No Touch; No go

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Leslie

When disruptive technologies get out of the labs and justify commercialization, we will see the world with new eyes

The technology treadmill moves at such a rapid pace that even well-established companies get caught on the wrong foot, and then struggle to strike a balance between their current businesses and paradigm-shifting disruptive technologies that force them to introduce new devices or services at short notice.
Consider this. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google Inc. has developed the first touchscreen laptops powered by its Chrome operating system that are likely to be sold later this year. If the report turns out to be true, it will be evident that Google has taken this step to compete with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system (Windows 8) that have touch screens, even as the new Chrome devices would also compete with devices powered by Google’s own operating system—Android.
Notwithstanding the fact that Chrome notebooks haven’t seen much success, the fact remains that companies have to be on the cutting edge of technology to survive. Take the case of Research in Motion Inc., now renamed BlackBerry. It was a leader in the enterprise market, but with the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ or BYOD trend wherein employees are permitted to use their personal devices for official use (of course, with security enablers), RIM lost marketshare rapidly and has had to introduce a new platform—BB10—to stay in the race.
Thorsten Heins, president and chief executive officer of BlackBerry, maintains that his company is preparing itself for the age of mobile computing that will introduce users to the Internet of Things (devices communicating with each other) world. Laptops will disappear eventually, he claims, and the mobile computing device will thus become an access device. It may help you update your car software—around 60% of car software runs on QNX (RIM acquired QNX from Harmen International in April 2010. Heins says he will invest in this vision of mobile computing while not disrupting the existing business.
Frankly, Heins has no choice but to do so. And neither do Google, Facebook or any other company for that matter.
One only has to take a look at the way the supremacy of Yahoo! was challenged by Google, which made the word ‘search’ almost synonymous with its name. Microsoft did wake up later with its own Bing. In the social networking segment, Facebook usurped Google’s Orkut (which is strong only in Brazil) and now has almost 1 billion users. With its job search, it’s now theatening to destablise traditional job portals and professional networking sites such as LinkedIn.
These remain but cases in point. When disruptive technologies like quantum computing and molecular computing gradually get out of the labs and justify commercialization, we will see the world with new eyes, the way Google glasses is making ”augmented reality” (simply put, adding layers of information on devices) appealing and affordable to the masses.
Simultaneously, cellphones that were as big as bricks almost a decade ago are becoming bigger again. So we have 5- and 6-inch phones or phablets as they’re called on the one hand, while we have smaller, sleeker feature phones and, of course, the 7- and 10-inch tablets that compete with notebooks and desktops.
Now with the convertibles that include notebooks and detachable tablets in a single device, the pitch is getting increasingly queered and consumers are being spoilt for choice.
Also, while the cellphone is becoming smarter and doubling up as your radio and television while giving you the Internet at your fingertips, your TV is also becoming smart by including the Internet and adding gadgets like Apple TV (from Apple Inc.) or Evo TV (from Amkette). And notebooks are getting their touch screens, similar to smartphones. And it won’t be long before we begin seeing more ‘Sixth Sense’ (made famous by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT’s Pranav Mistry) devices that will project information on walls, or any surface for that matter.
What will happen to our cellphones, notebooks, convertibles, TVs, then? One school of thought says these devices will converge and yet be divergent since they fulfil different needs. That may be true today but unlikely to stay so in the future.
Of course, these are simply the beginnings of the ”Internet of Things” phenomenon wherein your fridge will inform the vendor that it needs beverages or groceries or whatever. Likewise, your car will perform a self-diagnosis and inform your service centre of the same. Your imagination will be the only limit. Companies are watching these trends since they need to survive. Individuals need to pay attention too since they may be rendered redundant with cellphones that have artificial intelligence or AI or algorithm-based robots that put traders out of a job.

http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/NhURq9RoOLQTaIlMljoWaN/Losing-touch-will-not-pay.html

