Bharat Rakshak

Hopefully at this point someone will destroy this piece of software.
Edit: The piece of junk being Adobe Flash.

I have to say it is the worst piece of junk software I have ever encountered as an end user. Over dozens of machines, not 15 minute goes by but the thing needs to be killed for freezing or hogging resources or general poor performance. And I used the commercial version of Netscape for a while.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/29 ... tbwcw.html

Mozilla Firefox now blocks Adobe Flash, thanks to its horrible ongoing security problems. Not the least of which are the three plugin bugs exploited by Italy's now-notorious Hacking Team, which we covered yesterday.

I have been using Firefox for years now and I actually like it. I use it for personal surfing and IE for more work related stuff. I think the problem here lies with Flash, not FF. These days I keep getting annoying FF enable messages.

Guys, have you been looking at the recent push for AI and automation in our IT firms. The Big three seems to have already taken the bait. IBM of course remains the big global giant with Watson. Our players are trying to catch up.

http://www.livemint.com/Industry/TUqYq3 ... Ignio.html

Apologies if posted before.

Shanu wrote:Guys, have you been looking at the recent push for AI and automation in our IT firms. The Big three seems to have already taken the bait. IBM of course remains the big global giant with Watson. Our players are trying to catch up.

http://www.livemint.com/Industry/TUqYq3 ... Ignio.html

Apologies if posted before.

That is the future. Integration of Watson type AI into Big Data.

Question to guru's more on the career front. What are the entry options and career opportunities for mid-senior level marketing (brick and mortar) into Big Data application related fields?

Say, I am a mid-level Sales and Marketing guy who has 10+ years in a traditional durables industry, lead a team of 20 at a country level. If I were keen to make a switch into this genre, are there opportunities? What kind of reskilling is required. Is there anyone here who works in Big Data and would be open for a one on one correspondence to help me identify what options are there?

Since the Board rules do not allow me to PM, would really appreciate if someone willing to help out on this corresondence would PM me their mail id's

For Singha and Comer: 30% of the code for Watson is in Prolog. Pop out ye olde Prolog books and get busy to the big AI tsunami on the horizon.

Pooh pooh false dawn sire like many false dawns in ai.

We will still be writing crude python scripts for automation in 2040.

Just as we use decades old tech like IP, TCP, 3g, c, c++, Linux....many pretenders like ATM and all optical switching have come and gone.

vayu tuvan wrote:For Singha and Comer: 30% of the code for Watson is in Prolog. Pop out ye olde Prolog books and get busy to the big AI tsunami on the horizon.

That is both comforting and worrying. Prolog

a conversation on AI with danny hillis - one of the old gods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxqgGMmmj8A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Hillis

what seems to be happening more is "machine learning" - instead of a hardcoded decision algorithm, the system programatically takes its decisions based on data it sees ,...could be used for anything from generating ads to spam filtering to financial trading....

"machine learning" imo is being implemented in all sorts of languages not just a dead aramaic language like prolog which only the high priests of the Dark Tower can interpret.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33647358
WTO strikes 'landmark' IT trade deal

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has struck a "landmark" deal to cut tariffs on $1.3 trn (£838bn) worth of technology products.The deal will update the 18-year-old IT Agreement and add 200 products to the zero tariff list.It is expected to give a boost to producers of goods ranging from video games to medical equipment.The WTO says the sum is equal to global trade in iron, steel, textiles and clothing combined."Today's agreement is a landmark," said WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo.
"Eliminating tariffs on trade of this magnitude will have a huge impact," he continued.
"It will support lower prices - including in many other sectors that use IT products as inputs - it will create jobs and it will help to boost GDP growth around the world."The final technical details will be worked out until December.The existing 1996 IT agreement was seen by industry and policy makers as woefully out of date as it did not cover devices and products invented since then.

No mention of Services in IT

will it also increase the number of backdoors built into hardware?

