MIT Computer Users Group MIT Computer Users Group

Letter from the editors

Featuring It’s time Internet of things

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MCUG news MCUG on the run MCUG in action

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Innovations Project-X Kinect

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Amazing ventures Some say it’s impossible, we say it’s fizzible

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TechStuff Awesome intelligence Programming languages unveiled Neuromorphic Microchips

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Teknothon,2K14 schedule 17

Inside this issue

MIT Computer Users Group

Letter from the editors

Dear readers, We are delighted to bring to you the 8th issue of the MIT Computer Users Group Newsletter! We would like to begin by extending our immense gratitude to our HoD Prof. V.Y. Kulkarni Ma’am for her guidance and support in making this newsletter. Also kudos to the newsletter team for their hard work and dedication. The work wouldn’t have been so great without your inputs! Continuing the trend of articles featuring the latest trending technologies, the current issue also highlights some remarkable work by the MCUG team, amazing ventures by students of MIT as well as innovative project ideas by some of our MIT alumnus. Our aim is to bring forth such mar-velous initiatives and innovations and thereby provide our fellow students with food for thought about not only cutting edge technologies, but out of the box thinking too! Here’s hoping this issue lives up to the MCUG tagline “Sharing knowledge, Bridging gaps” Let’s come together and make this newsletter an iconic platform for revolutionary ideas and IT break-throughs! Thanks and Regards, Swetha Tatavarthy and Prashant Kumar, Editors, MCUG Newsletter. Articles Contributed by: Swetha Tatavarthy Prashant Kumar Singh Anees RG Varun Patni Nivedita Patil Yogesh Challawar Madhusudhan Saha Shahbazz Patel Rubal Jabbal

MIT Computer Users Group

It’s time!

Well, well it’s time to keep that Rolex, that Tommy and that Raga aside. It’s time for a watch that does more than just tell you the time. The cutting edge Apple iWatch has been unveiled! Apple’s most awaited and very first wearable smart gear is soon going to be the next ‘big thing’. After a year and a half of buzz about the next revolutionary wearable gizmo to be launched, here it comes. Let’s cut to the chase. What is it? An iOS-friendly watch that plays nice with your iPhone (probably) What will it cost? Around 400$. What are the features? It will come outfitted with a whopping eight gigabytes of storage with its yet-unknown processor thought to pack in 512 MB of RAM (of the LPDDR3-Low Power DDR3 variety), like the iPhone 4/4s. It’ll tell you the time! The wearable technology is an "extremely precise and customizable timepiece”. It’ll keep your health in check The iWatch's standout feature is believed to be a fairly robust set of health-tracking sensors. It's not known exactly what it'll be able to track, however, and a lot of potential sensor options have been thrown out there. Currently on the list of potential things that it might track: heart-rate, blood sugar, blood pressure, air pressure, altitude, temperature, weather, ultraviolet light exposure, calories, steps, sleep. Some of those seem a lot more likely than others, but it's worth remembering that Apple ap-pears to hope that this device will be able to serve some basic medical functions. It's even been seen meeting with the FDA to talk about health.

It'll be an extension of your iPhone The iWatch is probably running iOS, but it won't be able to do everything your phone can on its own. Reports suggest that the iWatch will need to be paired with an iPhone in order to send text mes-sages or place phone calls. That's potentially a good thing, though, as it means that you likely won't need to pay for a separate service plan for the watch. Presumably, the watch will display notifica-

tions, allow you to perform basic phone functions, and even have apps.

It'll be able to do a lot wirelessly, including pay for things With something this small, you can't be bothered with cords. It's expected that the iWatch will take advantage of wireless charging, and — naturally — it'll do its pairing with your iPhone wirelessly too. The really big wireless feature, though, is NFC. NFC is a type of short-range, wireless commu-nication that can let a device do a whole host of things. And, most importantly, it's able to communi-cate fairly securely because of how short its communication range is.

Innovations Featuring

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Apple is supposed to be unveiling a mobile payments service alongside the iWatch, and the watch will be able to hook into that thanks to NFC. Just by tapping the watch on a compatible receiver when you're checking out at a store, you'll be able to pay a bill using your credit card — all without taking out your wallet.