Posted in Birds' eye view, Technology | Leave a comment

Emails help identify global migration trends

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Leslie

by Leslie D’Monte

The so-called Internet Protocol or IP address typically finds itself in the news when authorities use it to track down cybercafes from which terrorists could have sent potentially harmful emails. IP addresses can be spoofed and camouflaged with anonymiser tools yet every device which sends an e-mail can be located at least at the country level by this internationally standardised code.
Two researchers–Emilio Zagheni from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and Ingmar Weber from Yahoo! Research in Barcelona–made good use of this IP feature.
Analysing the countries derived from IP addresses for a set of messages sent by 43 million anonymous Yahoo! account holders over three years–between September 2009 and June 2011–the two researches have concluded that the Internet can provide migration data that is much more accurate than the official one provided by governments, which “is outdated and inconsistent” since emigrants tend not to register after they move to a new country or do so very late, according to a press statement.
Where estimates of demographic flows exist, they are often outdated and largely inconsistent, reasoned Zagheni, adding: “Global internet data does not have these drawbacks.”
In addition to the date and geographical origin of each message, they compiled the self-reported birthday and gender of the sender. When a person started sending e-mail from a new location permanently, it was assumed that he or she had changed residence. This way they were able to calculate rates of migration from and to almost every country in the world.
Only anonymized data was used, so identifying individuals was impossible and no information about the recipients, the subject, or content of a message was accessed. The findings have now been published in the ACM Web Science Conference Proceedings.
The results not only are a proof of concept. They also reveal international migration characteristics never seen before. For the US, Zagheni and Weber were able to produce the first curve of emigration by age and sex ever. “In the U.S. many statistics are collected about people who move into the country, but there is no system that keeps track of people who move out,” said Zagheni.
The potential of the e-mail statistics goes far beyond calculating gross country profiles. For instance, the researchers also looked into Mexico-US cross-border mobility. The data reveals how strongly both countries are demographically integrated: most people who moved from Mexico to the United States either spent time in the USA before emigrating north, or went back to visit Mexico soon after moving to the United States. Those in their 30s have the highest rate of mobility across the Mexico-US border, while the least mobile are those 50 and older.
Some groups, like the elderly, use e-mail less or not at all and are thus underrepresented. But the researchers managed to calculate adjustment factors for such groups by gauging their e-mail data against migration numbers from European countries, where official data is fairly reliable.
“What we addressed so far is only the tip of the iceberg,” said Zagheni. With further fine-tuning of the adjustment factors and mining more digital data like Twitter messages, more difficult questions could be tackled. For instance one could keep track of the short and long-term mobility patterns before and after a crisis like that of the Japanese Fukushima reactors.
Unquestionably, digital records give demographers the chance to gain a more accurate picture of population dynamics in regions they can so far only guess about, said Zagheni. “This research has the most potential in developing countries, where the Internet spreads much faster than registration programs develop.”
“Our preliminary results indicate that the profile of out-migration from India is qualitatively similar to the one of other major countries, with a peak of out-migration for individuals who are around 25 years old. The results are still preliminary and we cannot share the numeric estimates yet,” Zagheni said in an email response.

Posted in Birds' eye view | Leave a comment

India gives away supercomputing gains

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Leslie

India’s Eka, which once figured among the world’s top 10, falls to 129 in global rankings; China takes lead in Asia
By Leslie D’Monte

