Business

Smart-City initiative and a glimpse of Naya-Raipur

Smart-City initiative and a glimpse of Naya-Raipur

Smart city is an urban area that uses different types of electronic data collection sensors to supply information which is used to manage assets and resources efficiently. This includes data collected from citizens, devices, and assets that is processed and analyzed to monitor and manage traffic and transportation systems, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement, information systems, schools, libraries, hospitals, and other community services.

The smart city concept integrates information and communication technology(ICT), and various physical devices connected to the network to optimize the efficiency of city operations and services and connect to citizens. Smart city technology allows city officials to interact directly with both community and city infrastructure and to monitor what is happening in the city and how the city is evolving.

ICT is used to enhance quality, performance and interactivity of urban services to reduce costs, resource consumption and to increase the contacts between citizens and government. Smart city applications are developed to manage urban flows and allow for real-time responses. A smart city may therefore be more prepared to respond to challenges than one with a simple “transactional” relationship with its citizens.

According to Professor Jason Pomeroy, in addition to technology, smart cities “acknowledge and seek to preserve culture, heritage and tradition”, such as Barcelona in Spain.Yet, the term itself remains unclear to its specifics and therefore, open to many interpretations.

Due to the breadth of technologies that have been implemented under the smart city label, it is difficult to distill a precise definition of a smart city. Deakin and Al Wear.

Four factors that contribute to the definition of a smart city:

1. The application of a wide range of electronic and digital technologies to communities and cities
2. The use of ICT to transform life and working environments within the region
3. The embedding of such Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in government systems
4. The territorialisation of practices that brings ICTs and people together to enhance the innovation and knowledge that they offer.

Deakin defines the smart city as one that utilise ICT to meet the demands of the market (the citizens of the city), and that community involvement in the process is necessary for a smart city.Smart city would be a city that not only possesses ICT technology in particular areas, but has also implemented this technology in a manner that positively impacts the local community.

Characteristics

It has been suggested that a smart city use information technology to:

1. Make more efficient use of physical infrastructure through artificial intelligence and data analytics to support a strong and healthy economic, social, cultural development.
2. Engage effectively with local people in local governance and decision by the use of open innovation processes and e-participation, improving the collective intelligence of the city’s institutions through e-governance with the emphasis placed on citizen participation and co-design.
3. Learn, adapt and innovate and thereby respond more effectively and promptly to changing circumstances by improving the intelligence of the city.

They evolve towards a strong integration of all dimensions of human intelligence,collective intelligence, and also artificial intelligence within the city.The intelligence of cities “resides in the increasingly effective combination of digital-telecommunication networks(the nerves), ubiquitously embedded intelligence(the brains), sensors,tags(the sensory organs)and software(the knowledge and cognitive competence)”.

These forms of intelligence in smart cities have been demonstrated in three ways:

1. Orchestration intelligence:Where cities establish institutions and community-based problem solving and collaborations, such as in Bletchley Park, where the Nazi Enigma cypher was decoded by a team led by Alan Turing. This has been referred to as the first example of a smart city or an intelligent community.
2. Empowerment intelligence: Cities provide open platforms, experimental facilities and smart city infrastructure in order to cluster innovation in certain districts. These are seen in the Kista Science City in Stockholm and the Cyberport Zone in Hong Kong. Similar facilities have also been established in Melbourne.
3. Instrumentation intelligence: Where city infrastructure is made smart through real-time data collection, with analysis and predictive modelling across city districts. There is much controversy surrounding this, particularly with regards to surveillance issues in smart cities. Examples of Instrumentation intelligence have been implemented in Amsterdam.This is implemented through:
   1. A common IP infrastructure that is open to researchers to develop applications.
   2. Wireless meters and devices transmit information at the point in time.
   3. A number of homes being provided with smart energy meter to become aware of energy consumption and reduce energy usage
   4. Solar power garbage compactors,car recharging stations and energy saving lamps.

Smart-City(Naya-Raipur)

Among the many successful policies and development projects, one of the most ambitious ventures by the state government is Naya Raipur, Chhattisgarh’s new capital city, which was recognized as worlds first ever integrated township in January 2017.

Environmental issues are considered to be a global concern today, and much remains to be done for effective conservation. In Naya Raipur, 27% of the land is solely devoted to greenery and the regions environmental policies make it the first Greenfield Smart City in India.

