TECH I’D LIKE TO SEE

With the Covid situation forcing everyone to

work from their homes, one of the things I am, and I am sure everyone is missing, is reaching out to a person and shaking their hand or giving a hug. Even my smile is muted and hidden below the mask when I am out shopping for grocery essentials. I have imagined many solutions before, but what I really wish for today is an augment-ed reality powered touch that can be delivered safely while maintaining social distancing. Google’s

AR-enabled animals have put that technology on everyone’s hands in a fun way. I think we are just a few steps away from making an AR-powered touch real and warm. It may sound like an extravagant idea, but human

touch goes a long way in promoting mental

health and psycho-logical wellness. Even after we come out of this, such tech-nology would help with babies

in neonatal care and also elder care.

A warm AR-powered hug

Maggie Inbamuthiah | MANAGING DIRECTOR, ANITAB.ORG INDIA

Arpita.Misra@timesgroup.com

Aarti Singh did something extraordinary. After grad-uating in economics from

Delhi’s prestigious LSR College, she did a Master’s in IT from SP Jain Institute of Management & Research in Mumbai.

She says she always tries to learn something which she doesn’t know well. “At that point IT was a field that was coming up and something I wasn’t suf-ficiently aware of,” she says.

IT was a challenge initially. Almost 95% of the students in her batch were engineers, and she looked like a misfit. But she was good at finance, and soon she realised that like maths, IT

was all very logical. “If you have a good analytical mind, it isn’t difficult. By the fourth term, my classmates accepted that I too was smart,” chuckles Aarti.

Today, Aarti, 43, is vice-pres-ident of IT at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India (MBRDI) in Bengaluru, one of Mercedes-Benz’s biggest engi-neering and R&D arms in the world. She leads a team of about 600 people who work on cyber security, digital workplace, en-terprise platforms and network & cloud services.

Aarti’s spunk perhaps comes from her upbringing. Born in

Kolkata, she did her schooling from Maharani Gayatri Devi Girls’ School in Jaipur, and her vacations were spent in the lush tea estates of Assam, where her parents lived. “Twelve years of boarding life made me very in-dependent, responsible and adaptive,” she says.

Maharani Gayatri Devi was also a big inspiration for the girls in her school. “She would talk to us about her life and how she strived to change what wom-en could do and become in soci-ety. She was not just an epitome of beauty, she had a lot of sub-stance,” says Aarti.

She had a 14-year stint with GE – an organisation she had always dreamed of joining as a

student, particularly because of their leadership programmes – and two years with Accenture before joining MBRDI in Janu-ary last year.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought fresh challenges her way. MBRDI’s R&D teams need very powerful systems to get their work done due to high memory and graphic require-ments for data-modelling and simulation. They also need very

secure and robust network con-nections with high capacity. “Despite these challenges, in about a week, we were able to get hundreds of people equipped to work from home,” Aarti says.

She thinks post-Covid, digi-tal technology will converge with daily life, with boundaries ceasing to ex-ist and driv-ing a cultural change.

Swati.Rathor@timesgroup.com

At a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has put the spot-light back on science, Indian

Institute of Technology (IIT) Hy-derabad director BS Murty says it is important to encourage youth in BTech to develop a ‘research mind-set’. He says students should be inquisitive to delve deep into the science stream and explore its nu-merous possibilities.

He rues that in the current edu-cation system, students are fo-cused on preparing for competitive examinations to enter top tech educational institutes like the IITs, and barely get any lab exposure in the 11th and 12th classes.

“One thing that we are going to start in IIT Hyderabad is, from the first year onwards, each student will be assigned to a faculty and the faculty will take the student to a lab and showcase the exciting

research that is taking place. We are revamping our curriculum, where every theory subject will have a lab associated with it. It will be a hands-on lab, where the stu-dent does experiments. We plan to implement this from August 2020,” says Murty, a winner of the Shan-ti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the most prestigious science awards in India.

In fact, IIT Hyderabad has set a target of generating Rs 200 crore per year for funding institute research by 2024, compared to the current level of Rs 50 crore a year.

