LIRC@SFIT

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 (Genera...

Leveraging technology for effective program delivery poses unique challenges. Technology is a tool that requires a capable state to be effective; also, it creates new power asymmetries. Three well-known economists weigh in. Read the full article at: https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/the-solutions-state-why-the-digital-needs-the-human-5625290/

Two-thirds of investors believe today’s private-sector  leadership  is unfit to handle future challenges. That sobering statistic comes from a survey done by consulting firm Korn Ferry as part of a larger study on whether leaders have qualities that will allow them to handle challenges in coming years and decades. “A majority of leaders can’t make decisions, take smart actions quickly enough, motivate people effectively, or build trust — all of which is needed to ensure their organization’s survival into the future,” Korn Ferry said in a statement on release of the report. According to the survey, 67 per cent of investors believe the current  leadership  stock isn’t fit for the future. At the country level, the figures were 82 per cent in China, 70 per cent in the US, with Singapore coming in at 51 per cent. “Investors are looking at, ‘Who can tell me the growth story I want to believe?’” Dennis Baltzley, Korn Ferry’s global solution leader for  leadership...

India's first commercial walking robot Stoch uses machine learning to move around The robot is the size of a small dog with four legs and a thick but flexible spine. When connected to a battery, it starts walking on slender, articulated limbs, like a canine.  It even has a 'face' that looks vaguely like that of a pug. The developers at the Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-physical Systems at the Indian Institute of Science ( IISc ) are calling it ' Stoch ' and they say it's on target to become the country's first commercial "walking" robot. Stoch has been under development since January last year. The first version was displayed a month ago at Aero India - it was heavy-footed and clumsy. A sleeker second version was developed just two weeks ago and a third will be ready in three months. A commercial variant is about a year away.  The robot uses  machine learning  to figure out how to walk by itself. Specifically, it uses reinforcement learning, whe...

India is lagging behind its global peers when it comes to being prepared for the jobs revolution, despite the country’s inherent favourable demographic dividend. To read the full article, please visit: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/news/india-lags-behind-global-peers-in-future-job-skills-report-says/articleshow/68412872.cms  (Accessed on March 15, 2019)

C-DAC already makes the PARAM series of supercomputers for strategic requirements KOLKATA : IIT Kharagpur is building a supercomputer of a speed of 1.3 Petaflops, all the parts of which will be manufactured indigenously. A Petaflops is a unit of computing speed equal to 1,000 million million (1015) floating-point operations per second. In three months, the institute will be ready to pull the veil off this genius, promised the computer wizards at the institute. The supercomputer is being built at the high-performance computing (HPC) facility and data centre ecosystem that has come up at the institute under the National Super Computing Mission, which aims at building the fastest and most powerful computers in the country. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), which is an autonomous scientific society of the ministry of electronics and information technology, scouted all the IITs before agreeing to set up the HPC at IIT Kharagpur, where the marvel i...

Source: Maharashtra Times dated 14 March, 2019