Worms affect IM

This is a call to the all the IM users through out the world.. The storm worm which had once affected the E-Mails is now targeting the IMs..

Brian Price in eweek writes:

The worm attacks the IM users by detecting when someone is chatting and sending out a message with a link to the first stage of malware on a site. If the user clicks the link, the first stage will execute.

“The botnet handlers will periodically inject new commands into this peer-to-peer network, and one of the first things they do is tell the infected machines to download several executables,” explained Jose Nazario, software and security engineer for Arbor Networks, based in Lexington, Mass.

“Instead of targeting the same infected boxes, the authors are choosing to DDoS each other’s base of operations,” Nazario said. “They have also targeted high-impact DDoS events against anti-spam and anti-criminal efforts, such as Spamhaus. These two malware networks are built specifically for spam, it seems, and so anti-spam efforts go a long way to hurting their spam delivery efforts.”

PC users can protect themselves from malware targeting IM systems in a number of ways. First, Nazario said, they should configure their IM clients to ignore messages from people not on their buddy lists. Secondly, they should practice the same kind of security there that they do for e-mail—treat unsolicited messages with suspicion.

“Sometimes asking someone to resend the link is enough to see that it was a machine sending the message and not a person,” he said. “All of this goes a long way towards defeating the simplest attack of all, the social engineering attack.”

So, IM users beware

Innovative Idea in launch of Vista from Microsoft India

I was just browsing my Television sets for a good show, and suddenly I stopped at Star Plus(a very famous Indian channel), seeing the logo of Microsoft and a background saying “Wow – Microsoft Vista”. There were 2 very popular anchors hosting the show. And the show was about launching Windows Vista and Office 2007.

Microsoft this time brought a new way of launching the product by making a tie up with the leading actors and actresses of Indian Film Industry. The anchors talk something about virus and that vista has a feature of real time virus protection, and there comes a girl performing on stage for a very famous song. They talk about various features, and they introduce every feature in a different manner. They conduct a interview with stars, something similar to the very popular koffee with karan show where the hosts ask few questions which is unrelated to Vista but it gives a message – Buy Original products.. Then they also put up a humour saying – Vista can do all except cooking

It was all in all a marketing for the Vista and Office 2007, They also gave out a prize for “one in billion contest” where after a survey, a person named Kaushik recieved a desktop computer and Vista package from Microsoft India.

It was a nice marketing strategies and innovative idea of Microsoft to launch the product. There was fun, humour as well as the message and features introduced to the common man.

Biological Databases

Bio-Computing these days are gaining lot of importance. I had mentioned about Convergence Technology in the blog. Bio-Computing also belongs to the convergence technology. I had written a paper on Biological Databases, thought of sharing with you all

Introduction to Bio-Computing:

There is an interesting question to be asked: why biologists and biochemists become increasingly interested in using computational approaches for their daily work??

Biocomputing, as the computational basis for e.g. Genetic Diagnostics, has increasingly more influence on the life of everybody but most people are not aware of it. It provides the theoretical background and practical tools for scientists to explore proteins and DNA. DNA and proteins are large molecules which consist of a chain of smaller residues called nucleotides or amino acids, respectively. They are nature’s building blocks, but these building blocks are not exactly used as ‘bricks’, the function of the final molecule rather strongly depends on the order of these blocks. So it is possible to think of these residues as being numbered.

The 3D (three dimensional) structure of a protein depends on the individual sequence of these numbered residues. The order of amino acids of a given protein is derived from the corresponding DNA. This piece of DNA consists of an ordered sequence of nucleotides.

Over the last 20 years it has turned out that many proteins from different origin with similar function also have similar amino acid sequences. Thus, there are corresponding DNA sequences which are similar even though the protein under analysis occurs in different species such as mice and humans. So, we look for differences and similarities on the DNA level between a mouse and a human for many similar sequences.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, many laboratories are analyzing the full genome of several species such as bacteria, yeasts, mice, and humans. During these collaborative efforts enormous amounts of data are collected and stored in databases, most of which are publically accessible. Besides gathering all these data, it is necessary to compare these nucleotide or amino acid sequences to find similarities and differences. Since it is not very convenient to compare the sequences of several (hundred) nucleotides or amino acids by hand, several computational techniques were developed to approach this problem. In addition, these are less error-prone than a manual approach. Using computational techniques to analyse biological data is referred to as Biocomputing.