Singha wrote: what seems to be happening more is "machine learning" - instead of a hardcoded decision algorithm, the system programatically takes its decisions based on data it sees

The machine learning being referred to is happening on a deeper level than what most people think. Its the kind of learning a human is unable to do. The machine is able to see more deeply into the data and draw conclusions from it.

However the real forward momentum in recent years has come from the flexibility with which these learning algorithms can be applied. The goal is to build a machine flexible enough to interpret any data you throw at it in a very deep way.

There's a youtube video on how Watson was developed for Jeopardy. IBM does not give away the secret sauce as to how Watson actually does it. But I think I have an idea of how its done. Once such a machine is developed, it has uses across a vast array of Big Data applications - including defence.

The defence establishment really needs to contact Tata, Infosys..etc if indeed they have developed their "Watson clone" learning machines and see how it can be integrated into defence (UAV, machine vision, network traffic, Big Data processing..etc). That will be the future of warfare on and off the battle field. Also the future of the consumer economy and many other areas of industry, business, stock market trading (which no doubt Goldman Sachs is using with its Timber Wolf II..etc).

Hell even the IRS in the US now uses learning machines to predict who to go after amalgamating all data from NSA, email, facebook, credit card usage, phone calls, et. al. The machine makes sense of it all without being given specific instructions on how to go about doing it... and just like Watson on Jeopardy, comes up with lists of individuals to go after.

They do the same to find folks to put on the no-fly list and other black lists. Being that you're on this site and NSA tracks this site, your IPs and identities are all on some list or another. Its like the Eyes Wide Shut movie. So don't be surprised if one of these days you get abducted and wake up the next day in an alley with sore buttocks.

Vipul wrote:Two Indian supercomputers in world’s top 100 list.

These supercomputers are an endangered species. Anyone can spawn a TOP 100 supercomputer on AWS or Azure these days.

The bell curve comes under the scanner
To be read with Accenture and Delloite revamping their annual appraisal system.

Wonder how this will go?
Indian Fab Project Hires Former GloFo Exec

Indian foundry fab will be located near Indore in Madhya Pradesh. The company reports that talks are moving the project forward on all fronts including: funding, technology and customers.

Cricket Semiconductor LLC, an analog and power pure-play fab project being prepared for touch down in India, is making progress on multiple fronts and has hired a semiconductor industry veteran formerly with Globalfoundries.

Aabid Husain, who was vice president of worldwide business development and marketing at Globalfoundries Inc. based at its 200mm wafer fab campus in Singapore, has joined Cricket Semiconductor as chief marketing officer.
Cricket Semiconductor also has a definite location for its wafer fab – Pithampur Industrial Park on the outskirts of the city of Indore, the largest city in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Indore happens to be Husain's birthplace. Cricket's plan is to break ground for the wafer fab at Pithampur in 2016 and to begin producing chips for customers there in 2018.

by Mukesh.Kumar
What kind of reskilling is required. Is there anyone here who works in Big Data and would be open for a one on one correspondence to help me identify what options are there?

From the technical lead perspective., I am currently working on a project to move all of our logs (1 TB a Day) to the Big Data (Hadoop) cluster. The second part is to make any sense of these logs i.e. clicking data., logins, IPs, pictures, videos, etc.

If you know Java and little bit of Database then you will be fine!

Mukesh.Kumar wrote:Question to guru's more on the career front. What are the entry options and career opportunities for mid-senior level marketing (brick and mortar) into Big Data application related fields?

Say, I am a mid-level Sales and Marketing guy who has 10+ years in a traditional durables industry, lead a team of 20 at a country level. If I were keen to make a switch into this genre, are there opportunities? What kind of reskilling is required. Is there anyone here who works in Big Data and would be open for a one on one correspondence to help me identify what options are there?

