Ego cogito, ergo sum

As it is, interviewing a lawyer is a tough task and if the lawyer heads an organization that is often embroiled in controversies, the task becomes even more onerous. This was my dilemma, as I started my interaction with Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the board, ICANN. The Kiwi Barrister had come down to India for an ICANN event and I met up with him at a seminar he was attending in Mumbai. He is one of the rare people, who genuinely was eager to attend all the sessions at the seminar. Thus, I had to time the conversation between two sessions and he sat down with a cup of coffee.

‘US is not controlling Net Resources’

It has been nearly a decade since Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) came into being at Marina Del Rey, California. Set up as a non-profit corporation to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the US Government by other organizations. The chief task of ICANN is to manage the assignment of domain names (over 145 million domain names) and IP addresses, popularly referred to as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) function. Yet, over the years, ICANN has been embroiled in controversies, be it political or technical in nature. The main grouse many seem to have with ICANN, is that it seems to be a trifle more conscious to the whims and fancies of the US Government.

In the past few years, there has also been an increasing chorus asking for either ICANN to be freed from its obligations to the US Government, or all together stripped of the role it plays. Nonetheless, the ICANN boat seems sail quite merrily, recently it launched the .Asia domain name with much fanfare and also announced the shift to IPV6 from IPV4. In midst of all this jumble-tumble, there was also a change of guard at ICANN, Internet pioneer Vincent Cerf was replaced by barrister Peter Dengate Thrush as the chairman of the board. It has been a significant move, as many argue that by appointing a New Zealander the Board is trying to play down its association with the US Government. Whatever be the reasons or compulsions, one thing is for sure, Thrush is completely in control with the developments at ICANN. It is almost impossible to pin down this suave barrister, he seems to be ready at all times with facts, figures and arguments to prove his contention.

Recently, Thrush had come down to India to attend the 33rd ICANN conference held in India. Taking some time out, Thrush spoke at length to Dataquest on the different controversies that surround ICANN and what he feels about the coming years. Excerpts.

How does it feel about fitting into Vincent Cerf’s shoes?
It is a big honor really, to follow someone who is such a pioneer and rightly rewarded for his work. I remember mentioning in my speech that he was ranked at number 11 in the list of 40 most influential technologists. I was elected unamiously by the Board, thus I have got the confidence of the rest of the Board. I have been on the Board for years, and know what the expectations are and how it functions. SO I have to just press on and execute the responsibilities that I have been given. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine, if you could fold your computer screen like paper. Would we then ever need paper at all? For the past many years there has been a lot of work going along on foldable displays and other things like that with limited success. The good news is that there is an Indian researcher at Bell Labs is not only working on the prospect of foldable screens, but is seeing frution of his work. He was one of the TR35 winners, and profiling him was a challenge for me.

Chemistry was always something that I was mighty uncomfortable with, in fact, after mathematics, if there is anything that I really disliked, it would be chemistry. I could never understand why we roted those weird molecular diagrams of ethyl alcohol or Benzene. So I was literally grappling with Organic Electronics, much work went into understanding the basics first. And by the time I was done with the story, I had developed a healthy respect for chemistry in general and Organic Electronics in specific. Here goes the fourth part of the 6 TR35 series.

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Of foldable screens and printed electronics

Ashok Maliakal for the past three years has been toiling at ways to revolutionize the computing world with the use of organic electronics. Going by the signs, it does not seem to be as far-fetched, as it may sound.

Much as we dislike it, plastic or polymer has nevertheless permeated everything in our lives. This organic substance seems to be fairly ubiquitous from white goods to textiles; polymer is an undisputed king. While it rules on the macro level, somehow it has not made headway on the nano scale. That all could very well change with the emergence of organic electronics.

Revolution seems like understatement, when one refers to the change that has occurred in the computing industry. Everything has dramatically and drastically changed; the processing power has increased hundred times over, applications have changed, newer devices have emerged. The only thing that has remained more or less untouched is the display device, or the unassuming monitor.

To be fair, the green monitor screen has been replaced by a much vibrant color screen; much slimmer and sleeker. In spite of these cosmetic changes, monitors have remained bulky and big. Take the case of a laptop display screen, in all these years; it has remained much as it was.

There is a ray of hope breaking on the horizon. A hope that in the future, display screens would not be as bulky as they are, they would not be limited to current materials, etc. All in all, the displays will be not only be sleeker but also more flexible in nature. A researcher at Bell Laboraties in the U.S. is earnestly working at making that dream come true and his name is Ashok Maliakal. He is a researcher in organic electronics.

