Saturday, November 30, 2019
GATE 2020 schedule released at gate.iitd.ac.in
Source:
https://www.hindustantimes.com/education/gate-2020-schedule-released-at-gate-iitd-ac-in/story-5WtxpLYmafCpQQqHQGexgK.html
https://www.hindustantimes.com/education/gate-2020-schedule-released-at-gate-iitd-ac-in/story-5WtxpLYmafCpQQqHQGexgK.html
GATE 2020 schedule: Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD) has released the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) 2020 exam schedule on its official website.
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD) has released the Graduate
Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) 2020 exam schedule on its official website.
Candidates who have applied for the exam can check the exam schedule at gate.iitd.ac.in.
GATE 2020 examinations will be held on February 1, 2, 8, 9. The
examinations will be held in Forenoon session (9.30am to 12.30pm and afternoon
session (2.30pm to 5.30pm).
According to the schedule, exams of IN, ME1, MT, PE, PH papers will be
held in the forenoon session on February 1, while the exams of CY, ME2, PI
papers will be held in the afternoon session on the same day.
The exams of AR, BM, BT, CH, MA, MN, ST, XE, XL papers will be held in
the forenoon session on February 2, while the exams of AE, AG, EC, GG papers
will be held in the afternoon session on the same day.
The exams of EE, EY, TF papers will be held in the forenoon session on
February 8, while the exam of CS paper will be held in the afternoon session on
the same day.
The exams of CE1 paper will be held in the forenoon session on February
9, while the exams of CE2 paper will be held in the afternoon session on the
same day.
Note: Visit the official website of GATE 2020 for latest
news and updates on the exam.
Friday, November 29, 2019
Purbachal scientist invents diarrhoea vaccine
Source:
https://www.telegraphindia.com/states/west-bengal/purbachal-scientist-invents-diarrhoea-vaccine/cid/1722769
https://www.telegraphindia.com/states/west-bengal/purbachal-scientist-invents-diarrhoea-vaccine/cid/1722769
The vaccine is
all set to be marketed by a global vaccine research and development laboratory
A resident of Purbachal has developed a vaccine to counter bloody
diarrhoea. Hemanta Koley of Cluster IX is the lead investigator of a team of
scientists at the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases in
Beleghata which has come up with a means to tackle a disease that causes about
125 million to fall sick annually and about 1,60,000 to die.
The vaccine is all set to be marketed by a global vaccine research and
development laboratory.
“Shigellosis or bloody diarrhoea is common in areas where people eat raw
vegetables or seafood. It is dangerous as just 10 organisms are sufficient to
trigger the disease. It is water-borne but people who are in contact with the
soil are also at risk. The Shigella bacteria causes cell injury in the large
intestine which leads to bleeding. We have patients coming daily to the
Infectious Diseases Hospital on our Beleghata premises with complaints of blood
and mucous in stool,” said Koley.
Hailing the invention, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has
stated in a release: “Developing this indigenous vaccine against shigellosis is
the need of the hour and is a major breakthrough.”
The reason is not far to seek. There is no medicine to treat this disease
except an intravenous injection of an anti-biotic called Ceftriaxone. But if
one is resistant to the drug, as it happens in about 10 per cent cases, there
is nothing left to be done. “Even if the patient is dehydrated, you cannot
administer oral rehydration solution (ORS). His ruptured intestine cannot
absorb it,” said Koley.
Children under five and the elderly who have reduced immunity are
especially at risk. Koley himself had contracted the disease in his infancy. “I
had to defeacate on the floor as I could not squat on the toilet pan, so
cramping was the rectal pain with a condition called tenesmus.”
Koley was working in Harvard Medical School as a post-doctoral associate
in the gastroenterology department specialising in microbiology and immunology
in 2004 when he was hired by NICED with a specific brief to develop the
Shigellosis vaccine. “This is the product of 15 years of research since then. I
had started with two students. Now 10 students are working with me. NICED
director and head of our department Shanta Dutta is also in the team.”
The vaccine will first be tested in European and African countries. “In
phase I, the test is done on 10 people and on 100 to 300 in the Phase II. This
test is called proof of concept which is done with normal volunteers. It will
reach India in Phase III, possibly in 2020, to be available for phase III
trials. After that, it will go on sale in the market.”
The facility to which ICMR has licensed the technology is MSD Wellcome
Trust Hilleman Laboratories, with which a memorandum of understanding (MoU) had
been signed in 2017 after the international patent was registered.
Other than in India, the vaccine, he says, will be especially useful in
Bangladesh, Japan and parts of the US where people are at risk. “Since it will
have large scale use, I am hoping it will be priced between Rs 10 and 15 so
that it will stay within the reach of our poor.
Tool to fight typhoid
Koley has developed another vaccine to combat typhoid and paratyphoid.
“These diseases are prevalent in different parts of West Bengal. There was a
vaccine for typhoid but none for paratyphoid. What I have developed is a
combination vaccine.
Koley believes in oral vaccination. “Mothers do not want their babies to
get hurt by injections. Also more antibodies are produced if the enteric
organisms are stimulated through the intestine, rather than through muscles, as
would be the case for intramuscular injections. Thus a vaccine will work better
orally. We have found that to be true in mice, guinea pigs and rabbits.”
