Artificial Intelligence: The Best is Yet to come...

Wouldn't it be great to have all your work done by robos ? Yes indeed, looks like a fictional movie scene but researchers around the world are working hard on it to make that dream possible one day..and what I feel is that we are not very far from this given the invention in recent times. Well by now you would have figured out that I'm talking about Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence also defined as the "study and design intelligent agents", where an intelligent agent perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. In this blog-post I want to show you guys some amazingg inventions that makes me believe that we are not too far from achieving the impossible. And I am sure after reading this, you will also feel the same.

 To start off with IBM has made a artificial intelligence program named Watson, which accesses roughly 200 million pages of information and is able to understand natural language and answer questions; the idea was that Watson's encyclopedic knowledge of medical conditions could aid a human expert in diagnosing illness, as well as contributing computer expertise elsewhere. IBM later announced that it could be used for a wide-range of call center, technical support and technical sales applications. Look at this video of how Watson beats the reigning champion.

Intelligent Transportation

We all know about Google's driver-less car which has been in and around the Bay Area for quite a bit of time now..Another major invention rather cheap is that of a computer scientist from Israel modified his Audi A7 by adding a camera and artificial-intelligence software, enabling the car to drive the 65 Km highway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.  The technique is different from Google in the sense that it uses cheaper methods of achieving its goal unlike Google's LIDAR which is expensive to deploy on production vehicles as sighted by Elon Musk.

Emotional Computing

Currently, at a preschool near University of California, San Deigo, a child-sized robot named Rubi plays with children. It listens to them, speaks to them and understands their facial expressions. Farther down the road, it is likely that applications will know exactly how people are reacting as the conversion progresses, a step well beyond Siri.

Robotics

A race is already under way to build robots that can walk, open doors, climb ladders and generally replace humans in hazardous situations. In November, DARPA had held a $2 million contest to build a robot that could take the place of humans in battle fields. For home, companies are designing robots that are more sophisticated than today's vacuum-cleaner robots. Hoaloha Robotics recently said, it planned to build robots for elder care, an idea that, if successful, might make it possible for more of the aging population to live independently.

Given all of this happening, I am desperately waiting to see some ground-breaking innovation that will blow our minds away!

Computer Science: History simplified...

     Computer science, it sounds like the scientific study of computers, doesn't it? But Edgar Dijkstra famously said:  "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." Also, don't scientists study nature, not machines?

     So what is Computer Science about? In a word: algorithms; Obsessively Inventing, testing, debugging, and improving algorithms. The algorithms might be controlling the brain of a robot, encrypting a massive stock trade, simulating an ecosystem, chasing an avatar through a virtual swamp, attacking a drug lord's computer, or searching a network like the animations above.

     When I started to know about its history, it goes long back in age of B.C and I personally feel good to be

a part of this discipline which has, and is still making a huge change in our day-to-day life. So, I thought I would present you with something very concise ranging from 1900s - today. Hope you like it!

Before 1900

It started with abacus and later another device called Antikythera mechanism which was found at some island in Greece, then came later somewhere in (1550-1617) the Napier's rod off course by Mr.Napier which simplified the task of multiplication. Of course there were a lot of other inventions which were done before we had the modern punched card invented in 1929 by Herman Hollerith

1900 - 1939 The Rise of Mathematics

Computer science was always about dealing with calculating numbers and doing as many calculations at one time.  This was the era when a lot was discovered in mathematics and also the very famous Turing machine was invented.

1940s

The second world war brought the era of digital computers and a lot of other inventions, the concepts of which are also used today ranging from ENIAC, EDVAC, EDSAC and also the magnetic core memory was invented..Some great ciphers like Enigma, Purple and many other were seen.

1950s

This is the era which defined the modern computer science and it's concepts. The first ever "bug" was discovered in 1947. The first compiler, FORTRAN was developed in 1957. We had the Dijkstra shortest path algorithm, the Turing Test.

1960s

Computer Science was formally defined as a discipline in this era. The first ever computer science department was at Purdue University in 1962 (I'm sure most of the computer science students like me would have no clue about it..). Also, the first ever Ph. D. from a computer science department was Richard Wexelblat, at the University of Pennsylvania, in December 1965.

Operating systems saw some advances. BASIC was developed. Computer mouse was invented in 1968. The first ever microprocessor was designed in 1969 at Intel. ARPanet was developed,  a precursor to the Internet.

1970s

Some great new inventions which most people are aware of today was done in this era. The theory of database saw major advances like relational database. Unix was developed and also the C language. The era was a major player in the invention today with some other languages being developed like, Pascal, the RISC architecture, NP-complete problems, supercomputers, Usenet, RSA was invented.

