proof.” 
    The computer is just a few square millimetres in size and able to perform basic counting and number-sorting functions using 178 transistors each holding between 10 and 200 nanotubes. It runs at 1 kilohertz — a processing capacity millions of times weaker than today’s computers. The 178-transistor limit was due to the team using a university chip-making facility rather than an industrial process, meaning the computer could in theory be made much bigger and faster, a statement on the study said. The machine ran a basic operating system that allowed it to multitask and swap between the two processes, it added. 
    Mitra and his team had been able to deal with two inherent shortcomings of CNT transistors: the tubes do not always grow in perfectly straight lines, which means that mispositioned ones can cause a short circuit, while others changed form and couldn’t be switched on and off. The team devised a method to burn up and eliminate the uncontrolled CNTs in a transistor and to bypass mispositioned ones. AGENCIES

BIG BOOST: The new technology raises hopes of future computers that are smaller, faster and more efficient.

Source:::: The Times of India, 27-09-2013, p.17,  http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Client.asp?Daily=TOIM&showST=true&login=default&pub=TOI&Enter=true&Skin=TOINEW&AW=1380269603906

HC raps Centre over use of foreign servers for secret info

Abhinav Garg TNN 

New Delhi: The Delhi high court on Thursday frowned at the high level of dependence of the government and its agencies on foreign internet servers. 
    “It’s an important issue. You must act fast,” a division bench comprising justices B D Ahmed and Vibhu Bakhru told the government after seeing that the National Investigating Agency (NIA), while issuing a public notice, gave a gmail ID to solicit secret information on terror suspects. 
    “The government of India and the NIA are using private email IDs on foreign networks that store data outside India. This violates Section-4 of the Public Records Act 1993,” advocate Parag Gupta argued, prompting the bench to express its displeasure with the Centre for such a lapse. 
    Gupta, appearing for petitioner K N Govindacharya, submitted a contact directory of the ministry of communication and IT, in which gmail and Yahoo! IDs of minister of state Milind Deora and other senior officials were listed. Gupta argued this was against the government policy wherein ‘nic’ network of emails must be used to ensure information remains on Indian servers. 
    Appearing for the Centre, additional solicitor general Rajeev Mehra and standing counsel Sumeet Pushkarna assured the HC that an email policy will be formed in four weeks for official communication by government officers so that the data wouldn’t be transferred to foreign servers. 
    The Centre’s stand in the HC on bringing a policy on securing its official communication is important as it comes in the backdrop of claims that India is among the top five countries extensively monitored by the National Security Agency (NSA), a US agency tasked with foreign surveillance. Reports say NSA recorded 6.3 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks in India, placing it fifth on the list of most extensively monitored countries.


Source:::: The Times of India, 27-09-2013, p.10,  http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Client.asp?Daily=TOIM&showST=true&login=default&pub=TOI&Enter=true&Skin=TOINEW&AW=1380269603906