In November 2007, India’s Eka was ranked the world’s fourth-largest supercomputer. Built by the Computational Research Laboratories Ltd (CRL), a unit of Tata Sons, the Hewlett-Packard (HP) system cost $30 million (around Rs 165 crore) and was built in just six weeks.
It was the first time that an Indian supercomputer figured among the world’s top 10.
The country had nine supercomputers in that Top 500 list, with two of them being in the Top 100—the other being an IBM system from the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc). China, on the other hand, had 10 supercomputers in the November 2007 list but just one, ranked 59, in the Top 100 list.
Four-and-a-half years later, the tables have turned dramatically.
India is falling far behind in the supercomputer race. So what’s ailing the country’s supercomputing abilities? Our technology editor, Leslie D’ Monte, finds out
According to the June 2012 Top 500 Supercomputers list (it is published twice in a year), Eka is now ranked 129. Two supercomputers figure in the top 100—the CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation (C-MMACS), ranked 58, and SAGA-220, developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) and the IISc to solve complex aerospace problems, which is ranked 86. China, on the other hand, has raced ahead with 68 supercomputers, of which seven figure in the Top 100, with an NUDT supercomputer from the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin ranked 5. A US supercomputer named Sequoia—an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—tops the list. Fujitsu’s K Computer installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, is now the No. 2 system. It held the No. 1 spot on the previous two lists.
Computational fluid dynamics model of the EKA data centre. The US is a clear leader in the high performance computing (HPC) segment with 253 of the 500 systems, followed by Europe with 107 systems. Dominant countries in Asia are China (68) and Japan with 34 systems.
Supercomputers, introduced in the 1960s and designed primarily by Seymour Cray at the Control Data Corp. (CDC), are used for calculation-intensive tasks such as problems relating to quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modelling and physical simulations, detonation of nuclear weapons and research into nuclear fusion.
PARAM 8000 is considered India’s first supercomputer. It was built by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) with Russian collaboration. The C-MMACS Intel-powered systems will be used for a range of applications from climate-modelling to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in aerospace. The project, reported Mint in March, will cost about Rs 50 crore. The National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF), which houses the PARAM Yuva, and the Bioinformatics Resources and Applications Facility (BRAF), which houses the Biogene and BioChrome supercomputing cluster, are used by researchers to solve problems in atmospheric sciences, nanosciences, strategic areas of engineering and research in cancer besides biomolecular drug research. But India sorely lacks speed in this area with the country’s supercomputers confined to teraflops (trillions of calculations per second). Getting to the petaflop level would mean increasing the processor power by 10 times and the cooling to 4,000 tonnes, besides the increase in floor space, all of which require a new architecture since growth in scale becomes non-linear at this stage, say experts.
SAGA-220 is powered by NVIDIA’s Tesla chips and Vishal Dhupar, managing director, sales and marketing, NVIDIA India, said for India to get into the big supercomputing league, it needed a “high performance computing ecosystem which involved hardware, storage capacity and scalable application software”. He explained that data centres and power are critical for supercomputers.
“A decent supercomputer would require 5-10 megawatts (MW) of power. Now that’s a problem in a country like India which faces a power shortage,” said Dhupar. He added that China had taken “bigger steps and hence has got the edge”.
“Supercomputer is a very niche area like car racing. Not all countries take it seriously all the time. Some like the US, Japan and Germany take it seriously all the time. China has taken it super serious. India, as usual, goes through fits and starts—CDAC Param once, Param Padma next, Eka suddenly,” said S. Sadagopan, director of the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Bangalore. “Institute of Mathematical Sciences, in Chennai built one, C-MACCS is building a real super one. They plan to build one more by 2017—perhaps the most focused effort. In essence, we are doing okay, not great. It is also an expensive proposition.”
Dhupar also pointed out the importance of combining graphics processing units (GPUs) that are capable of handling the heavy computing tasks, while freeing the central processing units (CPUs) for other basic computing”.
“Only 60 of the top 500 supercomputers have GPUs and CPUs. This is bound to change in the coming years,” he said.
Meanwhile, the government needs to do much more if it wants India to compete in the big league, say experts. On 6 June, Ashwani Kumar, minister of state for planning, science and technology, said the government had allocated Rs 5,000 crore in the 12th Five-Year Plan to help India join the big league in supercomputing. He made the statement while visiting the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune.