Since the Board rules do not allow me to PM, would really appreciate if someone willing to help out on this corresondence would PM me their mail id's

First lets get one thing clear - "BIG DATA DOES NOT EQUAL TO HADOOP". This is the biggest misconception among the techies that learning big data means learning Hadoop technology stack and have knowledge in a programming language like Java or Python.

Given your background in the marketing, you will be the best person to answer questions like "why do customers buy?". This is the basic question, you can develop several metrics based on the industry for which you are solving this question eg. Look to book ratio for airlines, shopping cart abandonment rates for retail ecommerce companies or lead conversion ratios for a B2B company. What is most important is finding out "what question to answer", this is where most of the so called big data technical guys go blank faced.

I am in the market hiring Datascientists for my team, the target candidate for me is someone who is well versed with data mining techniques, can create algorithms for predictive analytics, can work with large amounts data, knows how to cleanse the data, can do exploratory analysis to find out the data is good enough to be experimented, conduct the experiment (this is where hadoop comes in) and validate the results, interpret and tell the story to large audience. All this, on top the specific domain experience, in my case Marketing (B2B marketing).

Leverage your experience as you understand the buyers journey better than any software engineer out there. Be a marketer who could analyze.

Don't get me wrong, technical skills are important however that's not everything to truly become a big data expert aka a data scientist.

My suggestion would be two pronged:
1. Acquire analytical skills - based on your experience and exposure this could be the difficult to acquire and may take longest time. I would suggest start by reading a book "Data Science for Business by Foster Provost & Tom Fawcett". This book is more on how to solve business problems with various data mining techniques/ algorithms. Then there are many excellent resources including MOOCS on Coursera.com. You can look at the "The data scientist Toolbox" this course is conducted by John Hopkins university and it is the first course of the data science specialization. If you are interested you can take all 9 courses in this specialization for free.

2. Acquire sufficient technical skills:
a) You should be able to run exploratory analytics on your own to test that the algorithms that you created will work or to see if the data can give you the kind of answers that you are looking for. There are several tools that you can learn. I suggest start with R language, Weka or KNIME analytics platform.

b) Learn about Hadoop stack/ Map reduce - This will help understand the finer details on how to size your clusters, how to load balance and optimize for cost and time it takes to run a Hadoop job. Knowing Java will help you to write a Mapreduce job that will natively run in Hadoop environment. However you can submit a hadoop job written in any language via the streaming map reduce. You can use Python, Ruby, C#, C++ or use R directly (using the rmr package on top of Hadoop).

Remember that data scientists get better salaries and generally have more opportunities than the scripting/programming persons who can only code but cannot analyze.

Hope this helps.

Google is reorganizing and Sundar Pichai will become new CEO

In a blog post today, Google co-founder Larry Page announced a massive restructuring of the company, instituting Sundar Pichai as CEO and shifting himself and co-founder Sergey Brin to a larger holding company called Alphabet. As CEO and President of Alphabet, Page and Brin will oversee Google as well as affiliated companies like the life-extension project Calico and a drone delivery venture called Wing. Alphabet will also direct Google's early-stage funding operations, dubbed Capital and Ventures. Under the new organization, each of those operations will have its own CEO and leadership, while Pichai and Google retain control of search, ads, maps, the Google Play Store, YouTube, and Android.

So our own BRF brADmin RB (i.e. bOse bAbu AKA Sundar Pichai) is going to be the next CEO of GOOG? All the best to him/her

^^^^^
Fun fact: I only saw Sundar Picchai's picture today and thought he looked familiar. Turns out he was my batchmate, although we knew him then as P. Sundar or P. Sundarajan . Didn't connect the dots until today.

was he a topper and in general a prominent 'leader' in the student body ?

or a sleeper, coasting along like a submerged whale and conserving energy for the final surge?

^^^
He was a bit of a sleeper, TBH.

http://www.internationalreporter.com/News-21735/sundar-pichai-once-a-soul-of-iit-kharagpur-now-googles-new-android-chief.html

Pichai passed out of IIT Kharagpur in 1993, topping not only his metallurgical batch but also winning the Institute Silver Medal for excellence in academics.

