Dr. Rajesh Ingle Branch Counsellor Dear All, It gives me immense pleasure to write this message for the new edition of PICT IEEE Student Branch’s (PISB)’s P.I.N.G. The Credenz edition of P.I.N.G. is always special for all of us. This year we have an interesting theme ‘Technology in Music’ for Credenz ‘17. According to a recent survey conducted by PISB’s P.I.N.G. Editorial team, both electronic and print versions of P.I.N.G. are well received and appreciated by the readers. It is a great contribution by PICT IEEE Student Branch, which provides an opportunity for all, including student members to showcase their talent, views and further strengthen IEEE activities. It is a great pleasure to serve PISB as a Counsellor. It is a really interesting, valuable and great learning experience to work at various levels in IEEE. As a counsellor at PICT IEEE Student Branch; as a Chair, Conference Committee at IEEE Pune Section; Vice Chair, IEEE India Council, IEEE Region 10 Students Activity Coordinator; and Member, MGA SAC, I am thankful to all the members of PICT IEEE Student Branch for their active support. In January 2017, I had an opportunity to attend IEEE Region 10 meeting at Hong -Kong. I got an opportunity to participate in IEEE Region 10 Annual General meeting which was held at Makuhari Messe International Conference Hall, Chiba Prefecture, Japan on 4th and 5th of March 2017 and conducted a Training session for all section chairs and participants from Asia Pacific. We successfully conducted the first conference organised by PICT with the technical support from IEEE at Sheraton Grand and PICT Campus from 3rd to 5th of February 2017. First time in the IEEE’s history, Section Congress was organised at Sydney from 11th to 13th of August 2017. I also had an opportunity to participate in IEEE TISP (Teacher In Service Program) on 14 August 2017 at Sheraton, Sydney, Australia. This year we have seen growing interest among students about IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Robotics Society and other initiatives by IEEE, like TryComputing, TryEngineering and Future Directions. I would also like to mention the strong support from Mr R.S. Kothavale, Managing Trustee, SCTR, Mr Swastik Sirsikar, Secretary, SCTR, Dr P.T. Kulkarni, Principal PICT and all the students who worked at this level. We try our level best to create an environment where students keep updating themselves with the emerging trends, technology and innovations. At PISB many events are conducted throughout the year and widely appreciated by students, acclaimed academicians and industry professionals alike. The events include IEEE Day, workshops, Special Interest Group (SIG) activities, Credenz and Credenz Tech Dayz. I thank all the authors for their contribution and interest. On behalf of IEEE R10 & IEEE Pune Section, I wish PISB as well as this newsletter all the success. I congratulate the P.I.N.G. team for their commendable efforts. Prof. Dr. Rajesh Ingle IEEE R10 (Asia Pacific) Student Activities Chair Vice Chair, IEEE India Council Dean and Professor, PICT
nostalgia
Flashback
Manasi Godse, Ex-Editor getting appreciated widely is a cherished moment and for me, it was this release that allowed me to experience this feeling. Coupled with this was the fact that I was made one of the lead Editors which was a cherry on the top! Every P.I.N.G. release has a story to tell which includes management crisis and differences of opinion involving the one which leads to an internal debate about the presence of a comma in the sentence. It was quite a learning experience for me. P.I.N.G. raises its bar with every release. For P.I.N.G. 10.1, the roles were turned, I was no longer a Junior Editor but was required to work with a highly enthusiastic junior batch. This junior team made the first ever rotating P.I.N.G. Box, a class apart from all the prior boxes.
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hen I was admitted to Pune Institute of Computer Technology in July 2012, little did I know about IEEE and its student branches. It was during the membership drive that I was exposed to the PICT IEEE Student Branch (PISB). When the preparations started for Credenz ’13, we were asked to choose which team would we like to work with. That is when I decided to work for P.I.N.G., as I’d get to participate in the entire process of making a magazine from scratch. It was fascinating to know how the newsletter is sculpted, designed and published. It was fun collecting articles and proof-reading different versions of the copy. I had even submitted an article for the Issue 9.1 and the Editors deemed it fit for publishing. Come Credenz Tech Dayz ’14 and our esteemed seniors hand over the torch to us, the junior team. They were the guiding mentors who taught us how to tackle every responsibility that comes along with publishing a magazine that is praised at renowned conferences and loved by its readers. I confess here, working for Issue 10.0 considerably improved my communication skills within the academia and also outside it. I got the chance to network with various industry personnel. We pushed ourselves beyond our customary limits and worked hard to make P.I.N.G. 10.0 a huge success. Seeing your work
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Every Editor wishes to take the magazine to newer heights and leave a legacy behind. With a fresh bout of creativity, we revamped the magazine giving it a new look. To add to the pool of articles, we introduced a new feature ‘The Story of an Entrepreneur’ which was a riveting and enthralling read. Along with a new feature, we set in motion an Associate Editorial Team and I am happy to see that the trend still continues. My journey with P.I.N.G. was remarkable in every way. It gave me an opportunity to work with some of the best minds that I have met. My short-term, yet an incredible career with P.I.N.G. has and will continue to help me in the long run. I know that P.I.N.G. is in very capable hands and I wish all the very best to the entire team. To sign off, I would like to answer the P.I.N.G.’s famous rhetoric “Are you ready to get PING’d?” I was, am and will always be!
(Manasi Godse was an Editor of P.I.N.G. Issue 10.1 and currently works at Avaya as a Software Engineer. The Editorial Board is glad to share her experience with its readers.)
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outlook
Networking AI
E
ditorial Board is proud to present a new section in the magazine, which encompasses the author’s view on a particular technology.
Unleashing perspective using websites or applications because: 1) It can take seconds, or even up to a minute, to load a website but bots load instantly. As long as two products are comparable in value, people will always use the one that loads faster. 2) Mobile apps need to be downloaded. They take up valuable real estate on your phone. However, bots don’t need to be downloaded. You just need to send them a message.
A bot is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet. It can be thought of as an artificially intelligent entity which interacts with people and fulfills their demands. 1. You may not know this, but instant messaging applications are growing at an incredibly fast rate. Facebook Messenger, for example, is used by over a billion people every month. If messaging apps become the foremost choice of people to communicate with each other, then every business will need a way to interact with its clients and peers through these platforms. But how can a business talk to people on messaging apps? The business can set up a call centre where people are chatting online all day long. However, this isn’t cost effective and 99% of the businesses out there can never do this. The second option is that businesses can use a bot to talk to everyone. The bot can respond instantly, communicate with any number of people simultaneously and is incredibly cost effective. 2. In near future, bots will be faster than websites and mobile applications. As of now, they don’t understand everything we say and are very similar to lightweight applications than artificially intelligent personalities. Imagine a world where the experience of talking to a business organisation via a bot is just as good as using its website or mobile application. I believe that in this situation, people will choose to talk to the bot rather than CREDENZ.INFO
3. Every website and mobile application has a visual interface. However, each interface has its own characteristics. This means that one has to learn new interactive media in order to use favourite products, which is not an ideal situation. Now, look at ‘language’ as an interface. Use of language is something everyone is taught right from the moment they are born. Instead of having to learn new interfaces, interacting with a bot which uses natural langugage to communicate is a lot easier. In the future, bots will be able to understand you completely. Think about this; if you were to plan a trip today, firstly you would go to a travel website. Then, you would browse, find hotels, figure out which ones are in the right area, where the restaurants are, etc. You would have to mentally keep a track of everything while figuring out what you want to do. Now, imagine that instead of scrolling through the website yourself, you could actually talk to the travel website via a bot and it would understand everything you say perfectly! This is going to be one of the biggest shifts in how people interact with computers. In the future, talking to a bot will be like talking to a real person who has instant access to the entire databases of information and can process your thoughts and desires instantly.
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- Rounak Digambar Software Engineer BlueUmbrella Soft. Pune Pg 04
editorial
Charming Particle
S
peckled with the peculiarities of distinct contravening theories proposed to explain the structure of matter, physics has catapulted scientists to delve deeper into this conspicuous subject. Generations old, this subject is the fountainhead of electromagnetism, mechanics and astronomy. Our universe is composed of matter which can further be divided into microscopic particles. The face of science changed completely when electron, the smallest and one of the most fundamental constituents of an atom was discovered. The discovery of electron propelled the scientists to retrospect their theories concerned with the structure of matter. Diving deeper into these minuscule particles, scientists are trying to figure out the mysteries of human evolution and the ultimate force behind our very existence.
Fourteen billion years ago, the Universe came into existence with a bang. Crammed within a dot for space, energy coalesced to form equal quantities of matter and antimatter. As the universe cooled and expanded, its composition altered. Just moments after the Big Bang, antimatter had disappeared with all its entirety leaving the matter to form everything that we see around us, right from the stars and galaxies to the Earth and all life that it supports.The Standard Model of particle physics is the primary theory for describing how Pg 05
Ascertaining the conundrum
the rudimentary constituents of matter interact as per the four fundamental forces viz gravity, electromagnetism, weak interaction and strong interaction. For theorists, the Standard Model is an archetype of quantum field theory, which exhibits a wide range of physics including spontaneous symmetry breaking, anomalies and nonperturbative behaviour. It is used as the basis for constructing more exotic models that incorporate hypothetical particles, extra dimensions and embellish symmetries in an attempt to explain experimental results at variance with the Standard Model, such as the existence of dark matter and neutrino oscillations. According to this theory, quarks are the inherent constituents of matter which combine to form stable composite particles called hadrons. Quarks are of six types namely up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. Protons are made of two up and one down quark while neutrons are made of two down and one up quark. A baryon is defined as a composite particle made of three quarks. Protons and neutrons are examples of baryons. In 2002, researchers used the SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment) experiment at the Fermilab accelerator in Illinois and discovered a particle called the Xi-cc+, the singly charged doubly charmed Xi particle. This detection was just below the threshold of unassailable statistical significance and the putative particle’s estimated mass was wildly out of sync with predictions. SELEX’s claim was based on a very small number of observed interactions, approximately 16, that just cleared the threshold for a statistically significant observation. After a lot of research, scientists at the University of Glasgow discovered the Xi-cc++ particle in the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) at CERN, which is the European Organisation for nuclear research near Geneva. LHCb is an experiment set up to explore what happened after the Big Bang that allowed the matter to survive and build the Universe we inhabit today. The Xi-cc++
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particle is a part of the family of doubly charmed baryons. They found over 300 new Xi-cc+ particles, which was much more than the last time scientists believed they had found hints of doubly charmed baryons. Unlike the Xcc+ particle discovered in 2002, Xi-cc++ does not deviate from the Standard Model, and researchers found far more of them. All the previously observed baryons contained at most one heavy quark. This was the first time that a baryon with two heavy charm quarks had been observed. Xi-cc++ is 3.5 times heavier than protons and neutrons and has double the electric charge of a proton, with two positive charges. This new exotic particle wasn’t observed directly at the LHCb because it lasts only for a tiny fraction of a second. In this instance, researchers identified the Xi-cc++ by its decay products. The Xi decays into a particle called the lambda baryon and three lighter particles, the K- (or kaon) and two pions. Dr Patrick Spradlin who led the study said, “The properties of the newly discovered Xi-cc++ baryon illuminates a long-standing puzzle enclosing the experimental status of baryons containing two charm quarks, commencing an exciting new branch of investigation for LHCb”. “Finding a double heavy-quark baryon is of great interest as it will provide a unique tool to further probe quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong interaction with one of the four fundamental forces. Such particles will thus help us improve the predictive power of our theories”, said Giovanni Passaleva, new Spokesperson of the LHCb collaboration. Former Spokesperson of the collaboration, Guy Wilkinson, added, “In contrast to other baryons, in which the three quarks perform an elaborate dance around each other, a doubly heavy baryon is expected to act like a planetary system, where the two heavy quarks play the role of heavy stars orbiting one around the other, with the lighter quark orbiting around this CREDENZ.INFO
binary system”. This observation of LHCb is truly substantial for the researchers. The analysis of this experiment is considered to be quite accurate. As far as the lighter quarks are causing such a large mass difference, it’s unlikely to be related to differences arising from the quarks’ properties. Scientists are amazed to find two charm-quark systems behave so differently. Further, measuring the properties of the Xi-cc++ will help establish how a system of two heavy quarks and a light quark behaves. Important insights can be obtained by precisely measuring production and decay mechanisms, and the lifetime of this new particle. Though the Standard Model is a fundamental theory that explains what the world is and what holds it together, it is incomplete. While it describes much of what we see in the universe, it only incorporates three of the four forces, leaving out gravity. Further, it fails to answer fundamental questions, like what dark matter is and what happened to antimatter after the Big Bang. The findings of the new charming particle could bring new insights about the strong interaction, the force that binds particles together. While the Xicc++ particle can only be observed on Earth, it is likely that they existed in the primordial times just after the Big Bang. Mastering the forces that hold quarks together could offer deep insight into the physics of the universe in its infancy. The new particle could be a tool to unravel a deeper understanding of the fundamental strong force that binds quarks together to form protons and neutrons, which in turn form atoms - as well as planets, stars, galaxies and the entire universe.