Biological Databases:

A biological database is a large, organized body of persistent data, usually associated with computerized software designed to update, query, and retrieve components of the data stored within the system. A simple database might be a single file containing many records, each of which includes the same set of information. For example, a record associated with a nucleotide sequence database typically contains information such as contact name; the input sequence with a description of the type of molecule; the scientific name of the source organism from which it was isolated; and, often, literature citations associated with the sequence.

For researchers to benefit from the data stored in a database, two additional requirements must be met:

• Easy access to the information; and
• A method for extracting only that information needed to answer a specific biological question.

Currently, a lot of bioinformatics work is concerned with the technology of databases. These databases include both “public” repositories of gene data like GenBank or the Protein DataBank (the PDB), and private databases like those used by research groups involved in gene mapping projects or those held by biotech companies. Making such databases accessible via open standards like the Web is very important.

Few Popular Databases:

GenBank:

GenBank (Genetic Sequence Databank) is one of the fastest growing repositories of known genetic sequences. It has a flat file structure, that is an ASCII text file, readable by both humans and computers. In addition to sequence data, GenBank files contain information like accession numbers and gene names, phylogenetic classification and references to published literature.

EMBL:

The EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database is a comprehensive database of DNA and RNA sequences collected from the scientific literature and patent applications and directly submitted from researchers and sequencing groups. Data collection is done in collaboration with GenBank (USA) and the DNA Database of Japan (DDBJ).

SwissProt:

This is a protein sequence database that provides a high level of integration with other databases and also has a very low level of redundancy (means less identical sequences are present in the database).

The principal requirements on the public data services are:

Data quality – data quality has to be of the highest priority. However, because the data services in most cases lack access to supporting data, the quality of the data must remain the primary responsibility of the submitter.

Supporting data – database users will need to examine the primary experimental data, either in the database itself, or by following cross-references back to network-accessible laboratory databases.

Deep annotation – deep, consistent annotation comprising supporting and ancillary information should be attached to each basic datat object in the database.

Timeliness – the basic data should be available on an Internet-accessible server within days (or hours) of publication or submission.

Integration – each data object in the database should be cross-referenced to representation of the same or related biological entities in other databases. Data services should provide capabilities for following these links from one database or data service to another.

The Creation of Sequence Databases:

For researchers to benefit from all this information, however, two additional things were required:

Ready access to the collected pool of sequence information

A way to extract from this pool only those sequences of interest to a given researcher.

Simply collecting, by hand, all necessary sequence information of interest to a given project from published journal articles quickly became a formidable task. After collection, the organization and analysis of this data still remained. It could take weeks to months for a researcher to search sequences by hand in order to find related genes or proteins.

Computer technology has provided the obvious solution to this problem. Not only can computers be used to store and organize sequence information into databases, but they can also be used to analyze sequence data rapidly. The evolution of computing power and storage capacity has, so far, been able to outpace the increase in sequence information being created. Theoretical scientists have derived new and sophisticated algorithms which allow sequences to be readily compared using probability theories. These comparisons become the basis for determining gene function, developing phylogenetic relationships and simulating protein models. The physical linking of a vast array of computers in the 1970’s provided a few biologists with ready access to the expanding pool of sequence information. This web of connections, now known as the Internet, has evolved and expanded so that nearly everyone has access to this information and the tools necessary to analyze it. Databases of existing sequencing data can be used to identify homologues of new molecules that have been amplified and sequenced in the lab. The property of sharing a common ancestor, homology, can be a very powerful indicator in bioinformatics.

