New Delhi February 26, 2009

For those with limited Internet access, an effective method of storing frequently accessed Web content is a much needed utility. Now, an Indian scientist has come up with a highly efficient method of caching Web pages on a local hard drive so that precious bandwidth is not wasted in retrieving the same information repeatedly.

Vivek Pai, a computer scientist at Princeton University, and his group have created HashCache, an amazingly evolved way of storing web content that promises to be far less expensive than conventional caching systems.

According to an article in the inaugural issue of Technology Review India, the technology used by HashCache ends a long drought in fundamental caching advances. Technology Review is the MIT’s magazine of innovation, the India edition of which is being unveiled by renowned physicist Prof MGK Menon at EmTech 2009 in Delhi next week

Current caching technologies require not only large hard disks to store old data but also lots of random-access memory (RAM) (which is fairly expensive and uses a lot of electricity) to store and index the “address” of each piece of content on the disk.

HashCache abolishes the index, slashing RAM and electricity requirements by roughly a factor of 10. A one-terabyte hard-disk cache could give students in a poor country much faster access to Webcontent.

Throughout the developing world, scarce Internet access is a bigger challenge when it comes to bridging the digital divide than a dearth of computers. For instance, Universities in Africa and parts of India are extremely bandwidth constrained. In India, there are only 4 million broadband connections currently to serve a population of 1.2 billion This innovation will make it significantly cheaper to run a very large caching server.

At EmTech 2009, one of the sessions in fact deals with the future of bandwidth and connectivity. Kuldeep Goyal, CMD of BSNL will discuss with Dr Sanjoy Paul, who heads convergence technology Lab at Infosys and Aravind Sitaraman, Vice President, CISCO Development Organisation the technology that connects our planet seamlessly together and the applications needed to cope with increasing bandwidth.

At Lab to Market sessions running concurrently during the event, participants can get to see latest technological advances that are going to transform user experiences in the Internet world and outside.

New Delhi, February 25

A new way of fueling reactors could make nuclear power safer and less expensive as it needs only a small amount of uranium and doesn’t need to be opened from time to time.

A group of researchers at Intellectual Ventures, an invention and investment company in Bellevue, WA has come up with a preliminary design for a reactor called a traveling-wave reactor, which can generate power from uranium without damaging the environment and at a lower cost. This would reduce use of fossil fuels, reports the inaugural issue of the Indian edition of Technology Review, a 109-year magazine from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

As it runs, the core in a traveling-wave reactor gradually converts nonfissile material into the fuel it needs. Nuclear reactors based on such designs theoretically could run for a couple of hundred years without refueling, says John Gilleland, manager of nuclear programs at Intellectual Ventures.

Enriching the uranium for reactor fuel and opening the reactor periodically to refuel it are among the most cumbersome and expensive steps in running a nuclear plant. And after spent fuel is removed from the reactor, reprocessing it to recover usable materials has the same drawbacks, plus two more: the risks of nuclear-weapons proliferation and environmental pollution.

Gilleland’s aim is to run a nuclear reactor on what is now waste. Conventional reactors use uranium-235, which splits easily to carry on a chain reaction but is scarce and expensive; it must be separated from the more common, nonfissile uranium-238 in special enrichment plants. Every 18 to 24 months, the reactor must be opened, hundreds of fuel bundles removed, hundreds added, and the remainder reshuffled to supply all the fissile uranium needed for the next run.

This raises proliferation concerns, since an enrichment plant designed to make low-enriched uranium for a power reactor differs trivially from one that makes highly enriched material or a bomb. But the traveling-wave reactor needs only a thin layer of enriched U-235. Most of the core is U-238, millions of pounds of which are stockpiled around the world as leftovers from natural uranium after the U-235 has been scavenged. The design provides “the simplest possible fuel cycle”, says Charles W. Forsberg, executive director of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Project at MIT, “and it requires only one uranium enrichment plant per planet.”

The trick is that the reactor itself will convert the uranium-238 into a usable fuel, plutonium-239. Conventional reactors also produce P-239, but using it requires removing the spent fuel, chopping it up, and chemically extracting the plutonium—a dirty, expensive process that is also a major step toward building an atomic bomb. The traveling-wave reactor produces plutonium and uses it at once, eliminating the possibility of its being diverted for weapons.