Murty says that in the last decade or so, there has been a focus on encouraging research in the country, where the insistence is on coming up with a product. While it is a good approach, he says that blue-skies re-search, where a re-al-world applica-tion of the re-search is not g u a r a n -

teed but adds to the overall scien-tific knowledge, must also be en-couraged.

The IIT Hyderabad director has asked all his students across 13 de-partments to make use of the time that they have now at home to come up with innovative ideas and send proposals. The promising ideas will be funded by the institution, he says.

Murty, who has worked exten-sively in the area of metallurgical and materials engineering, points out that thanks to the advancement in additive manufacturing, the civil engineering stream will once again be a sought after discipline.

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, is a trans-formative approach to industrial production that enables the crea-tion of lighter, stronger parts and systems. It uses data, computer-aided-design (CAD) software and 3D object scanners to direct hardware to deposit material, layer upon layer, in precise geometric shapes.

Murty said that with more and more manufacturing

companies betting big on additive manufacturing and developing coun-

tries like India focus-ing on creating mas-sive infrastructure to boost growth, the de-mand for civil engi-

neers will pick up in the coming

days.

INSPIRATION

Sasken is helping end menace of headlight glare

Akhil.George@timesgroup.com

Headlight glares are univer-sally reviled. But, more importantly, they are a dan-

ger to pedestrians, cyclists and other motorists. So, when a Japa-nese automotive company came to Sasken Technologies in Ben-galuru to try and find a solution to the menace, Sasken jumped at the chance.

It developed an adaptive driv-ing beam system, integrating digital light processing (DLP), to reduce glare on pedestrians and cyclists and to ensure more pre-cise control of light distribution.

Basically, our engineers devel-oped computer vision algorithms that helped eliminate the menace of headlight glares, says Satish Burli, VP of product engineering at Sasken. A vehicle headlight is

not a single bulb, it’s a LED array. Sasken’s technology blanks out the LEDs that are aimed at an individual’s face. “So, when you walk in front of the car, the de-vice (a camera and DLP chipset) will track your movement and blank out different groups of LEDs. At the core of the technol-ogy is developing algorithms to recognise a human figure, then figure out where the face is, where exactly the eyes are, and then finally accurately mute out only the offending glare, leaving the rest of the LEDs functional,” Burli says.

Sasken helped with the devel-opment, porting and optimisa-tion of the algorithm, which re-quired building deep learning models developed using Keras library (an open-source neural-network library that enables fast experimentation with deep neu-

ral networks), as well as develop-ing Python scripts for post pro-cessing. The solution is now used globally in various vehicle mod-els, but Sasken said it cannot name the brands because of non-disclosure agreements.

These kinds of computer visualisation technologies have a wide array of uses. They are even used in industrial setups. “Specially designed industrial cameras on production lines, for example, can detect minute flaws using machine-driven algo-rithms. These flaws could be any-thing from an uneven paint job, detecting component-mixing, or even a component that is not fit-ted properly,” says Burli.

Sasken is also deeply engaged with all the major semiconductor vendors of the world, including Intel, Qualcomm and MediaTek. It works with them as they de-velop a chip. It develops software, adds features and tests the chipsets. These chipsets are then used in a whole range of sectors like automotive and telecommu-nications. Sasken describes itself as a chip-to-cognition company. “We work from the silicon, where it all starts, all the way to the cog-nition stage where we are looking at data and sensing it – which is where the end user experiences it,” says Burli

Streaming or WFH, cloud is the big gainer from the pandemic

Shilpa Phadnis, Habeeba Salim & Swati Rathor | TNN

The entire locked-down world is on a cloud and a prayer. From banking to work-from-home to vac-cine design to all the

entertainment streamed 24x7, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the cloud is what is underpin-ning them all.

The Covid-19 crisis tested the maturity of cloud infrastructure – hardware, software, public and hybrid – and it has proven to be resilient. Akhilesh Tuteja, part-ner at KPMG India, says the past five to six weeks have been game-changing for cloud. Its resilience, he says, has been tested and has generated much confidence among everyone.