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- The Editorial Board Pg 06
interview
Bridging the rift
With Dr Surendra Pal
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ioneer of India’s Satellite Navigation Programme, Dr Surendra Pal is an accomplished researcher and a prominent space communication technologist. In his 42 years of experience at ISRO, he developed many innovative technologies and worked remarkably for prodigious projects like Rohini and Aryabhata. At present, he is the Vice Chancellor of Defence Institute of Advanced Technology (DIAT) where he envisions to impart knowledge in the field of defence technology.
Q A
Could you please share with us some of your memorable moments from ISRO?
I joined ISRO after my brief tenure at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research(TIFR). The day I joined ISRO, I was really passionate about doing something extraordinary in the upcoming areas of technology. We were in the Space Science and Technology Centre where we were briefed about the journey we were going to embark upon. I was told that I will be joining the satellites system division. The VSSC (Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre) was under construction at that time. Our division head was Professor C. R. Rao. I started my career with him. In the year 2000, I started the Satellite Navigation Programme in India and I am the founder of GAGAN. These were a few memorable moments for me but the most precious moment was the launch of India’s first satellite, Aryabhata. Working in ISRO was very challenging and I loved taking challenges. You can take challenges in technical field but the same doesn’t hold true for personal life. In technical field, you can say ‘let me try it’, ‘I can develop it’, ‘I will make it’ and ‘let me test it’, those are the things which even if you don’t understand you will learn eventually, but the same thing is not applicable in real life. I owe all my success to ISRO since it has taught me many things in my life.
Q
Could you share with us the success story of your two significant projects Rohini and Aryabhata? Pg 07
Dr Surendra Pal, Vice Chancellor, DIAT
“Give one month, you will learn the subject. Give six months, you will become an expert.”
A
Professor C. R. Rao, my division head told me that Dr Sarabhai’s dream was to put one satellite in the orbit. Soon we started working on it and that satellite was called Rohini. It was 40 cm foot walk. I was asked to design the communication system and the antennas of Rohini Satellite. However, I never studied Antenna Systems. I did MTech in Quantum Electronics, which is presently your MRI, NMR, which is in practice for MASERS, LASERS. I wanted to inform my immediate supervisors that I didn’t want to work with antenna, but none of my other colleagues wanted it either. So, I was responsible for the design of Antenna system of Rohini Satellite. Later on, we began our work on Aryabhata. I designed Aryabhata’s antenna system
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Encephalophone is a device which is capable of playing music
by recording our brain waves and analysing them. These brain waves are fed to a synthesiser which interprets them and produces music. It can not only be used to explore new frontiers in music technology but also works as a therapeutic tool for stroke affected patients. along with the primitive and data equipment. When Aryabhata was launched from Kapustin Yar, Russia on 19 April, 1975, we were the first to receive the signal which was a great moment for all of us. When the first signal of Aryabhata having successfully reached the orbit was caught by the antenna we were very happy, that showed yes things are possible and you can receive the signal from space. Later on, even complex systems became very routine, the challenge was to learn new things yourself because no book teaches everything.
Q A
Can you share an instance of your meeting with Dr Sarabhai?
After spending a few months at ISRO, I met Dr Sarabhai. I told him, “Sir, I last worked on antennas, I am not interested in antennas, I don’t know anything.” Then he asked me about my background. After I told him about my educational background, he said, “you come from such a beautiful background with physics and electronics, you can learn anything if you spend one month”. If you spend one month, you will understand the subject, if you spend six months sincerely, you will become an expert. Sometime after this Dr Sarabhai passed away. I decided to do what he asked and stayed back in India. He always said, “we don’t want to get people from outside, we want local people to become experts”. You will be glad to know that 99.95% of engineers in ISRO were all educated in India, not from abroad.
Q A
Defence technology in India has been ever developing. What role has DIAT played in it?
At DIAT, we train the students to get recruited and become officers. We offer a brief orientation course of three to six months on the different aspects of various laboratories. DIAT has 52 laboratories, students are supposed to join one of them. It’s not possible throughout your career to learn everything. We have introduced various clusters here. Many students come here to perceive MTech and PhD. We are associated CREDENZ.INFO
with many industries like Bharat Force. So, there is an exponential growth here. Also, when I joined here, there were a hundred students and this year we have got 300 students. Overall, there are 600 students in the campus. I am pleased to mention that along with increase in number of students, the courses which we offer has also been incremented and currently there are 25 specialisations.
Q
What advantages does GAGAN have over GPS?
A
GAGAN is GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation. Suppose GPS has over 28 satellites in 3 planes, it’s not possible to find out orbit of these satellites very accurately because they keep changing since the gravitational model is actually very different. While drawing, what we do is we consider the earth’s orbit to be a circle. However, the orbit is neither circular nor elliptical. Even if it is elliptical, it’s not a smooth line because gravity goes on changing. Each satellite clock has got some bias and your receiver also has got some bias. So, we load the ephemeris in a certain time interval, and during that interval, there is either a regression or progression in the orbit depending upon what portion it is passing through, and then there are disturbances like ionospheric, tropospheric and atmospheric disturbances. Also, a certain number of waves also affects, all these range you get from GPS in pseudo range, you have to augment those things and you have to apply the corrections. The ionospheric correction is the most significant correction. However, the ionospheric model which we have used is not very well applicable for India due to a lot of electron disturbances taking place. All these things are not found in America or anywhere else. Our condition is very typical since the magnetic equator passes through Trivandrum and it is not found anywhere else. So, what we have essentially done is put a lot of reference stations around 15 places from Jammu and Kashmir to Trivandrum. Through GAGAN, we are monitoring the ionospheric conditions.
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Pg 08
Edible water bottle
is a blob-like water container made from sodium alginate gel. The bio-degradable blob was created in an attempt to switch over to eco-friendly bottles and curb the use of plastic. The container encloses a small volume of water in a flexible membrane made from brown algae. We have developed our own dual cell model and uploaded it. Generally, we correct the ephemeris of each satellite and upload them as well including the timing corrections. The receiver takes all those corrections automatically in the software and apply the corrections so that you can get accuracy of more than 5 to 10 meters. GAGAN is basically augmenting the GPS, increasing the accuracy and applying the corrections. Suppose, if a defence helicopter is flying in an uncharted region, you can know where it is going with the accuracy.
Q
You have been a part of many distinguished projects like Aryabhata and Chandrayan. What major difficulties did your team face?
A
We never thought of anything as a hurdle. We always thought out of the box and did not believe what the white person or yellow person is telling is correct. Many theories are available, we tried to modify them or use them for our purposes rather than blindly following. We believed in thinking something completely out of the box which lead us to develop many things, like we developed QPSK (Quadrature Phase Shift Keying) modulator ourselves. Ground stations were needed for this purpose and each ground stations used to cost around a crore during the 70’s and 80’s. However, we developed a feed with considerably less amount.
Q A
How according to you has IRNSS influenced everyday life?
IRNSS (Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System) is an autonomous regional satellite navigation system, that provides accurate real-time positioning and timing services. It will influence everyday life when it becomes fully operational. You will no longer be dependent on the GPS. GPS services can be denied, but IRNSS is your own constellation. You can send messages for defence purposes, accuracies are officially comparable but unofficially better than GPS. We are reaching the S-band of the ionosphere. It’s the latest system and nobody in the world could have thought of it before Pg 09
us. We have used the geo-orbit for navigation purposes as well. It’s a regional system. India has done exceptionally well in tracking cyclones and many other natural calamities. ISRO has done wonderful job over the past few years.
Q A
Could you please tell us what did you envision during the satellite development at ISRO?
Well, when we were developing Aryabhata, books about satellite communication were not available. The only communication satellite launched was the Early Bird by US. So, we envisioned to launch communication satellites. We had envisioned to go till mars and ahead. I am happy that during my tenure we went to the moon at least. I worked for almost 42 years. This is my 47th year after my Mtech. On 5 Aug 1971, I joined ISRO.
Q A
What message would you like to give to our readers?
In my opinion one should always think out of the box. You should get associated with various professional organisations like IEEE, IETE, attend their seminars, workshops and meet new people. In such seminars and workshops, you get very good ideas. Earlier, the motto of IEEE was networking because it is very essential. And networking is done by meeting people, organising workshops or by conducting various competitions. All these things are very essential, besides your course studies. I don’t believe one should get 99% or even 85%. In semester system, it is difficult to get second class. So, I feel that a person who manages to get second class should be given a medal than the one who has distinction. Besides these, opportunities are plenty nowadays. One should have hobbies and one should travel. I would suggest you to go and see the country with your family. We thank Dr Surendra Pal for his time and contribution to P.I.N.G.
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- The Editorial Board CREDENZ.INFO
maven
Blockchain
Novel security technique
D
eveloping secure means of transaction across a network has been a subject of widespread concern globally. The notion of cryptocurrency sheds light on a probable solution for this dilemma by acting as a medium which ensures secure transmission of funds using an array of encryption techniques. Since the inception of Bitcoins, many ideas were proposed to practically conceive a technology that maintains records of the Bitcoin transactions carried over a network.
Blockchain is the most talked about invention since the inception of Internet and may prove to be the ingenious innovation of this century. Though the technology was popularised by Bitcoin, the power of this technology is now being realised by many industries like FinTech. International remittances for instance, is a perfect use case which can benefit a lot by using blockchain in terms of time and money. Blockchain will potentially cut out the middleman involved in these types of transactions, thereby reducing costs and improving service time. At its basic level, a blockchain, sometimes called a distributed ledger, is a shared transaction database or ledger typically running in the cloud that has some unique properties. The first credible work on blockchain technology incorporated hash trees, also known as ‘Merkle trees’ as a pragmatic means to be able to collect several documents into one block. However, the idea of a distributed blockchain was conceptualised in 2008 and implemented the following year as a core component of Bitcoin. Through the use CREDENZ.INFO
of a peer-to-peer network and distributed time stamping server, a blockchain database can be managed autonomously. First, it’s shared. All the participants in the relevant network, be it consumers or a selected group of companies, can access the ledger and propose transactions. Second, it’s distributed implying that all participants have a copy. Third, the copies are synchronised as information is added to the ledger according to specific protocols. Finally, the security of the database is ensured by cryptography. Transactions are secured through a unique digital signature, then pooled into groups known as blocks and validated through a group consensus mechanism or algorithm. Participants are able to verify the identities of the parties involved in a transaction using a public and private cryptographic key and the validity of the transaction, i.e. ascertaining that the relevant party has the asset or value to transfer. Once a block of transactions has been validated, it is timestamped and indelibly linked to the previous block, creating a “chain” of records in chronological order that cannot be altered, reordered or erased. If a participant tries to falsify a past transaction, it would break the chain, alerting others. The timestamp mechanism also helps prevent the ‘Double Spending’ problem where one party tries to transfer the same asset twice. Though the ability of blockchain technology to support the challenging requirements of completing payment services is yet to be proven, a lot of investment and research is in place by major industry players to bring the technology usage into mainstream. To be successful, blockchain technology must continue to improve in order to extend the world of payments to leverage its benefits and support movement towards the realisation of real-time any-to-any payments.
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- Swanand Bhanej Human Resources ACI Worlwide Pune Pg 10
maven
GPS and Relativity
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Ameliorating navigation
n the year 1940, mathematician G.H.Hardy published an essay, ‘A Mathematician’s Apology’. The driving theme of the essay was based on his opinion that, “the most aesthetic and beautiful mathematics is the one which has no practical applications in the real world”. Many scientists would probably not just agree with Mr Hardy but in fact, take pride in proclaiming that their theory is devoid of applications in the practical world. But every now and then pure research finds an unexpected use case in the most practical problem statements. One such example and possibly a ridiculous one, is the very famous Global Positioning System (GPS) which surprisingly owes a part of its existence to Einstein’s ‘Theory of Relativity’.
cosmic phenomena and has specifically managed to turn the tables in realising and explaining effects pertinent to navigation systems. It has carved itself in everything we do and is critical to comprehend processes such as revolution of the sun. Satellites orbit the earth fast and far enough causing special relativity to come into play and cause time dilation. Jeffrey O. Bennett, the author of the book, ‘What is relativity? An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein’s Ideas’ believes that relativity has a reputation of being hard and hence significant to understand.
