Monthly Archives: February 2018

Combo of AI, Blockchain, VR is The Future of Jobs India Should Align Accordingly

The ancient Chinese game Go, which has a very high number of possible moves, was considered almost impossible for a computer to beat humans two years ago. Last year Alpha Go (a Go programme designed by two Go players) beat the best professional Go Player Lee Sedol in a five game match. Machine learning had breached even the bastion of strategic thought.

Impossible Foods, a fourth industrial revolution technology company, makes a plant based food that smells, tastes, looks like real meat. It threatens the future of the $90 billion meat industry. If only 20% of world population switches from eating real meat to alternative proteins it would free up 12% of total fresh water, free 400 million hectares of land and 960 megatonnes of CO2 emission.

Traditional manufacturing and service oriented industries are being disrupted in a manner we have never seen before. The first industrial revolution was triggered by the invention of the steam engine, which led to mechanical production. The second industrial revolution, catalysed by electricity and the assembly line, made mass production feasible and was catalysed by the discovery of electricity and assembly line. The third industrial revolution, from the 1960s onwards, was driven by computers, digital technology and the internet.

The fourth industrial revolution is being driven today by ten technologies that are transforming industrial production: autonomous robots; simulation; big data and analytics; augmented reality; the cloud; cyber-security; additive manufacturing; horizontal and vertical integration; the internet of things and artificial intelligence (AI). These technologies are impacting the entire production value chain from design to productivity, speed and quality of production.

There is widespread concern over the potential impact of the fourth industrial revolution on employment. A vast range of jobs are at risk of extinction and rapid scaling could lead to accumulation of job losses. The other fear is that new technologies would lead to increase in inequalities and lack of social cohesion. Elon Musk has stated AI represents an essential threat to humanity and has suggested tight regulations. Bill Gates has said that robots need to be taxed to compensate for greater efficiency compared to humans and suggested the pace of automation should be slowed down.

A McKinsey report estimates that 400-800 million people around the globe could be displaced by automation and will need to find new jobs by 2030, for which they will require new skills. There will be considerable need for re-skilling and training.

Let us look at what new technologies could do to enable India to technologically leapfrog. The two indicators holding ease of doing business in India back are enforcement of contracts where India is 164th, and registering property where India is 154th out of 190 countries. About 3 crore cases are currently pending in Indian courts. Two-thirds of all civil cases in district courts relate to registering land. Blockchain based smart contracts could radically reduce litigation, bring transparency in land registry and eliminate corruption relating to land. India has a billion biometrics on Aadhaar. We have a unique opportunity to leverage our public identities to have many applications on a blockchain network.

According to a PwC report, AI will contribute as much as $15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030. Given India’s strength in technology, favourable demographics and structural advantages in availability of advanced data India can be an AI pioneer. AI has the potential to add $957 billion to India’s economy by 2035, lifting it by 15% (Accenture report). India’s data diversity is a big draw for global AI implementers. AI can be a game changer in government where “scale” and “quality” need to be addressed simultaneously.

What does India need to do to embrace technology, create new jobs and meet the requirements of the changed scenario?

Firstly, we must realign India’s education system to emphasise skills rather than mere degrees. We must move away from the Anglo-Saxon system of education with emphasis on academic degrees, toward hands on learning in practical subjects. A beginning has already been made by Atal Innovation Mission. By 2018 end, nearly 2000 schools will have Tinkering Labs with robots, 3D printers, additive machinery, Internet of things and mentors so that children from class 6 onwards can build and experiment rather than only imbibe.

Secondly, we must constantly upgrade skills. There is a severe shortage of skilled manpower. India needs massive upgradation programmes in new technologies. Our IITs and IIITs must redefine themselves as institutes driving cutting edge technologies for the fourth industrial revolution.

Thirdly, we must create a highly flexible, resilient and adaptive workforce which is multi-skilled and has the capacity to undertake digital tasks from anywhere rather than a fixed location.

Fourthly, we must initiate measures to ensure that Indians are fully prepared to embrace the new era of AI, blockchain, additive manufacturing and emerging technologies. India cannot afford to bypass this revolution. This requires a new mindset. Our policies must drive this change.