Intellectual Ventures has patented the technology; the company says it is in licensing discussions with reactor manufacturers but won’t name them. Although there are still some basic design issues to be worked out—for instance, precise models of how the reactor would behave under accident conditions—Gilleland thinks a commercial unit could be running by the early 2020s.

New Delhi February 23, 2009

Search is the gateway to the Internet for most people; for many of us, it has become second nature to distill a task into a set of keywords that will lead to the required tools and information. But Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Silicon Valley startup Siri, envisions a new way for people to interact with the services available on the Internet: a “do engine” rather than a search engine.

Siri is working on virtual personal-assistant software, which would help users complete tasks rather than just collect information. The software takes the user’s context into account, making it highly useful and flexible, according to an article in the inaugural issue of Technology Review India to be unveiled by leading policy maker Prof MGK Menon at the emerging technologies conclave next week.

In order to get a system that can act and reason, a system that can interact and understand is needed. The Intelligent Software Assistant owes its origins to a US artificial-intelligence project called CALO, for “cognitive assistant that learns and organizes,” located at the research institute SRI International.

The project’s leaders combined traditionally isolated approaches to artificial intelligence to try to create a personal-assistant program that improves by interacting with its user, says the 109-year old Technology Review magazine that is considered as the authority on the future of technology.

The initial version, to be released this year, will be aimed at mobile users and will perform only specific types of functions, such as helping make reservations at restaurants, check flight status, or plan weekend activities. Users can type or speak commands in casual sentences, and the software deciphers their intent from the context.

Siri is connected to multiple online services, so a quick interaction with it can accomplish several small tasks that would normally require visits to a number of web-sites. For example, a user can ask Siri to find a mid priced Chinese restaurant in a specific part of town and make a reservation there.

Recent improvements in computer processor power have been essential in bringing this level of sophistication to a consumer product.

But the growing power of mobile phones and the increasing speed of networks make it possible to handle some of the processing at Siri’s headquarters and pipe the results back
to users, allowing the software to take on tasks that just couldn’t be done before. “Search does what search does very well, and that’s not going anywhere anytime soon,” says Dag Kittlaus, Siri’s cofounder and CEO. “[But] we believe that in five years, everyone’s going to have a virtual assistant to which they delegate a lot of the menial tasks.”

While the software will be intelligent and useful, the company has no aspiration to make it seem human. “We think that we can create an incredible experience that will help you be more efficient in your life, in solving problems and the tasks that you do,” Cheyer says. But Siri is always going to be just a tool, not a rival to human intelligence.

The EmTech conclave hopes to debate subjects like green transportation, future of bandwidth and connectivity, green architecture and urban planning and India as a innovation hub with over 500 participants from all fields.

New Delhi, February 27, 2008
Diagnostic tools that are cheap to make, simple to use, and rugged enough for rural areas could save thousands of lives in poor parts of the world. To make such devices, Harvard University professor George Whitesides is coupling advanced microfluidics with one of humankind’s oldest technologies: paper.

The result is a versatile, disposable test that can check a tiny amount of urine or blood for evidence of infectious diseases or chronic conditions, reports the inaugural issue of the Indian edition of Technology Review, a magazine from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Technology Review India is brought in association with South Asia’s largest specialty publisher CyberMedia India Limited. This is CyberMedia’s 15th publication. Technology Review India will be the first English edition of the 109-year magazine to be published outside India.

The finished devices are squares of paper roughly the size of postage stamps. The edge of a square is dipped into a urine sample or pressed against a drop of blood, and the liquid moves through channels into testing wells. Depending on the chemicals present, different reactions occur in the wells, turning the paper blue, red, yellow, or green. A reference key is used to interpret the results, elaborates the article from Technology Review India. The magazine will be launched by the noted policy maker Prof MGK Menon at MIT’s Emerging Technologies conclave here next week.

The squares take advantage of paper’s natural ability to rapidly soak up liquids, thus circumventing the need for pumps and other mechanical components common in microfluidic devices.

A small drop of liquid, such as blood or urine, wicks in through the corner of the paper and passes through channels to special testing zones. Substances in these zones react with specific chemicals in the sample to indicate different conditions; results show up as varying colors. These tests are small, simple, and inexpensive.