“The advantage of cloud is you can purpose it the way you need it and you can be operational very quickly,” says Madhusudan Shek-ar, head of solution architecture for startups at Amazon Internet S e r v i c e s , t h e I n d i a a r m of the world’s biggest cloud solu-tions provider.

When RBL Bank had to quick-ly enable work from home func-tions, including IT and backend support, it wasn’t easy. The sim-plest way to do it would have been to allow employees to use their own devices and connect to the of-fice network using a virtual pri-vate network (VPN) or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). But that’s a security minefield for an industry like banking.

The work-from-home (WFH)

transition finally happened when the RBL IT team chose to use Amazon WorkSpaces, a secure, managed DaaS (desktop as a ser-vice). “No data from a managed WorkSpace becomes available on the local machine and if you try to access the data, it comes across as protected and until you have the key, you have no way of un-locking it,” says Shekar. RBL Bank has deployed 200 Amazon WorkSpaces so far.

It’s too early to put a number to the spike in demand for cloud dur-ing this crisis, but most players say they have received an unprecedent-ed number of enquiries and cus-tomers. Customer numbers have surged particularly in two sectors – pharma and education. Cloud-based video communication tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom have seen quantum jumps in usage.

Cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean saw a spike in cus-

tomers, and applications that are specifically focused on video streaming and gaming, says glob-al head Prabhakar Jayakumar. “Since the lockdown, bandwidth usage on our network has gone up anywhere between 20% and 25%. We usually plan out infrastructure six months ahead, but the Covid outbreak has reduced this time-line,” he says.

Linode, another hosting com-pany, says the demand for cloud

has been so big that the peak uti-lisation has almost surpassed 100%. “Software, pharma and IT firms in tier-I cities have suddenly increased their load. Work from home has catapulted the surge,” says Ashwin Kumar, director of data centre and cloud operations at Linode India.

Since the lockdown, more IT, ITeS, banking and manufacturing firms have been signing up for our cloud services, says Rajesh Awasthi, global head of Tata Com-munications. “Covid-19 is accel-erating digital transformation,” he says. Cloud makes it far sim-pler to collaborate and share documents in real-time, unlike traditional methods where one would have to send files by a tool like email and then wait for a response.

VMware is witnessing higher demand for Workspace One, the cloud-based management plat-form that allows IT administra-tors to centrally control end us-ers’ mobile devices and cloud-hosted virtual desktops and ap-plications. “We already have a lot of customers for this tool. But until Covid-19, they were using it mostly for on-premise work. Now, many are using it to expand their WFH options,” says B S Nagara-jan, chief technologist at VMware India. VMware’s hybrid cloud solution HCX, which helps trans-fer applications across clouds, has also seen a lot of interest.

Lux Rao, director of solutions & consulting at cloud solutions provider NTT India, says on-premise customers whose busi-nesses were disrupted during the lockdown will migrate to the cloud “to save themselves from logistical and cash flow challeng-es, and the additional monetary onus of purchasing IT hardware or software assets.”

(With inputs from Swati Bhardwaj)

It has made collaboration a

breeze, and remote work so

productive

From economics at LSR to IT in Mercedes-Benz

CUTTING EDGE MADE IN INDIA

AN ISSUE OF TIGHTS LED TO ASKSID’S CREATION

HEAR THE PROF

IIT Hyderabad undergrads to focus

more on research

TECH PATENTS BY INDIAN COMPANIES SOAR

GAME CHANGER

Budding technologists should focus on developing technical expertise and

building products and solutions which, apart from being innovative, are easy to use

Aarti Singh | VICE-PRESIDENT OF IT,MERCEDES-BENZ R&D INDIA

When Sanjoy Roy was in the Netherlands some years ago and his wife Dolly needed a pair of tights, they were flummoxed with an online selection of 400 tights. Dolly had some specific requirements. But they just couldn’t get a proper answer online or from the brand’s call centre. They finally had to go to an offline store to get the answers

That was the genesis of the idea for a conversational AI solution for retail, which Roy and his then Mindtree colleague Dinesh Sharma decided to build