Indexing and searching of databases:

Searching – BLAST:

In Bio-informatics Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST, is an algorithm for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as the amino-acid sequences of different proteins or the nucleotides of DNA sequences. A BLAST search enables a researcher to compare a query sequence with a library or database of sequences, and identify library sequences that resemble the query sequence above a certain threshold. For example, following the discovery of a previously unknown gene in the mouse, a scientist will typically perform a BLAST search of the human genome to see if human beings carry a similar gene; BLAST will identify sequences in the human genome that resemble the mouse gene based on similarity of sequence.Here is an approach to searching genetic DNA sequences using an adaptation of the suffix tree data structure deployed on the general purpose persistent Java platform, PJama. The implementation technique is novel, in that it allows us to build suffix trees on disk for arbitrarily large sequences, for instance for the longest human chromosome consisting of 263 million letters. It has been proposed to use such indexes as an alternative to the current practice of serial scanning. This describes the tree creation algorithm, analyse the performance of the index, and discuss the interplay of the data structure with object store architectures.

Algorithm

To run, BLAST requires two sequences as input: a query sequence (also called the target sequence) and a sequence database. BLAST will find subsequences in the query that are similar to subsequences in the database. In typical usage, the query sequence is much smaller than the database, e.g., the query may be one thousand nucleotides while the database is several billion nucleotides.

BLAST searches for high scoring sequence alignments between the query sequence and sequences in the database using a heuristic approach that approximates the Smith-Waterman algorithm. The exhaustive Smith-Waterman approach is too slow for searching large genomic databases such as GenBank. Therefore, the BLAST algorithm uses a heuristic approach that is slightly less accurate than Smith-Waterman but over 50 times faster. The speed and relatively good accuracy of BLAST are the key technical innovation of the BLAST programs and arguably why the tool is the most popular bioinformatics search tool.

The BLAST algorithm can be conceptually divided into three stages.

• In the first stage, BLAST searches for exact matches of a small fixed length W between the query and sequences in the database. For example, given the sequences AGTTAC and ACTTAG and a word length W = 3, BLAST would identify the matching substring TTA that is common to both sequences. By default, W = 11 for nucleic seeds.
• In the second stage, BLAST tries to extend the match in both directions, starting at the seed. The ungapped alignment process extends the initial seed match of length W in each direction in an attempt to boost the alignment score. Insertions and deletions are not considered during this stage. For our example, the ungapped alignment between the sequences AGTTAC and ACTTAG centered around the common word TTA would be:

..AGTTAC..

  | |||

..ACTTAG..

If a high-scoring ungapped alignment is found, the database sequence is passed on to the third stage.

• In the third stage, BLAST performs a gapped alignment between the query sequence and the database sequence using a variation of the Smith-Waterman algorithm. Statistically significant alignments are then displayed to the user.

An extremely fast but considerably less sensitive alternative to BLAST that compares nucleotide sequences to the genome is BLAT (Blast Like Alignment Tool). A version designed for comparing multiple large genomes or chromosomes is BLASTZ. Also there is another well-known software called PatternHunter which produces significantly better sensitivity results than BLAST at the same speed or very similar sensitivity results at a much faster speed.

Parallel BLAST

Parallel BLAST versions are implemented using MPI, Pthreads and are ported on various platforms including Windows, Linux, Solaris, OSX, and AIX. Popular approaches to parallelize BLAST include query distribution, hash table segmentation, computation parallelization, and database segmentation(partition).

Indexing:

Introduction

DNA sequences, which hold the code of life for every living organism, can be abstractly viewed as very long strings over a four-letter alphabet of A, C, G and T. Many projects to sequence the genome of some species are well advanced or concluded. The very large number of species (and their genetic variations) that are of interest to man, suggest that many new sequences will be revealed as the improved sequencing techniques are deployed. Consequently we are at a technical threshold. Techniques that were capable of exploiting the smaller collections of genetic data, for example via serial search, may require radical revision, or at least complementary techniques. As the geneticists and medical researchers with whom we work seek to search multiple genomes to find model organisms for the gene functions they are studying, we have been investigating the utility of indexes. The fundamental lack of structure in genetic sequences makes it difficult to construct efficient and effective indexes.

The length of a DNA sequence can be measured in terms of the number of base pairs (bp). Because of their size, gigabase pairs (Gbp) is a more convenient unit. For example, mammalian genomes are typically 3 Gbp in length. The largest public database of DNA which contains over 15 Gbp (June 2001), is an archive which holds indexes to fields associated with each DNA entry but does not index the DNA itself. In the industrial domain, Celera Genomics2 have sequenced several small organisms, the human genome, and four different mouse strains. Their sequences are accessed as at files.