He wouldn't have been able to move to Stanford for post-grad if he wasn't a topper.

He wouldn't have been able to move to Stanford for post-grad if he wasn't a topper.

Not true. Quite a few Moojahids land up there. But if you want an all expenses paid gig at Stan Mad, you better end up near the top 5% of the class. Getting an admission is not as big a challenge as that. But back in the days when we wrote my dad's salary is less than $XX per month and $XXX per year and asked for application fee waiver and GRE reporting requirement , and got a loan from SBI to take that flight out with $25 in paakit (99% were flying for the first time in their lives that way), that was indeed a big big deal and financial need outweighed ranking of Madrassa. If you get a full aid with tuition waiver in a Madrassa 10 places down the list vs the top Madrassa that gave you just a tuition waver and asked you to fend for yourself, you took the former.

rahul yadav was also in metallurgy. funny that a non-CSE UG guy gets to head the most influential sw company in the world.

should take down the brattiness of the chosen ones a bit.

vina wrote:Not true. Quite a few Moojahids land up there.

Including an Ambani, if I am not mistaken... Kind of assumed Sundar followed the standard SDRE route, with financial aid.

ArmenT wrote:^^^^^
Fun fact: I only saw Sundar Picchai's picture today and thought he looked familiar. Turns out he was my batchmate, although we knew him then as P. Sundar or P. Sundarajan . Didn't connect the dots until today.

Wow!
It says somewhere that he was a cricket captain who took his team to some high level in the state competition. Is it true?
The press might be adding some mirch masala to create an interesting story.

Pichkari dropped out of Stan according to what I read.

My dad sent me this link today. He's been trying to get me to R2I

E-commerce firms like Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm and others embark on a hiring spree
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/job ... 429494.cms

KJo wrote:

ArmenT wrote:^^^^^
Fun fact: I only saw Sundar Picchai's picture today and thought he looked familiar. Turns out he was my batchmate, although we knew him then as P. Sundar or P. Sundarajan . Didn't connect the dots until today.

Wow!
It says somewhere that he was a cricket captain who took his team to some high level in the state competition. Is it true?
The press might be adding some mirch masala to create an interesting story.

Pichkari dropped out of Stan according to what I read.

That's the funny part. I don't remember him being part of the cricket team at all. There was another guy that was part of the state junior cricket team, but he was a leg-spinner and his name was definitely *not* Sundar. Incidentally, the school didn't have a very strong cricket team at that time, but was definitely slowly building up a very good basketball team (we eventually had 3 guys playing for the state and one of them was junior India captain too). I don't think they were playing inter-school cricket matches or anything at that time either.

Sundar was a very quiet chap and a bit of a bookworm at that time, so he wasn't exactly very noticeable. In that, he wasn't very different from most of the guys in the 'A' section.

I dont know if old Hindu readers of the late 80s remember Navin Budhiraja, IIT JEE topper whose name appeared in Brilliant Tutorial ads. He is a SAP executive now.

^ He was brought into Infosys by Sikka along with few others from SAP.

ArmenT wrote:

KJo wrote:
Wow!
It says somewhere that he was a cricket captain who took his team to some high level in the state competition. Is it true?
The press might be adding some mirch masala to create an interesting story.

Pichkari dropped out of Stan according to what I read.

That's the funny part. I don't remember him being part of the cricket team at all. There was another guy that was part of the state junior cricket team, but he was a leg-spinner and his name was definitely *not* Sundar. Incidentally, the school didn't have a very strong cricket team at that time, but was definitely slowly building up a very good basketball team (we eventually had 3 guys playing for the state and one of them was junior India captain too). I don't think they were playing inter-school cricket matches or anything at that time either.