Organic electronics (plastic electronics) is basically a branch of electronics that deals with conductive polymers, or plastics. The term ‘organic’ is used as the molecules in the polymer are carbon-based, like they are in every living or organic thing. Organic electronics differs from traditional electronics as the latter relies on inorganic conductors such as copper or silicon. “Since my doctoral work, I’ve been interested in how molecular structure affects a materials properties. Organic electronics is a wonderful place to explore these interactions,” says Maliakal.

The singular biggest application of organic electronics can be seen in what is popularly termed as ‘printed electronics’. This is an emerging technology that talks about printing of electronics on common media such as paper, plastic, and textile using current printing processes, just like we print a newspaper for instance. This printing utilizes common press equipment in the graphics arts industry, such as screen-printing, flexography, gravure, and offset lithography. Though, instead of the regular printing inks, families of electrically functional electronic inks are used to print active devices, such as thin film transistors, or RFID tags.

Once, printing electronics picks up, there is going to be an explosion of low-cost electronics useful for applications not typically associated with conventional (i.e., silicon-based) electronics, such as flexible displays, smart labels, animated posters, and active clothing. “Conventional ways of creating electronic circuitry are not only complicated but costly as well, with printed electronics there would be large scale upsurge in low cost devices. It would be quite dramatic,” says Maliakal.

One of the biggest application of printing electronics could be in the production of flexible electronic displays. As the current displays are quite rigid in nature, printed electronics could help in the invention of a low-cost, foldable, bendable display devices that can be mass produced for applications such as large area sensor networks, lightweight viewing screens for various handheld devices like PDAs, etc. Philips last year displayed a device with a rollable display known as Readius, that is fairly similar in design but quite different in the way it is manufactured. “My work could help enable a practical printing process for generating flexible display technologies,” says Maliakal.

Maliakal´s work at Bell Labs focuses on the design and development of nano-structured organic and hybrid materials for advanced electronic applications. His research is paving the way for design and development of functional electronic materials that will lead to new, fully integrated devices and sub-systems, as well as low-cost fabrication methodologies and increased functionality. Maliakal has made a breakthrough in the development of a new printable hybrid organic-inorganic material that formed good films with triple the permittivity of known polymers. “In it, I have mixed the certain properties of polymers (plastic) with that of titanium dioxide (ceramic) to achieve the new functional nano particle,” he says.

The beauty of Malaikal’s invention is that it not only allows inventive usage but at much lesser power consumption. “Prototype circuits made with the material operate at one-third the voltage of those made with the polymer alone. That could mean displays that consume a lot less power, “ he adds.

For his pioneering work, Maliakal was recently awarded the prestigious TR35 Award. It is an award given annually by MIT’s Technology Review to a selection of 35 of the world’s leading high-tech innovators under the age of 35. And all that Maliakal would say is, “Excellent! It is a great honor.”

Maliakal is a first generation American, as his parents had migrated from India a few decades back. He currently holds five patents awarded or pending and has published more than 16 papers. He completed his Bachelor´s degree in Chemistry from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Columbia University. His interests range from going out with family (wife and son) to music and running. He admits to occasionally see a Hindi movie, now and then.
Since, his parents are from Kerala, is he conversant in Malayalam? “I can understand it, but can’t speak fluently. I will certainly not win awards with my Malayalam,” he says. He occasionally visits India, and feels that “India certainly is improving in terms of scientific contributions. The number of research papers I read originating from India has been increasing.”

Maliakal also does not believe in astrology or sun signs and would not share his birthdate, as one could discern his sun sign and would judge him accordingly. On a lighter note, that seems a rather obstinate trait; now which sign could that be, any guesses?

Shashwat DC

Go to any part of India, and it is hard not to find a cell phone. If there is one revolution that has truly taken off in India, it is the mobile revolution. Indeed India has the fastest going mobile population in the world.So while we seem to be truly addicted to our Nokias and Motorolas, we are also completely oblivious to the challenges and the dangers it presents. The biggest challenge is data loss. I remember Swapnil Raje, a dear friend of mine, who had lost his mobile phone, was disconsolate not because of the hi-end cell but for the low end SD card that had pictures of all the wonderful places that he visits and other personal data. We could argue till doomsdays, about how and why should you back up the data on the phone, but the reality is no one really does. It is here that MOSES could come to our aid.