Searching DNA sequences is usually carried out by sequentially scanning the data using a filtering approach, and discarding areas of low string similarity. Typically, this approach uses a large infrastructure of parallel computers. Its viability depends on biologists being able to localise the searches to relatively small sequences, on skill in providing appropriate search parameters, and on batching techniques. Even under these circumstances it cannot always deliver fast and appropriate answers.

Suffix trees

Suffix trees are compressed digital tries (prefix trees). Given a string, we index all suffixes, e.g. for a string of length 10, all substrings starting at index 0 through 9 and finishing at index 9 will be indexed. The root of the tree is the entry point, and the starting index for each suffix is stored in a tree leaf. Each suffix can be uniquely traced from the root to the corresponding leaf. Concatenating all characters along the path from the root to a leaf will produce the text of the suffix.

An example digital trie representing ACATCTTA is shown in above Figure. The number of children per node varies but is limited by the alphabet size. This trie can be compressed to form a suffix tree, shown in Figure below.

To change a trie into a suffix tree, we conceptually merge each node which has only one child with that child, recursively, and annotate the nodes with the indices of the start and end positions of a substring indexed by that node. Commonly, a special terminator character is also added, to ensure a one-to-one relationship between suffixes and leaves (otherwise a suffix that is a proper prefix of another suffix would not be represented by a leaf | for instance node number 8 in Figure 2). The change from a trie to a suffix tree reduces the storage requirement from O(n2) to O(n)

Most implementations of the suffix tree also use the notion of the suffix link. A suffix link exists for each internal node, and it points from the tree node indexing aw to the node indexing w, where aw and w are traced from the root and a is of length 1. Suffix links were introduced so that suffix trees could be built in O(n) time. However, in our understanding, they are also the cause of the so-called memory bottleneck”. Suffix links, shown in Figure 3, traverse the tree horizontally, and together with the downward links of the tree graph, make for a graph with two distinct traversal patterns, both of which are used during construction.

So, at least one of those traversal patterns must be effectively random access of the memory. At each level of the memory hierarchy this induces cache misses. For example, it makes reliance on virtual memory impractical.

As would be expected from this analysis, we have observed very long tree construction times when using disk with the O(n) suffix-link based algorithms. A first approach is to attempt to build the trees incrementally; checkpointing the tree after each portion has been attempted. Here, the suffix-link based algorithm exhibits another form of pathological behavior. The construction proceeds by splitting existing nodes, adding siblings to nodes and filling in suffix-link pointers. As a result of the dual-traversal structure, no matter how the tree is divided into portions, a large number of these updates apply to the tree already checkpointed. This has the cost of installation reads and logged writes, if the checkpointed structure is not to be jeopardised. In addition, the heckpointed portions of the tree are repeatedly faulted into main memory by the construction traversals. These effects combine to limit the size of tree that can be constructed and stored on disk using suffix-link based algorithms to approximately the size of the available main memory. For example, in Java, using 1.8 Gbytes of available main memory we could build transient trees for up to 26 Mbp sequences. Using the suffix-link based algorithm under PJama, checkpointing trees indexing more than 21 Mbp has not been possible (the reduction on using PJama is due to two effects:

(i) It increases the object header size,

(ii) It competes for space, e.g. to accommodate

The PJama platform

The first set of experimental trials of this new algorithm has been conducted using the PJama9 platform. PJama minimizes the software engineering cost of providing integrated software environments supporting a very wide range of bioinformatics tasks. PJama enabled easy transitions between different underlying tree representations, and immediate transparent store creation from Java without any intermediate steps. Both transient and persistent trees can be produced using the same compiled code, but a different command-line parameter for PJama indicating whether a persistent store is being used. Although tuned, purpose-built mechanisms may be appropriate for large-scale indexes, the cost of implementing them and maintaining them would be an impediment to rapid experimentation. In addition, a great many index technologies are proposed and tested, in this area of application, as well as many others.

Hence, if we can make the general purpose persistence mechanism work for indexes, there could be considerable pay offs in reduced implementation times and more rapid deployment. The applications of the suffix trees will require much annotation and other data to make them useful to the biologists. This data, at least, does not have demanding processing and access performance requirements. Consequently, there are advantages to developing as much of the application code as possible in Java, for ease of multi-platform deployment.

