Open Source initiative celebrating 20 years

The term ‘Open Source’ was coined in California on 3^rd February, thus completing 20 years of a strong and increasing presence in the Digital world.

This initiative has indeed come a long way in the past two decades. It was a very welcome deviation in the Microsoft-Apple dominated “close” industry. In simple terms, Open Source upholds the idea that a license shall not restrict free distribution and that the source code should be included along with the program. Many a times, Open Source is misunderstood as ‘free’ software or program. It may be true 99% of the times, but there are certain exceptions too. To imagine a world without Open Source would be like to think what would happen without the likes of MySQL, PHP, Firefox, Android, Ubuntu etc.

In India, we are seeing the government increasingly use 'open source', it has already started to disseminate more information and offer more services online in the past few years. The initiative of ‘Digital India’ demands that open source be used more widely not just to save costs and time but also to ensure implementation of some of the ambitious plans effectively. This trend is seen in various other countries too. There is a shift from product purchase towards innovation. In this phase, it is crucial that awareness about ‘Open Source’ is created in an orderly and well-planned manner.

Reference:

https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/digital-india-can-only-grow-via-open-source/articleshow/62848528.cms

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/happy-birthday-open-source-a-look-back-at-the-software-thats-pushing-tech-forward/

Major win for Artificial Intelligence

In what could prove to be a major win for Artificial Intelligence, IBM's AI product named "Watson" was able to identify a rare form of Leukemia after Doctors failed to diagnose the exact cause for the woman not responding to the apparent treatment given. 

The mentioned incident took place in Tokyo, Japan.  It is said that the patient's genetic information was compared with 20 million clinical oncology studies before it could reach to the conclusion.  

Artificial Intelligence is surely taking huge leaps day by day, be it in Healthcare, gaming, scientific or any other field.

#ArtificialIntelligence win- @IBM #Watson detect leukemia which Drs couldnt. #AI should complement human inteligence pic.twitter.com/nR2ap2l2r8

— Rohan Mhasalkar (@rohan0203) August 9, 2016

News reference - Russia Today 

Robotics... soon to be a part of our lives

The very mention of the word Robot reminds us of the hi-fi machines that we have seen in numerous Hollywood movies such as Star Wars, Star Trek, AI, Terminator etc. That a robot can be a small device assisting one in their household tasks is something that most people will not believe at all. One always imagines a robot to be a man-like looking machine that acts and does tasks just like a human.

Today, knowingly or unknowingly the field of robotics has reached the house of every common man. The automatic vacuum cleaners, floor washers, automatic irons all are examples of small robots in our homes. Though they are not very commonly seen in India yet, it’s just a matter of few years when they will become very routinely used.

I came across an awesome video of a robot doing household chores, same is given below. Lot of exciting things await us in this Robotics for sure.

Video of a #robot doing chores... #Robotics will soon become part of our daily lives. Embrace #Technology.https://t.co/mmaDFuzlm1

— Rohan Mhasalkar (@rohan0203) June 24, 2016

SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS

#Research shows that 62% of US public get news on #socialmedia. Seems people find #Citizenjournalism more reliable. pic.twitter.com/K5TLA6PMt7

— Rohan Mhasalkar (@rohan0203) May 28, 2016

Undoubtedly, social media has changed the entire outlook of the society as such. Social Media has become such an integral part of our lives that its difficult to imagine how life was when it was not in existence.

Today, I read a news report, that in the US more than 60% of people rely on social media for getting news updates. Two thirds of Facebook users get their news from this media while about 59% of Twitter users do the same. To me, this was an astounding number.

Thinking further on this, I thought that indeed our traditional news media has become so mundane (and many times highly partial) that people are in fact finding social media to be much more accurate, true and reliable. The concept of Citizen Journalism gets its true meaning due to this.

As they said earlier “The pen is mightier than the sword”. In today’s world, we may rephrase it as “The Keyboard is mightier than the gun”.

BLOCKCHAIN... Real or Hype ?

So what really is Blockchain ? I am sure most of you would have come across this term somewhere or the other, be it on some website, blog article, news or other place. Analysts are projecting it to be bigger than Social media, Cloud Computing, Big Data or even Artificial Intelligence. Another term which is closely related to Blockchain, which no one had heard of till few years back is Bitcoin. Blockchain, in the simplest terms is the technology behind Digital or Virtual Currencies such as Bitcoins.

