AI garage? on kickstarting artificial intelligence

The NITI Aayog has published an ambitious discussion paper on kickstarting the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem in India. AI is the use of computers to mimic human cognitive processes for decision-making. The paper talks of powering five sectors — agriculture, education, health care, smart cities/infrastructure and transport — with AI. It highlights the potential for India to become an AI ‘garage’, or solutions provider, for 40% of the world. To pull this off, India would have to develop AI tools for a range of applications: reading cancer pathology reports, rerouting traffic in smart cities, telling farmers where to store their produce, and picking students at high risk of dropping out from school, among them. It is a tall order, but several countries have similar ambitions. The U.S., Japan and China have published their AI strategy documents and, importantly, put their money where their aspirations are. China, for example, plans to hand out a million dollars in subsidies to AI firms, as well as to run a five-year university programme for 500 teachers and 5,000 students. The NITI Aayog does not talk about how India’s ambitions will be funded, but proposes an institutional structure to get things going. This structure includes a network of basic and applied research institutions, and a CERN-like multinational laboratory that would focus on global AI challenges.

These are lofty goals, but they beg the question: can India bring it to pass? In answer, the NITI Aayog offers a sombre note of caution. India hardly has any AI expertise today. The paper estimates that it has around 50 top-notch AI researchers, concentrated in elite institutions like the IITs. Further, only around 4% of Indian AI professionals are trained in emerging technologies such as deep learning. And while India does publish a lot, these publications aren’t very impactful; India’s H-index, a measure of how often its papers are cited, is behind 18 other countries. This is not encouraging, considering that returns on AI are not guaranteed. The technology has tripped up as often as it has delivered. Among successes, a recent study found that a Google neural network correctly identified cancerous skin lesions more often than expert dermatologists did. India, with its acute shortage of specialist doctors in rural areas, could benefit greatly from such a tool. On the other hand, studies have found that AI image-recognition technologies do badly at identifying some races, because the data used to train them over-represent other races. This highlights the importance of quality data in building smart AI tools; India lacks this in sectors such as agriculture and health. Where data exist, this is poorly annotated, making it unusable by AI systems. Despite these formidable challenges, the scope of NITI Aayog’s paper must be lauded. The trick will be to follow it up with action, which will demand a strong buy-in from policymakers and substantial funds. The coming years will show if the country can manage this.

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A lot of thanks to all the people who standing with the good one and always support to the good one.

life is always standing in the balance if you walk you will be stay in race.

INTENSE MAGNETIC FIELD FOUND NEAR SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has revealed an extremely powerful magnetic field, beyond anything previously detected in the core of a galaxy, very close to the event horizon of a supermassive black hole.

This new perception assists space experts with understanding the structure and arrangement of these gigantic occupants of the focuses of cosmic systems, and the twin fast flies of plasma they habitually discharge from their shafts. The outcomes show up in the 17 April 2015 issue of the diary Science.

Supermassive dark openings, regularly with masses billions of times that of the Sun, are situated at the heart of all cosmic systems in the Universe. These dark openings can accumulate enormous measures of matter as an encompassing circle. While the vast majority of this matter is nourished into the dark opening, some can escape minutes before catch and be flung out into space at near the velocity of light as a component of a plane of plasma. How this happens is not surely knew, in spite of the fact that it is felt that solid attractive fields, acting near the occasion skyline, have significant influence in this procedure, helping the matter to escape from the vast jaws of dimness.

Up to now, just feeble attractive fields a long way from dark openings – a few light-years away – had been tested. In this concentrate, nonetheless, cosmologists from Chalmers University of Technology and Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden utilized ALMA to distinguish flags specifically identified with a solid attractive field near the occasion skyline of the supermassive dark opening in a removed system named PKS 1830-211. This attractive field is found decisively at the spot where matter is all of a sudden helped far from the dark gap as a plane.

The group measured the quality of the attractive field by contemplating the path in which light was energized as it moved far from the dark opening.

“Polarization is an essential property of light and is tremendously utilized as a part of day by day life, for instance in sun glasses or 3D glasses at the film,” says Ivan Marti-Vidal, lead creator of this work. “At the point when delivered normally, polarization can be utilized to quantify attractive fields, since light changes its polarization when it goes through a charged medium. For this situation, the light that we distinguished with ALMA had been going through material near the dark opening, a spot brimming with exceptionally charged plasma.”

The space experts connected another investigation procedure that they had created to the ALMA information and found that the heading of polarization of the radiation originating from the focal point of PKS 1830-211 had pivoted. These are the most limited wavelengths ever utilized as a part of this sort of study, which permit the locales near the focal dark gap to be tested.