Conclusion:

Biological databases have become an important tool in assisting scientists to understand and explain a host of biological phenomena from the structure of biomolecules and their interaction, to the whole metabolism of organisms and to understanding the evolution of species. This knowledge helps facilitate the fight against diseases, assists in the development of medications and in discovering basic relationships amongst species in the history of life. The biological knowledge of databases is usually distributed amongst many different specialized databases. This makes it difficult to ensure the consistency of information, which sometimes leads to low data quality. Thus with the latest search and indexing techniques we can access the data stored in biological databases and assist the researchers for comparing the DNA structures and finding a match.

 

Dr. Abdul Kalam on Convergence of Technologies and world knowledge platform

Here is a copy of the speech which Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam had given when he visited CIT for its Golden Jubilee valedictory function. He chose the topic convergence of technologies and he said it will be convergence of technologies that will rule the world and that there will be lot of scope for Bio-Informatics, Nanotechnology and other convergence technology. He also mentioned about shairng of knowledge between countries, and by these joint ventures, new products can be developed.

India in transformation

India is well on its way to become a knowledge power, there are all round growth in all sectors of the economy namely the agriculture, manufacturing and services. Today we have an opportunity to take the leadership in the knowledge revolution. Knowledge Revolution is indeed the foundation for leading India into a Developed Nation. For this, the time is ripe because of the ascending trajectory of the economy, availability of great institutions for capacity building of the human resource, abundant bio-diversity, and other natural resources and above all, our 540 million youth who are determined to make the nation prosperous, happy and a safe place to live well before 2020. With this background India must take the lead in mobilizing and integrating national and international knowledge resources. Keeping this in mind, I would like to discuss with you on Convergence of Technologies, Societal Grid leading to World Knowledge Platform.

Convergence of Technologies

The information technology and communication technology have already converged leading to Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Information Technology combined with bio-technology has led to bio-informatics. Now, Nano-technology is knocking at our doors. It is the field of the future that will replace microelectronics and many fields with tremendous application potential in the areas of medicine, electronics and material science. When Nano technology and ICT meet, integrated silicon electronics, photonics are born and it can be said that material convergence will happen. With material convergence and biotechnology linked, a new science called Intelligent Bioscience will be born which would lead to a disease free, happy and more intelligent human habitat with longevity and high human capabilities. Convergence of bio-nano-info technologies can lead to the development of nano robots. Nano robots when they are injected into a patient, my expert friends say, it will diagnose and deliver the treatment exclusively in the affected area and then the nano-robot gets digested as it is a DNA based product.

Convergence of ICT, aerospace and Nano technologies will emerge and revolutionize the aerospace industry and electronics leading to nano computing systems. This technological convergence will enable building of cost effective low weight, high payload, and highly reliable aerospace systems, which can be used for inter-planetary transportation.

Bioinformatics:

The convergence of bioscience and IT into Bioinformatics has given the thrust to researchers for genomics-based drug discovery and development. Pressure is mounting over the pharmaceutical companies to reduce or at least control costs, and have a growing need for new informatics tools to help manage the influx of data from genomics, and turn that data into tomorrow’s drugs.

Bioinformatics data play a vital role and emerging as a business model for the medical and pharmaceutical sector. Key areas such as gene prediction, data mining, protein structure modeling and prediction, protein folding and stability, macromolecular assembly and modeling of complex biological systems are thriving and IT has major role to play in these areas in bringing the tools to manage the high throughput experiments and the data they generate, and sharing and integrating all the data in a meaningful way resulting into the detailed models of complex systems, particularly biological pathways.

Bio Suite:

I launched the Bio-Suite at Hyderabad on 14th July 2004, which is an important software package that caters to all aspects of computational biology from genomics to structure-based drug design. It incorporates the latest publicly known algorithms, as chosen by a panel of academic partners, and has been coded entirely by the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) team, using the software engineering practices. It can be used by academic and R&D institutions, small and medium and large biotechnology companies. This bio-suite was developed by TCS in collaboration with Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and academic institutions for cost effective drug development in India.