This is the third part of the 6 series on TR35, in this piece I wrote on Anand Raghunathan and his endeavor to make mobiles much secure. He is a proud IIT’ian and is surely making his almameter swell with pride as well.

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MOSES’ second coming

This time to make mobile devices more secure; lest you think it to be blasphemous, we are talking about Anand Raghunathan and his team at NEC Labs have invented MObile SEcurity processor System (MOSES).

From fridges that place order for fruits over the Internet, to cars that pay toll tax wirelessly or phones that perform bank transactions, computers, rather embedded chips have become an integral part of our lives in ways we can barely imagine. Little wonder the phenomenon is called as ubiquitous computing. All these chips in myriad of products have made our lives more easier and if these companies are to be believed more productive. Yet, at the same time they also make us more vulnerable. The risk is often as grave as the convenience it offers. And the risk is from the small piece of code that infringes our PC and wrecks havoc on the system, a virus.

Rich Skrenta, a programmer by vocation is credited for creating the first computer virus “to appear in the wild”. In 1982, Skrenta created “Elk Cloner” that attached itself to Apple DOS operating system. The whole thing started of from a prank and has become a problem of mammoth dimensions. Every year billions of dollars are lost due to problems caused by computer viruses and more billions are spent protecting against them. It is an ending war fought on the PC front. And now, the war could just get murkier.

Device independent viruses are an eventuality many fear and few comprehend. Increasingly, the devices we use are communicating with each other in myriad ways through means like cables, Blue-tooth or even infrared. The phone connects to the MP3 player, the player to the PC, the PC to the phone, the phone to television. With the increase in this interconnect the threat levels also grow manifold.

What if a virus infected one of the devices, it could easily spread to other connected gadgets. Till now, there have been viruses that infect PCs and there have been bugs that attack mobile phones. But with the same OS running on our PC and PDA, the chances of a debilitating virus attack on both are quite a possibility. As more and more chips are being embedded into devices, the chances are increasing that a bug in one could affect another. There has been a lot of work done by software companies to safeguard against such attacks. Somehow, things seem to be spiraling a bit out of control.

Anand Raghunathan is a scientist working with NEC-Labs (America) for the past nine years or so. He has been grappling with idea of making mobile devices more secure. Raghunathan and his team are responsible for a paradigm shift in the battle with malicious code. He has invented a supplementary processor, called as MOSES (MObile SEcurity processor System) to safeguard critical data on a mobile device. This supplementary processor refurbishes security by separating it from the rest of the procession power.

“MOSES is a flexible hardware and software solution that can be integrated into chips for mobile appliances, and used to deploy a wide range of security functions. MOSES is based on the philosophy that any effective security solution must be based on a foundation that is isolated from, and not subject to the same vulnerabilities as, the system that is to be secured,” says Raghunathan, before adding, “at the core of MOSES is a separate processor that can execute a device’s most sensitive functions in an isolated manner, rendering them secure from arbitrary software attacks including compromises of the operating system. Functions that can be executed on MOSES include cryptographic algorithms, key generation and management, and verification of the operating system, applications, and communications firmware that execute on the mobile appliance.”

For his work, Raghunathan was recently awarded the prestigious TR35 Award. It is an award given annually by MIT’s Technology Review to a selection of 35 of the world’s leading high-tech innovators under the age of 35. “I feel very fortunate to be a part of this group. I have followed the TR35 and TR100 lists in the past, and of course did not imagine that I would be selected for this honor,” says Raghunathan modestly.

The genesis of MOSES happened around six years back, when Raghunathan and the team started examining the issue, especially from the perspective of mobile appliances like cellphones and PDAs. “We observed that mobile appliances were starting to evolve from simple devices that were used to perform a single function (e.g., make telephone calls) to highly complex, networked, multi-functional devices that contain our personal data, identity, and even our purchasing power. It was clear from looking at mobile application trends that information security would be an important problem. Today, a wide range of mobile applications and services are security sensitive, including mobile commerce (shopping, bill payment, and banking), location-based services, playback of copyrighted content, connection to corporate networks, etc.,” he says.

According to estimates over 1 billion handsets will be sold in 2006 alone, many of them capable of performing mobile commerce, and communicating with nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices. Even in developing countries, mobile appliances are far more pervasive (e.g., India has six times more mobile phones than PCs), making them an attractive platform to bridge the “digital divide”. Due to their widespread use, the consequences of security attacks on mobile phones can be catastrophic.

