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CEV was blessed to have Dr. Hemant Kumar Bulsara, Applied Mathematics and Humanities Department, SVNIT to give a talk on Commercialization of Technology Innovation: Issues and Challenges.

The audience was given knowledge about patent and how it has just become a protective mechanism for researchers and technologists rather than commercializing it and implement it among the greater good among the mass. Also, various case-studies were discussed and analyzed.

Dr. Bulsara had a great interactive session. A pinch of humor and honesty was sprinkled throughout the discussion. The QnA session was also very interesting as it helped the audience visualize various problems from a very different point of view.

 

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Shubham Gothwal delivered a brilliant talk on astronomy on the 16th of November 2016. The audience was made aware of various researches going on in this field. Various myths were also busted. The future scope and its correlation with engineering were given great importance.

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Orientation

September of 2016 was the time when Cutting Edge Visionaries (CEV) showcased its presence before the batch of 2020. It was unlike any normal orientation of student chapter of our college because the hosts were not merely restricted to informing us about the technical stuff but more importantly, they were sharing their true and honest stories with us, which helped the freshers to identify the various spectrum of college life.

In this Orientation program, students were given information about the college, life at college, facilities provided by the college, proper methods of utilizing the provided facilities, how can they be productive in the spare time etc. They were provided with various information, from which projects they can do to which TV shows and movies they should watch. Apart from this, they were also given knowledge about “Must Visit Places of Surat”, the famous delicacies and were given a glimpse of the culture and festivals celebrated here.

Special brochures were prepared and distributed among students which showcased various learning platforms, area of innovations, must watch TV series and movies, courses for academic and non-academic stuff and various other details which would be of great help to fresher.

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Artificial intelligence is the intelligence displayed by machines, in contrast with the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals. 

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and in the years since has experienced several waves of optimism, followed by AI winter( the loss of funding), followed by new approaches, success, and renewed funding. For most of its history, AI research has been divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other.

Now, let us inspect this issue from the perspective of a sane everyday human, rather than viewing scientific definitions and catchwords. This new neighbor is scary but at the very time exciting and enthralling. Many people desire to tour his/her house and fancy to socialize with him/her but are apprehensive of the consequences which may follow (death perhaps).

Isaac Asimov stated the three rules of robotics as follows
–>A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
–>A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
–>A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These rules have also been portrayed in the movie I, Robot.

There are always two factions to a thought and humans like to t explore them both. Even AI has become a part of that ever persisting dispute on the greater good of humanity.
Can AI create its own personality? Is that ensured? Is that ethical? If it creates its own personality, then it ain’t practicing the human’s order, should it be discontinued? Should it be sustained?

Machines with intelligence might have the potential to use their intelligence to make ethical decisions.

Then arises the most debated problem, the existential uncertainty from AI.

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of human race. Once humans develop AI, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded’ — Stephan Hawking

AI could also solve the many dilemmas with which humans are struggling. They might become successful in recreating human consciousness in a machine, which may yield humans everlasting experience.

The debate can go on and on but shouldn’t something be given an opportunity, a stepping stone or look at history, we humans invite chaos when we forget our principles. These are two contrasting arguments pointing towards the same issue, could that one opportunity invite death?

 

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“Laziness is the father of innovations”, beautifully quoted by Mr Stephen Shapiro, an American keynote speaker and businessman.

Consider an example of a human going for running some errands some miles away. “Walking would wear me out, so let me go on a bicycle. Well a bicycle is faster but efforts are still high, let me drop the idea of a bicycle. How about a two wheeler? No! It is hot out there and I hate dirt. Yes! I should use a car.” This type of laziness and comfort level is generally acceptable, but a lazy and luxury-oriented mind does not stop here. This is what it thinks, “Oh god! I am sleepy right now, how good it would be if someone would steer for me? Why to even sit in a car, I should learn teleportation. If only could I travel across the world with a blink of an eye?”

Well right now the first of the extreme desires of a human is starting to get fulfilled. An automatic car! Want to take a nap while driving? No problem. That is what a self driving car is all about. Okay, that is what a high amount of people think. The main aim of introducing autonomous car concept is not laziness or desires, but is to increase the safety measures of a car.