Relativity can be perceived as the modern scientific explanation of space. Discovered in 1905 by Albert Einstein, the theory of relativity strongly emphasised on the idea of similarity in the laws of nature and speed of light. More specifically, the theory determines that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating bodies and the speed of light in vacuum is independent of the motion of all observers. Relativity is a strange phenomenon since it tends to contradict common sense. The effects of relativity, though unnoticeable cannot be neglected when traversing at extremely high speeds close enough to the speed of light. Relativity has marked a breakthrough in understanding various
As long as the mobile phone knows its relative distance from a reasonable number of satellites (which happens to be 4), the phone can then infer its geographic location through a technique known as ‘Trilateration’, which is essentially a 3D geometry problem used to determine positions using the points of intersection of three overlapping circles or spheres. The precision achieved is remarkable. Even a simple hand-held GPS receiver can determine your absolute position on the surface of Earth within 5 to 10 meters in a few seconds.
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GPS was developed by the United States Department of Defence to provide a satellite-based navigation system for the U.S. military. It was later put under The Joint Department of Defence and Department of Transportation control to provide for both military and civilian navigation users and has become a part of our daily life. The internal working of GPS is fairly straightforward at an architectural level. A network of satellites fly at a few tens of thousands of kilometres above the earth and keep broadcasting their respective locations along with a very accurate timestamp of the broadcasted message. Our pocket mobile phones catch these signals and by comparing the timestamp at which the message was sent against the timestamp at which the message was received, (along with the knowledge of the speed of light), the distance of the satellite from itself can be calculated.
A GPS receiver in a car can give accurate readings of position and speed in real-time! In particular,
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CREDENZ.INFO
The Iron Man jet suit has finally been brought to life, or
atleast a prototype of it. Born as a brainchild of England’s Richard M. Browning, an ex-Royal Marine reservist, the suit undoubtedly bridges the gap between modern entertainment and technology. The suit utilises multiple Kerosene-fuelled micro gas turbine engines to achieve lift. USA’s GPS system, NAVSTAR is a network of 31 satellites orbiting at a height of 20,000 km in MEO (Medium Earth Orbit) at a speed of 14,000 km/hr, while India’s “geographically locked” GPS system, IRNSS, is a network of 7 satellites orbiting at a height of 36,000 km in GEO (Geostationary Equatorial Orbit). For an accurate estimate of time, the satellites house Caesium or Rubidium based atomic clocks which are astonishingly accurate - to an extent that the very definition of “second” is based on the radiation frequency of Caesium atom. The clock on the simple mobile phones is based on quartz crystal which though an interesting entity in itself, is not remotely as accurate as atomic clocks. The quartz clock is periodically calibrated by the atomic clocks to ensure that delta-time is always calculated accurately.
foot, you can see that positional accuracy quickly becomes dirty. This 7 microsecond a day is just the effect of ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ - there is an even bigger effect in play. Due to the different gravitational field strengths at sea level and at say 20,000 km for NAVSTAR, where the curvature of space time due to the Earth’s mass is less than what it is on the Earth’s surface, General Relativity predicts that clocks closer to a massive object will seem to tick more slowly than those located further away, implying that the clocks aboard the satellites are faster by about 45 microseconds a day as compared to those on earth. This effect is explained by the ‘General Theory of Relativity’. A combination of the effect of speeddifference and gravitational-field-difference has a net effect of 38-microsecond drift between the satellites and mobile phone per day, which would have resulted in a few kilometres worth of error per day, if left uncorrected. The engineers who built the GPS system compensated for this mismatch by reducing clock frequency of onboard atomic clocks in satellites by a few fraction, and hence realising the GPS potential. The theory of relativity has always been a blue sky subject since it is incredibly difficult to comprehend. However, the story of GPS has brought forth a new found realisation of the usefulness of seemingly the purest of all theories, with a strong message: “Blue sky has a shade of grey”.
Now here’s the fun part. The satellites and mobile phones are moving at different speeds, which mean that they have different notions of time as per the ‘Special Theory of Relativity’. If this drift is not accounted for, it would result in a drift in the notion of time of phone versus satellite by around 7 microseconds a day. Considering that a 1 nanosecond difference in the notion of time can cause a position estimation error of about a CREDENZ.INFO
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- Anay Joshi WWR&D engineer SEDEMAC Mechatronics Pvt. Ltd. Pune Pg 12
maven
Dojo Toolkit
Enhancing softwares
I
nternet, the colossal interconnected network of computers, has been paramount in revolutionising the sphere of Information Technology. Since the inception of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), software engineers have been developing standard web applications. With the passage of time, these web based applications have become integral in augmenting the quality of functioning of internet browsers. These web based applications are extensively used by everyone in carrying out their day-to-day activities. The key to the development and integration of these applications is to incorporate various scripting languages, available libraries and open-source software. Many such toolkits and frameworks are programmed by engineers and are widely available by everyone.
Dojo is one such JavaScript-based library that helps in developing web based applications. It is an open-source framework quite similar to other JavaScript frameworks like JQuery and Bootstrap. Dojo was launched in 2006, the time when crossbrowser rich web applications were in demand. At that time, developers were struggling with HTML 4 and JavaScript 1.5 since it demanded the development to be done for different browser vendors. However, Dojo came to the rescue. It had a rich set of libraries which enabled the development to be done without worrying about the browser the application will run in.
was the time when other JavaScript frameworks like JQuery and ExtJS became more popular. They were easy to learn, faster in performance and did not require more than 2 MB of space. Recently, Dojo was re-launched with a richer library called Dojo Toolkit. It has overcome all the shortcomings of its previous versions. It is fast and easy to learn. Apart from the built-in widgets like Charting, Dialogs, Editor, Menus, Sliders etc., it has a library which will enable the developer to create custom widgets which can be used at different places in an application without duplicating the code. Another major upgrade in the features of Dojo which makes it different from other JavaScript frameworks is its client side data storage facility. Most JavaScript frameworks use cookies and sessions to store client side data. Dojo on the other hand, provides a full-fledged database which can be used for fast retrieval of data on client side. Needless to say, like other JavaScript frameworks, Dojo is a responsive framework. The websites created with Dojo are compatible with multiple devices of different sizes, mobile phones, tablets etc. It provides a good testing tool which enables us to test the user interface, look and feel on different devices without actually deploying the application on them. Dojo supports Ajax, rendering XML and JSON. The latest version of the toolkit, named as Dojo 1.12.1 was recently launched by developers. This incredible toolkit aims at solving problems with DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and providing users with the virtue of dynamically developing the web applications. The future versions will provide features like developing mobile apps with Cordova, which is a technology to create cross platform mobile apps using HTML and CSS. The importance of web applications increasing significantly in our lives leaves a great scope for the upcoming versions of the toolkit.
Unfortunately, by the end of the year 2009, Dojo lost its place. It was criticised for being heavy, slow in performance and difficult to learn. This Pg 13
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- Hunaid Husain Senior Software Engineer Nihilent Technologies Ltd. Cape Town, South Africa CREDENZ.INFO
maven
Miniature rovers
S
tephen Hawking once said, “We must continue to go into space for the future of humanity”. Arguably, the most brilliant scientist of this century is warning mankind to search for another habitable planet and that too in the quick time span of 100 years to save the human race from extinction. Interstellar operations have been a topic of great interest for space scientists since centuries and now with Dr Hawking’s warning, all they need to do is speed up their research.
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and NASA are striving to get to the nearest, thought to be habitable planet, Proxima Centauri B. They are now closer than ever to realising this venture since they have developed a way to considerably reduce the travel time by attaining one fifth of the speed of light by means of chip sized spacecraft. These miniature spaceships can cover the estimated distance of 4.37 light years within 30 years. Now if present semiconductor families are considered, these 30 years could prove to be fatal given the environment they are subjected to. Radiations above the magnetic field in space can penetrate junctions of silicon substrate, resulting in erratic behaviour of circuits. This could prove to be fatal for silicon transistors in various controllers and memories onboard the spaceship. Two options for addressing silicon substrate damage are: 1. Choose a path with minimum radiation. 2. Provide protective shielding to the spaceship. Both these options defeat the purpose of the tiny spaceship to reduce expedition time and have CREDENZ.INFO
Minuscule spaceships light weight solution. A novel approach has been proposed by KAIST scientists to develop devices which can recover themselves from the damage caused by radiations in space. The fundamental idea is to change the legacy transistor channels to nanoscale wired channel. The gate, which is an electrode that turns the flow of charges through a channel on or offcompletely surrounds the nanowire. Adding an extra contact to the gate allows you to pass current through it. This current heats the gate and the channel it surrounds, fixing any radiationinduced defects. Scientists are expecting to cluster gates diminutive to be 5 nano metres in length. KAIST has successfully used these gate-all-around technologies to manufacture microprocessors, DRAMs with 1012 times successful damage repair and flash memory. These devices heal themselves by turning their power off, heating the damaged components and backing up to continue their operation. KAIST is also working on fewer junction transistors which heal themselves by inducing heat and exploring their further applications. NASA is also looking into the same field using micro heaters. This self-healing transistor channel can be the building block for various circuit elements used in spaceships like processors, logic gates and memories. These self-healing circuit elements can outlast their interstellar expedition time and also target far away galaxies and star systems. Along with ‘new age space tech’, self-healing transistors could be used in fabricating household electronics as well as every circuit which may experience extreme conditions to some extent. Using this technology, not only will we be able to prolong the average life of our electronic gadgets but also increase the reuse factor and gradually eradicate loads of e-waste. However, there are many challenges to get this idea running, like production cost and a further increase in the life time. -Ashwin Tayade Director of Sunshine Powertronics Pune
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pansophy
Astrionics
Inhabiting space
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nhabiting a planet other than Earth has been one of the most popular science fiction themes. As we become technically equipped, the idea of exploring the space for a new home is no longer a distant dream. In a recent research, the planet Mars has been at the forefront of this scientific study and scientists are trying to discover the possibilities of colonising this ‘red’planet.
The surface conditions and availability of water makes Mars inarguably the most hospitable of gh all the planets in the Solar System. The earth’s atmosphere is composed of 27% oxygen while the rest is occupied by nitrogen and other gases. The atmosphere on Earth is suitable for life since every living form can exist here with ease. Now, scientists at NASA are planning to produce oxygen in the atmosphere of Mars. The plan has been in existence for quite some time when they introduced the Mars Rover 2020 Space Mission. Although seemingly impossible, the scientists at NASA claim that it is possible to retrieve oxygen from the atmosphere of Mars. Scientists are working towards sending microbial life, possibly in the form of algae or bacteria in order to make the Martian atmosphere tolerant for human life. The aim is to feed microorganisms like algae, bacteria known as Regolith into the soil of Mars with a hope that they would pump out oxygen as a byproduct. It is envisioned that biodomes which contain microbes could be scattered across Pg 15
the surface of Mars to produce the oxygen needed for humans to survive. If the project turns out to be successful, we can install international space stations to test our life supporting system. In this process, Moon will become the next logical location for generating a space station. Canadian–American businessman Elon Musk has announced the plans to colonise Mars and planned a budget of $ 10 billion per person to colonise Mars. The $1.9 billion rover will include an experiment that will turn the carbon dioxide in Martian atmosphere into oxygen. “The device named MOXIE works like an engine in reverse”, said Michael Hecht, a scientist from MIT. It will make around 3/4th of an ounce of oxygen in an hour. If it works, then a device 100 times larger than MOXIE would be launched two years before astronauts reach there. If the experiments succeed, astronauts may reach Mars by 2030. NASA also plans to send astronauts to asteroids. Carrying fuel to Mars for return flights will be heavy and expensive. The other part of rocket fuel propellant can be made from light hydrogen brought from Earth or other chemicals mixed with Martian atmosphere. The distance of Mars from Earth is about 140 million miles. A trip to Mars, which would usually take about nine months can be shortened to six months by adjusting the speed of spaceship. In the fuel cell, fuel is heated in the presence of oxygen to produce electricity. For the reverse fuel cell, electricity which is produced in a separate machine would be combined with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to produce oxygen and carbon monoxide using a process called solid oxide electrolysis. If we can perform the experiment as per our expectations, then in next decade Mars will be a peaceful place for homo sapiens to live.
- Dr K. C. Nandi Professor in Physics Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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philomath
Neural lace
Tracking brain waves
E
ver since the inception of ENIAC, technology has evolved multi folds. The proliferation of technology has resulted in a steady march of human beings and computing towards tighter integration. Neural lace is the next step in this steady march where technology and humans will evolve as one. The outbound bandwidth of a biological brain is slow. While there is a relatively high upper limit on how much information the brain receives per second, our neocortex is great at interpreting huge streams of real time inputs from our eyes and ears, building up on the information received. However, the fastest we can get information out of our brains is severely constrained. Neural lace will enable humans to communicate, inbound and outbound with more speed enabling us to perform better and faster as individuals and in groups.