“We have discovered clear flags of polarization pivot that are several times higher than the most elevated ever found in the Universe,” says Sebastien Muller, co-creator of the paper. “Our revelation is a monster jump regarding watching recurrence, because of the utilization of ALMA, and as far as separation to the dark gap where the attractive field has been tested – of the request of just a couple light-days from the occasion skyline. These outcomes, and future studies, will offer us some assistance with understanding what is truly going ahead in the quick region of supermassive dark openings.”

PLASMA TECHNOLOGY IN LIQUID BY MICROWAVE IRRADIATION

Microwaves enter from this route, and bypass via this tube. Liquid accumulates in this area. Microwaves irradiate the liquid, and the irradiated place is wherein plasma is generated. to start with, we will say that nanoparticles can be produced extremely quick and uniformly in relation to what may be finished with the generated plasma.

This new technology can make it pretty smooth to produce nanoparticles immediately from a platinum rod. Waste merchandise have been generated as by way of-merchandise in the course of reduction with the aid of the conventional method of forming platinum compounds and lowering them. but, no waste merchandise are generated with this new technology. Produced debris have crystal planes, which beautify the feature as a catalyst. in addition, as tiny debris about as small as several nanometers are produced, general surface location is accelerated, main to a higher catalytic reaction.

we will make no longer most effective platinum nanoparticles, but also gold, silver, and copper nanoparticles. What are known as revealed circuit forums are currently produced through dissolving copper movie laminated on a resin substrate, however we can also produce particles that make it viable for home inkjet printers to print circuit boards. This new technology enables discount of organic compounds, removal of heavy steel in liquid, production of acid water, removal of hydrogen from waste oil along with used frying oil, and different programs.

Light Emitting Diode

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2014 to Isamu Akasaki, of Meijo University in Nagoya and Nagoya University, Japan; Hiroshi Amano, of Nagoya University, Japan, and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources."

New light to illuminate the world

This year's Nobel Laureates are rewarded for having invented a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source -- the blue light-emitting diode (LED). In the spirit of Alfred Nobel the Prize rewards an invention of greatest benefit to humankind; using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way. With the advent of LED lamps we now have more long-lasting and more efficient alternatives to older light sources.

When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a funda-mental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades.

They succeeded where everyone else had failed. Akasaki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Tokushima. Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps.

White LED lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. They are constantly improved, getting more efficient with higher luminous flux (measured in lumen) per unit electrical input power (measured in watt). The most recent record is just over 300 lm/W, which can be compared to 16 for regular light bulbs and close to 70 for fluorescent lamps. As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving Earth's resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights.

The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.

The invention of the blue LED is just twenty years old, but it has already contributed to create white light in an entirely new manner to the benefit of us all.

Guarding the peso: Argentina's economic crisis

Argentina is not alone among major emerging economies in trying to weather the current run on currencies due to the rallying U.S. dollar and rising interest rates. But with a history of recurrent defaults and devaluation of the peso, Buenos Aires has greater cause for concern. President Mauricio Macri, whose market-friendly image ensured Argentina’s return to the global capital markets in 2016 after a decade, has a special stake in ensuring that his reforms remain on track. Following a record sovereign debt issue that year, Argentina became the second Latin American state after Mexico to launch a 100-year maturity bond in 2017. The new optimistic narrative was based on the former businessman’s commitment to reducing the fiscal deficit, building on the prevailing reasonable ratio of public borrowing to GDP. Nevertheless, Mr. Macri’s poll promise to make Argentina a “normal country” has been put to the test mid-way through his term. In early May, the currency tumbled to a record low against the greenback, forcing the central bank to raise key interest rates thrice within a week to 40% to shore it up. Mr. Macri even sought a multi-billion loan from the IMF, a deeply sensitive move given the once-hostile relations with the lender and a public apprehensive about the institution’s overall mission. The most recent crisis in Latin America’s third largest economy — the 2001-02 default to the tune of $95 billion, the largest in the world — had unleashed hyperinflation, social unrest and political instability. When the then socialist President, Néstor Kirchner, took an aggressive stance vis-à-vis investors, the country was effectively closed from global money markets for a prolonged period. Then, at the height of its economic collapse earlier this decade, Mr. Kirchner’s wife and successor, Cristina Fernández, lampooned the hedge funds, which held out against the country’s debt restructuring terms, as “vultures”. Now the situation has raised questions about the sustainability of Mr. Macri’s so-called gradualist reforms, which were dubbed neo-Keynesian rather than neoliberal.

With the treasury minister recently hinting at further fiscal tightening, there are signs of a shift in tone, if not the overall policy. Conversely, Mr. Macri has been prudent to promise continuity with his cautious approach to regulate subsidies and to legislate tax and pension reforms. The era of economic profligacy that was propped up by the commodities boom in the last decade is probably history now. At the same time, no price is too high to avert a repeat of the horrors of the social upheavals of more recent years. Occupying a centrist platform, Mr. Macri is, however, better placed than most other politicians in the country to negotiate a path ahead to balance conflicting interests.

