New interdisciplinary course in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence: BEg Mechatronic can help you be a cobotisist

If you are imaginative and creative and want to play a part in developing the robots of the future working alongside humans, then you are a future 'cobotisist'

Interested candidates can apply at essex.ac.uk. (Representational Image)

The University of Essex, United Kingdom is set to launch a new course called Bachelor’s in Engineering in Mechatronic Systems – an interdisciplinary field of electrical, mechanical, robotics, electronics, computer engineering, telecommunication systems and product engineering. The three-year undergraduate course will begin from the academic year 2019-20 onwards and the applications process for the same has already begun at the official website — essex.ac.uk. The last date to apply is June 30, 2019.

According to Anthony Vickers, head, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, the course will teach students to design, build and test robotic systems and including the structural frame. The design of the structural frame is the unique element that separates mechatronics from electronic and robotics.

Modules include 3D printing technology, drives and power electronics, computer programming, sensors and digital signal processing, motion control algorithms, computer vision, robotics and embedded systems are also going to be part of the course curriculum.

Talking to indianexpress.com, Vickers said, “If you are imaginative and creative and want to play a part in developing the robots of the future working alongside humans, then you are a future cobotisist”.

“If there is one thing that we can be sure about the 21st century, it is that robots will be with us in increasing numbers. Here in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at Essex, we like to use the term cobotics — the collaborative working of humans and computers. The new course will align with new research areas within the school, and to provide completeness to our work in cobotics,” he adds.

Who can apply?

Indian students who have completed class 12 or equivalent can apply for the course. The minimum marks required for the course includes an overall average from the four best subjects (excluding PE and local language). For CBSE, CISCE and other regional and national boards, the minimum requirement is 75-70 per cent, including 60 per cent marks in mathematics and 70 per cent in English.

For Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh boards minimum requirement is 60 per cent, including 60 per cent marks in mathematics. Students who have cleared class 12 from West Bengal board will need 55 per cent marks, including 55 per cent in Mathematics and at least 60 per cent class 10 Science exam.

Placement Scenario

As part of the course, students can undertake a placement year but students will be responsible for finding their placement. The university, told indianexpress.com, that it would ‘support and guide’ them to find a placement.  If students complete a placement year they will only pay 20 per cent of their usual tuition fee to Essex for that year.

Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/education/study-abroad/new-interdisciplinary-course-in-robotics-ai-beg-mechatronic-can-help-you-be-a-cobotist-5643840/ (Accessed on March 27, 2019)

प्राध्यापकांसाठी ‘पीएचडी’ची अतिरिक्त वेतनवाढ बंद ?

Source: Loksatta dated March 27, 2019

CBSE का नया पॉडकास्ट एप शिक्षा वाणी' लॉन्च, मिलेगी सीबीएसई की सभी जानकारी

सीबीएसई ने विद्यार्थियों और अभिभावकों को सभी जरूरी जानकारी से अपडेट रखने के लिए सीबीएसई ने एक नया पॉडकास्ट एप लॉन्च किया है। इस एप का नाम ‘शिक्षा वाणी' है। इसके जरिए अभिभावकों और छात्रों को परीक्षा और उत्तर पुस्तिका के मूल्यांकन से जुड़ी सभी जरूरी जानकारियां दी जाएंगी।

12वीं के बाद CBSE ने सुझाए 113 कॅरियर ऑप्शन

सीबीएसई ने पॉडकास्ट की सुविधा लोगों को सही और जरूरी जानकारियां देने के लिए शुरू की है। इन पॉडकास्ट्स के जरिए लोगों को अकादमिक, ट्रेनिंग और एग्जाम से जुड़ी जरूरी जानकारियां दी जाएंगी। यह एप प्ले स्टोर पर एंड्रॉयड यूजर्स लिए उपलब्ध है। यहां रजिस्टर्ड यूजर्स को नई जानकारी के साथ ऑडियो और वीडियो फाइल मिल जाएंगी। इन्हें सीबीएसई द्वारा अपलोड किया जाएगा।

शिक्षा वाणी एप में छात्रों, अभिभावकों और प्रिंसिपल के लिए अलग-अलग सेक्शन हैं। इससे स्कूल के प्रिंसिपल बोर्ड के दिशा निर्देर्शों को जान सकेंगे। सीबीएसई के ट्रेनिंग एंड स्किल एजुकेशन डायरेक्टर डॉ. बिस्वजीत साहा ने बताया कि यह एप स्कूलों के प्रिंसिपल गूगल प्ले स्टोर से डाउनलोड कर सकते हैं। इससे उनको सीबीएसई द्वारा दी जाने वाली हर जानकारी मिलेगी। अब तक यह वेबसाइट के माध्यम से दी जाती थी, लेकिन अब उनको यह ऑडियो वीडियो के माध्यम से भी दी जाएगी। .

