Category: Science & Technology

Suvrath Mahadevan, a professor of astrophysics, space science and nuclear physics has been assigned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to lead its team that will build a new, cutting-edge instrument that will detect planets outside the solar system. Prof. Suvrath Mahadevan at Penn State, is NASA’s “Next-Gen Planet Hunter.”

Mahadevan, a 37-year-old IIT Bombay graduate, is engaged with his team of 15-plus specialists, including his graduate student Arpita Roy, to build the highly precise instrument, to detect “exoplanets” as they are called, and expects to complete it by Spring of 2019, when it will be installed on the powerful telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, he told News India Times.

Mahadevan’s instrument, titled NEID (pronounced “nee-id”), is derived from a word meaning “to discover/visualize” in the native language of the Tohono O’odham, on whose land Kitt Peak National Observatory is located. It is also short for NN-EXPLORE – Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler Spectroscopy.

The NEID will measure the tiny back-and-forth wobble of a star caused by the gravitational tug of a planet in orbit around it. The wobble tells scientists there is a planet orbiting the star, and the size of the wobble indicates how massive the planet is. NEID was one of two concepts for an extreme precision Doppler spectrometer that were selected for a detailed six-month study by NASA in June 2015. Mahadevan’s team won out.

“These instruments have a very hard job,” said Mahadevan. “Everything matters – from what happens in the earth’s atmosphere to who is walking around the instrument, could affect the result.” The instrument is built in vacuum chambers where temperatures are kept stable to one-thousandths of one degree. “If the room temperature changes by 1 percent, the instruments feels only one-thousandths of the change,” Mahadevan explained.

The instrument will be the centerpiece of a new partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) called the NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research program, or NN-EXPLORE.
According to NASA, using NEID as a facility observatory instrument, astronomers will be able to search out and study new planets and planetary systems, as well as follow-up the discoveries of NASA’s planet-hunting missions Kepler/K2 and the in-development Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). NEID will also help identify promising targets for future observations with the James Webb Space Telescope and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

Born in Ahmedabad, Mahadevan is the son of Malayalee parents, industrial engineer N.S. Mahadevan, and English teacher Vijaya Mahadevan. He credits some of his achievements to the “very solid and thorough” grounding at IIT Bombay, where he graduated in engineering and physics. “It was very, very valuable to me,” Mahadevan said, “An IIT education really helps you think out things, find innovative ways to solve problems and a solid core for attacking challenges.”

Mahadevan came to the U.S. in 2000. After starting out as a student at Penn State, he moved to the University of Florida to complete his studies. He returned in 2009 to join the Penn State faculty. He says India’s work in space science is impressive.

He collaborates with India’s Physical Research Lab in Ahmedabad and has collaborated with it to build an instrument dedicated to finding planets. India is already doing a lot on space research, he says, chalking up missions to the moon, a planned mission to Mars, as well as work on exoplanets which has been going on for several years, he said.

The search for “exoplanets” he says, attracts people from all backgrounds. “People flock to this because they are passionate about the subject, regardless of their ethnicity or origin,” he said, adding, “It belongs to all humanity.”

Google has celebrated the February 29 by giving the date that only comes around once every four years its own doodle. The season that 2016 has an extra day is due to planetary orbits.

The Gregorian calendar, the most widely used across the globe, measures a year to be 365 days following the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. However, the earth’s orbit takes 365.24 days to complete its solar orbit and an extra day every four years is added to keep calendar seasons synchronised with solar seasons.

February was chosen as the month to have the leap day as it is the only month without 30 or 31 days. It has long been suggested that February only has 28 days due to the jealousy of Roman Emperors.

According to the theory, the second month of the year had 30 days before the reign of Roman Emperor Augustus. Augustus supposedly wanted his month, August, to have as many days as July, the 31-day month named after Julius Caesar. As the theory goes. August was then only 29 days long, he took two off February for the benefit of August.