“The first mobile phone virus, Cabir, was first discovered two years back, and has since affected thousands of users across over 20 countries. We have really seen only the tip of the iceberg in terms of software attacks on mobile phones. There is also an emerging concern that, due to technologies such as Bluetooth, viruses can hop from cell phones to other electronic systems such as automotive electronics or home appliances,” says Raghunathan. He cites the instance of certain cases, where virus has been found to jump from a mobile phone to a car system. MOSES has already made an appearance in mobile phones and could be soon found RFID tags, set-top boxes, and automotive systems.

Raghunathan holds 20 U.S. patents in the field of integrated circuit and chip design. He did his schooling in Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, and Pune and his undergraduate degree was from IIT Madras. “I feel especially proud of my association with IIT-M, and the opportunity to interact with and learn from the people I met there,” he says.

In ancient Egypt, Moses protected the Hebrews from the wrath of the Pharaohs. Moses then was a protector, and thanks to Raghunathan, still is, albeit on the small device that you tag along all day.

Shashwat DC

Sitting there in auditorium of Taj Hotel, for some brief moments I found myself transmitted to Her Majesty’s land, good ol’ England. The Oxford University had organized an event in the city, wherein you had prominent Englishman talking on everything in general and nothing in particular. I have always admired the English wit and humour, and it is with a profound sadness that I see the coming extinction of it (the Americanization of British culture). Starting from the chivalrous knights on Arthur’s round table, to profoundly sarcistic Shaw to the rather eccentric Sir Branson, Englishmen have always stood out as a race.

What impresses me the most, is the English art of subtely poking fun at every one, including themselves. So, when I saw all those English gents talking in humorous phrases, I was really enjoying myself. It was here that I bumped into Lord Chris Patten. I remember as a youngster, seeing those images on television of Hong Kong being handed over to China. The whole ceremony wherein the Union Jack was lowered and the Chinese flag was unfurled. In some ways the whole ceremony reminded me of India’s independence from Great Britain. I imagined how it would have been some 30 odd years before I was even born. Lord Patten reminded me of the immensely famous Lord Mountbatten, the last English Governor General of India. Thus in some strange ways, India does indeed connect to Lord Patten (one of the ways is through films as well, his daughter played a central character in the hit Indian movie Rang De Basanti).

At the conference, I was able to wean Lord Patten away for a few precious moments and posed a few questions. His respones were characteristically English, namely, candid and witty. The best way is to judge it yourself, so read on.

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Patten had recently come down to India for the Oxford India Business Forum and regaled the audience with his wit and humor. He refers to self as a historian and thus has a lot to share on India and its ‘spectacular’ journey so far. This is just what he did with Shashwat Chaturvedi from CyberMedia News. By the way, he also has an interesting connection with India, more appropriately Indian cinema, as his youngest daughter (Alice Patten) was the leading lady of the Bollywood hit, Range De Basanti. Excerpts.

There is a feeling among many in India has just become a low value destination for measly jobs. That it is a case of new imperialism, this time it is money instead of ammunition.

That is surely not a correct observation. Over the years, Indian economy has grown in ways that had not been imagined. Today, the nation is renowned for its IT strength. In many ways, India has become a global back office. That does not mean dealing with low value added occupations only, a lot of high value jobs are being shifted to India and being done out of India. That is something to be pleased about not to be criticized. The challenge for India, as I see it, is to develop the manufacturing, food processing and agriculture, in the same ways it has done with IT, telecommunications and so on. And there is no reason, intellectually, why India should not be just as successful in those areas, just as it has been successful in the services industry.

Isn’t shift of jobs a big concern for people in the western countries like the U.K. and the U.S. There have been so many reports of backlash and hostility on the issue. Your views.
It is much less a problem with services sector, than in manufacturing, take for instance textile. A real appalling example of protectionism in the developed countries can be found in those sectors. I believe the way we behaved when the multi-fiber agreement was stopped, was very bad. The subsidies that we gave to more expensive agricultural communities like cotton are extremely bad too. I believe if we are to promote more open trade globally then we have to be much tougher on dismantling protectionism among the developed countries

You have voiced you support to India vis-à-vis China, due to the democratic institutions in place in India. How do you think the future will pan out?
The world should want both India and China to be a success. The point I make, is that you cannot see economic and social development without making political adjustment and if you open up the economy it is increasingly difficult for you to keep an iron grip on politics. As India has a political system that increasingly incorporates what is happening economically, it is better placed. China, sooner or later, will have to change its political system in order to bring it in line with the economic development. The question is whether it can do that without sacrificing stability.

