My Blog

ICTOODLE 2022: International Conference on Technology Enabled Online and Distance Learning for Education: In the Context of NEP 2020, jointly organized by the Department of Computer Science and Directorate of Distance Education Pondicherry University, was very well received by the participants. Here are some of my observations and take-home points from the Conference: Education in general and Higher Education in particular, is at an exciting phase of metamorphosis. Now we have only two scenarios: a) Higher education institutions adapting the educational technology or b) Educational technology companies adopting higher education. It is a question of relevance and survival for the higher education academia. With the changing learning patterns of the Millenials, we can't stick to outdated modes of content delivery. Non-linear and engaging modes such as Gamification / Game-based learning should be encouraged to keep the learner engaged. Knowing the learners is essential in all modes ...

Artificial Intelligence is Everywhere. In our smartphones, e-commerce sites, entertainment apps, e-learning, recommender systems, maps... Literally everywhere.  Imagination and the art associated with it are also now within the boundary of AI. Should we call it Artificial Imagination? Though image construction with algorithms has a proven track record, the recent wave of tools to create artistic images has captured the attention.  With AI-assisted Art winning the first prize in a competition, there is a debate on the role of algorithms in Art. Navigate to this article for more information. (Image is sourced from the linked article page).  There are various tools available for processing and styling images. The following two tools seem to be capturing lots of attention in recent days: MidJourney DALL.E Midjourney Midjourney has a powerful state-of-art algorithm to convert the textual descriptions into beautiful artistic images. You can try a demo with their bot at Discar...

The problem we face today is that anyone comments about anything without knowing the intricacies and the hard work of the people involved. The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) is no exception. I don't know why people always finds it joyous to take a negative stand and pump irrational criticism. Rocket science is not a Joke. Even in the worst case if we do not succeed in MOM , we shall be happy about the great attempt which we have made. கான முயலெய்த அம்பினில் யானை  பிழைத்தவேல் ஏந்தல் இனிது.             [ குறள் 772: ] Who aims at elephant, though dart should fail, has greater praise.  Than he who woodland hare with winged arrow slays. காட்டில் ஓடுகின்ற முயலை நோக்கி குறிதவறாமல் எய்த அம்பை ஏந்துதலைவிட, வெட்ட வெளியில் நின்ற யானை மேல் எறிந்து தவறிய வேலை ஏந்துதல் சிறந்தது. As a country we should develop the culture of encouragement rather than always taking a pessimistic stand. A Befitting reply to all those people by "The Space Review". :...

No.. No.. This is not yet another philosophical post.  I was in need of opening large text files. Large in order of 2+ GB for a single text file.  Tried with notepad. Result : Need to press Ctrl + Alt + Del to rescue my comp With Notepad++, my favourite text editor, it was struggling to open it.  Tried with Wordpad, Office 2007 Word etc.. Not satisfied with the performance. Then found Large Text File Viewer. A freeware. Sized only  367 KB .  http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/Other-Office-Tools/Large-Text-File-Viewer.shtml To my surprise it was opening the large files without even a single second delay. An awesome tool esp. for my current need.  The features of this tool are: · It uses little memory and is able to open a gigabyte file instantly. · Background file indexing makes browsing even faster. · It allows the user to perform high-speed complex text search by means of plain text or regular expression. The regular expre...

Hmm... I have Windows XP & 7 in my home PC. (Of course Ubuntu is also there).. Of late my XP had almost experienced the near-death scenario.  As usual initially system was becoming slow.. slower... slowest... Then it reached the next stage i.e. whenever I connected to net the system got rebooted automatically... System became totally un-responsive...  Then decided to go for an efficient(!!) anti virus.. Almost decided a brand to buy which costed ~Rs. 1600 for a three users license. Just before the purchase landed on to "Avast" anti virus site. They say it is free for "home users"... As said in the first line itself  the problem was on my home pc.. so I am a home user... ha ha ... Downloaded & Installed "avast" free edition.. Made the complete scan of my machine... it has 320 GB hard disk. To my surprise it completed scanning within 45 mins or so (more than 2.5 lakhs files) ... I expected much higher than this... It was t...