Blockchain is a form of Distributed database, which, as the name suggests stores the data in bits and pieces at different places. In context of Bitcoins or Currency, it is a public ledger (accessible to authorized users only, called miners) of the Bitcoin transactions. As the name says, Blockchain is the chain of blocks, where each block holds a series of transaction entries. Each transaction has a digital signature that authenticates it. The “distributed” part is introduced by making this ledger available to other miners. Transactions done every 10 minutes are recorded into a single ‘block’. Each block is then connected to the previous one in terms of transactional values, thus the name Blockchain. The Distributed architecture gives no single party the power to tamper with the data, thus securing it. Here, it is important to understand that Bitcoin is just an application of Blockchain technology and that this technology in itself has the potential to be as big as the Internet has become in the past 2 decades.

There are reports that DARPA as well as NATO is looking to use Blockchain technology for military related apps. This shows that Blockchain technology is becoming more and more mature and is now ready for applications in the real world.  It is being said that we are on the verge of a time like early 1990’s when we were just introduced to the Internet. Blockchain could change email, online shopping, Social networking, Internet of Things and just about everything we do online. Maybe a time will come sometime in 2035 when people will wonder how civilization ever functioned without it.

All said and done, it needs to be seen how much of all this will turn out to be true eventually. Nonetheless, technology seems to be bringing up exciting new avenues, which a common man cannot stay away from.

Website References:

https://hbr.org/2016/05/the-impact-of-the-blockchain-goes-beyond-financial-services

http://www.cio.com/article/3055847/security/what-is-blockchain-and-how-does-it-work.html

https://www.zebpay.com/blockchain-simple-explanation/?utm_content=bufferf9164&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

http://www.newsweek.com/blockchain-technology-will-remake-global-financial-system-462537

Facial Recognition and Social media... an interesting experiment

I happened to read an interesting article on the website PCWorld. In today's world of social media, mobile technology, gadgets, sophisticated cameras etc., do we really think we have enough privacy from various spying eyes ? If you think the answer is YES, then you really are not yet in this digital world. 

Today, it has become very common to search someone on Facebook or Twitter to gather more details about them. This experiment on Face Recognition was conducted by a Russian Art School student. It surely makes one think on how social media stays connected to us. 

The experiment title itself is "YOUR FACE IS BIG DATA". The experimenter did a search of about 100 random people on a social networking website and was able to find 60-70% of them between age 18 to 35. For these recognised "Faces", the experimenter was then able to find more details on the social media website.

You may refer to the entire article on the below mentioned URL:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3055305/your-face-is-big-data-the-title-of-this-photographers-experiment-says-it-all.html

Artificial Intelligence - marching into the common man's life

Couple of weeks back, I read a news article that US army plans to actively use Artificial Intelligence for creating cyber soldiers and also to fly its fighter jets. This was not at all astonishing, but the next piece of this article really was. DARPA has admitted that enemies are already ahead of them i.e. this technology is already being in use on the battlefield by several others. One other striking news was that in the military budget of 2016, US has kept $15 bn separate only for Artificial Intelligence. Most of the countries entire defence budget itself is lesser than this amount.

Usage of AI is becoming common day by day, with Mobile assistant (Siri, Google Now), Speech recognition, IVR’s, Medical surgeries and several others using this on a very active basis. 2015 has been considered to be a breakthrough year for AI inmany ways. Various companies are seen testing self-driven or autonomous cars which they claim would ensure increase of road safety. Just as I have been writing this post, there was the news that the National Highway Traffic SafetyAdministration (NHTSA) has given support to Google’s Self-driven vehicles by declaring that the AI system in control of the vehicle can be termed as a driver. There still is some time to actually see the autonomous cars running on the roads, but hurdles in its way surely are decreasing by the day. All of the IT giants,from Google to Apple and IBM to TCS are investing large amounts to build expertise in this field. The Healthcare industry is also seeing a major transformation with the concept of Robotic Doctors. With Smart Cities and Connected Living set to become such an important part of common man’s life, AI is the perfect bridge between technology and human behaviour.

Over the years since 1990’s when the computer started becoming part of a common-man’s life, technology was initially thought of as being dumb and non-cognitive. For many years, this always remained as the biggest limitation as well as challenge. But now with AI, the scenario is set to change. It is fast transforming technology into intelligent technology. Very soon, it will be an integral part of our daily lives.

All said and done, would AI ever be able to re-create the human touch… this is a question which would be very difficult to answer. However, human life is set to undergo a rapid transformation due to AI is something that can be concluded beyond any doubt.