Smooth and safe cycling lanes are constructed throughout the city, promoting the use of non-motorized transport systems. Apart from minimizing air pollution, steps have been taken to conserve water, and every building in Raipur will have effective and compulsory rainwater harvesting systems. The NRDA is maintaining 55 reservoirs in the region, including three lakes.

Public buildings should not only have this system but should be erected on the basis of green building concept. Green buildings use less water, optimize energy efficiency, conserve natural resources, generate less waste and have minimum impact on environment. The offices of NRDA and Housing Board Corporation are examples of such buildings, and a visit to the NRDA shows the building sparkling with sunlight.

In a bid to offer wholesome recreation for local residents, an amusement park is currently being built in sector 24 alongside Jhanjh Lake for water sports facilities. A club house in Sector 24 will offer fitness, lounge, theatre and other amenities while the Immersive Dome Theatre, streaming five-dimensional movies, is already entertaining Raipurians. Ekatm Path, a 2.2 km boulevard is a paradise for morning walkers, and reminiscent of Raj Path in New Delhi.

Purkhauti Muktangan, the cultural village showcasing the rich cultural heritage is a popular spot in the city. Recently, PM Narendra Modi inaugurated the Botanical Garden in Naya Raipur, and the Jungle Safari held as Asias largest man-made forest safari.

In its smart city initiative, NRDA is conducting an online citizen survey, seeking priorities, demands and innovative suggestions from people. This is the first time a newly developing town plan is being prepared with public involvement.

In any civilization the quality of life is dependent on housing and residential amenities. As per an NRDA plan, 21 sectors are reserved for residential premises in the city of which three sectors are built by state housing board corporation. These three sectors are habitable with 5100 units already constructed.

Virtual Reality Box

Virtual Reality Box-

A virtual reality headset is a head-mounted device that provides virtual reality for the wearer. VR headsets are widely used with computer games but they are also used in other applications, including simulators and trainers. They comprise a stereoscopic head-mounted display (providing separate images for each eye), stereo sound, and head motion tracking sensors (which may include gyroscopes, accelerometers, structured light systems, etc.). Some VR headsets also have eye tracking sensors and gaming controllers.

Because virtual reality headsets stretch a single display across a wide field of view (up to 110 for some devices according to manufacturers), the magnification factor makes flaws in display technology much more apparent. One issue is the so-called screen-door effect, where the gaps between rows and columns of pixels become visible, kind of like looking through a screen door. This was especially noticeable in earlier prototypes and development kits, which had lower resolutions than the retail versions.

The lenses of the headset are responsible for mapping the up-close display to a wide field of view, while also providing a more comfortable distant point of focus. One challenge with this is providing consistency of focus: because eyes are free to turn within the headset, it’s important to avoid having to refocus to prevent eye strain.

Virtual reality headsets are being currently used as a means to train medical students for surgery. It allows them to perform essential procedures in a virtual, controlled environment. Students perform surgeries on virtual patients, which allows them to acquire the skills needed to perform surgeries on real patients. It also allows the students to revisit the surgeries from the perspective of the lead surgeon.
Traditionally, students had to participate in surgeries and often they would miss essential parts. Now, with the use of VR headsets, students can watch surgical procedures from the perspective of the lead surgeon without missing essential parts. Students can also pause, rewind, and fast forward surgeries. They also can perfect their techniques in a real-time simulation in a risk free environment.
Latency requirements
Virtual reality headsets have significantly higher requirements for latency the time it takes from a change in input to have a visual effect than ordinary video games. If the system is too sluggish to react to head movement, then it can cause the user to experience virtual reality sickness, a kind of motion sickness. According to a Valve engineer, the ideal latency would be 7-15 milliseconds. A major component of this latency is the refresh rate of the display, which has driven the adoption of displays with a refresh rate from 90 Hz (Oculus Rift and HTC Vive) to 120 Hz (PlayStation VR).
The graphics processing unit (GPU) also needs to be more powerful to render frames more frequently. Oculus cited the limited processing power of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 as the reason why they are targeting the PC gaming market with their first devices.

Asynchronous reprojection /time warp
A common way to reduce the perceived latency or compensate for a lower frame rate, is to take an (older) rendered frame and morph it according to the most recent head tracking data just before presenting the image on the screens. This is called asynchronous reprojection or “asynchronous time warp” in Oculus jargon.

PlayStation VR synthesizes “in-between frames” in such manner, so games that render at 60 fps natively result in 120 updates per second. SteamVR (HTC Vive) will also use “interleaved reprojection” for games that cannot keep up with its 90 Hz refresh rate, dropping down to 45 fps.