Nano Technology:

When I think of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, I would like to discuss about three scientists who have laid the foundation on nanoscience and nanotechnology. Mr. Richard Feynman, who described the concept of ‘building machines” atom by atom in his talk at Caltech titled “There is plenty of room at the bottom”. Mr. Eric Drexler, who wrote the book titled ‘Nano Systems, Molecular machinery, manufacturing and computation”. Prof CNR Rao, who pioneered and fostered the nanoscience research in India. Molecular nano technology has enormous potential for future aerospace systems and health areas. Research has shown that newly discovered class of molecules, leading to the development of carbon nano tubes that they have multiple applications in the system developed in the areas of electronics particularly nano-electronics and power systems. Carbon nano tubes are normal form of carbon with remarkable electrical and mechanical properties. It is hoped that such materials could revolutionize electronic design and open the space frontier by radically lowering the cost of launch to orbit.

Carbon Nano tubes reinforced with polymer matrix will result in composites which are super strong, light weight, small and intelligent structures in the field of material science. This has tremendous aerospace applications.

Molecular switches and circuits along with nano cell will pave the way for the next generation computers. Ultra dense computer memory coupled with excellent electrical performance will result in low power, low cost, nano size and yet faster assemblies.

Energy for future generations:

The era of wood and bio-mass is almost nearing its end. The age of oil and natural gas would soon be over even within the next few decades. The world energy forum has predicted that fossil based oil, coal and gas reserves will last for another 5 – 10 decades only.

Hydrogen fuel and solar rays are the two modes to get clean power. The solar rays, when passed though presently available solar photovoltaic cells have an efficiency of less than 20%. I would like to discuss the latest research in the area of photo-voltaic cells using Carbon nano tubes which can give an efficiency of over 45%, nearly three times the efficiency which the present technology can offer.

CNT based solar cells for higher efficiency

The low efficiency of conventional photo voltaic cells has restricted the use of solar cells for large application for power generation. Research has shown that the Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) based PV cell with multi junction device could give maximum efficiency of 30%. Therefore, the present research trend is on the use of Carbon Nano Tube (CNT) based PV cell. Both single wall CNTs and multi wall CNTs have been used as electrodes, as electron acceptor, which can split exciton into electrons and holes to produce electricity.

The CNTs provide better electron ballistic transport property along its axis with high current density capacity on the surface of the solar cell without much loss. Higher electrical conductivity and mechanical strength of CNT could improve the quantum efficiency to the order of 35%. But, this is not sufficient. Recent research abroad has shown that the alignment of the CNT with the polymer composites substrate is the key issue and this aligned CNT based PV cells would give very high efficiency in photovoltaic conversion. The polymer composites increase contact area for better charge transfer and energy conversion. In this process, the researchers could achieve the efficiency of about 50% at the laboratory scale. The optimum efficiency was achieved with the aligned CNTs with poly 3 – octyl thiophene (P3OT) based PV cell. I am sure, scientific researchers in Coimbatore Institute of Technology (CIT) will be excited to work in this area of research in partnership with industries so that we can get large scale production of aligned CNTs with P3OT based high energy solar cells. Now I would like to describe the societal grid, which is essential for bringing the connectivity for the billion people towards building the knowledge society.

Technology to Society – Societal Grid

Development of technologies and their convergence have significant influence on the society in terms of knowledge, health care, governance and economic development. To maximize the synergy between the various components of education, healthcare, e-governance, rural development we need to establish connectivities among them. These connectivities will certainly bring seamless access and information flow among the various domains leading to maximization of GDP and productivity; hence, there is need for establishing the GRIDs namely Knowledge grid, healthcare grid, e-governance grid and the PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas) grid. This interconnecting grid will be known as societal grid. Knowledge sharing, knowledge utilization and knowledge re-use is very vital by all constituents of the society for promoting non-linear growth. Details of Societal Grid are:

1. Knowledge GRID - Inter connecting universities with socio-economic institutions, industries and R&D organizations.

2. Health Care GRID - Inter-connecting the Health Care institutions of Government, Corporate and Super specialty hospitals, research institutions, educational institutions and ultimately, Pharma R & D institutions.

3. e-Governance GRID – Inter-connecting the Central Government and State Governments and District and Block level offices for G2G (Government to Government) and G2C (Government to Citizen) connectivity.