Well... May 2010.. We all agree the theory of evolution, still. And we do believe that we have six senses and therefore we are the most advanced form of creature. I would like to differ at this point.  A sudden thought, giving birth to this post.. (Would try to translate my mind-map in to English.. Lets see how much I would succeed) Note the title which is the compressed form of Plant + Planet. -> Pla(ne)t. As we all know the mother earth is shared by both plants and animals. (ya.. we, humans being the social animal!!!.. Joke of the millennium)..  Most of us looks at the plants like they are simpler systems than animals/ us. But if you think deeply, look at the power these plants have. They have the ability to "manufacture" their own food (recall your school botany class photosynthesis, chlorophyll etc.). What a magical power it is!!!! Though it has been taken for granted, think of a scenario if humans / animals also  get this po...

Today life depends on Gadgets / Appliances. For some it would be few... For others they are many. Few are essential. Others are luxurious / fancy. The case with essential gadgets is different. But what about fancy gadgets? This post is about A/C : Air-Conditioner. Of-late, many of us have become accustomed to living in A/C environment. You might raise an objection that A/C is not a fancy gadget. Whether something is fancy or not truly depends on the society that you live in. In a society of ours, where people are not getting electricity for irrigation, where mandatory power-cuts have become order-of-the-day, where students studying for their exams need to struggle with constant power cuts etc., the decision of treating A/C luxury or not is left up to you. For me it is for sure. A 1000 Watts appliance running for an hour would consume 1 Kilo Watts of power.  Even a 1 ton A/C would consume more than 1000 Watts. Calculate the power consumption for days / nigh...

The announcement of GSoc 2010: "Google Summer of Code  (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period.  Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than more than 3,000 mentors & co-mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through  Google Summer of Code , accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits.  In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released...

Stop guessing. This is not a chemistry post. Read furthur to know what is C3H5. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) marks the boundary between your actual data and the presentation. This clear-cut separation between data and presentation would make the maintenance of an application smoother. The recent addition to the CSS family is CSS 3. It provides  whole lot of new capabilities to the Web UI engineer. In one of the previous posts (RIA Re-Defined), I highlighted about HTML 5. CSS 3 is a very good friend of HTML 5. This C3H5 (Thats the title!. Just like that thought of this acronym. So it is my innovation...LOL) would change the way that we approach the Web UI. Few of the capabilities of CSS 3 are : Dynamic Media Management: You can specify different CSS for different sized monitors with lot of ease. Multiple Backgrounds. Photoshop like Text effects with simple CSS. Imaged Borders Ability to provide multi-column layout. HSL color support Voice Effects (Called aural CSS usin...

Yet another milestone in Science. Scientist claim now that they can make a three dimensional object invisible. Isn't Sounds like Sci-Fi? Have look at the video. Listen to Prof. Michio Kaku explaining this thrilling innovation. Watch the latest news video at video.foxnews.com Thinking about the implications of this tech... Un-Imaginable...

" Go" is a compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent programming language developed by Google Inc.. Its not simply yet another programming language... Google explains why... In its Go FAQ, Google explains the main motivations behind the project: “No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. There are several trends: - Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster. - Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation. - There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript. - Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages. - The emergence of m...

Cricket is no exception to technology impacts. We have seen during the past decade how this sport has benefited (!) by introduction of technology. Continuing this trend, rather at a increased pace I wondered how cricket would be around 2015. These are simply the glimpses of my thoughts at this point in time: Smart Pitch Reader : Instead of manual pitch reports there would be specialized devices which would scan the pitch with various sensors for factors like moisture, hardness, soil type, grass length, grass orientation, wind direction & speed etc. The collected data would then be analysed with the help of data-mining techniques with the global database and the behaviour of pitch would be predicted with maximum possible accuracy levels. Smart Fielding Guide : Think of a situation when the captain is running out of ideas. He would be given a specialized device which would guide him to set the fielding. He might get spots in the ground illuminated (indicating fielder positions). ...