The neural lace is an ultra-thin mesh that can be implanted inside the skull, creating a collection of electrodes capable of monitoring the brain function. It forms an interface between the brain and the machine. Its primary purpose is to optimise mental output through a brain-computer interface, allowing the human brain to keep up with (and someday merge with) artificially intelligent systems.
the needle, it unravels while spanning the brain. Gradually, the lace becomes a part of the brain and evolves with the brain as it grows or changes its size slightly. Neural lace is an extension to our lifestyle. Our lives have already been integrated with smart phones and other devices constantly connected to software services in the cloud, making us more effective at home, at work and in our social relationships. A new paper published this month by researchers at Harvard University reports on the successful implantation of an electronic neuromorphic mesh in the brains of mice without triggering an immune response. Neuro prostheses shows the promise in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injuries and for the creation of brain-machine interfaces such as the neural lace. However, a major stumbling block for researchers has been the predisposition of these implants to induce an immune response, inflammation and scarring in the brain, severely limiting their potential use. The Harvard team’s new neuromorphic mesh is delivered to specific brain regions via a syringe injection and overcomes the problem of immune response in the brain. Their findings on the brains of injected mice showed little to no immune response and they observed that the neuromorphic mesh had merged with the brain tissue. The neuromorphic mesh’s unique ultra flexible nature and a layer of biocompatible polyimide polymer that covers all the metal interconnects to prevent any immune response. In a world where AI is beating us at almost everything, this may be the solution humans need to stay relevant. However, considering the technology we are working with, it might be a long time before we can have a merger between biological intellect and Artificial Intelligence.
To put neural lace, a tiny needle containing the mesh is rolled up and placed inside the skull and the mesh is injected. As the mesh leaves CREDENZ.INFO
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- Pavan Borole Vivekananda Education Society’s Institute of Technology Mumbai Pg 16
philomath
Ambient power
T
he world is becoming more inclined towards developing technology which is smart, efficient and sustainable. These steaming technologies focus primarily on sustainability, how everyday gadgets can minimise their side-effects on the environment and optimally operate in the most efficient manner utilising the resources available to them.
One of the key goals in developing sustainable technology is to reduce battery consumption and its usage. It has been a cause of major concern over the past few years. As improved and cuttingedge functionalities are added to a product, battery consumption has drastically increased, significantly straining the energy resources. A typical mobile phone charger is rated at anywhere between 3-7 W while charging. It means, even if your phone takes 2 hours to charge, it will just consume 0.006 to 0.014 units or kWh of electricity. This implies that even if you charge your mobile phone every day, you spend only 2-5 units in the whole year. However, as per the same research by Lawrence Berkeley Lab, if the mobile phones are kept to charge even after they are fully charged, it still pulls about 2-4 W of electricity. Although the number is insignificant from a personal context, if we combine the numbers for all the people having mobile phones in the country, this number is pretty huge. This is the principle reason why researchers from the University of Pg 17
Exploiting radiations Washington have developed mobile phones which are capable of operating at zero battery levels and can perform elementary operations like calling and receiving. These mobile phones are designed in a way so that they do not depend on electricity or any kind of charging and operate with the help of ambient radio signals or light present in the environment. So far, we have been able to concoct smartphones which can be charged wirelessly, without the need of explicitly plugging a battery to charge them. However, this kind of negligible dependence on the battery has taken our perspective to the next level. The researchers explain that for achieving such a difficult feat, it was necessary to think, design and analyse how phones operate at the most fundamental level. They had to rethink, reconfigure and change how a usual mobile phone functions in its regular environment, how much battery it requires and what type of intracellular communication takes place to establish a connection between two such devices. It was observed that a normal cell phone requires thousands of watts of power in the process of converting an analog signal to a digital signal in order to transmit sound and information across two devices. The researchers reconstructed the working of the cell phone and eliminated this huge hurdle of power need by making it derive power from its surroundings and operate within the power budget of just 3.5 microwatts. These cell phones consist of ultra- sensitive sensors which receive data from the tiny vibrations of microphone and capture that motion. This motion is converted from the standard analog signal, which is then transmitted to the other device. The exact same process is carried out at the other end but in the opposite order so that the end results are the same sound vibrations from the transmitting device. The radio signals utilised in this process are
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Sprout is a revolutionary all-in-one computer that makes it easier
than ever to get creative. By blurring the line between physical and digital, Sprout lets you bring your creativity to life instantly. It has a 3D camera and projection engine which can scan 2D and 3D objects easily and quickly and display them. emitted by a specific base station which works independently as of now. The base station can also be operated by integrating it with standard cellular networks or wifi routers. Hence, smooth communication is established among the devices. The two devices operate in two basic modes of operation- transmission mode and listening mode.
conduct a video call. Their research was published on 1st July in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on interactive, mobile, wearable and ubiquitous technologies and is funded by the Google Faculty Research Awards.
The research team, which consists of computer scientists and electrical engineers presented a prototype to demonstrate the phone’s functionalities and with the help of Skype, normal cellular activities like calling and receiving, were performed. Their live demonstration included energy derivation from two alternatives- ambient radio signals and small solar cells. Both function with the help of base stations 31 feet and 50 feet away respectively, with a solar cell scoring more as compared to radio signals in terms of offering compatibility and greater range of operation with respect to the base station. When asked about the motivation or purpose behind their research, lead researcher and professor Joshua Smith explained that while choosing among the devices to work upon for development of smart gadgets, the mobile phone was the most obvious choice. He reasoned by saying, “Cell phone is the device we depend on the most today. So if there were one device you’d want to be able to use without batteries, it is the cell phone.” When enquired about the future implications of this research, he excitedly commented about the increasing complexity of integration of these cell phones and modern mobile applications, making them compact enough to operate. Further, the team plans on implementing voice encryption to ensure safe communication between the devices and increase their operating range. At the same time, they are working on the phone’s UI by incorporating low power E-ink screens to Pg 11 CREDENZ.INFO
With the technologies becoming global, consumption of resources is increasing, making energy conservation an important issue. The ambient powered cell phones are bound to assist in the conservation of energy, leading to decrease in the use of electricity which in turn will help in reducing some of the major environmental threats like global warming. Sustainability is essential to maintaining the stability in nature. Exploitation of resources often based on the ever-increasing demands of people has lead to an inexplicable depletion in their levels. As we step into the ‘high-tech’ world, it is important to carry sustainability along with us. Developing ambient-powered cell phones can potentially change the face of the world since mobile phones are the most sought for devices in the current century and using ambient sources of energy to harvest power for these devices would literally be the icing on the cake.
- Saylee Marulkar Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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philomath
Oil Sorbents
R
Incrementing absorptivity
ecent studies have demonstrated significant progress in establishing oil sorption using a whole range of materials. Seth B. Darling, along with a team of researchers has explored a recent extension of atomic layer deposition to create benign and selective sorbents based on chemically modified polymeric foams with properties, that should make it especially effective at cleaning up oil spills.
testing. Sea water was used - dissolved to a final concentration of 35 parts per 1000 in distilled water. SIS-treated foams (sponges) were functionalised by grafting an oleophilic compound. Sorption tests were initially conducted on dry foams; they were immersed in a pure solvent bath for 15 minutes and then removed.
Sequential Infiltration Synthesis (SIS) and Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) methods have received considerable interest across a spectrum of fields for producing thin film coatings of atomically controlled thickness. In a recent work, the research group has demonstrated how an extension of ALD method to high-pressure can drive infiltration of organo-metallic precursor (Oilloving) molecules deep within a soft material, where they react with chemical moieties in the polymer and form a covalent bond. This method leads to the growth of inorganic materials in a molecularly controlled fashion analogous to ALD, with the qualitative distinction of bulk material growth rather than thin film deposition.
In comparison to polyurethane, treated polyimide foams showed greater sorption capacities, reaching as high as 90 g/g in the case of crude oil. The results demonstrate how strategies thus far applied only to polymeric thin films can be extended to porous polymeric macroscopic substrates. While there are inherent difficulties and ultimate physical limitations to this endeavour, there are myriad of opportunities for new material design.
It’s where a polymeric material, like polyurethane, is infused with inorganic material. The first coat is a metal oxide primer applied using SIS. It has been investigated as a method to improve the lithographic process in semiconductor manufacturing as IC structures shrink smaller and smaller. Testing Oil Sorption Capacity, Silicon oil, hydrocarbon-based vacuum pump oil and crude oil were used for Pg 19
Oil sorption selectivity with respect to water was measured by spreading a known amount of oil onto the surface of a water bath. A piece of foam was gently dropped onto the surface of the water, and allowed to float for less than a minute. The untreated polyurethane foams absorb both water and oil to some degree, but there is no selectivity and a relatively low sorption for both. They took minutes to reach their max crude oil sorption capacity, 7g/g, while treated foams reached 30g/g in seconds. Furthermore, the selectivity of the PU foam for oil compared to water increased dramatically after functionalisation.
By achieving high absorbency and selectivity, favourable re-usability characteristics and simple fabrication schemes using commercial starting materials, they are able to demonstrate a potentially useful example of the approach to create low-cost, environmentally benign, and scalable design of reusable oil sorbents, with the capability to absorb up to 90 times its weight in oil.
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- Aditya Dandekar Jacobs University Bremen, Germany CREDENZ.INFO
philomath
Wiseward
Smart wallet
I
gave up using a wallet this July. Reason? I lost it. Seems such a trivial thing, right? Losing your wallet with possibly the most important things for your existence (pretty much everything ranging from cash, driver’s licence, bills, and with numerous shopping cards, credit cards and debit cards among other things). With technology having touched and embedded in our lives in all the possible aspects there could be, the advent of a ‘Smart Wallet’ is a gift for our forgetful minds and a tough enemy for the smartest hackers and notorious pickpockets.
Remember how you guarded your wallet with your life in crowded places? But now, even in all the vociferousness and din, Baggizmo’s Wiseward smart wallet eases your anxiety with regards to losing your wallet. Security has now become a necessity in almost everything around us- social and media profiles, bank accounts, transactions and that has now been revolutionised by Baggizmo to provide the smartest security to our wallets. What makes this tech-savvy wallet a must have? The first point is the Anti-Theft alarm. This wallet aims at providing the best defence for your belongings with its integrated technology, the whole system environment just consisting of your phone and the wallet. Your wallet and your phone are connected through an app via Bluetooth. The app is supported on both iOS and Android platforms. If you find that your wallet is missing, all you have to do is activate an alarm through the Wiseward phone app to locate your misplaced wallet. The Pg 11 CREDENZ.INFO
second feature is RFID-blocking and RFID-free zone. RFID is an acronym for Radio-Frequency Identification, a technology which enables us to record the presence of an object using radio signals. This technology is the one that enables you to make “cashless payments” using your credit or debit cards. Electronic Pickpocketing is the 21stcentury version of traditional pickpocketing. A thief can “Wirelessly” steal your credit or debit card and consequently make purchases. The Wiseward wallet protects up to 10 e-pickpocketing trials and thus guards the sacred details of your cards. On the other hand, it also enables you to scan up to 5 cards from inside the wallet, using the RFID-free zone feature, thus eliminating the efforts of physically removing the cards from the wallet for your usage. Next up is UV light scanning. The wallet has a tiny UV light which scans the hard cash you put in, to check if they are legal or not. Say goodbye to counterfeit notes! The next feature is Wireless charging. There’s nothing as relieving as wireless charging- the smart wallet comes with a longlasting battery and can be charged with any standard Qi charging system. Another key-point is Movement Detection. The wallet is equipped with gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetic sensor to technically inform the owner in case of loss or an unauthorised access. It comes with its own NFC (Near-field Communication) chip too. The Baggizmo Wiseward wallet is much more than a wallet - it is a fashion statement for the Tech-savvy urban people. Vibrant colours and durable material make it a classy wallet to have. Yes! As simple a thing as a wallet is equipped with the aforementioned unique features! So until you get your hands on one of Baggizmo’s Wisewards, keep checking your pocket to keep your wallet safe!
- Bhargavi Rakesh Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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featured
5D Data storage
R
evolutionary innovations in the field of computer science and development of highspeed computing devices have transformed our world into a hi-tech digital era. Since the invention of the very first machines, proper storage and retrieval of information has always been a priority for developers and researchers.