Specifications:

Sizes: 38mm Stainless Steel Case with Brown Modern

Buckle. 42mm Silver Aluminum Case with Blue Sport

Band. Screen-Flexible, anti-reflective, scratch resistant and well protected. It's going to embedded with OLED technology. OLED's are often known for their over-saturated colors, but they have some important advantages. Namely, individual pix-els can be turned on and off as needed. That means that a watch might be able to display some basic information (like the time or a notification) while leaving the rest of its display blank. If that's how Apple chooses to use it, it could mean big battery savings. iWatch apps

The iWatch already comes with two workout apps dedicated to workouts. The app will allow

users to set goals, chart progress and even earn awards. The iWatch also measures three as-

pects of movement: Standing, moving, and exercising. The iWatch will have Siri and GPS fea-

tures. It will also be able to detect pulse rate with infrared, visible LEDs and photo sensors.

This will allow users to track their heart rate. The iWatch has an "accelerometer" that helps

measure body movement and can help to turn the device into a highly advanced sports watch

with an all-day fitness tracker. Companies that have already built their Apple Watch apps in-

clude BMW and Pinterest.

There are still some big questions remaining and there's a whole lot that we still don't know

about the iWatch, but here are a few points that stick out to us. How waterproof will it be?

Will it have any buttons? Will it let you control smart home devices? Will it be designed like a

fashion accessory or a tech accessory? Will it actually be called the iWatch? How long will its

battery last for?!!

The bad news, however is that you won't be able to buy it until next year. Well, everybody’s

looking forward to how the iWatch will change times!

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INTERNET OF THINGS

The Internet of Things, also called The Internet of Objects, refers to a wireless network between ob-jects, usually the network will be wireless and self-configuring, such as household appliances. The term "Internet of Things" has come to describe a number of technologies and research disciplines that enable the Internet to reach out into the real world of physical objects.

According to a report, by embedding the short-range mobile transceivers into a wide array of addition-

al gadgets and everyday items we enable new forms of communication between people and things,

and between things themselves. In this way a new dimension has been added to the world of infor-

mation and communication technologies (ICTs): from anytime, any place connectivity for anyone, we

will now have connectivity for anything (refer fig.1)

The benefits Internet of things has to offer:

Dynamic control of industry and daily life Improve the resource utilization ratio Better relationship between human and nature Forming an intellectual entity by integrating human society and physical systems

The inforgraphic on the next page will make you understand the things better:

Fig.1- A New Dimension

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Internet Of Things

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MCUG on the run!!

The best place to go the with all your doubts and worries, whether it is that frustrating in-ternet connection, a pen drive problem or even that mini project you are stuck up with! An open website for all MITians as well as Non-MITans (including teachers).

.

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MCUG in action!

To be an Engineering student and know the ins and outs of a computer is something that should come innately. As such it was a privilege for MIT Computers Users Group to have been in-vited by Shraddha Oza Ma'am to take a hands-on PC Assembly workshop at Army Institute of Tech-nology.

Conducted by a group of 6 students from MIT, Ankit Jain, Vyas Bhagwat, Anupam Alur, Prashant Kumar, Manoj Sakhala and Prasad Saindane the workshop was arranged at AIT, on the 12thJuly, 2014. The workshop comprised of two parts, first an interactive session and second the hands on workshop.

The session began with a presentation which included topics like booting process, processor evolu-tion, ROM, Ports & Connectors, and BIOS/UEFI giving the students an idea about the working of the motherboard. Following which the hands on workshop PC Assembly was conducted.

In the workshop, a crowd of around 80 enthusiastic Third Year E&TC students participated and the students had the opportunity to explore, assemble and disassemble a PC from scratch. The workshop

was a huge success and the students were able to learn a lot. The students successfully disassembled

and assembled the PC and most importantly the PCs worked!

On eBay, there is an average of $680 worth of transactions every second.

Ninety-one percent of all adults have their mobile phone within arm’s reach every hour of every day.

There are 6.8 billion people on the planet and 4 billion of them use a mobile phone. Only 3.5 billion of them use a toothbrush.

Every minute, 100 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube by individual users.

The first mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1963; it consisted of a hard wooden shell and two clunky metal wheels.

Google handles an estimated 1 billion search queries each and every day, releasing almost 200 tons of CO2 per day.

Did You know??

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Innovations

PROJECT X An idea can change the world they say! And ideas like Project X sure show one easy way to do that. For years, project innovations and ideas have blossomed. But, the idea of using the available re-sources of the college in a prolific manner, however, is infrequent. One of our alumni, Swapnil Bhoite came up with one such brilliant abstract idea of using the networking facilities of MIT, for better and widespread communication between the faculty, students and all related bodies. Named “Project X”, this project will be a portal which can be accessed by students, teachers or anyone within campus or on your phone or at home enhancing the huge underlying network of the college. The idea inspired from the expanding social

networking sites is proposed to be highly

interactive and user friendly to make it usable for

easy and swift communication. Not only will it

broaden the entire network but enable easy data

sharing between teachers and students.