The simplest technique is applying only projection transformation to the images for each eye (simulating rotation of the eye). The downsides are that this approach cannot take into account the translation (changes in position) of the head. And the rotation can only happen around the axis of the eyeball, instead of the neck, which is the true axis for head rotation. When applied multiple times to a single frame, this causes “positional judder”, because position is not updated with every frame.

A more complex technique is positional time warp, which uses pixel depth information from the Z-buffer to morph the scene into a different perspective. This produces other artifacts because it has no information about faces that are hidden due to occlusion and cannot compensate for position-dependent effects like reflectons and specular lighting. While it gets rid of the positional judder, judder still presents itself in animations, as timewarped frames are effectively frozen.

WHAT IS AUGMENTED REALITY

Augmented Reality was first achieved, to some extent, by a cinematographer called Morton Heilig in 1957. He invented the Sensorama which delivered visuals, sounds, vibration and smell to the viewer. Of course, it wasnt computer controlled but it was the first example of an attempt at adding additional data to an experience. Wikipedia describes?Augmented Reality ?as a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are Augmented” by computer-generated or extracted real-world sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.

Augmented reality is actually in simple words can be explained as adding some content in the real world which is actually not present there. Augmented reality is actually creating or adding a virtual world/ things over a real world. It brings 3D content to your eyes in the real world by using any medium like phone camera or web cams.

The first properly functioning AR system was probably the one developed at USAF Armstrongs Research Lab by Louis Rosenberg in 1992. This was called Virtual Fixtures and was an incredibly complex robotic system which was designed to compensate for the lack of high-speed 3D graphics processing power in the early 90s. It enabled the overlay of sensory information on a workspace to improve human productivity.

The best and most relevant example of app popularly known as Pokmon Go. Those who have played that that game knows what that game is. That game is actually creates virtual characters augmented in the actual world. The basic concept of that game is to catch pokmon as you open the app you see a different world in the same world. It just takes the real world as a base and shows augmented /virtual reality effects.

There are some popular apps other than Pokmon go if you want to take some good experience of virtual reality

1. Ink hunter
2. Augment
3. Holo
4. Sun Seeker
5. Aurasma
6. Quiver

Use of augmented reality can be done in different fields of study and practical use as:

1. Education

AR would also be a way for parents and teachers to achieve their goals for modern education, which might include providing a more individualized and flexible learning, making closer connections between what is taught at school and the real world, and helping students to become more engaged in their own learning.

2. Medical

AR provides surgeons with patient monitoring data in the style of a fighter pilot’s heads-up display, and allows patient imaging records, including functional videos, to be accessed and overlaid.

3. Military

In combat, AR can serve as a networked communication system that renders useful battlefield data onto a soldier’s goggles in real time. Virtual maps and 360 view camera imaging can also be rendered to aid a soldier’s navigation and battlefield perspective, and this can be transmitted to military leaders at a remote command center from the soldier’s viewpoint, people and various objects can be marked with special indicators to warn of potential dangers.

4. Video Games

A number of games were developed like Pokmon go and others. The gaming industry embraced AR technology in the best way possible for normal people.

And Much more

Future of Augmented?Reality

Experts predict the AR market could be worth 122 billion by 2024. So this report by BBC tells us that augmented reality has very big market as the development goes on and on.

Laravel – best PHP framework

Laravel is one of the highly used, open-source modern web application frameworks that designs customized web applications quickly and easily.

Developers prefer Laravel over to other frameworks because of the performance, features, scalability it provides. It follows Model View Controller (MVC) which makes it more useful than PHP. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions and caching. It has a unique architecture, where it is possible for developers to create their own infrastructure that is specifically designed for their application. Laravel is used not only for the large projects but also best to use for the small project.

Laravels first beta release was made available on June 9, 2011, followed by the Laravel 1 release later in the same month.