Source: https://www.livehindustan.com/career/story-cbse-new-podcast-app-launch-shikshan-vani-will-get-all-information-of-cbse-2461706.html (Accessed on 27 March, 2019)

Stadia is Google's new streaming service for games — no console needed

It is, however, launching a streaming service just for video games that will work on any TV withChromecast, computers running a Chrome browser, and Google's Pixel devices. You don't download the games to your devices, just play them over any Wi-Fi connection.

The Netflix-like product is called Stadia (that's the proper plural of "stadium") and is expected to launch later this year with big name titles including "Assassins Creed Odyssey" and specialYouTube features. Even without a console, it could help Google (GOOGL) take on game industry leaders Microsoft (MSFT), Sony (SNE) and Nintendo (NTDOF).

Google announced its big foray into gaming Tuesday during a presentation at, fittingly, the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

To read more, visit:

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/19/tech/stadia-google-gaming/index.html (Accessed on March 27, 2019)

पुस्तकाची देवाणघेवाण सोपी - मोबाईल अँप द्वारा

Source: Maharashtra Times dated 26 March, 2019

The artificial-intelligence approach to teaching English in rural India

Artificial Intelligence is drawing a lot of interest from corporates, start-ups and the government because of its potential for business and social transformation. Indian AI sector has seen 18% YoY growth in 2018 and NITI Aayog has also identified five prioritysectors— health, education, agriculture, smart cities and smart mobility in its research paper on National AI Strategy.

ISTOCK

Globally, the total economic value derived from AI is predicted to reach USD 3.9 Trillion by 2022. Hence, this is the right time for innovation in AI-based applications for improving the quality of life of rural population of India, especially in primary sectors. TEACHER SHORTAGE Indian village schools suffer from persistent shortage of qualified teachers. Globally, there is a need for 24.4 million primary school teachers to achieve UNESCO’s goal of universal primary education by 2030. In India, although the overall pupilteacher ratio (PTR) has been improving gradually, most of the teachers in rural areas lack proper training.

This is further aggravated by the fact that India has nearly 100,000 schools, mostly in villages, which are single-teacher schools. This impacts PTR negatively and leads to deterioration of learning experience of the students eventually affecting their motivation to attend classes regularly. Under these circumstances, teaching of all subjects, including English, has suffered a lot across schools in villages. This vacuum in rudimentary education is very difficult to fill using skill-based trainings done later. Unless this conundrum is resolved, ensuring employability of a huge segment of population, is going to be a persistent challenge. Hence, there is an urgent need to augment the teaching community at village schools using digital technologies as well as AI . LANGUAGE TEACHING English has emerged as universally accepted “lingua-franca” globally as well as across India. But various surveys have revealed the state of English language skills of Indian students. Especially, among rural students, the situation is worse, and it affects their employability in various customer facing roles across industries. Teaching of English can benefit from various capabilities of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) technique of AI to make it more effective. On one hand, it helps the students to pick up right skills at right pace, and on the other hand, it exposes teachers to emerging digital technologies. WRITING SKILLS Various NLP-based techniques, generated using (machine learning) ML and word processing, can be used to automate the process of teaching writing English to students. For example, automatic detection of incorrect spellings/punctuations, grammatically incorrect phrases or sentences, generating reward points for correctly formed sentences and such. The process can be made more engaging by starting with partially filled paragraph templates on chosen topics, where students work on correctly guessing and filling the blanks by adding words, phrases, sentences appropriately. Another advanced technique namely, words/phrase prediction on partially constructed sentences can help students to fill the gaps/void which they face while writing a paragraph on some topic. Such a model of Automated Assisted Learning (AAL) enables more experimentation, innovative thinking. Even for translation, the process that is a part of a student understanding the subjects, there are NLP models trained on language translation, which includes the relevant dictionary mapping (e.g. Hindi->English). SPEAKING AND READING For most Indian children, spoken English practice follows learning of writing skills. It is also true that many students who acquire good writing skill, still fear speaking in English, which is perceived as essential skill by employers. One way to help young people to come out of this is to engage them in regular English conversation. A chatbot, like Google Personal Assistant, trained on topic-based conversation can really help students to learn speaking English. To start with, the student can try pronouncing individual words correctly (by listening to pronunciation of the chatbot), followed by speaking individual phrases and complete sentences.