The basic working plan: There are basically two servers. One for local data sharing while the other is used to make data available outside the campus. The block diagram is as shown:

LOCAL SERVER sync WEB SERVER

CLIENT

In college Outside college

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Requirements Two 24*7 available servers (computer machine).

High storage capacity.

Programming language knowledge of Java, PHP, HTML, MySQL.

Salient Features: It enables you to share your own files or assignments on the server. Teachers can check the valid-

ity of the document and suggest corrections. Teachers can also pass on any study material to stu-dents via this network.

Transfer of information like an extra lecture or any seminar can be conveyed and event infor-mation between students can also be entertained.

It can also act as a notice board for all departments and inter-department notices can also be con-veyed.

Teachers will get an additional feature to take the attendance on their mobile devices and update the record on the go. The updated record would be viewable to students and hence a proper rec-ord can be maintained daily.

The portal can also be used to display result and many other networking facilities.

Home Automation System using Kinect

In the year 2013 three of our MIT alumnus, Siraj Memon, Mrinal Kumar and Aniket Zodpey trans-

formed an innovative idea into reality. In association with Amdocs Lab, they used Kinect, a motion

sensing device by Microsoft to build a Home Automation System. Sounds amazing right! To do a

project and have it manage your home, who wouldn’t want that?!

What is Kinect? Kinect is a motion sensing device, a product of Microsoft originally released for Xbox-360. This de-vice is used mainly for gaming purposes.

Working All the devices will be connected to a central controlling system. Central controlling system will be connected to KINECT & collect information from the sensors. This information will come in the form of gestures. This information will be processed & modeled in the desired format. Based on the gathered information, commands will be sent to devices for their operations. The system provides the following features: Automatic control by locating position of human. Voice command override. Remote access of the devices from geographically separated location.

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The Design of Kinect

Basic functionality:

Various benefits of Kinect include: Better control over an automated home. Remote access of the complete system. Users having KINECT will be able to use the system without additional hardware. Flexibility to control the automated home. In other words, it will make life easy and will also help Microsoft to tap a new market for Kinect. All the more reason to make it an award winning project!!

MIT Computer Users Group

Amazing ventures

Some said it’s impossible, we said it’s FIZZIBLE

Steve Jobs once said, "Let ideas not just dwell in your mind, make them play in front of you". Drawing in-spiration from one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, a group of 4 students from MIT, Pratik Magar, Prasad Saindane, Ishan Shahade and Vishal came up with a revolutionary idea of an online electronic store, a startup effort by students. An e-store where you can avail all trending electronic products at a cheap price and at the same time gain technical guidance and support too. This site was called Fizzible. Fizzible started in December 2013 with the objective of making things easier for engineering and research enthusiasts. In the initial stages, fizzible started their remarkable journey with just 2 colleges. Mid 2014 was the time when fizzible scaled heights to cover Pune's 52 engineering colleges. Till date they have covered 400+ successful orders! In just 6 months of their tenure they were able to guide 3 startups FizzDental, GRE counseling center, e-toppers online to set up their ideas. When asked about how it all started, Pratik said,” We wanted to create a system where people come with ideas and start implementing them. A lot of obstacles are faced by entrepreneurs in their college life. Our aim is to show that it is FIZZIBLE! Entrepreneurship should be fun!” Back in march 2014 fizzible was able to grab 92 teams participating in Robocon 2014. They were highlighted in 6 different college annual events. With 6 people working full time we have more than 30+ campus ambassadors who thrive to make the business a success. After strengthening their e-Commerce line, the founders of fizzible shifted their focus to also do-

ing innovating things at the college level, the target crowd in the first place. With an idea of pre-

senting stories of people who had achieved great things at a young age, they approached the col-

lege magazine team who was keen on content generation. This is how FizzStory was born.

They devised a strategy to take traditional high cost workshops at the least possible cost with the

help of fourth year students. This not only provided opportunities to enthusiastic students to take seminars and conduct sessions but also helped in providing employment to a large number of stu-

dents. Apart from that, they also took initiative in providing different forms of internships.

So far they have an impressive count of 30+ interns working on different lines to enhance and fame fizzible!