1980s and 1990s

It was the birth of Apple Computers, Computer viruses, Parallel computers came into development, Quantum Computing, Biological Computing and so many many more...with time computers kept getting smaller and smaller; with the birth of nano-technology.

We have reached the space and back. Today we can make burgers without killing animals and print guns in 3D. With such ground-breaking research only time will show us what is coming next. I'm definitely excited to see what's coming our way.

Let me know what you guys feel !

File Sharing: What's new in this ?

Imagine what would the world be like today if you didn't have access to files (music, picture, movies, etc...) Would you wait until days when it gets to you by a man travelling cross country ? Or given today will you carry all your favorite media along in a removable device (like CD's) wherever you go. Well, certainly not. 

We today are blessed by the technological innovation that has changed our life's by leaps and bounds. Today we find almost everything available online no matter where we are. Technology has made it possible for us to achieve all this. With more and more data moving to cloud services we are no longer in control of our data. As the concept of decentralized web is gaining traction: more and more people are thinking of ways to change.

This cause for this is obvious: the number of security flaws and privacy disasters that were made public has spiked recently. In April 2011, Dropbox changed its security terms of service to include that Dropbox has full access to user data. Similarly, Facebook also changed its privacy terms and conditions year on year, and from being a private communication platform to the one that shares users information with advertisers and business partners thereby limiting the user control to data.

Decentralized Applications:

The most popular amongst this is Diaspora. This project was started by 4 young programmers from NYC Courant Institute in 2010, and raised a record $200,000 from Kickstarter. It is touted as the "Facebook-killer" which allows users to have control of their data-security. This can be achieved by each user having their own Diaspora node. This essentially means allowing the users to have their Facebook server at home or ( anywhere else they prefer ). The Diaspora nodes are able to interact with each other to form one distributed social network. Furthermore, instead of users having to log into one single server, they can choose one of the many servers administered by different entities. This way they can decide whom to trust with their data and no entity has full access to it. (source)

Similarly, there are many other applications that have been developed recently, one such is buddycloud. The way this works is somewhat similar to Diaspora, but is working with W3C, Mozilla Firefox and XSF to build a foundation so that soon all products have a new social layer on top. This can be understood by a simple diagram,

This way each user can select which websites to share data with. Isn't that cool, you get to choose with whom to share your data.

Decentralized Storage.

With the issues in security over storing data in public servers who have access to all the clients data, ownCloud is being developed as a replacement to Dropbox. It allows users to make their own cloud and access their files from all the devices.

Likewise, the Locker project allows the user to set-up their own hosted server. This is achieved by installing their software on the client's server and providing features similar to what Dropbox does.

It is exciting to see that so many people feel that things have to change and come up with ideas and projects to make it happen. I'm sure we will see many exciting things in the future which would change the way we access and store our personal data over the public internet. 

Data Structures: What to know about them

All of you must have asked this question to yourself in college ( at least for the Computer Science students while studying Data Structures ), "Will I really use all of these in my professional life" or "Where will I actually use them". And the answer to this becomes clear as we are more involved in developing projects/applications where in the computation time (i.e. time required for the completion of some task ) is much more important than anything else. You do not want to be waiting all-day long for a certain result to be shown to you until you proceed further. 

Well, this is where the expertise about data structures and algorithm comes in picture. Data Structure is an integral part of any computer science problem. It specifies a way of storing and organizing data in a computer memory so that it can be used efficiently. With this in mind; we have different requirements for different applications. In some applications we need data retrieval to be fast as compared to storing, but in others we would need data to be stored in sorted order and everytime we retrieve the smallest of them. This way, depending on the requirement of the application/problem in hand, we need to select the data structure accordingly.

Different data structures have different approaches to storing data and retrieving it from the memory. Some algorithms store data faster than retrieval like, Linkedlist, whereas for other it's the opposite. Data Structures have time and space complexities associated which estimates the amount of time it will take to do the required operation. Because, you cannot deploy your application and then check for how much time it takes. For these, mathematical expressions such as Fourier and discrete transform along with various other mathematical expressions are used to estimate such things.  

Well, there are loads of data structures to use from, when solving a problem, ranging from heaps, hash tables, trees, linked list, Queues, etc. To get the complete list of data structures you can see this wiki.
When writing about this blog-post, I thought to write about a data structure I came across recently, called Trie which is widely used in most applications and many of us are not even aware of it.