In reality, there is evidence that the direct predecessor of the Gregorian calendar, the Julian Calendar marked February with 28 days before August became a 31-day month. If someone is born on February 29 in the UK, their legal date of birth is treated on non-leap-years as March 1.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Professor Munir Humayun and his student at Florida State University student have cracked the code to reveal the deep and interesting history of an ancient meteorite that likely formed at the time our planets were just developing.

Jonathan Oulton, a 2015 FSU graduate, working with Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Science Professor Munir Humayun, studied the pieces of a meteorite called Gujba. Using sophisticated lasers and mass spectrometers at the FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Humayun and Oulton conducted in-depth chemical analysis of the meteorite samples that shattered previous theories about when and how this meteorite had formed.

“We tried to elucidate a story about its origins through this science,” said Oulton, who is now pursuing a doctoral degree at University of Colorado. Previously, scientists believed that Gujba was formed more or less from the dust of the solar system.

But, as Humayun and Oulton analyzed it, they discovered it had a far more complex geological history than previously thought. They inferred that Gujba formed from the debris of a collision between a parent planet that had both a crust and mantle, something that would only be found on a fairly large planet of the kind that is not seen today in the asteroid belt.

To get that type of formation, Gujba would have been involved in more than the equivalent of a solar system fender bender. Oulton, Humayun and their collaborators argue that Gujba formed from the molten debris produced when a large metallic body smashed into another planet and both bodies were destroyed in the process. Based on chemical traces preserved in Gujba, the target planet might have been even larger than the asteroid 4 Vesta, one of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt with a diameter of about 326 miles or 525 kilometers.

“People used to say that meteorites like Gujba were the building blocks of the solar system,” Humayun said. “Now, we know it’s the construction debris of the planets, to borrow a phrase from Ed Scott of the University of Hawaii.”

The research will be published in an upcoming issue of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, but is currently available online. Oulton presented the preliminary results of the paper at the 2015 Lunar & Planetary Science Conference and received the Dwornik Award of the Geological Society of America for the best undergraduate presentation.

“In a broad sense, people have been trying forever to understand how we got here,” Oulton said. “Although this doesn’t get to that directly, this research gives us a greater understanding of the physical chemistry of everything that occurred at the time the Earth formed.”

Oulton served as the lead author on the article. Other researchers on the paper are Lawrence Grossman and Alexei Fedkin of The University of Chicago.

Silicon Valley, CA: Sundar Pichai, chief executive of tech giant Google, has joined the escalating battle between the FBI and Apple over iPhone encryption. Describing the letter published by Apple’s Tim Cook as “important,” Pichai says that a judge’s order forcing Apple to assist the FBI in gaining access to the data on a terrorist’s iPhone “could be a troubling precedent.” Seeing as Google oversees the Android operating system, Pichai is a crucial voice in this debate; Android also offers encryption to safeguard personal data.

“We build secure products to keep your information safe and we give law enforcement access to data based on valid legal orders,” Pichai tweeted moments ago. “But that’s wholly different than requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices and data.” Pichai seems to side squarely with Cook. “Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy.” Google’s CEO said he’s “looking forward to a thoughtful and open discussion on this important issue.”

That echoes the words of Cook, who in his letter wrote “This moment calls for public discussion, and we want our customers and people around the country to understand what is at stake.” At this point it seems like not a matter of if, but when other influential tech CEOs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella will weigh in on the matter.

Pichai was recently given a king’s ransom in stocks by the company. The Indian American, who was named to his post in August as part of a corporate restructuring when Google became a subsidiary of Alphabet, a new company run by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin was granted 273,328 Class C shares by Google Feb. 3. The shares amount to roughly $199 million.

Pichai, who joined Google in 2004, is generally known as a soft-spoken but highly effective manager. After leading efforts to build the company’s Chrome browser and related products, Pichai was given responsibility in 2013 for Google’s Android mobile operating system — a crucial role as the company was seeing much of its Internet business shift to mobile devices. The stock award by Google catapults Pichai to one of the highest paid CEOs. According to Equilar, the highest paid CEO of 2014 was David Zaslav of Discovery Communications.