His team carries out sensitivity tests on stool samples of patients
admitted with dysentery in the Infectious Diseases Hospital to deduce what kind
of organism had caused the disease and prepares the patients’ antibiograms.
“Antibiograms (a report that shows how susceptible strains of pathogens are to
a variety of antibiotics, or more simply which antibiotics will work on a
patient and which not) are vital to decide the course of treatment since if
patients are administered drugs without knowing what they are sensitive to they
might develop drug resistance.”
The scientist initially used to stay in CA Block but shifted to Purbachal
to be closer to his Beleghata lab. “I can stay back till any hour. Sometimes I
even go in the weekends. Devotion is needed for research.”
He is sad that bright students these days prefer to study engineering
than basic science. “It is a way to study less and earn fast and perhaps more.
But basic science is the mainstay of technological development,” he points out.
Koley’s dream project is a single vaccine in a single dose. “This will
spare mothers the trouble of having to take the baby to the primary health
centre multiple times for immunisation against separate diseases. Work has
already started in our lab with funding from several agencies across the globe.
I hope I shall be able to achieve it before I retire,” smiles the 53-year-old.
2020: Five artificial intelligence trends for engineers and scientists
Source:
https://analyticsindiamag.com/2020-five-artificial-intelligence-trends-for-engineers-and-scientists/
https://analyticsindiamag.com/2020-five-artificial-intelligence-trends-for-engineers-and-scientists/
1. Workforce skills and data quality barriers
start to abate
As AI becomes more prevalent in industry, more
engineers and scientists – not just data scientists – will work on AI projects.
They now have access to existing deep learning models and accessible research
from the community, which allows a significant advantage than starting from
scratch. While AI models were once majority image-based, most are also
incorporating more sensor data, including time-series data, text and radar.
Engineers and scientists will greatly influence the
success of a project because of their inherent knowledge of the data, which is
an advantage over data scientists not as familiar with the domain area. With
tools such as automated labeling, they can use their domain knowledge to
rapidly curate large, high-quality datasets. The more availability of
high-quality data, the higher the likelihood of accuracy in an AI model, and
therefore the higher likelihood for success.
2. The rise of AI-Driven systems increases
design complexity
As AI is trained to work with more sensor types (IMUs,
Lidar, Radar, etc.), engineers are driving AI into a wide range of systems,
including autonomous vehicles, aircraft engines, industrial plants, and wind
turbines. These are complex, multidomain systems where behavior of the AI model
has a substantial impact on the overall system performance. In this world,
developing an AI model is not the finish line, it is merely a step along the
way.
Designers are looking to Model-Based Design tools for
simulation, integration, and continuous testing of these AI-driven systems.
Simulation enables designers to understand how the AI interacts the rest of the
system. Integration allows designers to try design ideas within a complete
system context. Continuous testing allows designers to quickly find weaknesses
in the AI training datasets or design flaws in other components. Model-Based
Design represents an end-to-end workflow that tames the complexity of designing
AI-driven systems.
3. AI becomes easier to deploy to low power,
low cost embedded devices
AI has typically used 32-bit floating-point math as
available in high-performance computing systems, including GPUs, clusters, and
datacenters. This allowed for more accurate results and easier training of
models, but it ruled out low cost, low power devices that use fixed-point math.
Recent advances in software tools now support AI inference models with
different levels of fixed-point math. This enables the deployment of AI on
those low power, low-cost devices and opens up a new frontier for engineers to
incorporate AI in their designs. Examples include low-cost Electronic Control
Units (ECUs) in vehicles and other embedded industrial applications.
4. Reinforcement Learning moves from gaming to
real-world industrial applications
In 2020, reinforcement learning will go from playing
games to enabling real-world industrial applications particularly for automated
driving, autonomous systems, control design, and robotics. We’ll see successes
where Reinforcement Learning
(RL) is used as a component to improve a larger system. Key enablers are easier
tools for engineers to build and train RL policies, generate lots of simulation
data for training, easy integration of RL agents into system simulation tools
and code generation for embedded hardware. An example is improving driver
performance in an autonomous driving system. AI can enhance the controller in
this system by adding an RL agent to improve and optimize performance – such as
faster speed, minimal fuel consumption, or response time. This can be
incorporated in a fully autonomous driving system model that includes a vehicle
dynamics model, an environment model, camera sensor models, and image
processing algorithms.
5. Simulation lowers a primary barrier to
successful AI adoption – lack of data quality
Data quality is a top barrier to successful adoption
of AI – per analyst surveys. The simulation will help lower this barrier
in 2020. We know training accurate AI models requires lots of data. While you
often have lots of data for normal system operation, what you really need is
data from anomalies or critical failure conditions. This is especially true for
predictive maintenance applications, such as accurately predicting remaining
useful life for a pump on an industrial site. Since creating failure data from
physical equipment would be destructive and expensive, the best approach is to
generate data from simulations representing failure behavior and use the
synthesized data to train an accurate AI model. The simulation will quickly
become a key enabler for AI-driven systems.
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