Paper is easily incinerated, making it easy to safely dispose of used tests. And while paper-based diagnostics (such as pregnancy tests) already exist, Whitesides’s device has an important advantage: a single square can perform many reactions, giving it the potential to diagnose a range of conditions. Whitesides also wants to develop tests for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis.

The Harvard researchers have made the paper chips into a three-dimensional diagnostic device by layering them with punctured pieces of waterproof tape. A drop of liquid can move across channels and into wells on the first sheet, diffuse down through the holes in the tape, and react in test wells on the second paper layer.

The ability to perform many more tests and even carry out two-step reactions with a single sample will enable the device to detect diseases (like malaria or HIV) that require more complicated assays, such as those that use antibodies. Results appear after five minutes to half an hour, depending on the test.

The researchers hope the advanced version of the test can eventually be mass produced using the same printing technology that churns out newspapers. Cost for the materials should be three to five cents. At that price the tests will have a big impact on healthcare in areas where transportation and energy access is difficult.

Currently, Whitesides is developing a test to diagnose liver failure, which is indicated by elevated levels of certain enzymes in blood. People without consistent access to healthcare do not have that luxury; a paper-based test could give them the same safety margin.

New Delhi, February 25, 2009
Imagine if a physician could conduct a biopsy on a cancer patient’s tumour and prescribe treatment at a cost less than for a chest x-ray. A nano fluidic chip that not only cuts time on DNA sequencing but dramatically reduces costs, promises to do just that.

Han Cao, founder BioNanomatrix, has designed a nanofluidic chip that could lower DNA sequencing costs dramatically to $100, reports the inaugural issue of the Indian edition of Technology Review, MIT’s magazine of innovation, which will hit the stands in the country next week.

BioNanomatrix, a startup that runs the lab, is pursuing what many believe to be the key to personalized medicine: DNA sequencing technology so fast and cheap that an entire human genome can be read in eight hours for $100 or less. With the aid of such a powerful tool, medical treatment could be tailored to a patient’s distinct genetic profile.
For example the doctor could determine the particular genetic changes in the tumor cells of lung cancer, and order the chemotherapy best suited to that variant.

If this is an example of a technology that will revolutionise medical treatment, then at EmTech 2009, the emerging technologies conference at Delhi next week, many other such life altering technologies will be showcased. The conference will unveil 10 Technologies with the greatest potential to impact the way we live and do business. These revolutionary innovations promise fundamental shifts in areas from energy to health care, computing to communications, says Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief of Technology Review.

Despite skepticism from some quarters, BioNanomatrix believes it can reach the $100 target in five years. The reason for its optimism: Han Cao has created a chip that uses nanofluidics and a series of branching, ever-narrowing channels to allow researchers to isolate and image very long strands of individual DNA molecules for the first time. Cao’s chip, which neatly aligns DNA, is essential to cheaper sequencing because double-stranded DNA, when left to its own devices, winds itself up into tight balls that are impossible to analyze.

To sequence even the smallest chromosomes, researchers have had to chop the DNA up into millions of smaller pieces, anywhere from 100 to 1,000 base pairs long. These shorter strands can be sequenced easily, but the data must be pieced back together like a jigsaw puzzle. The approach is expensive and time consuming as the human genome consists of about three billion pairs of nucleotides. Even with the most elegant algorithms, some pieces get counted multiple times, while others are omitted completely. The resulting sequence may not include the data most relevant to a particular disease.

In contrast, Cao’s chip untangles stretches of delicate double-stranded DNA molecules up to 1,000,000 base pairs long—a feat that researchers had previously thought impossible. The series of branching channels gently prompts the molecules to relax a bit more at each fork, while also acting as a floodgate to help distribute them evenly. A mild electrical charge drives them through the chip, ultimately coaxing them into spaces that are less than 100 nanometers wide. With tens of thousands of channels side by side, the chip allows an entire human genome to flow through in about 10 minutes.

The data must still be pieced together, but the puzzle is much smaller (imagine a jigsaw puzzle of roughly 100 pieces versus 10,000), leaving far less room for error.