Trie is used in most of the application we use in our daily life.
It is used in search engines for storing the occurrence of the word in a particular URL, used in routers to match an IP address in a routing table. 
It has many advantages over other data structures in terms of searching, inserting and deleting, all of which can be found here 


It is a fairly simple data structure to understand but is used in all complex applications and yet most of us are not aware of it. I would highly recommend watching this video from IIT-Delhi. The concepts and all the problems of it are explained with solutions and reasoning. Also, this link has some good implementation details if you guys are interested in.
Well ,be it for technical interviews or problem solving my best bet would be to at least know what this data structure does.

Hacked...For You!

Hackers..I find these people really really cool. Man they can do all sorts of stuff which otherwise are not permitted. Well, the definition for hacking says. "Hacking is the practice of modifying the features of a system, in order to accomplish a goal outside of the creator's original purpose." The person who is constantly engaging in hacking activities is called a 'Hacker'. It wouldn't come as a surprise to you that there are indeed 2 types of hackers.

• White hat hackers (good ones)
• Black hat hackers (bad ones, also known crackers)

While white hat hacking is a hobby for some, others provide their services for a fee. Thus, a white hat hacker may work as a consultant or be a permanent employee on a company's payroll. A good many white hat hackers are former black hat hackers.

You must have heard of this hack when the new iOS 7 was released with the finger-printing technology. A small group of people actually hacked this feature in a couple of days, all this while being in a hotel room (Being hotel room is strange but the fact is that they were indeed there in a room in Miami )

FBI is always on the look-out for such cyber-criminals and the current list for the most-wanted can be seen here.

To combat attacks from such hackers, there are multiple organizations that organize mock-up days, competitions to expose zero-day vulnerabilities. One such incident happened recently when the White hat hackers exposed flaws of the US Stock market.

To market their product really well, companies also organize such zero-day competitions and offer huge cash prize to people who expose vulnerabilities in their product.One done by Google can be found here, another competition which is the most well-renowned (like Angel Hackathon) is Pwn2Own, offering prizes from $10,000 - $100,000.

I personally feel is that security experts are really the game changers in any product. No matter how awesome your product is, if it can be easily bypassed then it can severely affect the product.

Stay tuned for some more technical stuff!

OpenSource: Who invented this Nobel idea ?

     I wouldn't have come across "Open-source" hadn't I been studying Computer Science or for that sake technology. My experience with Open-Source came when I was first introduced to Linux Operating system. Well, I was flabbergasted by this totally and astonished to know that there were so many people who were contributing so much to open source software. 

    So, to know about it I decided to write something about it. It all started in the 1980s when Richard Stallman, created the Free Software foundation to support his idea (that code should be made available for the software you use or pay for). According to Stallman, rejecting proprietary software and promoting free software should be the ultimate goal. He thought this would promote rather than hinder the progression of technology. (and I must agree, he was totally right then..)

 
    With this began the era of free software which became to be known as Open Source Foundation. And if you go by the numbers today, mostly all of the software which are used in the industry are open-source. The perfect example of this would be Android itself, which is being used of millions of people today. As a matter of fact, all server used in data centers use some distribution of Linux which is suited for their application. Being a software engineer myself, we often use Open-source products over proprietary ones.

 
    Open-source does have many advantages which are not available in proprietary software. The users of Open-Source software are free to modify the software as per ones choice and requirements. There is a open community for every software being developed under this license where you can suggest changes/bugs and even modify them. The whole idea behind using an open-source software is flexibility and great technical support for the product. 

    One would think who gets the time to do anything for free for people. Well, the contributors of such software applications want to contribute to this enormous community because, it may have helped them at some point and that they want to give some back to them/they believe in the same ideology like Stallman (if not for them, I definitely feel so..). Stallman believed, "proprietary software is wasteful duplication of system programming, and that can be used instead into advancing the state of the art" . 

    The importance of open-source software and its reach can be felt, when we see executives from companies like Microsoft, one of the pioneers of proprietary software business quoting in 2001, "open-source is an intellectual property destroyer. I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the soft-ware business and the intellectual-property business." And later making official open-source presence on the Internet. The list of all open-source software by Microsoft can be found here. (the list is hugeeeee)

    Finally, I would conclude with a quote from one of our professors in San Jose State, Joel West, "While social change may occur as an unintended by-product of technological change, advocates of new technologies often have promoted them as instruments of positive social change." This explains much of the philosophy that free source movement is alive. To know about various open-source licenses, you might want to visit this link, and to know what are the different software available check this out.

Stay tuned! 

