Author: Satyen K Bordoloi

Artificial Intelligence has become so ubiquitous that it has become indispensable even on the cricket field , writes Satyen K. Bordoloi As fan hysteria reached a fever-pitch during the epic India-Pakistan cricket match yesterday, #Hotstar trended on Twitter. With the match poised to be one of the closest finishes between the arch-rivals, viewership counts on the official digital broadcaster reached 1.3 crore. Folks marvelled at the technology used to achieve this. #Hotstar began trending yesterday and fans quickly started sharing screenshots with 1.3cr on top right of their screens But cricket fans need not have taken screenshots of the 13…

The opportunities for the tech sector are manifold as India steps up the use of Artificial Intelligence in its armed forces but we must also be wary of potential misuse, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi An infiltrator trained in a neighboring country reaches the border to re-enter India and finds no sentry. Just barb wires and cameras stuck on poles. He quietly cuts the wires and reaches his usual rendezvous point only to be welcomed by a large posse of army men. The infiltrator wonders who tipped the forces because he hadn’t informed anyone of his plans. What he does not…

The Internet of Things has turned the world into a chip-hungry monster writes Satyen K. Bordoloi on, what is kind of, its 40th anniversary In 1982, students and faculty at the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) faced a peculiar irritation. After their department was expanded, offices moved away from a coke vending machine popular with caffeine-addict programmers. Now they had to walk three floors down to get a coke, often to find it empty or worse: pay and get warm coke. A few of them got together, installed micro-switches to “sense how many bottles were present in…

The world is pouring trillions into semiconductors, and although the Indian government is doing its bit, we are far behind, opines Satyen K. Bordoloi as he outlines the ways to catch up At the end of July, something unprecedented happened in the US Senate divided among partisan lines where Republicans and Democrats almost never cooperate. The opposing parties got together to vote on a bill that will pour $52 billion into domestic manufacturing of semiconductors. It seems tiny chips are powerful enough to unite big, warring factions. But this isn’t just restricted to the US. China is pouring $1.4 trillion…

There are a myriad amazing thing about the recent discovery of over 200 million protein structures by Google’s AI AlphaFold, says Satyen K. Bordoloi even as he evaluates its world-changing impact Protein is the very essence of life. All life on Earth is because of the elusive nature of how proteins fold. If proteins did not fold into 3D structures, you wouldn’t have all these complex biological manifestations that constitute all life on this planet. Even if we look at our individual lives, everything – from your ability to walk or talk, dexterity or proprioception, is dependent on protein folds.…

Every modern surveillance system uses artificial intelligence. This can be both harmful and useful states Satyen K. Bordoloi as he tries to figure out how to keep it in check George Orwell got it right that everyone in the future will be under surveillance. He was just wrong about how. In his dystopian novel 1984, feeds from every camera-TV in every home in the country is being watched in a windowless room by humans. Instead, this is how it actually works today. Most people, on their own accord, post nearly everything they do on social media. The few things they…

Satyen K. Bordoloi builds a case for India to develop autonomous vehicle technology to benefit 83 per cent of the world Two American TV series were popular with kids who grew up in the pre-cable TV 1980s India: Street Hawk and Knight Rider. Both – one a bike, the other a car – involved self-driving vehicles that fought and prevented crime. I remember dad making a joke about why Knight Rider can never be set in India: stuck in traffic they’d reach only after the crime was done. As self-driving vehicles – from cars, trucks, and drones to ships come…

While we were busy with Artificial Intelligence, CRISPR or Artificial Gene Editing, quietly threatens to irrevocably transform our physical world, writes Satyen K. Bordoloi When the history of our present is written 50 or 100 years from now: two things will stand out. First being how great strides in gene editing technology with its potential to transform the physical world were happening at the same time as the developments in the digital space. Secondly how the general public was hyper about one but almost entirely ignorant of the other. Maybe the reason is terminology. Artificial Intelligence or AI, seems such…

After crying while looking at its first photos released by NASA, Satyen K. Bordoloi pens a love letter to what itself is a paean to human ingenuity and imagination – the James Webb Space Telescope Dear James Webb Space Telescope, When NASA released the first images it reconstructed from your data on July 12, the meme-makers went on overdrive. Images comparing the clarity of your image next to Hubble’s, made the rounds. A joke crept up in my mind as well: at $10 billion you were the most expensive camera upgrade ever. https://twitter.com/panini_singam/status/1546633068252995590 https://twitter.com/minskycharlotte/status/1547010999890640896 Perhaps the most famous meme of…

How does the mind-brain problem apply to the domain of artificial intelligence? Satyen K. Bordoloi finds out Scientists in China have breached another scientific milestone with regard to the physical infrastructure of Artificial Intelligence. A South China Morning Post article reported that Chinese scientists have been able to run an artificial intelligence model as sophisticated as the human brain on their most powerful supercomputer, the Sunway. The team used the Sunway machine to train an AI model called bangualu (alchemist’s pot) with 174 trillion parameters which are more than the number of synapses believed to be in the brain. This…