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After starting FizzInternships many people were able to make electronic products helpful to society like making gardening easy with arduino. Not only that they are also in the pipeline of launching their own product lines like Fizzduino. Prasad claims, “During the surveys we were able to realise exactly where these local shopkeepers lagged. We are trying not to be a local vendor. What they lack is reachability. We have the site and that is our greatest asset. This business is completely different from clothing, food etc. here people need technical guidance with every single product. We are also in the process of starting a project, FizzWOW project wherein we’ll give Do It Yourself (DIY) kits to students living in slum areas.” Amazing right?!! Overcoming obstacles like supply chain management and keeping things in stock, emerged as a huge

success and serves to be an ideal example to what students can do even when they are still studying.

Down the line in 3 years, fizzible aims at grabbing markets of 20 states of India. Currently the list

goes for FizzStore, FizzED, FizzStory, FizzInternship, FizzWorkshops, and FizztStartups!

With the ultimate objective of changing the attitude of Indians towards Education, they wish to estab-

lish research labs all over India and make engineering as a whole fun! Having started this initiative by

making labs in 2 colleges of Nashik, these people sure as hell have a long way to go!

One of the arduino boards worked up by the fizzible team

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TechStuff Awesome Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has been around for a long time but has regained popularity in the past few

years. We all know that AI means giving a machine the capacity to think, so to speak. Natural lan-

guage processing (NLP) is one of its fun parts. Natural language is the language we speak. NLP al-

lows machines to understand this. Here are two interesting applications of NLP showing just how

awesome AI can be!

Akinator

What the Akinator does is it guesses any character you keep in mind (it really means any charac-

ter—living, dead, real, not-real) within a limited number of questions.

The very basic logic behind this program is simple. An enormous database. Each character in the da-

tabase has variables associated with it e.g. gender, real/cartoon, etc. Each variable can be answered with 5 options. So if the number of variables is say n. Then we can have n5 distinct characters. Each answer eliminates variables so that it finally narrows down to a single character. In case the Akinator cannot guess, you tell him your answer and it gets added to the database! Clever much? Check out Cleverbot!

This fun application of NLP, Cleverbot. This chatterbot was created by

Rollo Carpenter and has been chatting online for 18 years with around

100,000 conversations daily. Its underlying principle is crowd-sourcing. It

will remember each interaction individually and in turn learn appropriate

responses. For example, if you ask “What are you?” it will look back to the

many times it was asked this question and calculate the most appropriate

response. In 2011, this bot passed the Turing test at IIT Guwahati with

59.3%. The percentage indicates how human our bot seemed. Many peo-

ple claim that Cleverbot is just unsuspecting humans talking to each other. But that only goes to

show how efficient this chatterbot is!

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Programming Languages Unveiled!

Here’s a look at eight programming languages that not many of us have heard of. Eight not so prominent programming languages unveiled!

1. Haskell: It is a standardized, general purpose purely functional program-ming language with non-strict semantics and strong static typing.

It offers shorter, cleaner and more maintainable code, fewer er-

rors, higher reliability and a smaller Symantec gap between the

programmer and the language. The irst formal verification of microkernel SeL4 was done using Haskell. Bluespec System Verilog (BSV) is a language for semiconductor design that is an extension

of Haskell.

2. Erlang: A functional language created by ComputerScience laboratory at Ellemtel (now Ericsson AB) around 1990. It features eager eval-uation, single assignment, dynamic typing and supports hot swapping. 3. Scala: It is object-functional programming & scripting language for gen-eral software application.It features syntactic flexibility, unified type system, tail recursion, object-oriented extensions.Designed by Martin Odersky – creator of Javac compiler. It is used by com-panies like gilt, foursquare, coursera etc. 4. ‘GO’: It is Google’s newly related procedural programming language which is very easy to learn! It features sprawling libraries and dependency chains, a dominance of networking, client / server focus, rise of multi-core CPU’s, typesafe & memory safe, sup-port for concurrency & communication. Concurrency:“Don’t communicate by sharing memory instead share memory by communicating.” 5. F#: It strongly types, functional-first programming language for writing simple code to solve complex problems.It is cross-platform and open source! It is used in Web Programming, Analytical programming, scripting mainly for desktop REFL scripting, etc.

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6. R Language: R is a free software programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners or developing statistical software and data analysis. Its application area includes Computational econometrics and analysis of ecological and environmental data. 7. Objective-C: Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented program-ming language used by the Apple operating system. It pow-

ers Apple's OS X and iOS, as well as its APIs, and can be

used to create iPhone apps, which has generated a huge de-

mand for this once-outmoded programming language.

8. Swift: Swift is a multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple for iOS and OS X development. It uses Automatic Reference Counting to manage memory. Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast.

The Present state!

