Yantrakaal

Five Drivers of the emerging civilisation It is always fascinating to speculate on the contours of the future, but perhaps it is easier to do so in terms of what might actually shape it. Rather than trying to define where we want to go or determine how to go there, let us instead try to determine who, or what, our drivers are and let them lead us into whatever it is that awaits us in the years, and the road ahead. So sit back and take a ride through a  thoughtscape  delineated by nuclear energy, space travel, biohacks, the metaverse and artificial intelligence. A ride that ends with an unusual Indic twist in the tail or tale. Energy The first driver is energy which is what gives dynamism to an otherwise static universe. It is obviously a prime driver for the emergence of civilisation, which is why the discovery – and control – of fire was such an epochal event in the evolution of human society. Without access to substantial sources of energy, human society can only regress to...

 Presentation made on the occasion of the Decade of Data Science Event held at the Park Hotel.

  Since Zuckerberg and Nadella is talking about the Metaverse, I thought I should do the same. After all, great minds think alike!

 জেনারেল স্ট্রিম থেকে প্রোগ্রামিং কেরিয়ারে ভারতবর্ষে সবাই চায় ইঞ্জিনিইয়ারিং বা মেডিক্যাল কলেজে ভর্তি হতে কারণ এই পথে চাকরি বা রোজগারের সুযোগ খুব বেশি। কিন্তু সবার কপালে সেটা হয় না। কিছুটা মেধা, কিছুটা টিউশান বা গৃহশিক্ষক এর উপর খরচা করার ক্ষমতা আর কিছুটা সৌভাগ্য বসত বেশ কিছু ছাত্র এই লাইনে ঢুকে যায়। কিন্তু দেশের বেশির ভাগ ছেলে-মেয়েদের জেনেরাল স্ট্রিমে ফিজিক্স, কেমিস্ট্রি, ইতিহাস, ভূগোল, বটানি, বাংলা, ইংরেজী ইত্যাদি নিয়ে তিন বছরের গ্র্যাজুয়েশন  কোর্সে ভর্তি হতে হয়।  তবে এই বি-এ বা বি-এস-সি পাশ করে চাকরি পাওয়া খুব‌ই শক্ত ব্যাপার। আই-এ-এস, আই-পি-এস, ডব্লু-বি-সি-এস, লোয়ার ডিভিশন ক্লার্ক, ব্যাংক, রেল, স্কুল টিচার  এইসব লাইনে মুষ্টিমেয় কয়েকটা খালি পদের জন্য কোটি কোটি আবেদনকারীর ভীড়। কাট-থ্রোট কমপিটিশন। ডোমের চাকরির জন্য মাস্টার্স পাস করা প্রার্থী ! আবাসনে, সুপারস্পেশ্যালিটি হাসপাতালে সিকিউরিটির কাজে বহাল হয় মাস্টার্স করা ছাত্র। কোনও পেশাই ছোটো নয় কিন্তু তাহলে জেনেরাল স্ট্রিমে পড়ে গ্র্যাজুয়েশন করলে ভবিষ্যৎ কী একেবারেই অন্ধকার? একেবরেই না। ছেলেপুলেরা কী স্বপ্ন দেখবে না? নিশ্...

 Celebrated Engineers Day by reaffirming my identity as a Mechanical Engineer and building this Mars Buggy with a kit from Ukraine Gears . Cost me about 4 hours of work and a very sore thumb. Wish I had a tool to press in the wooden pieces

We are surely aware of SaaS or Software as a Service but let us explore the intriguing concept of the Crisis as a Catalyst for Change. Y2K - 1999 Those of us who are old enough to have been professionally active during the Y2K era, would recollect that industrialised societies, especially the US, were in a tizzy over how computer systems, both private and public, would collapse on 31 Dec 1999. This was because of the way dates had been defined with two digit years since the dawn of the computer age in the early 1960s and no one had thought that 99 would be followed by 00. Hence massive IT projects were commissioned to make systems Y2K proof by rewriting the code to accommodate four digit years so that 1999 would be followed by 2000. But the size of the task -- spanning so many organisations and their plethora of systems -- was so huge that there were simply not enough programmers to make even this simple change. At this point of time, software companies in India were trying to do busin...

Software artifacts that display artificial intelligence are increasing in both number and sophistication. There are many definitions of what constitutes intelligence and there are many ways in which software has been programmed to demonstrate the same. Of all the many options,  the use of artificial neural networks (ANN), that closely mimic the connectionist approach of animal brains, has been found to be most effective in performing tasks that are both useful and insightful. This includes, for example, recognising faces, driving cars, generating meaningful text passages and playing a wide range of games both against humans and against other programs. It may not be the case that the ANN will always be the best way to demonstrate this kind of intelligent behaviour, so for the purpose of this study an ANN is neither necessary nor sufficient. All that we need is a digital artifact -- a container of data, code, model, APIs or a combination of some of these -- that we will refer to as a...