They founded AskSid in 2017. It’s today part of Nasscom’s DeepTech Club

It supports 15 languages and is used by retail brands in the US, Latin America, European Union and Apac

The AskSid team, including founders Sanjoy Roy (extreme left) and Dinesh Sharma (third from left)

HOW THE PRODUCT WORKS

When a new brand is onboarded, the system ingests the brand’s product data in its raw form, such as catalog text, product images, PDFs

Using AI/ML algorithms, it organises and enriches this data into a global product knowledge base consisting of product Q&As and product attributes

A chatbot on the front end channels (website, FB, Skype, WhatsApp, mobile apps) is powered by this product intelligence and is able to answer questions from buyers instantly and at scale

The central knowledge base constantly learns from a variety of sources, including customer conversations and unstructured data

6,500 patents were fi led by India domiciled companies in the US between 2015 and 2019, up from 4,600 patents between 2015 and 2018. In the total, the share of tech patents is growing rapidly, and within tech, the share of emerging tech patents is accelerating

Technology patents’ share in total patents fi led

49.9%

50.1% 51.9% 46.2%40.6%

48.1% 53.8% 59.4%

1,793

2015 2016 2017 2018/19

1,836 1,526 1,338100% *

Technology Non-Technology

Number of Emerging Technology Patents Filed

Artifi cial Intelligence

Cyber Security

IoT

Cloud Computing

Others*

330604

193262

107190

181702

958

88

2015-2018

2015-2019

TOP PATENT FILERS

Wipro, TCS, HCL, Infosys, Reliance,

Sun Pharma, Welspun, Hindustan

Petroleum

Source: Nasscom

IIT Hyderabad will soon have more industry-

oriented MTechs, in areas like additive engineering, e-waste management, sensors and medical device innovation. In the two-year MTech programme, one year will be dedicated to working on projects

BS Murty | DIRECTOR, IIT HYDERABAD

The past five to six weeks have been game-changing for the cloud.

The resilience of cloud infrastructure has been tested and has generated much confidence about its potential among everyone. As a result, for example, companies that had email on premise will now consider shifting it to cloud. Or sectors like manufacturing as well as MSMEs will open up to adopting cloud solutions in the near-term

Akhilesh Tuteja |PARTNER, KPMG INDIA

Organisations that have invested in IT, especially

in cloud computing and open technologies, have been able to make the transition to remote working far more seamlessly. From enabling us to manage our banking digitally and providing essential services like milk, to adding network capacity

to ensure seamless telecommunication connectivity, the organisations are overcoming challenges to survive and grow in

these testing times.

Vikas Arora | VP,CLOUD AND COGNITIVE

SOFTWARE & SERVICES,IBM INDIA

We are seeing a trend towards cloud adoption by

global healthcare organisations, as they look for capex reductions and business scalability. Organisations are migrating applications and data, and moving backups to the cloud. End-user workstations are being provisioned on cloud infrastructure.

Development and test environments are moving to cloud, which gives companies greater agility and lowers on-premise infrastructure

TCO (total cost of ownership)

Vinil Menon |SVP, CITIUSTECH

We are seeing a lot of engagement in the healthcare

space. We have launched the Covid-19 Data Lake, a global repository with up-to-date datasets that you can pull up and start working. A little over 45,000 research articles are there on it. We also built a search engine specifi cally focused on Covid-19 that provides a mechanism to do search and even ask natural language queries and it will come back with responses

Madhusudan Shekar | HEAD, SOLUTION

ARCHITECT, AMAZON

INTERNET SERVICES

Sasken employees at a session with actor & director Ratna Pathak Shah in Bengaluru

ENGG SPECIALIST The 30-year-old firm has

around 1,700 employees, a majority of them in India

It has centres in Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata, and a presence across Finland, Germany, Japan, UK and USA

Specialises in product engineering and digital transformation

THE TIMES OF INDIA, BENGALURUWEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 20204

CCI NG 3.7 Product: TOIBangaloreBS PubDate: 29-04-2020 Zone: BangaloreCity Edition: 1 Page: TOIBGCC3 User: sitadri.dhara Time: 04-28-2020 23:16 Color: CMYK