Fifthly, we must work across disciplines and institutional boundaries. We must break silos. Medical data is an example. Life saving opportunities can be utilised by sharing large sets of genomic data across different health providers and research organisations.

Sixthly, our focus must be on social sector – education, health, nutrition where new technologies will enable us to improve the quality of life and enhance our human development index. These are also the sectors where maximum jobs will be created. Countries are still navigating the early stages of this new industrial revolution. Can India jumpstart this transformation?

Source: Times Of India

Technology and Cryptospace At Centrestage- Harshita Pride For Young India

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MEERUT: Sixteen-year-old Saharanpur girl Harshita Arora‘s app that updates users about price fluctuations in more than 1,000 cryptocurrencies in 32 countries has become one of the most sought-after paid apps on Apple’s App Store. What’s more, she launched it just on January 28 this year.
Daughter of a local financier and a homemaker mother, Harshita, who dropped out of school at 14 as she was “not cut out for common courses”, told TOI on Friday that she had her “fundamentals” very clear from the beginning. “I don’t underestimate school education in India but these common courses are not for me. My computer teacher introduced me to the wonderful world of technology. I have a different goal in life that the current education system may not provide. I am being home schooled. Computer technology must be given its due in school curriculum.”

The first time she heard about cryptocurrencies was in 2016. She soon got into Bitcoin mining, the basic underlying technology and cryptography. Not that the sudden stardom has come easy. When Harshita introduced the iOS app, she was at the receiving end of a lot of cynicism, with some doubting that a girl her age could build an iOS platform like that and others accusing her of plagiarizing the app.

All that is behind her now. “Ever since I was 13 and was introduced to designing concepts, I began reading IT magazines and the latest developments in the field. I learned about cryptocurrency and how it worked. Then I interacted with my internet friends and real investors in the currency to understand what they wanted in an app,” Harshita said.

She attended MIT Launch (a high school entrepreneur programme) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US some time back, which she said helped her a lot. This was a four-week long entrepreneurship programme for people between 15 and 19 years of age. “I met like-minded people who helped me build this app,” Harshita said.

Gericke Potgieper, managing director of Artifex Knowledge, a firm that provides technology based business solutions, who has been mentoring Harshita, said, “She is full of energy that she draws from her passion for solving problems and generating ideas in IT. She has this impeccable propensity to learn very fast. I can predict that she will go places.”

Midhun V Manikkath, her former school teacher who introduced her to computer programming, said, “I had the pleasure of teaching Harshita in class VIII at Pinewood School in Saharanpur. She always impressed me with her thoughts which she brought to the field of computing.”

Harshita now has plans to move to America to broaden her horizons. “In June I will move to the US and eventually establish myself as an entrepreneur launching startups. Currently, I am working on a new app, Snap Food. It will aim at providing exhaustive information on a particular food item,” she said.
The teenager has the full support of her family. “My daughter is my true inspiration. She is a highly focused child full of confidence,” said her father Ravinder Singh Arora.

Source: Times of India

The iOS App developed by Harshita: Crypto Price Tracker

Harshita Website: Harshita Apps

More about Harshita:

On Youtube

On Quora

On Twitter

On Medium

On Your Story

Why The World And India in The First Place Needs Distributed Ledger Economy

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Editorial Views, I ll be posting at some later point of time:

Read the incidents of Ongoing scams in India under the nose of Authorities.

1.NEW DELHI/ MUMBAI: Both the Central Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement Directorate moved the ministry of external affairs on Thursday to revoke the passport of billionaire jewellery designer Nirav Modi, accused of defraudingPunjab National Bank (PNB) of Rs 11,300 crore,+ even as doubts rose about whether he has citizenship or permanent resident status of some other country as well.
Modi, his wife Ami, brother Nishal and uncle and business partner Mehul Choksi all left the country in the first week of January. Modi was last seen in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum‘s annual meet in Davos (January 23-26). Ami is said to be an American citizen, while Nishal is a Belgian national. With his operations spread across the world, Modi is said to spend a lot of time in the US.