Washington, DC: February 3, 2016: Many of us, especially from South Asia, who immigrated to the United States decades ago, have come here due to economic opportunities, freedom and the great influence this nation offers. According to new reports, the power of the US is on the decline. In International conflicts in cyberspace have increased since 2012, with countries now openly using the web to attack, steal from, and spy on each other. Given how embedded the Internet has become in people’s lives, these disputes could have devastating consequences.

“While it should continue to promote and espouse the virtues of an open, global, and secure Internet, the United States must prepare for a more likely future—a highly contested, nationally divided cyberspace,” writes Adam Segal, director of the digital and cyberspace policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), in his new book, The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age.

“The challenges of the hacked world order are both familiar—other states will pursue policies that limit U.S. power and influence—and unconventional—new actors may exploit unexpected and unknown vulnerabilities in networks to wreak damage and destruction,” writes Segal, who is also CFR’s Maurice R. Greenberg senior fellow for China studies. In the book, Segal details the characteristics of a fractured cyberspace, including

China’s and Russia’s attempts to implement a more controlled, state-centric version of the Internet; North Korea’s and Russia’s deployment of cyberattacks as a tool of political conflict and influence; cyber weapons designed to cause physical damage or death, such as the Stuxnet virus allegedly deployed by the United States and Israel to destroy centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear enrichment plant; clashing positions between the United States and European Union over user privacy, which were exposed by the disclosures about National Security Agency global surveillance programs; the use of social media by the self-proclaimed Islamic State, Israeli and Palestinian activists, and Russian and Chinese trolls to counter mainstream media narratives; and

Brazil’s push to globalize Internet governance and reduce American control over cyber policy. To maintain American influence and enhance security in this new environment, Segal identifies three core objectives for the U.S. government:

Increase cyber defenses at home to deter and prepare responses to cyber assaults, thefts, and espionage. Collaborate with private technology firms to attract more technology talent to public service and to establish agreements over privacy, data collection, and trade. Build an international coalition with friendly countries that share the goal of a free and open cyberspace.

Tomoharu Oka; January 24, 2016: Astronomers have detected signs of an invisible black hole with a mass 100 thousand times that of Sun around the cente of our galaxy Milky Way. The team assumes that this possible “intermediate mass” blrack hole is a key to understanding the birth of the supermassive black holes located in the centers of galaxies.

A team of astronomers led by Tomoharu Oka, a professor at Keio University in Japan, found an enigmatic gas cloud, called CO-0.40-0.22, only 200 light years away from the centre of Milky Way. The CO-0.40-0.22 unusual has a surprisingly wide velocity dispersion — the cloud contains gas with a very wide range of speeds.

The team found this mysterious feature with two radio telescopes, the Nobeyama 45m Radio Telescope in Japan and the ASTE Telescope in Chile, both operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

The team observed CO-0.40-0.22 to obtain 21 emission lines from 18 molecules. The results show that the cloud has an elliptical shape and consists of two components — a compact but low density component with a very wide velocity dispersion of 100 km per second, and a dense component extending 10 light years with a narrow velocity dispersion.

There are no holes inside of the cloud. Also, X-ray and infrared observations did not find any compact objects. These features indicate that the velocity dispersion is not caused by a local energy input, such as supernova explosions.

The team performed a simple simulation of gas clouds flung by a strong gravity source. In the simulation, the gas clouds are first attracted by the source and their speeds increase as they approach it, reaching maximum at the closest point to the object.

Jain, an IIT-Kanpur alumnus, is professor of tumor biology at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Harvard Medical School.

He has received numerous awards for his work on tumor biology, particularly research on the link between tumor blood vessels and improving the effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

The National Medal of Science was created by statute in 1959 and is administered for the White House by the National Science Foundation.