Sundar was a very quiet chap and a bit of a bookworm at that time, so he wasn't exactly very noticeable. In that, he wasn't very different from most of the guys in the 'A' section.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/10 ... 16921.html

Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai likes the Golden State Warriors, the San Jose Earthquakes and is pro gay marriage. He was also captain of his high school cricket team in India, leading them to a victory in the Tamil Nadu regional cricket tournament.

KJo wrote:Pichkari dropped out of Stan according to what I read.

KJo,

That is not an acceptable comment saar.

dropped out of Stan according to what I read.

Par for the course. Good thing he did, just like many more out there.

Guess you are not familiar with the history of Stanford - how it started, WW, etc. That school encourages one to drop out to start a new business/idea. The school will actually provide boat load of help. They have had a mature incubator system for decades now - just to support drop outs.

Theo_Fidel wrote:

KJo wrote:Pichkari dropped out of Stan according to what I read.

KJo,

That is not an acceptable comment saar.

What do you mean?

I was reading a profile about him and I saw that in there. Larry page also dropped from Stan and Gates dropped out from Harebird and Mahdi dropped out of Reed College. Our own Desi Steve Jobs dropped out of IITB.

What is your point?

KJo wrote: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/10 ... 16921.html

Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai likes the Golden State Warriors, the San Jose Earthquakes and is pro gay marriage. He was also captain of his high school cricket team in India, leading them to a victory in the Tamil Nadu regional cricket tournament.

Yep, someone just flicked that from wikipedia or whatever and that bit about captaining the cricket team is total BS. I can pretty much assure you that we didn't have a high-school cricket team that played tournaments outside the school (most guys were too busy trying to crack JEE). During sports period, we played footer, basketball and volleyball only. After school, we had a few people interested in hockey as well (yours truly was one), thanks to the efforts of our beloved marker, who was a devoted hockey fan. For one thing, it is too much trouble to put up the stumps in the middle of the footer pitch and you'd have to roll out the matting for the pitch too (since ground was full of small stones) and only a few people can play at a time, what with sports period being only 45 minutes long, you'd have a big fight over batting gaaji if cricket was played. Cricket was restricted to XI vs. XII type matches and such for one week a year (or on weekends, it was my street vs. your street type 20 over gully cricket matches with a tennis ball on the footer pitch). I happen to also know the guy that captained our class side and it wasn't him. Not only me, another 180 people from my class can attest to the same thing.

Oh, I forgot to mention that we did occasionally play cricket during lunch break, but what we played was hand-cricket (due to lack of bat) with one pitch catch rules. If a bat could be found, we would play french cricket (because of lack of stumps!) Most of the time, we couldn't play this because we didn't have a ball (unless someone brought one in the school bag), because the school certainly didn't supply cricket balls.

ArmenT, blog such things, do not post here. Thanks

KJo, if you cant pronounce a name properly, dont post. That term you used, is derogatory in Tamil and is not acceptable.

he lists stanford for MS on linkedin. so he must have completed it. it would be unwise for such a public figure to lie about it...hawks are always trying to pounce for their own ends.

Tamil - English
Pichkari = beggar women
Pichai = Alms, Mercy etc

Singha wrote:he lists stanford for MS on linkedin. so he must have completed it. it would be unwise for such a public figure to lie about it...hawks are always trying to pounce for their own ends.

http://mashable.com/2015/08/10/sundar-p ... oogle-ceo/

Like the Google founders, Pichai dropped out of Stanford's PhD program and pursued a business career. He worked as an engineer at chipmaker Applied Materials down in Santa Clara, then skipped over to the east coast to get his MBA at Donald Trump's alma mater, the Wharton school. Making his date with destiny at Google in 2004, he arrived for his interview on April 1, the day the company launched Gmail. Like many of us in the Googleplex on that day, he immediately assumed it was an April Fools' joke. After all, the company had a history of those.

I don't think he is lying. He may be saying that he went there. Or maybe the website has wrong info.