As availability of appropriate corpus is an important pre-requisite of building such a learning application, initially such a model can be targeted for teaching English to students speaking most common languages, such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi or Tamil.

Source: Hindustan Times dated 27 March, 2019

‘I always want to master whatever people call impossible’

A relaxed Michael Phelps looked at the Times Sport page, saw the previous night’s IPL report, and chuckled. “Cricket? Doesn’t that take, like, 10 days to get over?”

He was only joking, of course, but we explained there were three formats, and that this was the ultra-shortened version. He seemed to like the idea, especially an analogy which cropped up about fine wine co-existing with the cheaper variety on the shelves, but still couldn’t stop guffawing about a game taking days to get over!

Phelps’ swimming career, after all, was all about short, sharp bursts of sustained physical, tactical and technical excellence. It was all about extending the will and soaring above the bounds of the possible, something he did better, and more often, than most other sportspersons in history.

The most decorated Olympian of all time, with 28 medals, 23 of them gold, Phelps is that rarest of rare species — a sporting genius. As we found out, though, he can also be remarkably human. Here as brand ambassador for apparel company Under Armour, Phelps is still easing into his various post-career roles, and still staving off the keen urge to compete. Most importantly, Phelps the superstar is learning to coexist with Michael the ordinary family man. 

To read the full interview, please visit https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/i-always-want-to-master-whatever-people-call-impossible-michael-phelps/articleshow/68590185.cms

(Accessed on 27 March, 2019)

30 years of surfing the giant web

Source: The Times of India dated 27 March, 2019

AICTE to introduce students feedback-based assessment for the promotion of Engineering teachers

Besides research work and their overall performance, teachers in Engineering colleges will now be appraised on the basis of students' evaluation All India Council of Technical Education's (AICTE) decision to include the students' feedback to assess the teachers has been introduced to improve the educational quality of engineering colleges. But, its effectiveness remains to be seen. "Since students' feedback will be considered while granting promotion to the teachers, they will have to put their best foot forward in the classroom. This assessment pattern is followed by the IITs and NITs," says AICTE chairman Anil Sahasrabudhe.

As per the rule, students' feedback will have 25% weightage in the overall assessment of the faculty, which will be a decisive component for their promotions. Till now, the focus for promoting teachers in colleges has been on the number of research papers published by the faculty members. This was partly the reason for the publication of substandard research papers in fake journals. "Colleges in tier II and III cities, may not have the resources to conduct research. But research publications being given high priority during promotions often leads to the problem of paid journals. The new assessment will thus award good teachers," adds Sahasrabudhe. While some academicians are positive about the impact of this assessment system, others are of the view that students might not be honest with their feedbacks owing to various reasons. "Students are sometimes not objective or may be simply confused while giving feedback for teachers. Their opinions are based on peer thinking. While interacting with the students, I have come across several students who behave differently in class and during one-on-one interactions," says Govinda K, professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT). Addressing the concern, Sahasrabudhe says that the number of such students is mostly low, thus the overall score of a teacher who is good at his work is not hampered. "Some students may give poor feedback, probably because the teacher is strict or is not lenient with marks, but this is temporary. In the long run, a teacher who is passionate about teaching and thinks about students' welfare will always be valued by the majority. Also, such an assessment will also ensure better student-teacher communication," he says. This system will allow the teachers to address their weaknesses and improve teaching methods, says KK Mahapatra, dean, Academics at NIT, Rourkela. "Since students are the direct beneficiaries, this will help the teachers to analyse their skills, for instance, maybe there is an issue with communication or students might be finding the teaching method complicated," says Mahapatra.

Source: The Times of India dated 25 March, 2019