Posted in Technology | Leave a comment

Home-grown technologies

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Leslie

MIT’s ‘Technology Review India’ identified 20 young innovators for 2011. We profile three of them
Leslie D’Monte

Article link: http://www.livemint.com/2012/05/11193453/Research–Homegrown-technolo.html

Inspired by insects and lizards that can scale rocks and walls with ease, 33-year-old Abhijit Majumder from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, created an adhesive that can stick to any surface as snugly as a lizard on a wall.
Somnath Ray, 35, designed a tricycle from off-the-shelf bicycle parts that gives the disabled mobility as well as a mobile commerce platform.
V.S.K. Murthy Balijepalli, 26, from IIT Bombay, developed a method to forecast electricity price, grid frequency and load that can assist in making power grids smarter, while Priyanka Sharma, 28, from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR’s) Institute of Microbial Technology in Chandigarh, developed a plastic chip that uses simple assay (analytical procedure) techniques to quickly and cost-effectively detect toxic materials in the environment.
All these people are listed as under-35 technology innovators, identified by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review India. They provide evidence that innovation in the technology sector is no longer restricted to Western countries or India-born Americans.
Technology Review India received over 250 nominations for 2011. A panel of 23 judges identified 20 individuals who, in their opinion, had developed technologies that are likely to benefit society. The India TR (Technology Review) 35 programme started in 2010 and in the last two years, Technology Review India—published by CyberMedia, a New Delhi-based speciality media house—has identified 37 young innovators.
In the 2011 list, released in March, IIT Bombay emerged as the country’s hottest technology innovation centre, with three of its researchers making the grade. Six innovators were from IITs and CSIR-funded labs. Nine of the 20 winners dabbled in computing and Web applications, while the remaining winners spanned fields such as biomedicine, communications, energy, materials and transportation.
We chose three of the 20 scientists mentioned in the list:
Haptic shoe for the visually impaired
A former research consultant to Hewlett-Packard, or HP Labs (the central research lab for Hewlett-Packard) in India, 24-year-old Anirudh Sharma has a passion for product design. Based in Bangalore over the past two years, he has been surrounded by schools for the visually impaired in the vicinity of Koramangala.
Shoe sense: Anirudh Sharma’s creation takes directions from mobile maps and transmits them to the user’s shoes.(©2011 Techaw)
Shoe sense: Anirudh Sharma’s creation takes directions from mobile maps and transmits them to the user’s shoes.(©2011 Techaw)
Most visually impaired people typically have canes or trained dogs to guide them. Sharma noticed, however, that they generally did not like using technology aids that use voice-feedback-based devices since these block their inherent sense of hearing, which is critical in avoiding traffic, crowds and obstacles.
“My job at HP Labs was to develop new interfaces. Whenever I looked at the global positioning system (GPS) screen in my car, I felt it would be better to replace the visual feel with a haptic (which refers to the sense of touch) one. My exposure to the visually impaired strengthened this idea, which gave rise to the Le Chal technology,” says Sharma.
Le Chal, put simply, is a shoe that provides haptic feedback, guiding the user towards his destination by vibrating in the front, back, or on either side. A vibration in the front indicates the user should keep going straight; a vibration on the left means she/he should turn left, and so on.
The user begins by announcing his destination on Mobile Maps, using the Le Chal app running on an Android smartphone. That phone then communicates—using Bluetooth (a wireless technology)—with a circuit board located in the heel of the shoe.
Following the cloud-supplied (cloud is a metaphor for the Internet) turn-by-turn directions, along with locational data from its own GPS unit, the phone gets the control board to activate each of the shoe’s four vibrators as needed. The vibrations start out low but build in intensity as the user comes closer to the point where s/he has to take a turn. A proximity sensor in the front of the shoe also alerts the user to obstacles, which can be detected from up to 10ft away.
After quitting HP Labs, Sharma filed for a patent on Le Chal about two months ago and started his own company, Ducere Technologies. He is now on a mission to fabricate at least 20-30 sub-$20 (around Rs 1,000) Le Chal kits and distribute them to the visually impaired.
“We are in the product development phase for Le Chal. We hope to launch it commercially by September-October this year,” says Sharma. “I’m not a maker of shoes. Our wearable technology augments the shoes.”