Every bit of data is stored, modified and authenticated for the users, providing them with all the features they need, the most important of them being - security. From huge floppy disks, capable of storing only 1 MB of data to saving gigabytes of data on microchips, data storage techniques have surpassed an evolution of changes. Today, these small-sized devices can systematically store a large amount of data and are extensively used in laptops, mobile phones and other gadgets. With advancements in technology, many devices paved their way for efficient data storage. Innovation in digital storage of information scaled new heights when a team of nanoscientists at the Delft University of Technology in Netherlands unveiled that the data of entire Library of Congress could be accommodated on a dust mite. Isn’t this concept astonishing? It became one of the densest storage techniques ever invented. This popular 3D optical data storage technique has the potential to provide petabyte-level mass storage on DVDsized discs. In addition to the academic research, several corporations have shown a keen interest Pg 21
Archiving mankind in the optical storage technology. This addition of one dimension entirely changed the concept of data storage and retrieval. But, even after several breakthroughs, the demand for efficient and secure data storage is ever-increasing since every design has its own disadvantages. Nowadays, due to digitalisation, our world is literally dependent on technology for every little task, whether its bill payment or education, it’s all possible by means of internet. Therefore data is stored digitally instead of those stack of files, which we hardly make use of. Imagine storing everything in one minute glass, literally everything? And what if that object would last forever? Researchers from the University of Southampton have created a new data encoding format that encodes information in tiny nanostructures in the glass. This technology is called five-dimensional data storage, also coined as the ‘Superman memory crystal’. Here, the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. These 5-dimensional discs are not time travelling devices capable of viewing various universes, but instead, tiny patterns printed on three layers within the disc. Data is recorded in the fourth and fifth dimensions by using the glass to reflect and polarise light. The concept of being five-dimensional means that one disc has several different images depending on the angle that one views it from and the magnification of the microscope used to view it. Basically, each disc has multiple layers of micro and macro level images. A femtosecond laser is adopted which produces a burst of laser light for about 280 femtoseconds. These spots are capable of recording data in two dimensions (X and Y axes). By varying the focus of the laser, dots start cropping up in the third dimension (Z axis) separated by a meagre distance of 0.005 micrometres. Finally, by simply moving the laser horizontally and vertically, information can be stored in two more dimensions, bringing the total to 5D. This technique is more beneficial than the direct laser writing technique employed in
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Feng microphone is a nanogenerator-based, dual-functional and self-
powered thin patch loudspeaker or microphone for personal electronics. It is a flexible, robust device which has the ability to generate power with better electromechanical efficiency as compared to the traditional loudspeakers. CDs and DVDs as there is no heat damage as well as no surface debris. Data is read from a normal CD by shining a laser at a tiny line with bumps in it. Whenever the laser hits a bump, it’s reflected back and recorded as 1; else recorded as 0. These are just two “dimensions” of information that indicate on or off. Through these two dimensions, CDs can store anything: music, books, images, videos, or software. But because this bumpy line is stored on the surface of the CD, it’s vulnerable. It can be eroded either by physical scratches and scuffs, or by exposure to oxygen, heat, and humidity.
A major drawback of 5D storage technique is its writing speed which is about 13 kilobits per second, much slower than the writing speed of CDs and DVDs. To retrieve the data, you have to pulse light at the glass again and record the polarisation of the waves with a microscope as they pass through. The reading time has not been estimated as yet. This disc, though appearing very small, boasts of a 360 TB memory storing capacity and that too forever. The nanostructures on which the data is encoded, if maintained at a temperature of about 190-degree Centigrade, the average temperature of cooking, can last for 13.8 billion years which is equal to the estimated lifetime of the universe. This data storing technique can be best used for archival purposes, such as that of museums and galleries, but also have a “commercial” scope in the future. Scientists have been successful in the perennial Pg 11 CREDENZ.INFO
documentation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the Magna Carta, the Holy Bible and Newton’s “Opticks”. A copy of the UDHR encoded to 5D data storage was recently presented to UNESCO by the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the International Year of Light (IYL) closing ceremony in Mexico. This five-dimensional data storage technique has the ability to preserve the data of entire generations of humanity. The material used in this technique is glass, which is widely available and inexpensive. Glass has this amazing attribute of surviving even under high temperatures. Therefore, these discs can last for a very long time since glass is a material which needs a lot of heat to melt or wrap it and most importantly- it is chemically stable. Researchers at Southampton guarantee that the 5D discs are safe up to temperatures of 1000 degree celsius, thus making our data survive under harsh environmental conditions. Scientists are confident that this technique has the ability to store the culture, language and essence of the human race in a simple piece of glass. Besides important historical records, these disks can be used for everything – from an immense library of video games to storing the entirety of human race for future civilisations. The innovations in technology have revolutionised the world we live in today. After the invention of the first machine, man never wondered that technology can be scaled up to such great heights, where even a tiny object will be capable of performing a plethora of operations. With smartphones getting thinner and advancements getting faster day-byday, it could only be a matter of time before this kind of data storage is the norm.
- Vedant Puranik Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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philomath
Atomic fingerprint
T
o set the war efforts back in UK and America during the world war II, the Nazis released fake American and British money in their respective country to set off inflation. The Nazis were not the only one to successfully counterfeit money in massive amounts. A mob called the Lavender hill mob managed to forge an estimated 50 million pound sterling. After the mob was caught and broken up, the Bank of England had to change its 20-pound note to make it more secure.
Countering counterfeit
well as the potential reaction it has with our bodies. If the medicine we buy is not from a certified pharmaceutical company, whose products are regularly tested to make sure that they adhere to the rules of the FDA, then that medicine might cause harm instead of helping us. Our body due to the weakened state that it already was in, has the potential to further deteriorate, something all of us and all our doctors want to avoid the best we can. Replica of medicines is not the only one which has the severe potential to harm or possibly even kill us. Counterfeit machinery parts, like automobile parts, can also do the same job and yield wonderful results. The parts used in machines are tested thoroughly. Each step of the process undergoes relentless scrutiny to prevent any unpredictable and unwanted failure. Machines have to operate under harsh conditions like extreme heat or cold, high pressure, humidity etc.
When mentioning people who made millions with the help of fraud, let’s not forget Frank Abagnale. A person who posed as a pilot, doctor and a prosecutor managed to con millions of dollars before he even turned 19. He achieved this by forging cheques. He was so good at what he did that not only the FBI turned to him to catch other cheque forgers but he also got a film based on his life-Catch Me If You Can. Counterfeiting might be fun and exciting to read about in books or watch in movies but it has some serious repercussions and needs to be stopped. This dangerous and highly illegal activity is not restricted to currency; other aspects of this industry are pharmaceuticals, automobile parts etc. As we all know, the medicine we take is prescribed by our doctors who keep in mind the careful balance of the components in that medicine as Pg 23
A sudden failure could cause a life threatening accident. Nowadays due to digitalisation, online shopping has become a norm. People order several products online, some websites and portals have become extraordinary platforms to find good deals on products with better discounts. But still, many customers have launched a complaint against such companies about receiving fake products. It is very easy to get scammed. Especially, in peer-to-peer business models, counterfeiters have been known to sell fake products. Accidental purchase of these products by customers can have disastrous results and many organisations are trying to avoid it. The impact of counterfeiting on the economy is getting worse day-by-day. It has become more prevalent in developing and poor countries. China and India rank very high on the list. Moreover, pirated goods are manufactured and sold more in small towns and villages where surveillance is weak and relatively higher profits make it an attractive proposition. Counterfeiting and piracy have increased with growing criminal networks and organised crime. The international trade in
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PowerRay
is a computerised Sting Ray which is a boon for fishermen and biologists all across the world. It provides detailed information on fish distribution, underwater temperature, depth and underwater landscape. It can be used to monitor the underlying activities inside the ocean and analyse the recorded data. pirated goods may be in excess of US$500 billion on a rough estimate. This amount is larger than the Gross Domestic Product of more than 100 countries. Therefore, recognising counterfeit parts is where the challenge comes in, as we buy and sell them without realising that we are doing so. Scientists from the Lancaster University have invented an extremely simple yet effective method to detect a forged object. This is done by embedding a 2-D layer of a component like a graphene into the original product. This layer of graphene has some intentional flaws which help create eccentric patterns. These flaws may include removal and/or addition of atoms like carbon, oxygen etc. After the intentional flaw is set, the graphene is integrated into ink. This ink is then used to print an atomicthin layer onto a hologram, that has to be stuck to the product. If the product is spray-painted with the label instead, then the ink can be used for spray-painting. Once the product adheres with the ink, it is sent for distribution. The consumer can confirm the presence of the compound with the help of their smartphones. The process is simple, the consumer uses their phone to click a picture with the flash on. The flash of the phone produces enough energy to excite the atoms present in the ink used. The excited atom produces a unique colour based on the pattern of the atoms used in the ink. This unique pattern, acting as a fingerprint, is captured by the camera. An app is used to analyse the image taken. The app confirms whether the product is unique or not. The name given to this process is atomic fingerprinting, and quite rightly so. The atoms of the compound have a unique structure. The structure not only depends on the atoms that are removed or included but also on the reactions and conditions under which these reactions are done. Every atom that is used, forms a bond with the original compound creating a unique structure. This structure, when excited displays an exclusive pattern which helps in identifying the origin of the product. Pg 11 CREDENZ.INFO
Scientists are quite satisfied with the simplicity of the technique. The application is soon expected to be utilised in the automotive industry, where parts are already spray-painted with labels. The product is expected to flourish the market in the first quarter of the year 2018. This method is not only uncomplicated but will also prove to be very effective and efficient in the industry. The application of this technology is wide spread. Due to its simplicity, this technology can be used on automobile parts and medicines without any changes. It has the potential to put a large dent on the production of fakes.
Counterfeiting is an industry that needs to be stopped. As with every other industry its power comes from the demand of its product. Once we are able to recognise when the product is a fake, we need to stop purchasing it. Then the demand stops and when the demands stop, so does the supply. Therefore, once this simple yet fascinating technology will be incorporated, not only forging of products but also the loss of billions and health risks will be reduced to a great extent. The replica may be cheaper for us in the present moment but it has serious repercussions in future. The kind that we all would rather avoid.
- Tushita Singhel Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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Smart Garden
F
00d is an indispensable appurtenance of life. It is essential to the functioning, growth and maintenance of our body. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to fresh food. The apparently “fresh looking fruits” sold in supermarkets might not necessarily be fresh.
The increased transportation and processing delays add further to the dilemma of ensuring the quality of food products. Hence, it’s always better to switch over to the concept of growing your own food. However, technology has taken its toll over the lifestyle of people and most of them don’t have the time, motivation to know- how to grow plants in their apartment, making them reluctant to resort to in-house gardening practices. Hence, scientists continue seeking prospective solutions to combat these obstacles. Various types of smart gardening systems are available in the market and most of them include a smart sensor, a water tank and a smartphone app. The system allows you to ‘plug’ in seed pods with smart soil which creates ‘bio foam’, allowing the roots to grow, synthesise nutrients and spread just like they would in normal soil. The smart soil is a nano material which maintains an optimum level of oxygen, water, pH and nutritional ingredients. The seed pods simply latch on, so that you can easily take them on and off as needed, or when the plants grow. The seed pods can be selected from different types of seeds ranging from herbs to peppers and tomatoes, all chosen to work well within small Pg 25
Modernising landscapes root space. Some variants of the smart garden also include an auto watering cloud which fills up the water tank whenever the water level goes down. The Smart Garden app can sync with the smart sensors of the garden and provide information on water, nutrients, light levels and humidity, allowing you to observe and analyse diverse aspects of the gardening system and address questions such as: do your plants need anything else, are they healthy and is there a need to water them. This makes inhouse agriculture easy, especially for those who typically forget to water plants. One of the very first Smart Gardening systems which was actually implemented was the Plug and Plant system. The Plug and Plant system was originally created by Vertical Green, which is a part of Verde Vertical, a company specialising in vertical gardens. Smart garden ‘Airy’ uses an air cleaning system which ensures that the plant does not get affected by the household toxins in the form of floor cleaners or cigarette smokers which might affect the soil in general. Ninety percent of the air cleaning in case of plants is done by the roots which usually get covered by a base pot. Airy constructs the base pot with multiple small openings allowing the root to cleanse efficiently. Grass Lamp is a technology which allows you to grow micro green plants like wheat regardless of the temperature and amount of sunlight it receives. We can grow plants using only water and LED lamps. One of the more recent smart gardens includes click and grow technology. The other competitive products in the market hugely rely on pumps, mixers and fertilisers which make the system complicated and expensive. The plants grown in smart garden systems have shown up to 600% more antioxidants than supermarket bought herbs and salads. Smart Garden systems serve the opportunity to make fresh food available to everyone irrespective of their knowledge or experience. - Faizan Shaikh Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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ICO
Prospective investment option
I
n this world, where a higher capital for business is becoming increasingly important, there are a variety of ways to invest money. Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is one such way used for capital raising. ICOs are used by firms to bypass the regulated capital-raising process mandated by venture capitalists or banks (needed in case of IPOs). If a firm wants to raise money through an ICO, it usually creates a plan on ‘white paper’ that explains what the project is about, how much money is needed to take up the particular project, proportion of virtual tokens that founders will keep for themselves, what type of money is accepted and the duration of the ICO campaign. Using the virtual currency, interested parties can buy some crypto-coins distributed by the company. These crypto-coins are referred to as tokens and are similar to shares of a company sold to investors in an IPO transaction. If the money raised does not meet the minimum funds required by the firm, the money is returned to the bankers and the ICO is deemed to be unsuccessful.