Some associates in the diamond trade claim to have seen him use a Belgian passport while travelling. They added that Modi used to frequently visit India, but had cut down on his visits in the last two years. “He often said there was little time to fly down to India. But he was quick to add that he was just a phone call away for friends who were never separated by distance,” said an associate. SOURCE: TOI

2. In 2016, Nirav paid Rs 48 crore in duty, penalty for smuggling

MUMBAI: Nirav Modi had to pay Rs 48 crore in 2016 towards duty and penalty for smuggling. In December 2014, DRI had intercepted eight export consignments by Firestar Diamond International and Firestar International at the air cargo complex at Sahar in Mumbai. Both firms, with Modi as chairman, are SEZ units in Surat and the exports were meant for countries including the US, Canada and Hong Kong.

DRI found that the value and description of goods were under-declared in six of the consignments. The cut and polished diamonds, which were imported duty-free and declared as studded in the jewellery being exported, were not found on the pieces.

DRI estimated that the value of the stock declared was less by Rs 1,000 crore, and the duty-free diamonds had been diverted into the market. After detailed investigation, it was revealed that the Firestar units, along with another Modi firm Radashir Jewellery Company, had substituted the imported diamonds with low quality cheaper ones.Two separate showcause notices were issued against the firms. Following adjudication, in 2016, the firms paid Rs 48.2 crore, including penalty of Rs 5.6 crore. DRI has gone on appeal in the customs, excise and service tax appellate tribunal, saying another fine has to be imposed on the firms.

SOURCE: TOI

3. Jug suraiya’s take: Call to account: How I became a Non Performing Asset for my bank

The government is reportedly pumping in a whopping amount of money, going into many thousands of crores, to recapitalise state-run banks which have become ‘stressed’ because of non-performing assets, or NPAs, as they’re known to their buddies.

NPAs are accounts which are in the red, for one reason or another. A common cause for an account to stop performing, like an out-of-work actor, is because people like Vijay Mallya become ‘willful defaulters’, by taking loans from a bank and then refusing to repay them.

But there are other types of NPAs, and i’m one of them. No, i haven’t taken a loan from a bank and then done a moonlight flit, or a Mallya flit, to foreign parts to avoid repaying my loan.

The reason that i became an NPA was that nine years ago i tried to close my account with a particular bank. So i sent a letter addressed to the bank manager telling him that i’d like to close the account.

There was no reply to my letter, so i sent another letter. Still no reply. So i phoned the bank, and was told that to close my account i had to come to the bank in person, a highly inconvenient exercise as the bank is miles from where i live.

So i withdrew all the money from my account, leaving behind some odd paise or so. And i thought that was that. But it wasn’t, far from it.

Nine years later, i still get messages from my bank regarding what should long have been a non-existing account.

When you think of the cost of maintaining that account – all those employees, all those ledger and/ or computer entries devoted to it – you wonder why the bank won’t simply consider the account closed.

The reason is that it looks bad on the bank’s report card to the sarkar if accounts get closed. So many banks keep hundreds and thousands, maybe millions, of loss-making accounts going, at ruinous costs to themselves.

Defaulters are the main cause of banks’ NPAs. But banks themselves can often be their own NPAs: Non-performing Asses.

Source: Times of India

Technology Makes Billions To a Few, Why Can’t Few Bucks to The Billions

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The actual wordings of Leila Jana may be different from the title of this blog post. But if you can understand what the underlying sensibility is there, I am almost done.

Yes, I am talking about Samasource and its founder Leila Jana. Read this excerpts from wikipedia:

In 2008, Janah launched Samasource (then called Market for Change), an idea that was inspired by her time spent in Africa and her experience managing a call center in Mumbai.^[5] Samasource is a not-for-profit business with the mission to reduce global poverty by giving dignified online work to people living in poverty. Samasource uses an internet based model called microwork to break down large digital projects into smaller, easily trainable tasks for workers to complete at delivery centers. Samasource offers five services, including machine learning, data verification and image annotation.^[8] As of August, 2016, Samasource reports that it has impacted 32,265 people, which includes both direct Samasource workers and their dependents.^[9] Samasource also reports that their workers increase their income by 3.7x over the course of four years.^[9]

Janah got the capital to start Samasource from winning $14,000 in a business-plan competition at Stanford.^[3] She raised an additional $30,000 in a European business plan competition.^[3] In 2009, Samasource was selected to participate in fbFund, a $10m seed fund to support developers and entrepreneurs.^[5] Janah got her first contract for Samasource with a company called Benetech, a non-profit social enterprise that provides technology solutions.^[10] Samasource has been named one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies”^[5]and counts Walmart, Google and eBay among its clients.