Because the chips can process long pieces of DNA, the molecules retain information about gene location; they can thus be used to quickly identify new viruses or bacteria causing an outbreak, or to map new genes linked to specific diseases. And as researchers learn more about the genetic variations implicated in different diseases, it might be possible to biopsy tissue and sequence only those genes with variants known to cause disease, says Colin Collins, a professor at the Prostate Center at Vancouver General Hospital.

New Delhi, March 2, 2009

The oldest and most prestigious technology magazine in the world made its debut in India today. Fittingly enough, the forum in which the India edition of Technology Review, described as a magazine of innovation, was launched was one where a large number of innovators were gathered.

The Indian edition of the 109-year old magazine was unveiled at Emtech2009, the conference of emerging technologies. Watched by a galaxy of thought leaders, Pradeep Gupta, chairman, Cyber Media handed over copies of the pilot issue of the blue chip magazine, which is read by over 2 million readers around the world, to leading policy maker Prof M.G.K. Menon and Hewlett Packard India’s managing director, Neelam Dhawan.

As Gupta pointed out, “While India has many polished technology magazines in specific verticals, it so far lacks a thought-leader publication cutting across all verticals on innovation economy and breakthrough technologies.Technology Review will fill this need.”

Both Prof Menon and Gupta also mentioned that it was only fitting that the magazine, which traces its genesis to the cradle of technological innovation Massachussets Institute of Technology, should be launched in a country that prides itself on being the original knowledge nation. As Prof Menon pointed out, “Knowledge is in our DNA.”

As copies of the special issue were handed out - Gupta clarified that what we were seeing was the pilot issue and the first issue would only hit the stands in June 2009 — its cover story on Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2009, is expected to make a buzz, especially as an Indian figured on the list. The TR 10 list is a sought after annual list of technologies that the magazine bets will change the way we live and work. Vivek Pai, a computer scientist at Princeton University with his innovative Web storage solution Hash Cache, made India proud by featuring on the list.
The India edition of Tech Review wears much the same look and feel as its parent edition. However, the magazine in India which has been licensed over to Cyber Media, will have more localized content with a good mix of stories emanating from R&D labs here.

As Technology Review editor in chief and publisher Jason Pontin pointed out, one of the reasons for launching the edition in India was a selfish one. “India is a leading provider of emerging technology. I want to be the first person to show to the world what’s coming out of Indian labs,” he said.

Till 1997, most of the stories in Tech Review were seated in MIT’s large research environment and covered primarily the work of alumni, but after that, as the magazine enlarged its scope, pursuing an aggressive expansion strategy, it actively started looking at innovations around the world.

In recent years, editions have been launched in China, France, Germany and Italy.
The launch of the India edition of the magazine signals the growing influence of the country as a knowledge powerhouse. While it’s too early for the Indian edition to show a definite character and style of its own, Jason Pontin is confident that the India edition will eventually have its own quirks and obsessions. “It’s fascinating to see how the German edition has become auto engineering focused, the China edition is so personality focused – we are all waiting to see what will preoccupy the Indian edition,” he said.

For Cyber Media, South Asia’s largest specialty publisher, this will be the 15th media offering, expanding its presence in the technology sector. According to Gupta, the monthly magazine priced at Rs 100 will have an initial print run of 15,000 copies.

About CyberMedia
CyberMedia is the largest specialty media house in South Asia and amongst India’s top five magazine publishers. With 15 publications, 12 websites, more than 100 events and weekly TV programs, it reaches out to a community of over 1.5 million people. Its brands have consistently been leading in their respective domains. They cover InfoTech (Dataquest, PCQuest, ciol.com), telecom (Voice&Data), consumer electronics (Living Digital), biotech (BioSpectrum and BioSpectrum Asia), entrepreneurship (Dare), legal (Halsbury’s Law Monthly) and emerging technologies (MIT’s Technology Review India). Its media services include market research (IDC India), content outsourcing and distribution. CyberMedia is the first media company from India India to launch international products.

And we can also make calls!

The mobile phone is no more just a communication device, but your wallet, your school, your hospital and your passport to a better life!

Balwinder Khokhar, director of Value Based Skills Academy, spearheads a project that delivers education to rural youth in western Uttar Pradesh over the mobile phone.  Sanjay Swamy, CEO, mChek, has facilitated over 2 million people in India to pay their bills over the mobile phone. Vivek Mohan, president, Alcatel Lucent talks of creating a national identity number for all Indians which is linked to their mobile phone.