4. PURA GRID - Connecting the PURA Nodal centers with the Village Knowledge Centres and Domain service providers.
We have, so far discussed all the four connectivities required for the societal transformation. With this transformation, India is poised for creating the World Knowledge Platform for promoting synergy amongst partner nations.

World Knowledge Platform

During my visit to Singapore, Philippines and Republic of Korea, I have put forward the concept of “World Knowledge Platform”, which will integrate the core competencies of the partner countries to develop knowledge products. This platform will enable joint design, development, cost effective production and marketing of the knowledge products in various domains based on the core competence of partner nations to international market.

In India, we have today an example of a successful joint venture which harnessed the core competencies of two nations India and Russia, who have different cultures, languages and design standards. The product which has come out is of world class, much ahead of other countries due to the joint working of best of minds from both countries. This proves that if the core competencies of nations are combined, best of knowledge products can emanate well ahead of time.

Missions of World Knowledge Platform:

The convergence of Bio, Nano and ICT is expected to touch every area of concern to the humanity. The “World Knowledge platform” will take up the missions, in some of the areas given below, which are of utmost urgency to all of us to make our world a safe, sustainable and peaceful and prosperous place to live:

1. Energy: exploration, storage, production and conversion

2. Water: treatment and desalination

3. Healthcare: Diagnosis, drug delivery system

4. Food: preservation, storage and distribution

5. Knowledge products :Hardware, Software and Networking Products

6. Automobile: Hardware and embedded software integration

In addition to the areas mentioned above, areas such as electronics, ICT and Automobile Sector may also be focused especially in the areas of design, development leading to productionization for meeting the market demands of partner countries and the world market. The core competence of India is software and the core competencies of the other partner nations are hardware and software, it can lead to design, development and marketing of world class systems that is equally dominated by the software intelligence and hardware innovation. The world knowledge platform will also evolve a virtual design centre with the participation of collaborating countries.

The WoW Starts Now – Vista Launched

The much awaited Windows Vista was launched yesterday. Liane Cassavoy in PC World has given a Live update of the launch straight from New york city.

According to him – Steve Ballmer was very enthusiastic and enthusiasm was the theme of the day and the big flat screens said “Wow Starts Now”

Vista is the major update of Microsoft after Windows XP and is called as Longhorn. After Windows 95 launch, this is the first time where both the operating system and Office tools are being launched together. Yes, yesterday both Vista and office 2007 was launched together and both products were the talk in the market for many years.

Here is a screen shot of the welcome screen of Vista

Watch – the slide show of the screen shots of windows vista in PC Magazine.

According to Liane, Ballmer stated the following during the launch:

  Ballmer says that in the next 3 months, Microsoft expects to sell five times as many copies of Vista compared with the sales of Windows 95 in the same period after its launch. He said the company also expects to sell twice as many copies of Vista as it did as copies of Windows XP in that time.
Among the highlights of the new software:

1. Its ease of use and excitement: he cites the new Aero interface and the integrated search in Vista and the new ribbon in Office 2007 as part of this.

2. It’s safer, with a focus on security, he says, citing parental controls, and antiphishing features.

3. It’s designed for digital entertainment, such as photos, movies, and games.

4. It’s also about helping people connect, whether that be multiple computers, multiple devices, or to Internet-based services.

Ballmer is joined by some of Microsoft’s industry partners from Dell, Intel, Toshiba, AMD, and HP, and will be answering questions from the press.

Liane also writes what Bill Gates had to say during the launch. According to Liane:

When 95 was released, Gates recalls, your computing tasks centered around things like creating documents and then hoping you were able to print. Fonts, he recalls, were an amazing innovation. Tasks like digital photography and online shopping were just a gleam in our eye, he says.

Today, everything has become digital, he says, noting that as things have gone digital, people have high expectations. In 1995, there were no portable computers. Now, people want their PCs to run with their phones, he says. And, of course, he believes that Windows Vista is the key to the era we have today.

I wish I could also have been there during the launch. Its really exciting to watch the launch of Microsoft products.