MIT Computer Users Group

Neuromorphic Microchips

Today, computers can perform billions of operations per second, but they are still no match for even a young child when it comes to skills such as pattern recognition or visual processing. The hu-man brain is also millions of times more energy-efficient and far more compact than a typical per-sonal computer.

Neuromorphic microchips, which take cues from neural structure, have already demonstrated impressive power reduc-tions. Their efficiency may make it possible to develop fully im-plantable artificial retinas for people afflicted by certain types of blindness as well as better electronic sensors. Someday neuromorphic chips could even replicate the self-growing connections the brain uses to achieve its amazing func-tional capabilities. A pug-size robot and a toy figure facing off inside a rough mod-el of a child’s bedroom that the wireless-chip maker Qualcomm has set up in a trailer. The robot pauses, almost as if it is evaluat-ing the situation, and then corrals the figure, turns around, and pushes it toward three squat pillars representing toy bins. Qual-comm senior engineer Ilwoo Chang sweeps both arms toward the pillar where the toy should be deposited. The Robot spots that gesture with its camera and duti-fully complies. Then it rolls back and spies another toy figure. This time the robot beelines for the toy, ignoring a chessboard nearby, and delivers it to the same pillar with no human guidance. This demonstration at Qualcomm’s headquarters looks modest, but it’s a glimpse of the future of computing. The robot is performing tasks that would typically need powerful, specially programmed comput-ers that use far more electricity. But it is using only a very small smartphone chip with specialized software, it can recognize objects it hasn’t seen before, identify their similarity to related objects by merely being shown once where they should go. The robot can do all that because it is simulating, albeit in a very limited fashion, the way a brain works. Over the years, technology has reached new heights but no innovation so far has come close to matching what the human brain can do.Therefore, the contemporary world needs an invention that can imitate the behaviour of the human brain.It has the potential to overtake all the technological advancements of our times.

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The Human Brain Project in Europe is spending roughly 100 million euros on neuromorphic pro-jects, including efforts at Heidelberg University and the University of Manchester. Today’s computers all use the so-called von Neumann ar-chitecture, which shuttles data back and forth between a central processor and memory chips in linear sequences of calculations. That method is great for crunching numbers and executing precisely written programs, but not for pro-cessing images or sound and making sense of it all. Qualcomm could add a “neural processing unit” to mobile-phone chips to handle sensory data and tasks such as im-age recognition. Even if neuromorphic chips are nowhere near as capable as the brain, they should be much faster than current com-puters at processing sensory data and learning from it. Trying to emulate the brain just by using special software on conventional processors is way too in-efficient to be the basis of machines with still greater intelligence, says Jeff Hawkins, a leading thinker on AI who created the Palm Pilot before cofounding Numenta, a maker of brain-inspired software. “There’s no way you can build it [only] in software,” he says of effective AI. “You have to build this in silicon.” A smarter silicon retina The researchers tested their findings on an advanced electronic camera known as silicon retina with a visual-processing-based task inspired by those used to evaluate the cognitive abilities of human sub-jects. "The subject (neuromorphic system in our case) is presented with a cue at the beginning of the exper-iment which specifies the rule to use for the task," Indiveri explained. "The subject is required to look at a screen in which a horizontal bar and a vertical bar are moving, and depending on the initial cue, the subject is supposed to report if and when a vertical bar crosses the middle of the screen from left to right, or if a horizontal bar crosses it from right to left." Aside from real-time visual processing, the task also requires memory and context-dependent decision making, elements that are commonly accepted as signs of cognition. Interestingly, the neural structures that form as this visual test is performed has shown a remarkable similarity with neural structures in the mammalian brain.

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MIT Computer Users Group

Like every year, this year too the department of Computer Engineering, MIT along with MIT Computer Users Group bring to you TEKNOTHON,2K14 a technical event organized with the aim of bridging the gap between the students and the industry via various means like work-shops, seminars, informal and formal interaction sessions, competitions etc. All events are conducted and sponsored by different companies/organizations. The event is Free and open for all MIT students irrespective of branch. Schedule for TEKNOTHON,2K14: Saturday,13th September 2014

Sunday, 14th September 2014

Time Name of Session Speaker

09:30 am Android Rooting and Flashing MCUG members

11:30 am Open Source Ideology Mr.Siddhesh Poyarekar

2:00 pm How Stuff Works MCUG members

3:30 pm Unseen Java Mr.Nitin Kotasthane

Follow us on: mcug.mit@gmail.com www.facebook.com/groups/mitcug

For Private Circulation only.

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Time Name of Session Speaker 9:30 a.m. Arduino Exploration Workshop fizzible.com

1:00 p.m. Reverse Interview Reverse Interview Panel