Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

An instant decision: Entrance topper of NDA’s 1st women’s batch

 Talking about her preparations for the exam, Shanan Dhaka, who currently lives in Punjab’s Zirakpur, says she studied five hours a day for 40 days and made it a point to solve previous years’ papers.

“It was instantaneous,” says Shanan Dhaka, 19, on her decision to apply for the Army. The Haryana resident came first among women candidates — and tenth overall — in the entrance examination for the National Defence Academy (NDA), which will admit women cadets for the first time this year.

“I took inspiration to join the armed forces from my grandfather, Chanderbhan Dhaka, who was a Subedar, and my father, Vijay Kumar Dhaka, who retired as a Naib Subedar from the Army Service Corps,” Dhaka told The Indian Express. “Growing up in cantonment areas, I saw the respect being accorded to Army officers. Plus the trust everybody has in Army personnel really motivated me to join the service. It’s an opportunity to serve the nation with unparalleled pride and honour.”

To read the full article, please visit - https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/chandigarh/an-instant-decision-entrance-topper-of-ndas-1st-womens-batch-7983178/

Friday, December 3, 2021

Gita Gopinath to take on new role at IMF as First Deputy Managing Director

Gita Gopinath, who was scheduled to return to her academic position at Harvard University in January 2022, has served as the IMF's chief economist for three years.

Indian-American Gita Gopinath, the chief economist of International Monetary Fund, is being promoted as IMF’s First Deputy Managing Director, the fund announced Thursday. She will become the second-ranking official, replacing First Deputy Managing Director Geoffrey Okamoto who plans to leave the Fund early next year.

Gopinath, who was scheduled to return to her academic position at Harvard University in January 2022, has served as the IMF’s chief economist for three years.

To read the full story, please visit: https://indianexpress.com/article/world/gita-gopinath-to-take-on-new-role-at-imf-as-first-deputy-managing-director-7653547/

Monday, October 18, 2021

Booklets on Cyber Safety & Security for students

 Be Safe in Cyber World: Do's and Dont's for Teachers

 Be Safe in Cyber World: Do's and Dont's for Students

For More resources, please visit the following URL:

https://ciet.nic.in/pages.php?id=booklet-on-cyber-safetysecurity&ln=en&ln=en






Quiz on Cyber Safety & Security

October is celebrated as National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) globally. In order to bring attention to Cyber Security and as a concentrated effort to stay safe and secure online, NCSAM is celebrated all over the world. It is an initiative to put conscious efforts towards ensuring better cybersecurity hygiene and incorporate stronger security measures.

With this objective, DSCI drove a month-long awareness campaign under the guidance of the National Cyber Security Secretariat. The campaign disseminated various content artifacts and reached out to 3.25 million citizens throughout the country.

Many interesting quizzes have been launched on the myGov portal to test the knowledge and readiness level of citizens around Cyber Security. The overall objective of the Quiz was to create Cyber Security awareness among citizens, to achieve a better security posture for the country, and to empower online users to remain Safe Online. 

Participate and earn reward certificates: https://quiz.mygov.in/quiz/securing-digital-space/


Source: https://www.mygov.in/


Saturday, March 16, 2019

India likely to benefit as UK lifts limit on PhD level work visas

According to the most recent UK Home Office data, Indians form the largest group of highly-skilled professionals within the Tier 2 (General) category of work visas.

London: Indians are among the largest group of professionals set to benefit from a new UK government plan to remove any limit on the number of PhD-level work visas to be granted.
UK Chancellor Philip Hammond announced on Wednesday in a Budget update, referred to as the annual Spring Statement, that from later this year all such highly-qualified roles will be exempt from any cap on the numbers that can apply and come to work in Britain.
“[A] key pillar of our plan is backing Britain to remain at the forefront of the technology revolution that is transforming our economy. And to support that ambition, from this Autumn we will completely exempt PhD-level roles from the visa caps,” Hammond said in his speech in the House of Commons.
“From Autumn 2019, PhD-level occupations will be exempt from the Tier 2 (General) cap, and at the same time the government will update the immigration rules on 180-day absences so that researchers conducting fieldwork overseas are not penalised if they apply to settle in the UK,” he added in his statement.
According to the most recent UK Home Office data, Indians form the largest chunk of highly-skilled professionals within the Tier 2 (General) category of work visas, accounting for 54 per cent of all such visas granted in 2018.