You stated that the ‘world is not flat’, what makes you say so?
There is an implication and many people who must have read that book must have taken this message that technology has made us all equals. But it hasn’t. There are terrible mountains that poor people and poor countries have to climb and I don’t think it is enough to say that information technology revolution, even though it has made problems more solvable, but haven’t actually solved them. I mentioned about traveling to the incredibly impressive Infosys campus in Bangalore on the way you notice evidence to the fact that the world is not actually flat, you see very poor people and you travel on very poor infrastructure. I think we have a very long way to go before we can truly claim that the world is really flat. And it never will be entirely, though I wish we were doing more to decrease global inequity in wealth and opportunities.

Shashwat DC

Here goes the second part of the 6 series on TR35 Winner. This time I talk about ad hoc networks , believe me it was one tough nut to crack. I earnestly thank Prithwish in helping me understand ad hoc in around an hour that we spoke. Check the article for yourself.

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Networking the ‘ad hoc’ way

Ad hoc networks are the current talk of the town with scores of companies working on the standards and applications. Pritwish Basu a scientist at BBN Technologies has won an award for his work on ad hoc networks.

Boxing day (December 26) of 2004 will be forever be etched in our memories. It was the day, when human misery hit a crescendo, a day when nature unleashed its fury on the South Asian shores of Indonesia, India, Srilanka and others. It was the day when the Tsunami stuck. While innumerable people died in the wake of the flooding waters, thousands died in the aftermath, for want of medicine and food.

There was no real paucity of medicine and food packages, what was lacking was a communication structure over which the relief process could be coordinated. But how can relief agencies communicate, when the whole infrastructure has been ripped apart? Satellite communication is quite dear (cost wise) and often unreliable in cases of far-flung locations.

An alumnus from Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi), based in the U.S., is currently working on a technology that will make all such concerns (communications without infrastructure) redundant. And, he recently received a prestigious award for his work. Pritwish Basu a scientist at BBN Technologies has developed algorithms that enable wireless devices to interconnect with each other (ad hoc networks) with very low drop rates. For his work, Basu recently awarded the prestigious TR35 Award. It is an award given annually by MIT’s Technology Review to a selection of 35 of the world’s leading high-tech innovators under the age of 35.

Thirty-one year old Basu is pretty gung-ho on being selected for this award and terms it to be a ‘pleasant surprise’. He describes ad hoc networks as wireless networks that can be set up quickly for communication between nodes and do not need any infrastructural support from satellites, cellular towers or base stations.

Ad hoc is a term borrowed from Latin and can be loosely translated as, “for this purpose only”. The term aptly describes the way the whole network is configured. Unlike a traditional network, in which, all the devices are linked to a central hub, in an ad hoc network, all the devices communicate with each other and relay data forward.

It may seem fairly similar to the Wi-Fi network that is common nowadays. Basu clarifies. “The similarity with Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11a/b/g) or WiMax is that an ad hoc network also may use similar wireless radio transceivers. However the difference is that in the case of Wi-Fi etc., there is a static base station that is established a priori and that allows wireless nodes to access the Internet; in case of ad hoc networks, there is no base station and nodes communicate directly with other nodes in their transmission (radio) range, and they can help in cooperatively forwarding packets to remote nodes that are not in direct communication range of the source node. There are several well-known ad hoc routing protocols that can perform this task,” he says.

In a way, Game theory finally makes an appearance in the ICT domain. For the past few decades, Game theory has been used as a tool for understanding the way people, communities, or nations interact with each other. Basically speaking, Game theory talks about interplay of different people, wherein each desires to maximize his benefit. All these people cooperate to a level, till such state is reached (maximum benefits for all). This is cooperation at its best. Ad hoc networks symbolize cooperation, wherein one device collaborates with another for transmitting data.

Considering the nature of these networks, military applications come naturally to mind. But as of now, defense forces use satellite communications extensively. What is the real benefit they can derive from this emerging technology? “Indeed, the military uses satellite networks for a lot of their communication needs. But the bandwidth that is available over satellite channels is usually inadequate to satisfy the communication needs of all soldiers in the armed forces. Ad hoc networks are extremely useful when the nodes are localized (within a few kms or tens of kms of each other) and have to communicate with each other. Then they can get higher data rates with lower delays,” says Basu, adding, “Also satellite signals are often inaccessible indoors and in dense foliage. Needless to say, access to a satellite communication link often costs several dollars per minute whereas ad hoc wireless links are free.”