Incidentally, in 2005, two researchers from the University of Sydney, Xiaoyan Fu and Dahai Li, published a paper, Haptic Shoes: Representing Information By Vibration, in the medical journal The Lancet, which referred to a haptic shoes system that could obtain haptic stock market data and also be applied in a wide range of computer technologies, including data analysis, network connection, embedded system and wireless communication.
Virtual trial room
Apparel shopping in cyberspace is catching the fancy of users but getting the right fit online, which fashion-conscious youngsters insist on, has proved a challenge. Even as physical space in retail outlets is getting more expensive, store managers are being faced with an increasing need to provide more trial rooms.
Innovators: Hemanth Satyanarayana visualizes what a new outfit will look like (Kumar/Mint)
Innovators: Hemanth Satyanarayana visualizes what a new outfit will look like (Kumar/Mint)
Hyderabad-based Hemanth Kumar Satyanarayana, who was familiar with augmented reality (a technology that superimposes content over images) during his stay in the US around 2005, made it to the list for developing Trialar, a digital interactive platform that helps shoppers try out clothes and accessories instantaneously, virtually and seamlessly.
It is an augmented-reality-enabled digital trial room, which can be installed in brick and mortar apparel stores. While its integrated analytics platform helps retailers understand customer preferences better, its digital catalogue and analytics engine for guidance help the shopper mix and match apparel, accessories and compare multiple items simultaneously.
“I have used a combination of computer vision and computer graphics that helps get data from users. The technology was patented in 2011—a couple of retailers in Hyderabad and one in Bangalore are using Trialar as a pilot,” says Satyanarayana, who co-founded Imaginate Software Labs with Pavan Kosaraju in 2011.
While Satyanarayana did not disclose names of retailers, the 29-year-old says the cost of hardware was around Rs 1 lakh. “We will try our best to keep the cost of the digital trial room as low as possible. However, there are software, licensing and maintenance costs. The service contract is the biggest challenge,” he notes.
Globally, there have been similar attempts. In November, UK-based Mail Online reported that Debenhams had become the first UK brand to pilot a new augmented reality technology which allows shoppers to try on potential purchases without getting undressed or battling through crowded shops. In October, American retailer Macy’s launched virtual-sizing technology in the US. It had partnered with software provider True Fit.
Non-invasive chemotherapy
When he was doing his BTech in biochemical engineering, there were a few subjects that covered drug-delivery systems too. Nitin Joshi, 28, did not forget these lessons. When he returned to IIT Bombay as an MTech student, he came across a project that dealt with the non-invasive delivery of a single drug.
Nitin Joshi (Leslie D’Monte/Mint)
Nitin Joshi (Leslie D’Monte/Mint)
“In advanced lung cancer cases, doctors typically advise combination chemotherapy (which uses medicine to weaken and destroy cancer cells) rather than a single-drug treatment. But when drugs are given intravenously (directly into the vein), patient compliance is a big problem. I wanted to solve this issue and work with a combination of drugs,” says Joshi, who completed his MTech in 2008 in biomedical engineering.
He developed dual-compartment nanostructures (a nanometre is one billionth of a metre) which contain two anti-cancer drugs—paclitaxel (a known anti-cancer drug) and curcumin (a part of turmeric which has anti-cancer properties)—and deliver them jointly to lung cancer patients using the aerosol (a dispensing system) delivery method that is non-invasive.
In normal chemotherapy, Joshi explains, the patient gets multiple doses of injections. “These are released into the bloodstream, but a huge amount gets wasted and the toxins released by the drugs even affect the surrounding healthy tissues. If there is localized and regional delivery instead, like aerosol, it has minimal chances of destroying adjoining healthy tissues since the drugs concentrate themselves mostly around the tumour,” he adds.
“During animal trials, we got good results in the treatment of lung cancer (which still claims many victims), the metastasis (spread of the disease to other organs) itself, and the synergistic effect of both the drugs,” says Joshi, who patented the product in 2011. His guide was Prof. Rinti Banerjee, who has MBBS and PhD degrees, but doesn’t practise medicine.
Other scientists, according to Joshi, have tried the aerosol method with single drugs. ”But not much research has been done on the surfactant (the material that lowers the surface tension of a liquid) properties of the drug so that it does not collapse the airways when delivered in the body,” he adds.
“We have done animal trials so far. There are regulatory guidelines that we have to follow now before it goes for FDA (the US’ food and drug administration) approval or reaches patients. We are now looking for funding and partners,” says Joshi.
The usual chemotherapy would cost around Rs 5,000 for a single vial. Joshi hopes his solution will reduce the dosage and the overall cost, besides increasing the efficacy of the drug.