Indian nationals also marked the largest increase in the grant of Tier 2 visas last year, up by 6 per cent at 3,023 more visas compared to the previous year.
The UK government’s latest PhD-level visa exemption was welcomed by UK universities, who are key employers of international researchers.
“This is fantastic news for Indian researchers who would like to work in the UK, and for UK universities who thrive on bringing together a diversity of brilliant minds from around the world,” said Vivienne Stern, Director of Universities UK International, the main representative body for UK higher education institutions.
“Many of the UK’s leading researchers, in fields ranging from biomechanics to gender politics, come from India. Outside of Europe, India is the third-largest country of origin for academic staff in the UK,” she said.
Universities UK International said that despite making up only 0.9 per cent of the global population, the UK is responsible for 15.9 per cent of the world’s most highly-cited research articles.
“The achievements are made possibly as a result of the international community of researchers that work at and with UK institutions,” Stern said.
The new announcement comes soon after doctors and nurses were removed from the cap to address shortages in the state-funded National Health Service (NHS) last year.
Currently, only a limited number of visas are issued every year under the Tier 2 skilled worker section of the visa system. The government’s latest announcement is seen as the first step towards the complete removal of a cap on visas for skilled workers in 2021, when a new immigration system comes into force.
“We already issue more skilled worker visas to Indian nationals than to the rest of the world combined, and I am delighted to see many Indian students coming to study at our world-class universities,” UK immigration minister Caroline Nokes had said following a Migration Dialogue with Indian government officials in January this year.
“Under the new system, operating from 2021, we will always be open to the brightest and best from India, who wish to come to live and work in the UK,” she said.

Thursday, March 7, 2019

EU, India to step up cooperation in research and innovation


India and the European Union will step up cooperation in research and innovation, according to a statement.
On areas for future cooperation, health research and bio-economy will remain high on the agenda, it said.
Jean-Eric Paquet, Director-General of Research and Innovation, European Commission, co-chaired the 12th EU-India Joint Steering Committee meeting on science and technology along with Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary of DST, here according to an official statement.
India and the EU will step up cooperation in research and innovation, Paquet said here.
To build upon the robust cooperation of the past 20 years, the EU and India intend to renew the India-EU Science and Technology Agreement for another five years, the statement said.
It was also agreed to explore new areas of cooperation to fill the knowledge gap on climate change, on renewable energy in line with Mission Innovation aiming at reducing CO2 through concentrated efforts on energy.
On artificial intelligence, importance of ethical standards was stressed, the statement said.
The EU and India acknowledged their excellent cooperation which was recently boosted by the launch of seven India-EU projects on purification of water and waste water treatment, two on vaccines and one on polar sciences, it said.
Source: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/science/eu-india-to-step-up-cooperation-in-research-and-innovation/article26447711.ece (Accessed on 7 March, 2019)

Saturday, February 23, 2019

20+ Best Indian Blogs To Read From Popular Indian Bloggers (2019 Edition)

Are you looking for the top bloggers and best blogs in India? This is the place where you’ll discover top Indian blogs to read in 2019.
There are only two ways to succeed in blogging: reading and implementing. If you’re not a regular reader of blogs and don’t know what’s going on around your niche, you can never create a successful blog that makes money.
Reading best blogs is a no-brainer if you want to get the latest trends in your industry. Some of my favorite blogs that I usually read are from Indian bloggers. And I like to read Indian blogs because I can relate myself with them. It’s not like that I do not read other bloggers but still love to read Indians.
To read the full article, visit
https://bloggerspassion.com/5-indian-blogs-you-must-read-always/ (Accessed on February 22, 2019)

Monday, February 11, 2019

Prof. Balaram Ravindran: AI Expert

Wizard of AI: Meet India’s foremost reinforcement learning expert

Reinforcement learning is a pretty complex topic to wrap your head around, as far as intellectual pursuits go. It’s also one of the hottest areas of AI research: MIT Technology Review picked it as one of the top 10 technologies of 2017. Reinforcement learning chalked up one of the flashiest wins for AI this decade in March 2016, when DeepMind AlphaGo beat world championship player Lee Sedol at the game Go. Sedol, after his 4-1 loss to AlphaGo said that it felt like he was playing against an alien intelligence. Many AI researchers consider reinforcement learning, or RL in short,  to be the path that will help humanity scale its highest summit: artificial general intelligence. (Park away in your mind artificial general intelligence, or AGI, for later in this story.) No wonder then, that it’s on a league of its own, in terms of ambition and hype.