At EmTechIndia 2009, a conclave in Delhi to showcase emerging technologies, hosted jointly the Massachussets Institute of Technology’s Technology Review and CyberMedia, it was brought home sharply how the mobile phone has ceased being just a communication device. Today it is showing signs of becoming your wallet, your school, your hospital and a passport to a better life for millions of Indians at the bottom of the pyramid! At the conference, Khokhar, Swamy and Mohan were just some of the people who were showing what the mobile phone can do for India, and specifically for the less advantaged.

Vivek Mohan’s keynote on Day 2 of the emerging technologies conference, which has left US shores for the first time, gave exciting glimpses of how the mobile is going to be the future route to deliver solutions to our national problems - be it education, health or security. Later sessions, where participants got to see development of new applications in the mobile space, showed how the future is already here.

Already people are getting education over the mobile phone, but post 3G which is only some months away, the numbers will go up exponentially, said Mohan.

In his presentation, Mohan touched upon how the mobile platform could be extended beyond delivering cricket and entertainment, and even used to deliver traffic solutions and health services. For instance, there could be nurse stations, where people can call and describe their symptoms and get a quick diagnosis.

But the most exciting news was the creation of a national identity number for every Indian linked to the mobile phone. “We are working with the Government so that mobile number can be used as ID number of a person. It is significant since the number is unique and we already have around half a billion mobile customers in the country. It has the potential to touch the basis of human life, which is what an application should do,” Mohan said.

Another exciting application that Mohan unfolded was how mobile telephony could be used to solve the traffic woes of a city.

If Mohan’s session was a window to the future, then further sessions gave a greater glimpse of how technology is unravelling in the mobile space. For instance, Sanjoy Paul, associate vice president and general manager - Research and head Convergence Lab, Infosys, described how the company was working on a host of mobile enabling Web applications. “We have recently come out with a Middleware, which transforms the user interface based on the type of device being used. This has been used to enable mobile banking on Finacle, Infosys banking product,” he said.

Sanjay Swamy’s session on the mobile payment gateway created by his company mChek demonstrated how this gateway is not just for the rich or the literate, but is being used by people at the bottom of the pyramid. Swamy described how mChek has facilitated women in the slums of Bangalore to avail loans through a microfinance project using the mobile phone. “Now they feel so empowered, they have come to us asking if they could pay their electricity bills over the mobile phone,” described Swamy.

As Swamy pointed out, while broadband penetration has stagnated at around 5 million, mobile phone connections are setting new records, which augurs well for mobile banking. The fact that RBI has laid out a formal policy on mobile payment is a forward step, he said. At the ICT session, panelists, who included Venkatesh Valluri, president and country general manager Agilent Technologies, Ajay Gupta, Director, IPG R&D Centre, HP India and Manish Gupta, Associate Director,IBM Research Labs described how India had added more than 15 million mobile phones in January, which is a world record, in terms of monthly addition.

As one participant pointed out, what we were seeing at the conference was only the tip of the iceberg – there’s so much happening in the labs in the mobile space that a revolution is only a short while away. As Sanjoy Paul pointed out, Infosys was working on a sort of an application factory in the mobile space, “where we can roll out many applications which can be later deployed.”

Hearteningly, what was brought home sharply at the conference was that many of the technologies and applications that companies today are working on is for the bottom of the pyramid and relevant to the specific needs of the Indian masses. An m-powered India is not too far away.

The first ever emerging technologies conference from MIT’s Technology Review
EmTech India 2009 kicks off in the capital on Monday March 2 with a inaugural address by Prof MGK Menon, renowned scientist and policy maker.

Prof Menon, who has spearheaded a number of government initiatives in the technology sector, including providing leadership to the IIT Delhi as the chairperson of the Board of Governors, is a member of all three Science academies in India. He will speak on need for innovation in technology that touch a billion lives.

Following Prof Menon will be Ms. Neelam Dhawan, Managing Director for HP India, who will speak her mind on Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Neelam, ranked at 11 amongst India’s most powerful women by Forbes, should know a thing or two about software and start ups as she has worked for more than two decades in companies such as the HCL Group, Microsoft and IBM.