Features of Laravel:

1. Modularity: Modularity is defined as the degree to which a systems components get separated and then recombines. You split the business logic into different parts, which belongs together.
2. Authentication: Authentication is the most important part of any web application and developers spent enormous time writing the authentication code which has become simpler with the update in Laravel 5.
3. Application Logic: It can be implemented within any application either using controllers or directly into route declarations using syntax similar to the Sinatra framework. Laravel is designed with privileges giving a developer the flexibility that they need to create everything from very small sites to massive enterprise applications.
4. Caching: Caching is a temporary data storage used to store data for a while and can be retrieved quickly. It is often used to reduce the times we need to access database or other remote services. It can be a wonderful tool to keep your application fast and responsive.
5. Method or Dependency Injection: In Laravel Inversion of control (IoC) container is a powerful tool for managing class dependencies. Dependency injection is a method of removing hard-coded class dependencies. Laravels IoC container is one of the most used Laravel features.
6. Routing: With Laravel, we can easily approach to routing. The route can be triggered in the application with good flexibility and control to match the URL.
7. Restful Controllers: Restful controllers provide an optional way for separating the logic behind serving HTTP GET and POST requests.
8. Testing & Debugging: Laravel is built with testing in mind, in Fact, support for testing with PHPUnit is included out of the box.
9. Automatic Pagination: Simplifies the task of implementing pagination, replacing the usual manual implementation approaches with automated methods integrated into Laravel.
10. Template Engine: Blade is a simple, yet powerful templating engine provided with Laravel. Unlike controller layouts, Blade is driven by template inheritance and sections.
11. Database Query Builder: Laravels database query builder provides a convenient, fluent interface to creating and running database queries.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)

Multi-factor authentication(MFA)

Multi-factor authentication is a method of computer access control in which user granted access only after successfully presenting several separate pieces of evidence for authentication mechanism- typically at least two of the following categories: knowledge(something they know), possession(something they have), and inherence(something they are).

Two-factor authentication

It is a combination of two different components.
Two-factor authentication is a type of multi-factor authentication.

A good example from everyday life is the withdrawing of money from an ATM; only the correct combination of the bank card (something that the user possesses) and a PIN (personal identification number, something that the user knows) allows the transaction to be carried out.

The authentication factors of a multi-factor authentication scheme may include:

• Some physical object in the possession of the user, such as a USB stick with a secret token, a bank card, a key, etc.
• Some secret known to the user, such as a password, PIN,TAN, etc.
• Some physical characteristic of the user (biometrics), such as a fingerprint, eye iris, voice, typing speed, pattern in key press intervals, etc.

Knowledge factors

Knowledge factors are the most commonly used form of authentication. In this form, the user is required to prove knowledge of a secret in order to authenticate.

A password is a secret word or string of characters that is used for user authentication. This is the most commonly used mechanism of authentication. Many multi-factor authentication techniques rely on password as one factor of authentication.Variations include both longer ones formed from multiple words (a passphrase) and the shorter, purely numeric ,personal identification number (PIN) commonly used for ATM?access. Traditionally, passwords are expected to be memorized.

Possession factors

Possession factors (“something only the user has”) have been used for authentication for centuries, in the form of a key to a lock. The basic principle is that the key embodies a secret which is shared between the lock and the key, and the same principle underlies possession factor authentication in computer systems. A security token is an example of a possession factor.

Disconnected tokens

Disconnected tokens have no connections to the client computer. They typically use a built-in screen to display the generated authentication data, which is manually typed in by the user.

Connected tokens

Connected tokens are devices that are physically connected to the computer to be used. Those devices transmit data automatically.There are a number of different types, including card readers, wireless tags and USB tokens.

Inherence factors

These are factors associated with the user, and are usually bio-metric methods, including fingerprint readers, retina scanners or voice recognition.

On-screen fingerprint sensor

First on-screen fingerprint sensor –

The world’s first phone with a fingerprint scanner built into the display was as awesome as I hoped it would be.

There’s no home button breaking up your screen space, and no fumbling for a reader on the phone’s back. I simply pressed my index finger on the phone screen in the place where the home button would be. The screen registered my digit, then spun up a spiderweb of blue light in a pattern that instantly brings computer circuits to mind. I was in.

Such a simple, elegant harbinger of things to come: a home button that appears only when you need it and then gets out of the way.

How in-display fingerprint readers work

In fact, the fingerprint sensor — made by sensor company Synaptics — lives beneath the 6-inch OLED display. That’s the “screen” you’re actually looking at beneath the cover glass.

When your fingertip hits the target, the sensor array turns on the display to light your finger, and only your finger. The image of your print makes its way to an optical image sensor beneath the display.

It’s then run through an AI processor that’s trained to recognize 300 different characteristics of your digit, like how close the ridges of your fingers are. It’s a different kind of technology than what most readers use in today’s phones.

Because the new technology costs more to make, it’ll hit premium phones first before eventually making its way down the spectrum as the parts become more plentiful and cheaper to make.