Baljeet Singh, who serves as the product lead in charge of video at Twitter, will step down in January 2016, according to a Twitter spokesperson in a Re/Code article published. The Indian American senior product director left YouTube after a five-year stint to join Twitter in March 2014. While at Twitter, Singh handled consumer video product for the main app, among other things.

Singh’s departure comes on the heels of three product executives leaving in June, as well as Glenn Brown, an ad executive, who left the company in October. According to the Re/Code article, video in social media has grown of late, with Facebook and Snapchat building up around videos. Twitter, it added, has shown increased interest in video, although not at the Facebook and Snapchat level, it added.

Singh served as senior product manager, group product manager and product director and global head of partnerships, EDU and family, while at YouTube. Prior to his stint at YouTube, Singh was the product manager at Google. He has also worked at DoubleClick, Updata Partners and Alventive. Singh is a graduate of Duke University, earning a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and computer science, and of NYU Stern School of Business, earning an M.B.A. in finance.

Tata Motors has entered the top-50 league of the world’s biggest companies in terms of their R&D investments, topped by German automaker Volskwagen. On the annual Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard for 2015, prepared by European Commission, Volkswagen is followed by Samsung, Microsoft, Intel and Novartis in the top-five. Tata Motors has moved up from 104th position last year to 49th now and has also shown the largest increase in R&D (Research and Development) investments on the list. However, most of this R&D is at its UK subsidiary Jaguar Land Rover.

In the expanded list of the world’s 2,500 top R&D firms, there are a total of 26 Indian companies, as against 829 from the US, 360 from Japan, 301 from China, 114 from Taiwan, 80 from Switzerland and 27 each from Canada and Israel. There are 608 companies from the EU countries, including 136 from Germany, 135 from the UK, 86 from France, 42 from Sweden and 32 from Italy.

India is overall placed at 15th position in terms of the number of companies on the list. Among other Indian companies, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories is ranked 404th, M&M is at 451st, Reliance Industries at 540th, Lupin at 624th, Sun Pharma at 669th, Cipla at 831st and Infosys at 884th.

Other Indian firms on the list include ONGC, Tata Steel, Wockhardt, Cadila Healthcare, Bajaj Auto, Hindalco, BHEL, Piramal Enterprises, Wipro, Helios and Matheson, HCC, Ashok Leyland, Apollo Tyres, TCS, Suzlon Energy, TVS Motor, Force India, HCL Tech and Glenmark.

While the top-five companies globally have retained their respective positions, Google has moved up to sixth place (from 9th), while Pfizer has moved to 10th (from 15th). Roche, Johnson and Johnson and Toyota are ranked 7th, 8th and 9th, respectively.

In a room full of homeless men and women, all of the people gathered have many needs: A square meal. A decent night of sleep. Clean socks. A home. A Twitter account might not seem high on the list. But on a recent day, Kushaan Shah, an Indian American graduate of the University of Maryland, stood in front of the group and tried to convince these homeless people that they needed Twitter. And Facebook. And LinkedIn. And he wanted to be the guy to sign them up.

Shah, 22, has created a role for himself as a sort of social media consultant to the disadvantaged, whoever they might be. Immigrants. Former prisoners. Schoolchildren from low-income families. And, one day last month, homeless people selling $2 copies of the newspaper Street Sense on D.C. street corners.

Shah told the vendors, most of whom had never heard of Twitter, that he once tweeted to encourage people to buy the paper from a vendor named Leonard at the corner of 18th and M streets NW. That tweet was seen by 987 people. “Hold on. Hold on. Run that by me again!” Leonard said. He high-fived Shah. That’s the reaction Shah aims for with his social-media-for-good program, which he calls Social Rise.

The idea was born when Shah was a student at the University of Maryland and volunteering with a program that helps low-income families. He watched the participants strike out again and again as they filled out job applications, and he thought: That’s not how I would get a job. Why tell these people to do it that way?

Shah knew that studies have found that 70 or 80 percent of people get their jobs through networking, not just blindly applying. And much of that networking happens nowadays via screens, not face to face.