To read more, visit:
https://factordaily.com/balaraman-ravindran-reinforcement-learning/ (Accessed on February 11, 2019)

Related Videos:

NPTEL Course on ML by Prof. Balaram Ravindran
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC7V8QsPBec

Reinforcement Learning in Artificial Intelligence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67NOtMdT95I

10 best ML Researchers in India

Research in AI started soon after the Indian government launched the Knowledge-Based Computing Systems (KBCS) program in conjunction with the United Nations Development program in 1991. Later, a number of nodal centres were set up to focus on various research including expert systems in IIT Madras, a speech processing centre in Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, parallel processing in Indian Institute for Science, image processing in Indian Statistical Institute, and natural language processing in Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
The top 10 names chosen by Analytics India Magazine were based on various parameters such as their PhD degree, patent papers and authored technical publications, pioneering work, knowledge and many more. We mined LinkedIn and H-Index data for the same. Here are top ten artificial intelligence and machine learning researchers presented in an alphabetical order.

Balaraman Ravindran

Professor Balaraman Ravindran of IIT Madras is one of the top Indian AI researchers in India and foremost reinforcement learning expert. He also heads Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at IIT Madras. Ravindran did his PhD research from the University of Massachusetts. According to his Google Scholar profile, his academic work, which spans over two decades, has produced 170 research papers.

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Ravindran’s AI journey began in the late 1980s when he was doing his undergraduation from Thiagarajar College. According to his LinkedIn profile, his current research interest span the broader area of machine learning, ranging from spatiotemporal abstraction in reinforcement learning to social network analysis, and data mining. Much of his work is directed toward understanding interactions and learning from them.

Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri

Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri is the founding head of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit at ISI, Calcutta. His research areas are:
  • Optical character recognition of Indian scripts
  • Design of Indian language workstation for the blind: Bharati braille system
  • Natural language processing in Indian languages including electronic dictionaries, word-processing editor, morphological processor and spell-checker design
  • Pattern recognition and image processing
  • Image data compression
  • Optical communication and dielectric waveguides
According to ISI Calcutta website, he has published about 350 research papers in various international journals and conference proceedings. He has also authored five books titled Two Tone Image Processing and RecognitionObject-Oriented Programming: Fundamentals and Applications, Computer and Information technology Dictionary, Digital Document Processing, and Sound Symbolic Words in Bangla.
Chaudhuri obtained BSc (Hons) (1969), BTech (1972) and MTech (1974) degrees from Calcutta University and a PhD degree (1980) from IIT Kanpur.

Krithi Ramamritham

Krithi Ramamritham is a chair professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. According to his website, his current research involves applying computational approaches to energy management, based on the SMART principle: Sense Meaningfully, Analyze and Respond Timely. This work explores and extends state-of-the-art database systems, real-time computing, sensor networks, embedded systems, mobile computing and smart grids.
Ramamritham did his PhD in Computer Science from University of Utah (1981) and BTech in Electrical Engineering (1976), MTech in Computer Science from IIT Madras.

Nikhil R Pal

Nikhil R Pal is a professor in the Electronics and Communication Science Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. His research interest includes pattern recognition, medical and satellite image analysis, fuzzy sets theory, neural networks, evolutionary computation, bioinformatics, and brain science. According to Researchgate website, Pal produced 299 papers. His research paper received over 14,000 citations.
He has co-authored a book titled Fuzzy Models and Algorithms for Pattern Recognition and Image Processing and Advances in Soft Computing. He also co-edited Advances in Pattern Recognition and Digital Techniques, ICAPRDT99 and Advanced Techniques in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
Pal obtained his BSc (Physics) and MBA (Operation Research) degrees from the University of Calcutta and his MTech and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Indian Statistical Institute.