”Clearly EmTech India 2009 brings for the first time a host of leaders and ready-to-market technologies across businesses,” said Jason Pontin, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of MIT’s Technology Review.

The two-day event will focus on a host of burning issues from rising energy and healthcare costs to technologies that aim to predict traffic movements and stock prices. Processes and products developed in top research labs across the world will be showcased in the national capital.

Crude Oil: Is The Price Shock Over?
Those who think the era of higher fossil fuel prices is over are likely to be in for a rude shock — crude oil rates may regain their earlier highs sooner than expected as the economic turmoil works its way out of the global economy. Therefore, the hunt for greener and inexpensive transportation remains a priority for all, irrespective whether they have oil assets or not because the commodity itself is a depleting resource.

For India, which imports 70 percent of its energy needs, this is even more critical. Participants will also get to understand the barriers, which are efficient energy storage and nascent standards to name just a few. They will also get a peak into how advancements in bio-fuels and nano technologies may provide clean and cost-effective energy solutions through new materials that will cut energy consumption.

Gurukool: Can Illiterate People Be An Asset?
The event will attempt at solving the conundrum that India, which annually produces the world’s second highest number of graduates, also remains an unfortunate home to 300 million people who have some of the lowest literacy levels across the globe. There will be answers to low-cost technologies required for delivering education to such citizens, resulting in higher economic growth.

Even as we struggle with educating millions of adults and children, Indians, especially those below the poverty line, grapple with the huge lack of quality healthcare. Although great progress has been made in providing world class medical care in cities over the last 15 years, it is the villages and towns where curable diseases also claim thousands of lives. World renowned surgeon Dr. Prathap Reddy, who heads the Apollo Hospital Group, will speak on relevant technological solutions where are the key to bringing quality healthcare at affordable costs to a billion people.

“As both an MIT TR100 and an MIT alumnus, I am thrilled to participate in the launching of EmTech in India.  Dimagi is a company I co-founded out of MIT because we thought we could create mobile software that would improve the public health of millions,’’ says Dr. Vikram Sheel Kumar.

Vikram will bring his experience of touching hundreds of thousands of patients across through small technology innovations to a fireside chat on touching a billion lives at the bottom of the pyramid along with IIM Professor Anil Gupta.

Can The Not Wealthy Be Healthy?
If (ill) health is around, can pharmaceuticals be far behind?  India’s $2.5 billion biotech industry is at the forefront of the global push to cut research and development costs, time to market and clinical trial costs. These paradigm changes come at a time when drug regulators are coming down hard on new products and drug recalls coupled with rising side effects from synthetic chemical based drugs are sapping industry profits.

Even though India is at the forefront of developing cutting edge software, it lags behind most Asian tigers in spreading economic benefits of large scale bandwidth deployment to its population. We, the lovers of Bollywood and Cricket, have just 4 million bandwidth connections in a population touching 1.2 billion people. So, it is a problem not only of connectivity and content, but also of the absence of technology required to manage hardware, applications and driving customized content to viewers’ homes and mobile phones. Some of these questions might get answered by Kuldeep Goyal, managing director at Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd., India’s largest telecom player and Dr. Sanjoy Paul, the head of convergence technology lab at Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Some of technologies from MIT Media Laboratories, IITs and Infosys SET Labs that will be showcased during the event include Synthetic Neurobiology, the Next Billion Cameras, Industrial Biomaterials, Mobile Applications for the Emerging Markets, to innovations like GPS-based temper proof Auto Fare Meters with Secure Fare Guides.

In his Lab 2 Market session on Synthetic Neurobiology, Vinay Gidwaney of MIT Media Labs will share how by combining engineering, software development, neuroscience and psychology, the Media Lab has a multidisciplinary approach to advancing the next great frontier of medical science – treating the brain.

In another Lab2 Market session, Ramesh Raskar of MIT Media Lab will dwell on how the emergence of a billion networked and portable cameras on mobile phones in just seven years changed our social culture. The addition of another billion camera phones could also impact of the visual computing tools will spawn new visual art forms, optically smart sensors will empower disabled persons, portable devices will create tomographic models of patient internals and pixel-coordinated interactions will harvest productivity of crowdsourcing for complex tasks.