Safety is now the primary consideration for every vehicle manufacturer. As a customer, I would first have to predict if I could survive driving that car or not. “A little care and accidents become rare”, this is a famous road safety quote and a very essential one. According to survey, around 137,000 people died in India due to accidents in 2013 alone. This is more than the number of people killed in all our wars put together. According to Delhi Traffic Police reports, the major reason for accidents is a driver’s fault.

A self driving car comes with sensors attached with the calls all around it. The sensors keep track of the objects around it, the distance of objects from the car, the speed with which they are approaching the vehicle etc and accordingly the vehicle decides the speed of car movement, the steering direction etc. This way the accidents can be prevented. This is what the computer aided vehicle (CAV) manufacturers claim.

In India, the road traffic regulations are not much strict. People feel free to break some laws due to lower restrictions compared to other nations like USA, Canada, Germany and many more. These traffic jam costs the government around Rs 60000 crore a year due to fuel wastage, time delay etc. If everyone uses fully autonomous cars, there would be no traffic rules violations, no illegal road crossing, no traffic lights jump etc, so there will be smooth traffic flow and much time and money would be saved.

Productive use of driving time: “Time is money”. According to a Times of India survey, an average Indian spends about 18 days in a year behind the steering wheel. That is a lot of time wasted in driving. If one could use this time, much productivity could come out. Self driving cars could provide that too.

Vehicle life and fuel efficiency: Human efficiency while driving is much less. Improper acceleration, deceleration, braking, gear shifts etc would wear out the car transmission parts. A computerized control would do a better task in these areas and hence a high vehicle life would result. This could also increase the fuel efficiency of the vehicle because of steady and identical aerodynamic effects on every car on the road.

Aid for elderly people and disables people: How many times have you wanted to go out in a car, but couldn’t due to lack of driving ability and no person to drive you there? There are no such problems if you have a self driving car. Self driving cars would facilitate the travel of elderly people and disabled people. With aging, reflexes and eyesight become weak. Self driving car would pose as a boon for them.

Unemployment: But this is India; there are more people than it can feed. According to statistics, around 18 million people are unemployed in India. According to a case study, around 17 Million people are employed in road transport sector. If all the vehicles are replaced by driverless vehicles, unemployment would rise up to double of its current value. Not only drivers, but traffic police would be jobless. This poses a huge problem for India. “How can we allow such self driving vehicles when we already have a huge amount of unemployed people?” this statement was given by our current minister of road transport and highways, Mr Nitin Gadkari.

Fault in technology: Well, whatever the advantages discussed are based on an ideal driverless vehicle. But there is a potential for technology to go wrong. Driverless cars are based on programming and machine learning. Those codes are to be written by humans. There are possibilities of codes to have some bugs or glitches. Even if the vehicle performs well at first, it may happen that there are some bugs in the update the company provides. So there is a possibility of technology going wrong.

Privacy concerns are major these days. Threats for crimes and safety are increasing due to privacy leak these days. People can track you through GPS and follow you; they can have a track where you are and where you are headed to. And if a software drives your car, it becomes easier for the car to get hacked. Though the company would provide high security but software is always vulnerable to hack despite of all securities.

Expensive: The most important aspect that would come in India’s way of self driving cars is cost. Software and hardware for self driving cars would cost a lot to the customer. The most sold car in India in July 2017 is Alto. It cost around Rs 2.8 lakh. This is what an average Indian wants to spend on cars. Most people want to have a car under Rs 8 lakh. Hence self driving car won’t have much market in its initial period.

Many more pros and cons can be listed in this subject, but the important ones that would affect the most are listed above. A self driving car has lots of pros and cons. To solve the unemployment problems, driverless technology can be used only as an aid to driver or an assistant to driver. But this won’t solve traffic problems. Hence if we try to eliminate one disadvantage, it would also eliminate one advantage too. So we cannot come to an absolute consensus with this topic of whether to have a driverless environment or to have the system as it is right now.

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Everything in this world is mercurial,even “MY PRECIOUS”,”GOLLUM’S PRECIOUS”,”EVERYONE’S PRECIOUS”.