Decentraland, a virtual reality project built on top of blockchain technology raised over $26 million through a recent ICO. Estonia, a country in Northern Europe, floated the idea of potentially raising money for Government spending through an ICO by issuing a token called ‘Estcoins’. While ICOs are quick ways to generate capital, especially for start-ups, there are a few drawbacks too. For starters, ICOs are more prone to hackers. In July 2017, a hacker stole $8.4 million from Veritas Pg 11 CREDENZ.INFO
Neum’s ICO, while another stole over $7 million in Ethereum funds from the CoinDash ICO after he took over their website and changed the Ethereum address at which users were supposed to send money to buy their CoinDash tokens. Singapore’s central bank recently issued a warning about the risks of Initial Coin Ofering (ICOs). These risks included the potential for a lack of market liquidity, the high rate at which start-ups fail and the potential for fraud. While there are risks associated with ICOs, at the same time there are risks related to the foundation of ICOs, that is, cryptocurrency and the Bitcoin bubble. There is no question that many of the ICOs receiving investments now will not succeed. This is not to suggest that they are scams necessarily, but the fact remains that many new ventures in any sector fail, and this will be the case with blockchains as well. This is exactly what happened with the mortgage crisis of 2007 to 2010 and the dot-com boom and bust from 1997 to 2001. In the process of the dot-com bubble, hundreds and thousands of investors lost huge sums of money, companies were destroyed, and workers lost their jobs. In the housing crisis, the entire global economy suffered, as millions lost their homes. To conclude, while fears of a potential Bitcoin bubble burst persist, investors currently are putting those fears at the back of their minds and focusing on the appreciating value of cryptocurrencies. If you had bought $1,000 worth of Bitcoin in 2010, you would be worth almost $35 million now. Based on the statistics provided by ICOSTATS, the return on capital of 40 cryptocurrencies since their inception stands at a staggering 67.03%. In order for you to earn similar rates of returns in the stock market, it will take you approximately 957 years!
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- Akshay Bapat Indian Institute of Management Lucknow CREDENZ.INFO Pg 26
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DAC
Music meets intellect
A
n artificially intelligent musician composes its own songs in different genres after analysing more than 2,000 tunes. It’s already eying our jobs, defeating us at our own games and even creating art masterpieces. It is all geared up to strike the musical cords.
phase. “The deep artificial composer constructs a string of notes from beginning to end, including the very first note”, said an EPFL statement. It picks a follow-up note for each note played, based on the range of probabilities it memorised. But the program is taught not to pick the single-most probable note, rather one of the many between the least and the most probable. Colombo justifies his algorithm by saying that an algorithm that chooses the most probable note will continue repeating the same note and will provide no variation, thereby defeating the whole purpose. A game changer?
Swiss researchers have developed a computer algorithm which has the ability to create new tunes in different musical genres after analysing more than 2,000 music pieces. It isn’t quite at the level of Beethoven and Mozart, but future versions of the algorithm may be fine-tuned to create melodies that rival those made by today’s musicians. The Deep Artificial Composer, or DAC, “can generate complete melodies, with a beginning and an end, that is hundred percent original”, said codeveloper Florian Colombo of the EPFL research university in Lausanne, Switzerland. The DAC programme uses ‘deep learning’ that works in a similar way to the human brain in memorising instances and learning from them. Listening and Recreating The DAC system is trained to ‘listen’ to already existing tunes to learn what works and what does not. In the latest study, it was trained on 2,158 folk songs. It teaches itself to predict the pitch and time duration of every note. Once it is accurate at predicting about 50 percent of note pitches and about 80 percent of note durations in existing songs, the machine’s training is complete. Then starts the most important phase - the creation Pg 27
When experts were asked to listen to DAC and human-composed melodies, they could still tell the difference. “It will take a long time before an algorithm will fool connoisseurs of Irish folk music”, said Colombo. The researchers have tested their program on Irish and Ashkenazi Jewish folk music. The DAC’s ability to identify the genre and avoid mixing the two is simply astonishing. The team proclaims that any style of music can be used and will generate the required results. For the moment, DAC is limited to singleinstrument compositions only. Eventually, its developers hope it will create a full orchestra score. The goal, however, is not to replace fleshand-blood human composers but to provide aid to the process of development. Colombo also mentioned that DAC-composed music might be used for small jingles but will never be able to match the standard of ‘serious music’. He went on to add that a good composer with path-breaking ideas will never get over-shadowed by a computer algorithm. A composer pours out his heart into his creation, something a computer will never be able to master.
- Vishva Iyer Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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4D Camera
Capturing beyond reality
T
oday, when all efforts are being made to ease the user, automation of devices and machines has proved to be a great asset in different domains of technology and even day-today life. By the end of this decade, scientists believe that automation will definitely bring revolutionary changes in the technological industry. Automation has inspired a myriad of innovations like robots, self-driving cars, delivery drones and much more.
thought of using fibre optics to replicate it which turned out to be rather expensive. So researchers at Stanford and UCB instead used a combination of lenses, Digital Signal Processing and Light Field View Photography. Light Field View Photography developed by Stanford researchers uses the 2D image and mixes it with light entering along two directions. For comparison, a 2D image can be thought of as looking through a peephole where you can just know how the object is but you cannot know exactly what is the composition of the object and the distance from the camera lens. However, 4D Image is like looking through a window where you can see the entire surrounding and tell the distance between the camera lens and the object, you can move and as a result, identify features like shape, transparency and shininess. Where Will It Be Used?
These machines are majorly dependent on gathering information and its processing. Most of devices use light sensors and 2D cameras for sight and receiving information. Now, researchers have created the perfect eye for machines to gather more data and have a wider view. Scientists at UCB and Stanford have synthsesised a 4-dimensional camera, that can capture information with an angle of 140 degrees, allowing it to gather more information than conventional cameras in a single image. Where It All Began? Researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley have developed the 4D camera using DARPA’s Soldier Centric Imaging with Computational Cameras (SCENICC) program. DARPA has developed spherical camera lenses for the SCENICC program, which has accomplished a field of view of nearly 360 degrees by encompassing almost one-third of the circle of the spherical lens. It takes 140 degrees of information and captures video at the rate of 125 mph per frame. It was difficult to replicate spherical images into flat focal planes. So they Pg 11 CREDENZ.INFO
This camera has the ability to take photos on which we can refocus, unlike mainstream cameras where we cannot refocus the image after capturing. Drones will benefit from it as it helps improve the quality of the image by reducing the use of more processing power. Bots equipped for disaster management will see a boost in the image as they can capture more information in an image and refocus in light rain. Autonomous cars can use this system to improve their vision. Mixed reality (i.e. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality) is going to see a large expansion due to this as you can render images relentlessly and have more information about the surrounding. The model being made is still in working stages and too big to implement. However, researchers believe that it will become compact and would be implemented in daily machines.
- Deepak Choudhary Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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RNA nanodevices
P
rogramming in itself is the most exciting and interesting thing that has gripped people of all ages and taken the world by a storm, leading to the creation of millions of applications, electronic gadgets and media networks. In the 21st century, programming is going to gain a new facet with the trend of “programming biology” gaining prominence and becoming the key to solving the most pressing world problems including human health and agriculture. This biological programming tool makes programming living cells quite similar to the writing of a computer software.
Programming living cells
metabolite levels or inflammatory signals. Just like electronic circuitry, these synthetic biological circuits can deal with information and make logic-guided decisions. Unlike their electronic counterparts, biological circuits must be fabricated from the molecular components that cells can produce and operate in the crowded and everchanging environment within each cell. In the past 15 years, genetic engineers have designed parts like sensors, memory switches and biological clocks which can be collectively used with existing parts. Isaac Asimov famously said, “Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact”. Professor Alex Green of Arizona State University would most certainly agree with him, for who could have fathomed in 1994 that the possibility of using DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) and RNA (Ribonucleic acid), the molecules of life, to perform computerlike computations would actually become reality? Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California was the first to make this proposition back then. On July 26th, 2017 Professor Alex Green and his colleagues demonstrated how these living cells can be induced to carry out computations in the manner of tiny robots or computers. How do RNA circuits learn to program?
Synthetic biology is the interdisciplinary nexus of biology and technology, which is growing at an amazing pace today. It has opened new vistas and new disciplines that were beyond imagination in the medical world a few ages ago. Since the inception of this new field, synthetic biologists have been turning microbial cells into living devices which will be able to carry out useful tasks like manufacturing drugs, biofuels to detect antibodies (disease-causative agents) and the generation of therapeutic molecules inside the body. To accomplish this, they attach artificial molecular machinery to cells, which sense stimuli such as toxins in the surrounding environment, Pg 29
Predictable and programmable RNA to RNA interactions are used to define what these circuits can do. Scientists use computer software to design RNA sequences to behave the way they want to in a cell. Specialised circuits called logic gates are designed in the lab and then incorporated into living cells. The small circuit switches are tripped when messages (in the form of RNA fragments) attach themselves to their complementary RNA sequences in the cellular circuit, turning the logic gate on and producing the desired output. Just as a computer may take several variables and perform sequential operations like addition and subtraction to obtain a final result, RNA switches may be combined in various ways to produce more complex logic gates capable of evaluating and
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LensFree
Camera is the next generation camera which can revolutionise photography over a large scale. The device resembles a square that measures just 0.04 inches by 0.05 inches (1 by 1.2 millimeters) and has the potential to switch its “aperture” among wide angle, fish eye and zoom instantaneously to capture better pictures. responding to multiple inputs.
another leap towards an amazing future.
In Digital Electronics, logic gates such as AND, OR, NOT are used for designing basic circuits. Each AND gate gives output in the cell only when two RNA messages A and B are produced. An OR gate responds to either only A, only B or both of them. A NOT gate block gives output if a given RNA input is present. Using RNA to grip switches, the researchers created ribocomputing devices which are capable of processing a fourinput AND, six-input OR, a 12-input device and a complex combination of AND, OR and NOT logics known as a disjunctive normal form expression. When any logic gate encounters the correct RNA binding sequences which lead to activation, a toehold switch opens and the process of translation to protein takes place.
The next stepping stone in this field is that of the creation of neural networks within living cellscircuits capable of analysing a range of excitatory and inhibitory inputs, averaging them and producing an output once a particular threshold of an sactivity is reached, similar to the way a neuron averages the incoming signals from other neurons. Now, researchers are trying to induce cells which communicate with each other using programmable molecular signals, creating a completely interactive, brain-like network.
Significance and use This innovation has ushered in a new generation of accurate, low-cost diagnostics, for a broad range of diseases. Significant implications can be seen in the field of intelligent drug design and green energy production. The most significant are the possibilities of the development of futuristic nanomachines capable of hunting down cancer cells. The ribocomputing devices can be used by synthetic biologists to find and interpret multiple signals in cells and logically instruct their ribosomes to make different proteins, blocking aberrant gene production. Useful tasks such as the production of fine chemicals and biofuels can be performed using them. Thus, this innovation marks a milestone in the field of synthetic biology and is a one-stop solution for controlling protein production with precision. The invention of computational nanodevices made out of a living material in the form of RNA and the concept of Biocomputing pioneered by Peng Yin and his team enormously expands the potential that can be explored using synthetic biology applications in living cells. This field moves ahead with speed every year, and this represents yet Pg 11 CREDENZ.INFO
In this era of fast paced technology and wild innovations, this one definitely is a mark apart simply because it bridges the gap between Biological Sciences and Computing, proving to the young minds that the two can walk hand in hand! The field of medical science is one of the most significant ones in today’s world and with advancements in technology, this discipline is scaling new heights in the most unimaginable ways. These two fields of science are like two swift rivers flowing independently, both sourcing from the human mind, emptying into the vast ocean of knowledge and their imminent confluence producing a rush of opportunities.