Pushpak Bhattacharya

IIT Patna director Pushpak Bhattacharya has recently been appointed as the chairman of the committee for standardisation in AI set up by the Bureau of Indian Standards under the Union Ministry of Consumer Affairs. Bhattacharya is known for his contribution to natural language processing and has several distinctions in the field.
He also heads the Natural language processing research group Centre For Indian Language Technology (CFILT) lab at IIT Bombay. His research areas are natural language processing, machine learning, cross-lingual IR and information extraction. According to his LinkedIn profile, he published more than 250 research papers and led government and industry projects of international and national importance. He has also authored a book titled Machine Translation. Bhattacharya received his BTech from IIT-Kharagpur in 1984 and did an MTech from IIT Kanpur in 1986.

Rajeev Rastogi

Rajeev Rastogi is the director of Machine Learning at Amazon, where is developing ML applications and platforms for the e-commerce giant. He has published over 200 papers and holds over 50 patents. His research paper Cure: An Efficient Clustering Algorithm For Large Databases received over 3,100 citations.
Before Amazon, he worked with Yahoo! Labs and Bell Labs Research Center in Bengaluru. Rastogi is active in the fields of databases, data mining and networking.
Rastogi received his BTech from IIT Bombay and a PhD degree in Computer Science from University of Texas, Austin.

Soumen Chakrabarti

Soumen Chakrabarti is a professor at IIT Bombay in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. According to his Google Scholar profile, Chakrabarti has produced 167 research papers. His current research interests include:
  • Better embedding representation for passages, entities, types and relation
  • Searching the annotated Web with entities, types and relations
  • Graph conductance search, which is supported by IBM and Microsoft.
Chakrabarti holds eight US patents on web-related inventions. He has authored one of the earliest books on web search and mining. He also wrote a book on web search and mining called,Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data.
He has done his B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur (1991) and a Master’s (1992) and PhD (1996) in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sankar Kumar Pal

Sankar Kumar Pal is a distinguished scientist and former Director of ISI, Calcutta. He has co-authored 17 books and more than 400 research publications in the areas of:
  • Pattern recognition and machine learning
  • Image processing
  • Data mining and web intelligence
  • Soft computing
  • Neural nets
  • Genetic algorithms
  • Fuzzy sets
  • Rough sets and bioinformatics
Pal ranked at 77 in Google H-Index and has been the recipient of the 2013 Padma Shri,1990 SS Bhatnagar Prize (most coveted accolade for a scientist in India) and many other prestigious awards in India and abroad.

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay is the director of Indian Statistical Institute. According to the ISI website, she has authored and co-authored more than 300 research articles and has published six authored and edited books from publishers like Springer, World Scientific and Wiley. Her research interests include:
  • Computational biology
  • Bioinformatics
  • Soft and evolutionary computation
  • Pattern recognition using ML in large datasets
  • Data Mining
Sanghamitra won the Infosys Prize 2017 in ‘Engineering and Computer Science’ category for her work on algorithmic optimisation and for its significant impact on biological data analysis. She was also awarded Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Science in 2010.
Bandyopadhyay did her BTech, MTech and PhD in Computer Science from Calcutta University, IIT Kharagpur and ISI.

Sunita Sarawagi

Sunita Sarawagi is a professor at IIT Bombay. Her current research interests are deep learning, web information extraction, data integration, graphical models and structured learning. Sarawagi has published more than 130 research papers and holds four patents. She was also a visiting scientist at Google Research. She obtained her BTech in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur and PhD from University of California, Berkeley.




Tuesday, January 22, 2019

What makes India rank among the top 3 countries in Artificial Intelligence skills

In the past few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has remained in the limelight with countries like China and the US leading the way. But, did you know that India too has joined the AI bandwagon? According to a latest LinkedIn report, India ranks third in the global front with respect to the penetration of AI skills (46%) just after China (48%) and the US (46%)! Exciting, isn’t it?