“Ad hoc networking has forced designers to rethink different layers of the network protocol stack above the physical layer, i.e., medium access control (MAC), network (routing), transport, and application layers. The MAC and routing problems are what make ad hoc networking very different from traditional wired IP networking or even wireless cellular or Wi-Fi networks,” emphasizes Basu.

According to him, in an ad hoc network, the MAC layer has to coordinate the order in which different nodes transmit in a distributed manner because there is no luxury of a central authority like the base station for computing the transmission schedule. The routing layer too has a more difficult task. Whereas in wired IP networks, hierarchical routing is feasible because nodes have static IP addresses which can be aggregated into hierarchical sub-network addresses. This is not possible in mobile ad hoc networks since nodes could be moving around and hence it is not as easy to aggregate their addresses into subnet addresses. One mechanism of computing routes is by periodically broadcasting the status of all current neighboring links to all other nodes in the network. “A lot of research has occurred in the last decade for optimizing this process since the wireless channel is much more resource-limited than a wired network. Recently people have been rethinking even the design of physical layers to benefit ad hoc networking (e.g., techniques such as cooperative diversity),” he says.

Amazingly, ad hoc networks can play a major role in our everyday lives. For instance, Basu talks about networking parking meters that could be configured through an ad-hoc network. “One could have a transmitters on each parking meter; then you add a sensor that can tell whether there is a car in that spot. Thus if a user wants a parking slot near his building all he does is to query on the console in his car. The query is sent to the nearest parking meter, and if it isn’t empty, the request would be forwarded to the next meter till it finds a free spot, and then even reserves it, if possible,” he says. Buildings could also be networked on such sensorized mesh ad hoc networks, he says. “If it is a bit chilly, the sensors in different windows transmit a message, and they are closed automatically, thereby saving heat,” adds Basu.

“Blue tooth is the first truly ad hoc product. It can support up to 80 nodes, sadly till date it has only been used for cable or wire replacement. It is a cool application, so is Zigbee,” he says.
Battery life is one of the biggest challenges faced by the industry. “Since the devices are constantly transmitting data, the battery life could be a big issue. For that one needs to develop better protocols or dramatic gains in the battery technology is required,” Basu says.
Ironically, for a man who is at the forefront of designing new networks, could have been a doctor as he had passed a few medical entrance exams. But his love for maths scored over his interests in medicine. “I do not regret that choice,” he says. His father is a retired civil servant and mother a housewife, both currently reside in Delhi. Basu considers Boston University to be his Alma meter, where he did his MS and PhD. He has also graduated from his love for cricket to soccer and baseball and continues to visit India regularly.

In the years to come, Basu hopes to see a lot more ad hoc networks, even in India. “The potential of ad hoc networks is mind boggling. From saving lives in case of natural disasters like tsunami or earthquake, to making our lives easier and more happier. The future could be quite like the science fiction movies that we often see. We are getting closer to that future with ad hoc networks,” signs off an optimistic Basu.

Q&A
India is regarded as an IT Powerhouse, do you think, there is enough innovation happening out of India?
There is innovation happening in India in institutions like IISc but I don’t think that it is enough considering how much progress India has made in the IT sector recently. I believe this is primarily due to the lack of research funding from the Indian IT industry. The government funding is inadequate as well. There is a direct relationship between R&D funding and research/innovation output. I believe if the IT sector invests some of its profits towards fundamental and applied research (and not just proven products), then we will see several innovations happen in India. The other roadblock is the highly structured educational system in most schools and colleges. There is much more emphasis on consistency over all subjects rather than creativity or innovation.

Can ad-hoc networks make an appearance in India?
Mesh networks and sensor networks are forms of ad hoc networks that could easily make an appearance in India. Asset tracking and monitoring applications could motivate the use of sensor networks in India. The deployment challenges and business models may be slightly different though.

Shashwat DC

Every year MIT’s Technology Review comes out with an annual list of awardees, TR35. These are individuals who have broken new ground in the field they are working on be it genomics or semi-conductor and most importantly they are under 35 years of age. This list is very well respected among the scientific community, and the awardees are guaranteed their fifteen minutes of fame almost instantly.