- Sidhee Hande Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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Solar paint
Harnessing cleaner energy
E
very year, let alone a vastly populated country like India, several well-developed countries also face the stress of energy crisis. Many researchers have put their combined efforts to overcome this problem with a clean renewable source of energy like solar panels.
Painting or re-decorating a house could be a big deal for some people and it’s exciting as well. Researchers at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) thought of something entirely different yet captivating enough to capture thid excitement of people. Solar paint is a completely unique technology that made the problem of energy crisis less problematic. The idea was to utilise the titanium oxide found in paint and moisture found in the surrounding atmosphere. Titanium oxide is commonly found in most of the commercially available paints and solar paint combined this oxide with new synthetic molybdenum sulphide, which acts a lot like silica gel with consumer products that protect it from damage by absorbing moisture. According to their team, the synthetic could absorb the solar energy and moisture and split water into H and O. This hydrogen could then be used in hydrogen fuel cell for clean energy production and “it could also be applied to cars as well”,Dr Torben Daeneke, the lead researcher at RMTI said. It could be applied to any areas and can be converted into an energy producing source. “Any place that has water vapour in the air, even remote Pg 31
areas far from water, can produce fuel”. It would be effective in a variety of climates ranging from damp to dry areas and even in the remote areas. Though it’s not expected to release anytime soon, the final paint would be cheap and quite effective and when released would soon be added to the top innovative and most user-friendly energy producing technology in the market. Another innovation in this field was made by Professor Paul Dastur, the Founding Director of the Centre for Organic Electronics at the University of Newcastle. He focused on the development of electronic devices based on semiconducting polymers. These exciting materials offered the tantalising prospect of paints that generated electricity directly from sunlight. Essentially the technology involved the development of completely printable organic solar cell based on semi conducting nanoparticles dispersed in water. Light shining on an organic cell produced +ve and -ve charges that travel a very short distance of 10 nm making it is necessary to collect these charges before they recombine. Fortunately, this occurs at junctions or interfaces. The charges travel separately to the electrodes and then out of the solar cell in the form of electric current. The advantage of using these tiny cells was that they could be printed on large surfaces. Though initial trial involved coating them on plastic and applying this plastic on roofs and surfaces, further development would allow us to directly apply the coating on roofs, walls and sheds. Turning these cells into a cleaner energy source which would not require much equipment and space for set up would definitely help in our objective to achieve sustainability. Thus, the use of solar energy with the help of solar paint would become a space saver and an innovation indeed!
- Shubham Agrawal Government Dental College and Hospital Nagpur
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Zcash
Securing cryptocurrency
I
n the pre-digital currency world, all individuals and enterprises were sure that their transaction details were private and secure. Bitcoin, the most famous world wide cryptocurrency and digital payment system, is a “bit” too open about privacy. Despite its reputation as anonymous internet cash, it was never designed for perfectly private payments. In order to solve the “double spending problem”, all the transactions on Bitcoin must be stored on a public ledger. Not only that, anyone can use the public ledger to break secrecy. Therefore, starting in 2014, the Zcash protocol (briefly known as “Zerocash”) was developed through a collaboration between the researchers at Johns Hopkins University and a group of cryptographers at the MIT, the Technion and Tel Aviv University, who together worked to improve upon the original design by making it more efficient and more private. The Zcash is a decentralised and open-source cryptocurrency that provides strong privacy protections. It uses novel cryptographic zeroknowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) to protect both amount and recipient on special ‘shielded’ transactions. It brings fungibility to cryptocurrency by unlinking shielded coins from their history on the blockchain. Its payments are published on a public blockchain, but the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction may remain private. In addition, all of the metadata is encrypted and used to prove nobody is cheating or stealing. So, if Bitcoin is like HTTP for money, Zcash is https-a secure transport layer. In order to have zero-knowledge privacy in Zcash, the function determining the validity of a transaction according to the network’s consensus rules must return the answer of whether the transaction is valid or not, without revealing any of the information it performed the calculations on. This is done by encoding some of the network’s consensus rules in zk-SNARKs. Zcash also enables users to send public payments which work like bitcoins. With the support for
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both shielded and transparent addresses, users can choose to send Zcash privately or publicly. Zcash, ZEC (trade symbol), was introduced on 28 October 2016. It is developed by Zerocoin Electric Coin Company (ZECC). On 4th April 2017, it entered the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap. Like Bitcoin, Zcash has a fixed total supply of 21 million units. At present, Zcash mining is possible through GPU and CPU. It remains ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit) because of the Equihash Algorithm.
The first mining of ZEC was at 17:10 London Time with the release of the 1.0.0 “Sprout” release on October 28, 2017. Zcash was written in C++, Rust and uses a fork of lib snark, a C++ library for zkSNARKs. However, Zcash requires a higher use of memory with the significantly longer time needed to send a private transaction. Also, privacy proponents have criticised Zcash for its “selective disclosure” capabilities, which allows Zcash to flag suspicious transactions as well as be AML compliant which satisfies anti-money laundering regulations. On this Zooko Wilcox, Zcash’s founder has gone on record saying that, “they did not develop the currency to facilitate illegal activity”.
- Sudhanshu Bhoi Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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Origami Anything
W
ho could have ever thought that techniques of folding paper could tap technologies across a multifold of scientific dominion? Origami is the art of building a 3D object simply by folding a piece of paper.
Origami has found itself a noticeable place in diverse scientific disciplines. Certain properties pertinent to designing the structure of various objects strongly depend on Origami. However, in order to build complex shapes, it is necessary to resort to certain automated algorithms which can fold a piece of paper into any conceivable 3-D shape. Erik Demaine and Tomohiro Tachi have developed a universal algorithm for origami shapes that guarantee a minimum number of seams. The researchers’ algorithm designs crease patterns for producing any polyhedron. Computer graphics software, for instance, models 3-D objects such as polyhedra consisting of many tiny triangles. Technically speaking, the guarantee that the folding will involve a minimum number of seams which means it preserves the “boundaries” of the original piece of paper. Suppose, for instance, that you have a circular piece of paper and want to fold it into a cup. Leaving a smaller circle at the centre of the piece of paper flat, you could bunch the sides together in a pleated pattern. In this case, the boundary of the cup - its rim - is the same as that of the unfolded circle. A closed surface, such as a sphere - doesn’t have a boundary, so an origami approximation of it will Pg 33
Neat pleat require a seam where boundaries meet, which is decided by the user, putting the creases into motion. The algorithm begins by mapping the facets of the target polyhedron onto a flat surface. While the facets will be touching when the folding is complete, they can be quite far apart from each other on the flat surface. Developing a method for automatically calculating those crease patterns involved a number of different insights, but the central one was that they could be approximated by something called a Voronoi diagram. The Voronoi diagram - named after the 19th-century Ukrainian mathematician Gyorgy Voronoi - describes both the location at which the fires are set and the boundaries at which adjacent fibres meet. In Demaine and Tachi’s algorithm, the boundaries of a Voronoi diagram define the creases in the paper. Joseph O’Rourke, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Smith College and the author of How to Fold It: The Mathematics of Linkages, Origami, and Polyhedra, agrees, “What was known before was either ‘cheating’ - winding the polyhedron with a thin strip - or not guaranteed to succeed,” he says. “Their new algorithm is guaranteed to produce a folding, and it is the opposite of cheating in that every facet of the polyhedron is covered by a ‘seamless’ facet of the paper, and the boundary of the paper maps to the boundary of the polyhedral manifold. Finally, the extra structural ‘flash’ needed to achieve their folding can all be hidden on the inside and so is invisible.” Continuous study and analysis of effective folding algorithms are still going on. While computational origami has opened a wide array of possibilities for further improvement in the structural design, achieving conceivable shapes is no longer a distant dream.
- Apoorva Maheshwari Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune
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IEEE WIE
Unravel the techie
with Dr Celia Shahnaz
D
r Celia Shahnaz is the founding Chair of WIE Affinity Group, IEEE Bangladesh Section and has made an incredible contribution to the development of the group as a chair till 2015 for which she is currently acting as an advisor. We are truly inspired by her remarkable contribution in the IEEE WIE Section and various IEEE activities. We are honoured to share her experiences with our readers. My experience as IEEE Region 10 WIE Coordinator- a path of hard work and vision: It is always a humbling experience for me to recall every step of my volunteering life in IEEE for more than 17 years. I was the founding chair of WIE Affinity Group (AG) in IEEE Bangladesh (BD) Section and the winner of 2013 IEEE R10 WIE Professional volunteer award. I was also the recipient of 2015 WIE inspiring member award (from global IEEE WIE). Under my leadership, in 2015, WIE Bangladesh won an honourable mention for AG of the year award (from global IEEE WIE). I was the Founder and TPC Chair, IEEE WIECONECE 2015, the first ever WIE technical conference in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Dhaka, Bangladesh. I feel honoured to serve as 2016 R10 WIE Coordinator since I gathered a lot of learning and extraordinary experiences. I am blessed that I could create a great impact across the whole IEEE region 10 through different activities. The most significant ones were R10 WIE Mentor and Mentee Program (WIEMMP) conducted with members of around 28 sections in R10, the first R10 WIE webinar and IEEE WIE Global Summit at Bangalore 2016 (the first oneday WIE summit in R10). Programs designed by R10 WIE in 2016 transformed WIE from a non-technical group towards more Engineering and technology driven group. The initiatives were taken to enhance and increase collaboration between WIE AGs. This was possible due to one to one mapping in building a relationship between WIE leaders/volunteers in different sections and myself. I am gratified by the enormous cooperation and support that I Pg 11 CREDENZ.INFO
received from my R10 WIE team and countless WIE volunteers with whom I got connected to. I take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to all of them. Hope the tremendous momentum created by R10 WIE activities in 2016 will be sustained in future years to come. 2016 has been an amazing year with full of enthusiasm, cooperation, activities and success. I am pleased to inform you that the IEEE Member and Geographic Activities (MGA) Board has selected me as a Recipient of the 2016 MGA Leadership Award with citation: “For leadership in engineering and technology driven innovative IEEE Women in Engineering activities for enhanced membership development and engagement in Region 10 and across the globe.” In 2016, WIE BD has won IEEE R10 WIE AG of the year award and in 2017, WIE AG of the year award (global). I served as the General Chair, IEEE WIECON-ECE 2016, the first ever initiative for WIE members’ intersection engagement (Bangladesh and Pune). I wish a wonderful 2017 and future years for every one in IEEE Pune Section with full of new hope, aspiration, motivation, drives, communication, connectivity, collaboration, peace and grace. (PISB WIE Affinity Group and The Editorial Board is grateful to Dr Celia Shahnaz for her contribution to P.I.N.G.)