Agile Methodology: For nOObies

     Project management is a very important facet in any software development. We have many different approaches to achieve the desired results in SD. Since I was myself a novice in understanding this terminology I thought I would delve deeper into it and make some sense out of it. And hence, this blog-post

So why do we need a Software development framework ?
Wouldn't you like your things to be kept in a systematic way yet organized way ? Likewise, in software development right, from SDLC, the idea is "to pursue software development information systems in a very deliberate, structural and methodical way, requiring each stage of the life cycle right from the inception of the idea to the delivery of the final system, to be carried out sequentially and rigidly".
Well, comparing it at an individual level with maintaining stuffs (being organized, clean..Blah blah...Don't we hear this so much from our seniors) it does make sense right ? 

What is it?
Software development as a  framework, is used to structure, plan and control the process of developing an information-system this includes the pre-definition of specific artifact and deliverable that are created and completed by a project team to develop or maintain an application. Several approaches typically used by people for software development today are viz., 

• Waterfall model
  
• Spiral model 
• Incremental 
• Prototyping 
• Rapid Application development (RAD)

Don't you think if the objective of all of them is to achieve the same result, then why the hell on earth do we need so many models (Grrrr...) Don't worry :) you will soon realize that like I did.
Since, it is not necessary that all the projects have similar requirements, likewise different framework also have their own strengths and weaknesses. Let's put it this way, for different project requirements we have different frameworks.

   To give a brief summary of the past, Software development in the 1990s was shaped by 2 major influences: internally, object-oriented programming replaced procedural-programming as favored by some experts; externally, the rise of the internet and the dot-com boom emphasized speed-t-market and company-growth as competitive factors. Rapidly changing requirements demanded shorter life-cycle , and were often incompatible with traditional methods of software development.
Didn't I assure, that you will soon realize the need for different software development frameworks!

What is Agile ?
Agile is a group of software development methods used based on iterative & incremental development. This methodology provides opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout the development life-cycle. This is achieved through regular cadences of work, known as sprints or iterations, at the end of which teams must present a potentially shippable product increment. By focusing on the repetition of abbreviated work cycles as well as the functional product they yield, agile methodology is described as “iterative” and “incremental.” In waterfall, development teams only have one chance to get each aspect of a project right. In an agile paradigm, every aspect of development — requirements, design, etc. — is continually revisited throughout the life-cycle. When a team stops and re-evaluates the direction of a project every two weeks, there's always time to steer it in another direction.

The results of this “inspect-and-adapt” approach to development greatly reduce both development costs and time to market. Because teams can develop software at the same time they're gathering requirements, the phenomenon known as “analysis paralysis” is less likely to impede a team from making progress. And because a team's work cycle is limited to two weeks, it gives stakeholders recurring opportunities to calibrate releases for success in the real world. Agile development methodology helps companies build the right product. Instead of committing to market a piece of software that hasn't even been written yet, agile empowers teams to continuously re-plan their release to optimize its value throughout development, allowing them to be as competitive as possible in the marketplace. Development using an agile methodology preserves a product's critical market relevance and ensures a team's work doesn't wind up on a shelf, never released.

Well that's about it from Agile methodology. But you also must have heard a lot about Scrum. 

Like in SDLC we have many different methods. Likewise, for Agile we have many different methods:

• Scrum
• Extreme Programming 
• Adaptive software development (ASD) 
• Dynamic system development method (DSDM)

What is Scrum ?
Scrum is the most popular way of introducing Agility due to its simplicity and flexibility. Because of this popularity, many organizations claim to be “doing Scrum”, but aren't doing anything close to scrum's actual reference. Scrum emphasizes empirical feedback, team self-management, and striving to build properly tested product increments within short iterations. Doing Scrum as it's actually defined usually comes into conflict with existing habits at established non-Agile organizations.

Scrum has only three roles: Product Owner, Team, and Scrum Master. These are described in detail by the scrum training series. The responsibilities of the traditional project manager role are split up among these three Scrum roles. Scrum has five meetings: Backlog Grooming (aka Backlog Refinement), Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum (aka 15-minute standup), the Sprint review Meeting, and the Sprint Retrospective Meeting. 

To know more about scum many books and classes are available from a variety of competing sources of varying accuracy and quality. One place to start would be the Scrum Training Series, which uses an entertaining approach to cover the most popular way of introducing Agile to teams. You can also download the 6-page illustrated Scrum Reference Card.

I hope after reading my blog you never make a (what's that huh ? expression) , hearing/talking about Scum or Agile to anyone. 

Stay tuned for more!