Populists in Rome

The political whirlwind that has swept Italy looks to be dissipating, at least for now. Giuseppe Conte, a little-known academic with an embellished resume, has been sworn in as Prime Minister, after weeks of wrangling between President Sergio Mattarella and a coalition with a slim parliamentary majority. The two-party combine, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) led by Luigi Di Maio and the far-right League headed by the rabble-rousing, anti-migrant Matteo Salvini, disbanded plans to form a government after Mr. Mattarella exercised his powers to block the appointment of Eurosceptic Paolo Savona as Finance Minister. The President then decided to order fresh elections and appoint an ex-IMF official as interim Prime Minister, a decision that, if implemented, could have made a bad situation worse. The Eurosceptic coalition partners wasted no time in using the President’s actions as a rallying point for their cause. They charged that France and Germany were running Italy and called for Mr. Mattarella’s impeachment. The prospect of snap polls, which could have resulted in the populists getting a stronger majority, rattled markets early this week. Italian bond yields hit highs unseen in years and share prices dropped not just in Italy but across Europe, the U.S. and Asia. The coalition, which began serious talks in early May, had toned down some of its anti-European Union demands such as leaving the single currency and some €250 billion in debt forgiveness. But it still planned to spend some €170 billion on income support, and lower the pensionable age and taxes. Without plans to raise adequate revenue to fund the spending, the markets and Brussels got jittery. Italy’s government debt is at 132% of GDP, well above the Eurozone average. However, as the week progressed, all sides saw opportunities and a deal was struck, with the President assenting to economics professor Giovanni Tria taking over the finance portfolio. The new government will now have to win a confidence vote next week.

The road ahead for Italy is far from clear. According to official EU surveys, although 59% of Italians favour the euro, just over half “tend not to trust” the EU. Both Europe and Italy would sustain significant damage if Italy left the Eurozone. Fortunately, that is still an unlikely scenario. The current situation, a coalition of populism and the right, is not ideal. But it provides an opportunity to address some of the underlying Italian disenchantment with the EU, perhaps by striking a balance between austerity and populism. Also, Brussels, along with France and Germany, could work with Italy to address economic and social anxieties. A way can be found that protects both the democratic choices of Italians and the stated values and integrity of the EU.

Mixed growth signals

Official data showing the GDP expanding at the fastest pace in seven quarters in the three months ended March 31, a brisk 7.7% at that, is reason for cheer. Given that this has been propelled largely by increases in manufacturing and construction activity is a basis for optimism given that the former contributes almost a fifth of quarterly gross value added (GVA) and the latter about 8%. The rebound in construction is all the more heartening since it is both a creator of direct and indirect jobs and a multiplier of overall output. In the fourth quarter, construction is estimated to have posted a robust 11.5% growth, almost a doubling in pace from the 6.6% in the third quarter, and compares favourably with the contraction of 3.9% seen in the demonetisation-hit year-earlier period. Two key groupings of services that together contributed more than 38% of fourth-quarter GVA — the first comprising trade, hotels, transport, communication and broadcasting; and the second, financial, real estate and professional services — accelerated year-on-year, helping lift full-year sectoral GVA growth. Agriculture, forestry and fishing continued an accelerating trend over the four quarters of the last fiscal, with growth of 4.5% boosting the annual expansion to 3.4%. While the fiscal year’s pace for this vital sector is still appreciably lower than the 6.3% in 2016-17, if the quarterly momentum is sustained and the monsoon pans out as forecast, we could see a more broad-based revival in rural demand.

There are, however, pressure points in the estimates of national expenditure. Private final consumption expenditure continues to languish, with the share of its contribution to GDP sliding to 54.6% in the January-March period, from 59.3% in the preceding quarter and 55.2% a year earlier. Government spending too eased in the fourth quarter, as a proportion, to the lowest quarterly level of the last fiscal at 9.5%. Only gross fixed capital formation, which reflects investment demand, provided cause for some comfort as it contributed 32.2%, which was the most in percentage terms since the 32.5% posted in April-June 2016. A sobering thought here is that the very same growth momentum is likely to spur price pressures across the economy that, combined with the bullish trend in global oil, could fan faster inflation. This may leave the RBI with little option but to raise interest rates, possibly as early as next week. Separately, the latest survey-based Nikkei India Manufacturing Purchasing Manager’s Index shows manufacturing activity expanded at a weaker pace in May from the previous month amid tepid domestic demand. With borrowing costs set to rise and global trade tensions adding to uncertainties for India’s exporters who are yet to capitalise on the rupee weakness, policymakers will need to eschew populism and stick to policy prudence if the tenuous momentum is to be sustained.