So after Shah graduated from college and started a job at IBM — where his duties include teaching executives to use Twitter and LinkedIn — he created a Web site, recruited a few volunteers and launched Social Rise. On Nov. 3, he said, he learned that Social Rise had been accepted as a federally recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity.

Social Rise offers instructional presentations and one-on-one coaching to any nonprofit organization with which Shah can connect. One that took him up on his offer is Empowered Women International, which teaches low-income and immigrant women to start their own businesses.

Rebecca Lazar sells baked goods at farmers markets and wants eventually to open her own storefront bakery. With Shah’s help, Lazar started Facebook and Google+ pages to tell people when and where they can find her products.

“Before this, I wouldn’t see any need for the Internet to get the business out there. I’ve been swamped — working at another bakery, raising a family and trying to get my own business,” said Lazar, 39.

She said the social media pages have helped her drum up business. And Shah answered one nagging question she had: “About those hashtags. Maybe I’m that backwards with technology, but the hashtag was something I never understood before. Why do people put the pound sign before everything?”

Mayamerica Cortez, a Salvadoran immigrant who has been writing poetry and prose for decades, said she looks forward to promoting her next novel on her new social media accounts, once she has finished writing it.

“I thought it was more for socializing,” she said. And since she is in her late 60s, she worried she was too late to start. “With Kushaan, I learned that it’s a good tool to expand (the number of) people who can know your work.”

Cortez said that when she had a one-on-one meeting with Shah, she couldn’t believe how easy it was to post her work online. “Oh, my God. I was amazed,” she said. “At that very moment, I put the first little poem on.”

Not everyone immediately feels that excitement, and Shah acknowledges that “there’s no real manual on how to teach social media to the homeless.” At the Street Sense vendors workshop, Shernell Thomas, who sells the paper near the Dupont Circle and Farragut West Metro stations, expressed a common concern.

“Isn’t it also dangerous? Because you’re putting all your personal information out there — this is what you look like, this is who you’re related to over here, this is who your friends are over here,” she said. “I don’t want my life to be an open book on the Internet.” Shah tried to reassure her — and to emphasize ways in which Twitter might be useful.

He suggested, for example, that vendors might figure out the hashtag that a local conference is using, then tweet with that hashtag to encourage conference attendees to buy Street Sense papers while they are in town.

To demonstrate to the group, he clicked on a trending hashtag, (hash)MotivationalMonday. One post caught everyone’s eye — a video of an adorable puppy. Thomas hit upon the fundamental strangeness of social media: “I’m missing something. You pass this particular area where a dog is running across a bed. And you say I’m going to advertise on that?’

A team of Virginia Tech researchers have discovered fossils of kinorhynch worms – commonly known as mud dragons – dating back more than 530 million years. The historic find – made in South China – fills a huge gap in the known fossil record of kinorhynchs, small invertebrate animals that are related to arthropods, featuring exoskeletons and segmented bodies, but not jointed legs.

The first specimen was unearthed in rocks in Nanjiang, China, in 2013 and more fossils were found later that year and in 2014. Helping lead the international team of scientists and biomedical engineers who unearthed, studied, and imaged the ancient, armored, worm-like creature is Shuhai Xiao, a professor of geobiology in the Department of Geosciences, part of the College of Science at Virginia Tech.

Dubbed Eokinorhynchus rarus – or rare ancient mud dragon, the newly discovered animal dates back from the Cambrian period and contains five pairs of large bilaterally placed spines on its trunk. It is believed to be related to modern kinorhynchs. The group’s findings were published in Scientific Reports, a Nature family journal.

“Kinos represent an animal group that is related to arthropods — insects, shrimps, spiders, etc. — which are the most diverse group of animals on the planet,” said Xiao, who refers to kinorhynchs as “kinos” for short. “Although arthropod fossils date back to more than 530 million years ago, no kino fossils have ever been reported. This is a huge gap in the fossil record, with more than 540 million years of evolutionary history undocumented. Our discovery is the first report of kino fossils.”