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IEEE WIE
Unravel the techie
with Dr Anwesha
D
r Anwesha Bhattacharjee is one of the most intellectual and creative women in the technological industry. She currently works as a senior data scientist at Sabre corporation based in Southlake, Texas and has worked on projects across various domains. The Midway Ladder-Snap: ‘Why women engineers withdraw early?’ “Because I believe that deep down in a woman’s nature lies slumbering the spirit of revolt. Because I believe that a woman’s freedom depends upon awakening that spirit of revolt within her against the things that enslave her and the things which enslave a woman must be fought with openly, fearlessly and consciously”. The manifesto, ‘Why the Woman Rebel’, was written by Margaret Sanger, an American suffragette, in her magazine Woman Rebel in March 1914. As women engineers more than a century later, we have come to take many rights for granted, we have been fortunate enough to live off the hard-won freedoms earned by our female, and some male, ancestors around the world. However, as I read these lines over and over again, I realised that very little of what she sought has truly, in absolute certainty, become a reality for us. Many women in India are working at offices. According to the National Sample Survey (68th Round) of 2011-12, 24.8% of rural women were part of the labour force, as opposed to 54.3% of men. In urban areas that number fell to a measly 14.7% as opposed to 54.6% employment for men. Yet, the bigger concern is that the rate of female employment in India is falling. India ranks 11th from the bottom in female labour-force participation as published by the International Labour Organisation. The first pertinent question to ask is whether women engineers in India are following a similar path as the national trend. The answer is not a straightforward yes or no. Young women constitute 40% of the developers work force. Unfortunately, for Indian women over Pg 35
35, that number drops to 18%. Essentially, what we’re seeing is that while women are entering the workforce at a young age, the numbers dwindle as they grow older. The next question then, following the same line of thought, is what changes as women engineers grow older? Diksha Madhok, the writer for Quartz India, finds that it is, indeed, motherhood. Marriage is not a barrier as much as childbirth. Lack of adequate childcare options, inflexible work policies like work-from-home and demanding work hours leave many women engineers without the means to compete in an aggressive work environment in India. However, how we choose to overcome this pitfall depends on how women already in the workforce choose to engage with the problem. But an equally large onus falls on young engineers, both men and women in engineering schools that are poised to enter the workforce. Instead of becoming a part of the problem and proliferating it, how can we change the conversation around motherhood in India? The major systemic barriers to mothers in the workforce are almost double that of most developed
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nations. However, if any women executives are reading this, I’d urge them to think about making the workplace amenable to employees who are also mothers. What I would like to focus on, instead, is how we and the societal institutions we surround ourselves with or even glorify, become the biggest barrier to our own growth and how we can prevent ourselves from falling behind. This includes adhering to traditional gender roles and sticking to designated divisions of labour within our family structures. Another common societal expectation in case of women is to put the honour and physical well-being of her family before herself. By themselves, these constructs can impact a woman engineer’s confidence to excel, but in the context of child rearing, these can amount to the death for women engineers. I am going to start with my strong aversion to the word motherhood alone, taken in the context of child rearing. I prefer Parenthood instead, which makes child rearing a joint responsibility of both parents. We often hear that child rearing is ‘natural’ for women. I scoff at that argument, however, because it is also ‘natural’ for humans to go to bed at sunset like other mammals, but here we are at engineering jobs that require us to work 16-hour-days at all sorts of times and across multiple time zones. Many Indian women of my age in technology, or otherwise, continue to find it odd when their husbands or partners contribute toward household chores or help with the baby. Changing that conversation is a huge part of furthering women’s careers. I find these notions to be not only archaic but ridiculous from a mathematical perspective. When a woman becomes a mother, she alone is expected to not only do her 16-hour day job but also come home and tend to the baby, the home and fulfil other social commitments. That’s a 28-hour job, on the whole, which is impossibile. Our solution to that is, free up her 16 hours or cut it down to 8, and she’ll have the whole day to be a mom. Instead, all we have to do is trim our commitments and share the Pg 11 CREDENZ.INFO
remaining hours of housework and child rearing between two people. That is what you would do at work too, wouldn’t you? If your deadline demands 28 people-hours in a day, you put two resources on the job. Why does this have to be different? Perhaps, because in India, and truly, in many parts of the world, we continue to see caregiving as an economically unproductive activity. We are not only steeped in gender stereotypes that deem men as primary breadwinners in our country, we also neglect to attribute any true economic value to child rearing or home keeping. There lies our second problem, one that young engineers can actively seek to diminish. If each of us, men and women, began to account for activities at home, activities that involve caregiving, be it caring for an elderly parent or for a child, as part of our daily responsibilities that have economic value, we would all be a lot more comfortable adjusting to parenthood as a family and as a society, instead of letting one half of our population bear the brunt of a societal need. Think of it as social responsibility at home, just as we all partake in corporate social responsibility as part of our day jobs. To return to Sanger’s dream, parenthood need not be an enslavement for women in engineering. It need not limit a woman’s career progress, simply because the job of child bearing biologically falls to her. But in order to ensure our progress and growth remain unhindered, we must accept parenthood as a joint social responsibility within our familial constructs. A decade from today, when we reach the upper rungs of corporate India, after weathering undue criticism, gender bias and discrimination, which of course continue to exist, we can start making the future workplace friendlier to our next-gen women engineers.
(PISB WIE Affinity Group and The Editorial Board is grateful to Dr Anwesha Bhattacharjee for her contribution to P.I.N.G. )
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panegyric
Artificial music
M
usic is the manifestation of an artist’s imagination. It is capable of portraying a multitude of emotions scaling from extreme happiness to rampant rage. Music was traditionally conceived to be bound within the reaches of arts. Although seemingly impossible, with the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, scientists have left no stones unturned in promulgating the idea of mechanising the melody in music. Today, scientists have developed models which are capable of producing the finest music. In this article, we bring forth a few neoteric technologies which have potentially revolutionised the music industry, causing music to propagate on an untrodden path.
Google Magenta Google Magenta is an initiative of Google to explore the horizons of Machine Learning in enhancing the creativity of computers. The project revolves around adopting eccentric techniques of machine learning to create compelling music and art. Magenta encompasses two goals: the first one includes ameliorating the state-of-the-art in music, video and text generation. Secondly, it aims at forming a community of artists, coders and machine learning researchers. To facilitate its objectives, the core Magenta team is building open-source infrastructure around TensorFlow Pg 37
Striking a resilient note for composing art and music. This already includes tools for working with data formats like the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and is expanding to platforms that help artists to connect with machine learning models. Accurate timings and expressive dynamics are essential for the production of music. Google Magenta uses recurrent neural networks to model polyphonic noise with expressive timings and dynamics. The performance Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) generates them using a stream of MIDI event which consists of precisely timed note-on and note-off events which specify the pitch of the noise and also describe the intensity with which a note should be stricken. The model then determines which note to play, when to play it and how hard to strike a note. The model has been trained using a dataset from Yamaha Pianoe-Competition which consists of MIDI captures of 1400 performances by skilled pianists. The output of RNN is represented using fixed metric grids where the output is generated for every time step and the step size is fixed. To create additional training examples, two techniques are used. One of the techniques is time-stretching which involves making each performance up to 5% slower or faster and transposition where we raise or lower the pitch of each performance up to a major third. The output of this model can be controlled using the parameter of temperature. One of the most riveting features of this project is that ‘anyone can contribute’. This initiative by Google will extrapolate music beyond human understanding. Algorithmic Music We have all at one point in time or the other listened to music composed by a computer algorithm, without realising. Artificial Intelligence researchers have made huge gains in algorithmic creativity over the past few years and in music especially these advances are now filtering through to the real world. These AI programs have produced albums in many genres and have also
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Int-Ball, a part of the Japanese module “Kibo” is a Photo Capturing
Drone which has adapted itself to anti-gravity. It saves nearly 10% of the time of on board astronauts by automatically adapting to the light conditions by adjusting its lens mechanically, thus ensuring a perfect photo. generated mood music in games and smartphone apps. But what does computer-authored music sound like? Why does it? And how is it changing music creation? The Greek philosopher, mathematician, and music theorist Pythagoras recorded the relationship between music and mathematics, that laid the foundation for our modern study of music theory and acoustics. The Greeks believed that understanding of numbers was the key to understanding the universe. Their educational system, the quadrivium, was based on a study of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Although we have numerous treatises on music theory dating from Greek antiquity, the Greeks left no clues whether mathematical procedures can be applied to the composition of music or not. An algorithm is a set of rules or a sequence of operations designed to accomplish some task or solve a problem. Human beings are considered to be very good at designing and implementing algorithms. The composition is the process of creating musical work. The word composition literally means “to put together” parts as a unified whole. The process of composing music is often characterised by trial and error. So, it is understood that when talking about Algorithmic Composition, we want to combine both algorithms and composition. In the simplest sense, this is when a composer uses an algorithm to put together a piece of music. Algorithms that a programmer can write in minutes could test any hypotheses a composer might have about a particular musical technique and produce virtual instrument sounds in dozens or hundreds of variations that give them a strong idea of how it works in practice. This makes algorithmic music an interesting field of study. Reactables We all have played with lego blocks, stacking them atop each other was the best part-time as kids. All the structures were a symbol of our ingenuity as kids and it provided a channel for our brains CREDENZ.INFO
to express creativity. Tables can be a fun space, a place where people gather to converse, share ideas and work. Even all professional spaces have large tables for collaborative work. With the primary concepts of blocks and tables, the Reactables were designed.The Reactable is a music synthesiser and if you hear it being played, it sounds similar to a lot of modern electronic dance music. The difference between the Reactable and a typical synthesiser, however, is that participants manipulate sound with blocks on a round table.
A person (or several people) can tweak a variety of sounds, beats and notes, creating an electronic soundscape by moving or rotating blocks on the table. Along with that, it’s fun to watch! The table has a translucent blue surface that lights up with dynamic animations that highlight the musical changes. For all musicians and common people, the Reactable is a musical instrument that’s not only fun to listen to, but fun to watch as well. As each day goes by, it’s always intriguing to find out what all a small micro processor is becoming capable of producing. The fact that computers are now learning how to make music is taking AI to another level. Considering how a tiny chip can generate new intonations of frequencies never thought of by any artist ever before, is really thrilling! That day might not be far where we will have computers alongside all our favourite artists on the billboard producing record breaking music.
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-The Editorial Board Pg 38
PISB Office Bearers 2017-2018
Branch Counsellor: Dr. Rajesh B. Ingle Chairperson:
Amol Soley
Vice Chairperson:
Rajat Paliwal
Treasurer:
Rahul Chaudhari
Vice Treasurer:
Stavan Shah
Secretary:
Kshitija Waghurdekar Pratik Pugalia Rohit Lokwani
Joint Secretary:
Atharva Gomekar Chinmay Ingle Viram Shah
Secretary of Finance:
Rutu Gandhi
Joint Secretary of Finance:
Mansi Mahajan
VNL Head:
Anmol Bora
VNL Team:
Mihir Karkare Prathamesh Jadhav Rajat Pathak Sharveya Baxi
PRO Head:
Raunak Maheshwari
PRO Team:
Kritika Patade Rishabh Jain Tejas Srivastava
Design Head:
Kinjal Sanghvi Sneha Gathani
Design Team: P.I.N.G. Head: Pg 39
Mohit Agrawal Motish Mehta Shivani Firke
P.I.N.G. Team:
Batul Merchant Kartik Sahasrabudhe Omkar Bhalerao Rutuja Patil
Webmaster:
Rachit Joshi
Web Team:
Anurag Kallurwar Rameshwar Dhondge Shreyas Bhaskarwar
App Head:
Rashi Bisen
App Team:
Sabarinath S Vishva Iyer
Programming Head: Programming Team:
Arnav Shrivastava Naman Shukla
WIE Chair:
Anjali Jain Nidhi Ramanathan
WIE Secretary:
Amulya Chetlapalli Purva Ekatpure
Senior Council:
Abizer Lokhandwala Akash Bachkar Ajay Sabale Ankit Kurani Faraz Saifullah Kedar Takawane Saurabh Awinashe Sayali Deshpande
Atul Avhad Pankaj Wajire Rajat Gedam Sanjali Suryawanshi Shantanu Rathi Tushita Singhel
Aishwarya Naik Komal Preet Hora Nandita Yelamanchili SEPTEMBER 2017 ISSUE 13.1
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PISB Office Bearers 2017-2018
Aditi Joshi Aditi Sonar Amit Dhotay Amit Shinde Aniket Jalan Ankit Kurani Anshika Agarwal Archisha Shrivastava Arshad Hussain Khan Ashish Abhang Ashish Kshirsagar Atharva Rajurkar Atul Gunjal Avanti Dorle Chinmay Shimpi Eravatee Raje Faizan Shaikh Hari Kedar Purnapatre Hyder Ali Wani Kiran Mandhare Mahesh Ghuge Mansi Chavan Nachiket Lele Nakul Thombare
Junior Council: Omkesh Mitkari Pallavi Gandalwad Pranav Swami Pratibha Menon Pratik Jaiswal Riya Rege Rohan Maniyar Rushabh Gandhi Sakshi Bole Sanket Kokane Shalaka Ingawale Shraddha Pandey Shreya Kanhe Shreyas Umare Shweta Lanke Sourabh Kulkarni Subodh Gujar Sunil Madhyan Tanmay Bagdiya Tanmay Singhal Tejas Jain Tejasvi Kamble Vaibhav Yende Vishwajeet Thoke Yogesh Karwate
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PISB Milestones PICT IEEE Student Branch (PISB) was established in the year 1988 with an aim of inculcating a sense of technical awareness amongst its student members. It has escalated to new heights since its inception and is recognised as one of the most active student branches in Asia today. The members of PISB try to accomplish new milestones every year with their immense hard work and dedication in various activities. PISB organises Credenz, its annual technical symposium which serves to reinvigorate the competitive spirit of the students and sets a stage for young minds to put forth their ideas and analyse them. Credenz is the second largest tech-fest of Pune and attracts students and industrialists from all over India. Amongst a plethora of achievements of PISB, we are pleased to enlist a few. 1988
Start of Credenz (The annual technical symposium of PISB)
Dr Rajesh Ingle Honoured with IEEE Region 10 Best Branch Counsellor Award
50 years of IEEE Region 10
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Inception (Establishment of PISB)
2004
2012
Formation of PISB WIE Student Affinity Group
2015
Awarded the Best Student Branch Award by IEEE India Council
2017
Awarded the Region 10 Exemplary Student Branch Award
2014
2016
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