Nanotechnology – Age of Convergence

I delivered a speech On Nanotechnology for Cyberfest – a technical symposium about which I had once mentioned it in the blog – Cyberfest2007. The theme chosen was “Nanotechnology” to be in line with the upcoming Convergence Technology. So, here is the writeup of the speech.

NANOTECHNOLOGY:

“ I have often wondered how even after many years, the colour of the peacock feather does not fade away. This phenomena of long lasting original colour to the peacock has come from God’s own creation of nano materials coated in a peacock’s feather. Observation of nature and the role of science in understanding it from our research in nano sciences can be converted into a technological product”

– Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Nanotechnology is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the branch of technology that deals with dimensions and tolerances of less than 100 nanometres, esp. the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules.” A nanometer is one billionth (one-thousand millionth) of a meter.

A breakthrough technology is one that breaks through the dam of conventional wisdom and slow progress, opening up prospects for transformative change. This holds true for nanotechnology’s claim to novelty. The emerging fields of nanoscience and nanoengineering – the ability to manipulate and move matter – are leading to unprecedented understanding and control over the fundamental building blocks of all physical things. These developments are likely to change the way almost everything – from vaccines to computers to automobile tyres to objects not yet imagined. Nanotechnology is the builder’s new frontier and its potential impact is compelling.

“There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom” – This famous quote by physicist R. Feynman is often seen as the birth of nanotechnology – The vision of a whole new world that goes beyond simple miniaturization because the laws that govern interactions at this level are quite different from what we are used to. Understanding these interactions is important to be able to assess the potential of such technologies – for good and for bad.

The main thing to know about nanotechnology is that it’s small – Really small. Nano, a prefix that means “dwarf” in Greek, is shorthand for nanometer, one-billionth of a meter: a distance so minute that comparing it to anything in the regular world is a bit of a joke.

When Eric Drexler popularized the word ‘nanotechnology’ in the 1980’s, he was talking about building machines on the scale of molecules, a few nanometers wide — motors, robot arms, and even whole computers, far smaller than a cell.

Nanotechnology matters because familiar materials begin to develop odd properties when they’re nanosize. Tear a piece of aluminum foil into tiny strips, and it will still behave like aluminum—even after the strips have become so small that you need a microscope to see them. But keep chopping them smaller, and at some point—20 to 30 nanometers, in this case—the pieces can explode. Not all nanosize materials change properties so usefully, but the fact that some do is a boon. This is like you shrink a Flash Drive and keep shrinking it, and then at some point, all at once, it turns into a DVD.

In its original sense, nanotechnology refers to the projected ability to construct items from the bottom up, using techniques and tools being developed today to make complete, highly advanced products.

Nanotechnology is often referred to as a general-purpose technology. That’s because in its mature form it will have significant impact on almost all industries and all areas of society. It offers better built, longer lasting, cleaner, safer, and smarter products for the home, for communications, for medicine, for transportation, for agriculture, and for industry in general.

In practical terms, most people will encounter nanotech through an apparently simple device called a nanofactory that may sit on your countertop or desktop. Packed with miniature chemical processors, computing, and robotics, it will produce a wide-range of items quickly, cleanly, and inexpensively, all controlled by a touch screen.

 

The major breakthrough has been achieved in field of medicine where Nanotechnology is being used to. The first nanomedicines are already bringing clinical benefit to thousands of patients, said Professor Ruth Duncan.

“Progress in the development of nano-sized hybrid therapeutics and nano-sized drug delivery systems over the last decade has been remarkable. A growing number of products have already secured regulatory authority approval and, in turn, are supported by a healthy clinical development pipeline. They include products used to treat multiple sclerosis, AIDS, cancer, hepatitis and arthritis.”

Furthermore, the improved understanding of the molecular basis of disease has led to “real optimism that a new generation of improved medicines is just around the corner,” said Professor Duncan.

Some breakthrough’s that can be achieved using Nanotechnology are:

• Nearly free consumer products
• PC’s billions of times faster then today
• Safe and affordable space travel
• Virtual end to illness, aging, death
• No more pollution and automatic cleanup of existing pollution
• Reintroduction of many extinct plants and animals
• Terraforming Earth and the Solar System

So, to achieve all these breakthrough’s all we need to do is

“Think Big in this Nano Size World”.