Xiao added that the new fossil can tell scientists more about how and why body segmentation evolved many times among not only arthropods, but several other groups of animals. Scientists believe kinos and arthropods should have evolved more than 540 million years ago. More so, the authors found that E. rarus has a number of similarities with living kinorhynchs, suggesting a close evolutionary relationship.

Similarities between the fossils of E. rarus and living, modern kinorhynchs include their hollow spines arranged in a five-fold symmetry and their body segments each consisting of articulated plates. However, E. rarus differs from modern species with more numerous segments. Hence the belief of an ancestorship.

There are approximately 240 living kinorhynch species, all found in marine environments. The body of kinorhynchs is divided into three sections: a head, which includes a mouth cone with teeth; a neck; and a trunk with 11 segments. These creatures could provide clues to origins of body segmentation, but such efforts have been hampered by a lack of well-preserved kinorhynch fossils, until now, said Xiao.

The found specimen is 0.078 inches in length and l0.02 inches in width, roughly half the size of a grain of rice, said Xiao. The discovery and resulting research is a collaborative effort with Xiao’s geosciences department, the Virginia Tech College of Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Chang’an University in Xi’an of China. On the team are Drew Muscente of Allentown, New Jersey, and a doctoral student in geosciences; Guohua Cao, an assistant professor, and Hao Gong of Fuzhou, China, a doctoral student, both in the Virginia Tech Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics; Huaqiao Zhang, Xunlai Yuan, and Bin Wan, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Yunhuan Liu and Tiequan Shao, both professors at Chang’an University who were visiting faculty at Virginia Tech while most of the study was carried out.

The first kino fossil was unearthed by Zhang. “He sent me an image of the fossil for identification. I immediately recognized it as something very similar to modern kinos,” said Xiao. Xiao studied the specimen using an X-ray micro-CT located at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center. Meanwhile, Liu discovered additional specimens in her collection of fossils.

“We used electron microscopy to thoroughly image the fossils’ surface features, and then the microCT to scan their interior structures, including their midguts,” said Muscente, who devised an X-ray transparent plastic grid to secure the specimen during examination. He also collected with Gong microCT data that were used in generating the microCT reconstruction.

“Because this suite of data is so comprehensive, it includes pretty much everything you can know about the morphologies of the fossils,” he said. Xiao and his team believe more specimens will be found.  “Future discovery of additional kino fossil will offer important insights into the early evolutionary history of this group of tiny and little-known animals,” he said.

After discovering the need for many parents to feel more at peace while their newborn babies are sleeping, Indian Americans Pavan Kumar and Sivakumar Nattamai, as well as Rubi Sanchez teamed up to create an all-purpose baby monitor, a press release here stated. Dubbed the Cocoon Cam, the Kumar-Nattamai-Sanchez creation not only covers the basic audio-video features, it also gauges a baby’s temperature, heart rate and breathing.

While some monitors do offer those added features, Kumar pointed out that they are typically clip-on devices that sometimes lead to skin irritation, and they don’t monitor sleeping positions.

“Cocoon Cam is an intelligent wireless video camera designed for parents looking for a simple, secure way to monitor their newborns … without the need for uncomfortable wired, clip-on sensors, giving parents the peace of mind they deserve,” Kumar told India-West.

Kumar touts that the baby monitor will allow parents to view video and receive custom notifications via their smartphone “without compromising safety.” He added that Cocoon Cam’s “secret sauce includes computer vision and machine learning algorithms which detect vitals without contact.”

Cocoon Cam is a product under the umbrella of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Wearless Tech Inc. company founded by the baby monitor’s creators. Kumar serves as the chief technical officer, while Nattamai is the chief operating officer, and Sanchez is the company’s chief executive officer.

The Wearless Tech founders met in 2014 at various startup weekends and hackathons. During the course of those encounters, they developed a rapport with each other, which led to the prospect of starting the company.