Everything is generally associated with two types of activities,the conditional and the constitutional.Conditional means an activity that is subjected to requirements being met.Constitutional means an activity relating to someone’s nature.

For example,water is liquid by nature.Hence,liquidity is its constitutional activity.However due to excess cold it becomes ice and freezes others.if heated,it changes to vapour and makes other warm or burns.Both of these are conditional activity.

when a living entity is conditioned,he has two kinds of activities:one is conditional and other is constitutional.As for protecting the body or abiding by the rules of society or state, and many other activities in connection to conditioned life,these are called conditional.Besides these,we understand body as the person and also use terms as ‘my body’,’my mind’,’my intelligence’.Nobody says ‘I am body’, ‘I am mind’…..This means that the speaker ‘I’ is somebody different from body.Across the globe,if the body has conscious principle,it is considered as a person.when the same body loses consciousness,nobody addresses that dead body as a person.Without realising the fact,we accept the constitutional position of all living being.This means we all accept that a living being is called ‘living’ when he possesses that conscious principle known as ‘Atman’.Accepting a Atman is accepting the living being as constitutional position of that living being.In other words,until the atomic soul,energy of the eternally existing,blissful,knowledgeable Supreme Lord,remains in the body,it is identified as a person.By the existence of that principle, ‘I’ remains and by the absence of that principle,’I’ do not remain, that is my nature.

SOUL IS ETERNAL,BODY IS NOT ETERNAL.THAT IS MY CONSTITUTIONAL POSITION.

whenever we embrace our conditional state,we move away from our constitutional state,that is reality.

 

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On Friday, 4th August 2017 members of Cutting Edge Visionaries met for the first group discussion of the new academic year. The discussion was focused on Censorship of Cinema in India and its comparison with that of the other film industries.

The discussion was initiated with a thought that censorship captivates a movie’s idea within certain limits. It does not allow people to express their thoughts freely. Sometimes the board orders the filmmakers to remove many parts of the film that takes away the essence of the movie. Sometimes the message to be conveyed gets faded and it does not create the impact on the audience as it was meant to.

It was pointed out that what people call “Censor board” is actually the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). Their work is actually to provide a certificate to the filmmakers for the public display of the film. Other most important task of the board is to categorize the film according to the content of the film and the age groups that could receive it without any harm.

Sometimes to earn more money, the film makers try to display some high brutal violence and some ill content that may not be perceived satisfactorily by certain people. Such graphic scenes are trimmed by the CBFC and in such way it can be helpful. One cannot directly attack on a certain group or cult, even some specific religion should not be directly disgraced on the name of entertainment. The CBFC looks after all these and takes necessary actions. It is not always that the board bans a movie because of the aggressive content. Certain movies having extreme violence are also released with an adult certification as long as it does not harm the religious beliefs of people. In a way the CBFC filters the movies and categorizes them for the public.

On the other hand, some great movies like “Lipstick under my Burkha” gets a ban. Cinema is all about the reflection of what is happening in the real world, how the society works and what needs to be improved. It feels like the film makers are being deprived of this and are in some way forced to produce the same kinds of drama films. Some members felt that the reason behind this could be corruption and politics. Politics play a major role in every aspect of the nation, directly or indirectly. Hence it is possible that certain interests of any political leader may influence the decisions of the board.

Comparing to Indian film industry, the censorship of other international film industries is much more lenient. They allow the free minded thoughts of the film makers to be carved in a movie. You may see aggressive contents in those movies. But when those movies come to India, the scenes are directly removed and many dialogues are muted. Sometimes the length of movie is drastically reduced due to this and the story seems to be off. This snatches away the essence of the movies.

The discussion was concluded with agreement of all the members that we do need a censor board but also there is something much wrong with it. India being a diverse country, everyone cannot digest everything we show them. There may be opposition by some group of people while the others may like it very much. Hence we do need a censor board. But the system seems to be not working up to its efficiency. Certain factors are holding it back and some wrong decisions are being passed by the board. Hence the board should come up with some technique to pass decisions such that the message of the movie is not curbed. After all cinema is the most popular form of communication to show the society’s reflection.