blog@Yantrajaal

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...