Stating that AI is ushering in a new era of digital revolution, the report highlighted three key points:



  • With an increase of 190% between 2015-17, AI skills are one of the most widely growing skills on LinkedIn.

  • The industries incorporating more AI skills within their workforce are the most dynamic industries.

  • The countries that record the highest usage of skills in and around AI are China, the USA, Israel, and Germany.


Another study titled The Augmented Human Enterprise (a collaborative study by Goldsmiths, the University of London, and Automation Anywhere) reinforces India’s stand as one among the top five countries in the world to have the highest penetration of AI skills. In a survey of four markets, this study established that India has the highest proportion of AI penetration with nearly 71% of the Indian respondents stated that their employees integrated both AI-based augmentation and Robotic Process Automation to the optimum potential.


So, how did India come to the forefront as being one of the leading countries in the world with AI skills?


The reasons behind India emerging as a forerunner of AI skills are many with a major push coming from the $143 billion outsourcing industry. For a long time, Indian IT and Consultancy magnates such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro have been providing their services to global magnates including the US Army, Microsoft, IBM, and Deutsche Bank, to name a few.


Another impetus for AI comes from the Indian government’s Digital India and Make in India campaigns both of which focus on making India a digitally savvy and self-sufficient nation.


An excellent case in point is the NITI Aayog. In the June 2018 discussion paper titled ‘National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence’, NITI Aayog seeks to embark on a mission - #AIforAll - with special focus being on five sectors - agriculture, healthcare, education, smart cities and infrastructure, and smart mobility and transportation.


India has become a hotbed for startups and with the government’s efforts to digitize India, the startup scene is further blossoming. In just a matter of a few years, the AI-based startups in India have generated around $36 million in funding from philanthropic investors like Ratan Tata and also from VC firms such as Sequoia Capital.


At present, the trend is towards developing smart AI solutions in the country itself and Indian tech giants are fast catching up with the other two global leaders (China and the US). For instance, Tata Consultancy Services is now laying increased emphasis on building a strong market for its state-of-the-art AI product, Ignio. Infosys and Wipro, too, have joined TCS in the AI race. Infosys is working on its AI platform Nia which is based on its first AI platform Mana. The aim behind developing Nia is to promote data-driven business decisions by helping businesses dive into customer and market data to understand consumer behavior, market revenue patterns, predict compliance and fraudulent issues, among others. Wipro is focusing on leveraging Holmes (Wipro’s AI platform) to automate various mundane and routine facets of fixed-price projects with the aim of boosting the efficiency of the Software Engineers while also allowing them to focus on more important tasks that demand human intelligence. In the process, Wipro aims to save around $46.5 million!


Coming to the job front, job site Indeed maintains that between June 2016-June 2018, there has been a whopping 179% increase in the number of AI-related job searches in India. The report further maintains that since the very beginning of 2018, the demand for AI skills has been at an all-time high in India.


In the 2018 Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study it was found that although companies across the globe are planning to implement AI and other related technologies with their operational infrastructure, China and India hold the greatest chances of implementing AI in the short-term. Experts suggest that a primary reason behind this is that China and India being developing nations, the impact of any technological change on such economies is always of a greater magnitude than that in a developed nation. Let’s look at the case of smartphones. China and India are two of the largest global consumers of smartphones. Why? Because consumers in a developing nation are quick to adopt the latest technological trends. And with India being one of the fasted-growing economies backed by a huge population (the second largest in the world), the Indian market is ripe for AI-penetration.


How To Gear Up For India’s Emerging AI-Driven Economy?


The most important thing that you need to do in this rapidly advancing technological age is to Upskill! Make active learning a part of your upskilling routine. Learning as you go will not only increase your knowledge base but it will also increase your chances of being hired by top tech companies (the World Economic Forum maintains that today ‘active learning’ is a key in-demand skill). By learning the in-demand skills you can maintain your relevancy with the ever-changing needs of the job industry.


Upskilling has become quite easy today, thanks to the numerous online platforms offering excellent artificial intelligence courses. Taught by the leading industry experts and academicians, the most advantageous point of learning from an online platform is that you get to learn at your own pace and convenience.


So, are you ready to gear for India’s rapidly growing AI market?


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