Posted in Science | Leave a comment

When tech alters business

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Leslie
Leslie D’Monte
The rapidly-moving technology treadmill can compel companies to rework their business models or reprioritize their focus areas.
Take the case of Microsoft Inc., which heralded its push on hardware with its ‘Surface’ tablet personal computer or PC–a move clearly spurred by the success that Apple Inc. has tasted with its iPad and Samsung with its Galaxy tablet PCs.
Apple alone sold 15.4 million iPads during the fourth quarter of 2011.
Not to be left behind, Internet search leader Google Inc. is rumoured to follow suit with a tablet PC later this year. The world’s largest online retailer, Amazon Inc. had introduced its own tablet late last year.
While most people identify the tablet PC with Apple’s iPad, the term was made popular by Microsoft way back in 2001 when it announced a product that was defined as a pen-enabled computer conforming to hardware specifications devised by it and running mostly a licensed copy of a “Windows XP Tablet PC Edition”. The software company, however, was not able to capitalise on its first-mover advantage, and analysts attributed the failure to bad timing, high pricing and poor user interface (UI) design. In January 2010, Microsoft had another go at the tablet. HP’s Slate device was demoed by CEO Steve Ballmer at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES), along with tablets from other vendors.
Hardware is not new to Microsoft, primarily known for its software or Windows Operating System (OS) business. The company has its highly popular gaming device–the Xbox360 and Xbox Live–all from the company’s hardware unit set up way back in 1982. And since a well-integrated device is a delight to consumers, especially if the software does not crash or hang mid-way, Microsoft’s ‘Surface’ tablet PC may see success if it gets its act right like Apple or Samsung did.
But while Microsoft is betting on this hardware push, there have been technology companies that have moved away from hardware to software and services.
For instance, the $100 billion International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), which sold its personal computing (desktops and laptops) business to China-based Lenovo in 2004, is sharpening its focus on enterprise software even as global revenue from hardware declines. IBM, according to Gartner, now ranks as the No.2 enterprise software vendor currently after Microsoft Corp. Other companies like Hewlett-Packard Development Co. LP and Oracle Inc. are focusing on services, and so is Dell Inc. that was synonymous with hardware and the poster boy for hardware supply chain best practices.
And companies like Google and Amazon are today competing with Indian and multinational information technology (IT) service providers in the outsourcing space with the help of cloud computing—also known as a non-linear or non-headcount-related technology—that is reducing the IT infrastructure and software costs of their clients by hosting them on their own data centres.
Coupled with the popularity of social media tools, new models are emerging, and with it, new competitors.
Once an online leader, Yahoo! Inc. is almost being treated as a spent force while Google–a David in 1998–forced the then Goliath, Microsoft, to go Live (read concentrate on the online world). Social media networking company, Facebook Inc.–which today has over 900 million users, of which 51 million come from India–has become the world’s largest social networking site right under the nose of Google which had its own Orkut. Facebook is rumoured to be working on a smartphone. And this is not the last of the changing business models that the tech world is seeing.
Posted in Technology | Leave a comment