Vivo’s phone is the first one we’ve gotten to see with the tech in real life.

Vivo’s been working on putting a fingerprint sensor underneath the screen for the last couple of years, and now it’s finally made one that’s ready for production.

The company had already announced last year it had developed the “in-display fingerprint scanning” technology for a prototype phone. That version used an ultra-sonic sensor and was created with support from Qualcomm.

The new version of the finger-scanning tech is optical-based and was developed with Synaptics. In a nutshell, how the technology works is the phone’s OLED display panel emits light to illuminate your fingerprint. Your lit-up fingerprint is then reflected into an in-display fingerprint sensor and authenticated.

It’s really nerdy stuff? all you really need to know is that phones with fingerprint sensors on the front are back again. And this time, without thick bezels above and below the screen.

Should e-sports come to Olympics ?

Should e-sports come to Olympics ?

For those who have been spending hours or rather wasting hours sitting in front of a screen all day and explaining the world how e-sports will make them famous one day are definitely in for a disappointment. That being said, let us also acknowledge that people are earning in the world of e-sports and if reports are to be believed e-sports earnings are at an all time high. Twelve of the e-sports are paying as much as $1 million as prize amount. This makes us wonder if e-sports should already be welcomed into Olympics. It was being speculated for quite some time that the growth of e-sports would make it go all the way to Olympics sooner than later. However, recently International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach suggested otherwise and received huge rebuke from video game fanatics all over the world.

A career already

E-sports are already becoming a prime time profession, with lead players of the most popular games earning tons of money. These sports are also gaining massive support as well as sponsorship by top companies like BMW. It is evident that youth is and will be attracted to it. Why not make it official already by introducing it in Olympics?

Physical fitness

Apart from the fact that the spirit of Olympics have always been about physical strength, mortar reflexes and fitness, it is worth noting that e-sports makes a person extremely lazy, in most cases obese and sometimes causes injury to hands and fingers of those who play them for prolonged period of time. This is absolutely against the spirit of Olympics.

More viewers

More viewers and more sponsorship would be attracted to Olympics if e-sports could be given a place. It would eventually lead to better prize money to athletes.

Violence

Even if e-sports would make it to Olympics, fans would be disappointed as the most popularly played video games would not be played. They are always violent, including explosions and killing.
It would be better if e-sports would rather have a separate event of their own like e-Olympics instead of mixing it up with the existing culture of sports at Olympics.

PRATYUSH

On Monday 08-01-18,
India unveiled its fastest supercomputer ‘Pratyush’ which is an array of computers that can deliver a peak power of 6.8 petaflops. One petaflop is a million billion floating point operations per second and is a reflection of the computing capacity of a system.
According to reports of Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pratyush is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world which is designed for weather and climate research. It will also upgrade an Indian supercomputer from the 300s to the 30s in the Top500 list, a respected international tracker of the worlds fastest supercomputers.
The government had sanctioned last year 400 crore in order to put in place a 10-petaflop machine. The main functionality of this supercomputer would be monsoon forecasting with the help of a dynamic model. This requires simulating the weather for a given month and letting a custom-built model calculate how the actual weather will play out over June, July, August, and September. This new system would provide wings to the technology and it would be possible to map regions in India at a resolution of 3 km and the globe at 12 km.
The machines will be installed at two government institutes: 4.0 petaflops HPC facility at IITM, Pune; and 2.8 petaflops facility at the National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast, Noida.
The sole purpose of installing such a high-capacity supercomputer in India is to accelerate the weather forecasting in the country, primarily before the arrival of Monsoon season in India. In addition, Pratyush will monitor the onset of other natural calamities such as floods and Tsunami in the country. As a matter of fact, farmers will get a big relief as the unprecedented rainy season in India often results in a bad annual crop production.
This increase in supercomputing power will go a long way in delivering various societal applications committed by MoES. This will also give a fillip to research activities not only in MoES but also in other academic institutions working on various problems related to Earth Sciences, said IITM in its release.

INDIA’S OTHER SUPERCOMPUTERSWith Pratyush, India makes its way into the list of top 30 supercomputers in the world. As of June 2017, following systems of India were on the list of top 500 supercomputing systems:

• SahasraT (SERC – Cray XC40) installed at Indian Institute of Science (ranked 165)
• Aaditya (iDataPlex DX360M4) installed at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (ranked 260)
• TIFR – Cray XC30 installed at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (ranked 355)
• HP Apollo 6000 Xl230/250 installed at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (ranked 391)