Details here:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samasource

2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Janah

3.https://www.samasource.org

4. Leila speaking at TEDx: Youtube Video

5. Leila’s Interview with Roxxane Varza published at Medium

When 10-year-olds are published authors

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At an age when most kids need help to write their school essays, some precocious youngsters are writing books. And their parents are willing to pay to have them printed
Keshav Mohta has just spent a gruelling year writing about extra-planetary life. His novella- about humans seeking alternate habitation on Mars and Saturn- is now in search of a publisher. But unlike most first-time writers, Keshav isn’t the one chasing editors; his father is. Keshav is 11. He was 10 when he started writing The Red Rings of Friendship.

Neeha Gupta began writing her novel Different at 14. “I started it in the summer holidays last year and finished it nine months later,” says the 15-year-old, whose 55,000-word book, about an alien on earth, sells at Crossword stores and online.

Books by children aren’t really new. Alexander Pope’s An Ode on Solitude was written, he claimed, when he was 12, in the year 1700. Bangalore-based Samhita Arni’s The Mahabharatha: A Child’s View was written and illustrated a few years before it was published when she was 12. Most, however, don’t see the light of day. Now, thanks to options like self and paid publishing, they’re coming out of backpacks and reaching bookstores and Kindles.

IT professional Shubha Gupta spent between Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh on each of her son’s last three titles, published at the Noida-based Parragon Publishing. Her 10-year-old, Akshat, has written six books in all, having begun at age 8. “Even if bigger publishers don’t pick up a book, there are now many other players in the market who offer publishing packages depending on whether you want their editing services, illustrations, and so on,” says Shubha.

Akshat has promoted his books (Tram of Trims, Zulebi, Good Things in Small Packs) at several schools and litfests in NCR, including the Gurgaon Children’s Literature Festival, where he was a panelist last year. “We have earned close to Rs 50,000 from sales, but all proceeds go to charity,” says Shubha.

For many parents like Shubha, it’s not about sales but the belief that their children’s talents ought to be appreciated by an audience wider than the family circle. They also believe that properly nurtured, their child may continue to write into adulthood, becoming an established author.

Neeha Gupta, 15, published a novel titled Different, about an alien on earth, in December. She began writing stories in blog, but decided a book was more “long-lasting and far-reaching”

Anup Jerajani, who heads The Write Place Publishing which is the paid publishing wing of bookstore chain Crossword, says 11 of the 68 books they’ve published were by authors aged 14 to 17, four of these in the last year. “When parents approach us, we are surprised to receive 40,000-word manuscripts,” he says. Seventy percent of the books published by The Write Place are paid for by the authors. “None of these parents are looking at their children making a career of writing at that age, as happens with child actors, and models. They know it’s expensive and their children’s books are not going to sell like an established author,” says Anup, who makes an interesting observation. “During August-September, when people start applying for international college admissions, that’s when many approach us. We figure the children are building a CV,” he muses.

Tanima Saha, editor at Rupa, says they too get a lot of queries from parents about books authored by their kids. “But content is king, irrespective of the author’s age,” she says. Vidhi Bhargava, senior editor at Scholastic India, says the craze to get one’s child published has reached another level. “We ask parents to be objective and realistic about their expectations of their child’s manuscript. We don’t market books by the age of an author but by the power of the story.” Yet, an exceptional author’s age might become a talking point at promotions. Scholastic’s annual anthology of children’s writing, For Kids By Kids, compiled from competition entries, manages middling sales of around 5,000 copies a year. Another anthology of children’s writing (and art), Chhote Haath Badi Baat, will see its 4th volume released at Jaipur Lit Fest this year.

Shabnam Minwalla, a children’s and young adult author, says only about 10% of the stories submitted at creative writing competitions are original in concept and well-written. “About 30% are derived or plagiarised, and 10% well-conceived but poorly written,” says Minwalla. Half don’t make the cut at all. This is not to nip any young writerly ambitions in the bud, but to suggest they go slow, to develop their own voice and style, and write not simply to have their name on a cover.

Source: Times Of India