blog@Yantrajaal

 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...

Do you wish to carry out complex life science experiments but do not have the equipment to do so? Or even otherwise, if you want to catch a preview of the next big thing in technology, you should know about cloud based Life Science. But what is the "Cloud" that we are talking about? Unless you have been living under a rock for the past ten years, it is very unlikely that you have not heard of Cloud Computing. Originally popularised by Amazon AWS and then picked up by Google Compute, Microsoft Azure and host of other companies, cloud computing is a business that allows individuals and organisations to do away with owning computing hardware. Instead they use computers located at vendor premises and pay only for the time that they use it. In fact, individuals who use GMail, Hotmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets or even the new Office 365 are actually using a cloud service. All that they have on their laptop or phone is a web browser - Chrome, Mozilla, Edge etc., while their docume...

I recently saw two movies on Indian mathematicians, the first on Shakuntala Devi and the second -- The Man Who Knew Infinity -- on Srinivas Ramanujan. Obviously both these mathematicians are very well known in India and to a certain extent, or in certain circles, in the world as well. Both Shakuntala Devi and Ramanujan seemed to have magical or supernatural abilities to see or visualize solutions to mathematical problems. Of course, Ramanujan was several orders of magnitude higher than Shakuntala. His work on Number Theory, -- the Queen of Mathematics ( where Mathematics is the Queen of the Sciences) -- was vastly more significant or exciting compared to the mere complexity of arithmetic computations that Shakuntala could demonstrate. But then, if Shakuntala had not been deprived of her childhood and childhood schooling by her avaricious father, who made Shakuntala earn money for the family, she might have had the opportunity to demonstrate more significant abilities. But we are not h...

With regard to a close relationship, you may encounter turbulence. The full moon of April 26 might be difficult for you because unpredictable Uranus will be conjunct the Sun, making things quite unstable, and this would directly affect your living quarters. At the same time, Uranus will directly oppose the full moon in your house of marriage and committed partnerships. This full moon could involve your steady, live-in sweetheart, your spouse, or someone you collaborate with closely to do your job. A sudden tearing away from the status quo is likely to result. Your landlord may tell you the rent will go up (too high in your opinion) or that the building you live in has been sold, and you will need to move soon. This unexpected news may rattle you, but as you think of it, it may be for the best—you need more room. It’s possible you are breaking up with your romantic partner, and in that case, you would be moving out. It appears the onus of finding a new place to live will fall to you, n...