It was in July 2014 when they realized there was a major concern of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome by parents of newborns. Upon completing customer validation interviews that confirmed the concern of SIDS, Kumar said they “identified that there was a gap in the baby monitor market that was not currently met by existing baby monitoring solutions.” They then demonstrated the proof-of-concept for detecting a baby’s heart rate from video streams.

Kumar, 24, who was an intern at Apple and turned down a full-time job there to pursue Wearless Tech, developed the computer vision and machine learning technology behind Cocoon Cam to facilitate non-contact and non-invasive detection of skin temperature, respiratory rate and heart rate.

At MedHack San Francisco in September 2014, the group demonstrated a proof-of-concept and a panel of 27 judges from the medical, investment and entrepreneurship spaces voted it the “Most Practical Solution” at the event.

“Since then, we have been working on solving key challenges in building a prototype which can reliably monitor the baby in real-world conditions,” Kumar explained to India-West, adding they have been talking to people in attempts to establish partnerships to bring the monitor to market.

The Cocoon Cam is currently available for pre-order although two of the systems within the product still have patents pending. After obtaining a degree at M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore, where he was born and raised, Kumar moved to the United States to pursue his master’s at U.C. San Diego in 2013. He now lives in Sunnyvale.

Kumar and the Wearless Tech team, however, aren’t stopping at just Cocoon Cam. There are plans to further enhance the technology they use to track newborn babies. “Besides leading our technology efforts, our R&D team will continuously work on developing techniques to monitor other vital signs, including blood oxygen levels, blood pressure, which can help us expand our product portfolio and provide more value for our current and future customers,” the Indian American said. He added, “Our vision is to use our amazing technology to completely redefine the limitations in the consumer caregiver monitoring, ICU monitoring, telehealth monitoring, security and surveillance spaces.”

Wearless Tech has raised an undisclosed amount in angel fund investments and received an I-Corps award from the National Science Foundation of $50,000 towards the commercialization of Cocoon Cam. In addition, facilities at Stanford University and U.C. San Diego have shown interest in running clinical trials on the product. Cocoon Cam is expected to be on the market in the first quarter of 2016.

The Indus Entrepreneurs and Confederation of Indian Industry have released a new book chronicling the success stories of Indian Americans in the Silicon Valley area of California.

The book, titled “India Rising @ Silicon Valley,” was unveiled to the public on November 17 and provides insights on many Indian American entrepreneurs’ success stories, as well as the impact they have made on the world.

Among the entrepreneurs written about in the book are Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella, Adobe president and CEO Shantanu Narayen, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, India Community Center co-founder Talat Hasan, and SanDisk co-founder and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, among many others.

The book depicts the journey of the entrepreneurs – some of whom have gone on to become philanthropists, giving back to India and the community – providing personal anecdotes giving the reader a glimpse into their road to success.

“The contributions of Indian Americans from Silicon Valley run both ways and this book is a small sample of their achievements,” CII director general Chandrajit Banerjee said in a statement. “We hope it will inspire technology entrepreneurs in India to realize their aspirations for success.”

Added TiE Silicon Valley president Venktesh Shukla, “I am very proud of TiE’s role in the enormous collective success of this group. TiE was formed in 1992 primarily as a way to network and foster entrepreneurship. The principle of the organization was that successful people are obligated to help the next generation of entrepreneurship. “We have succeeded beyond our wildest expectations,” Shukla said.

The book notes that while many Indian American managers are not company founders, they have been able to climb the ranks to reach influential positions within their respective companies.

An excerpt of the book explains that Indian Americans and Silicon Valley needed each other to experience growth.

“Closer synergies between India and Silicon Valley are inevitable as both sides look to each other for sources of growth. In a knowledge-based global economy, each side will continue to inspire and learn from the other. The ‘protocols’ of the Indian American community in Silicon Valley and its engagement with India are rapidly being redesigned and will continue to amaze the world.”

India is increasingly on the radar of cybercriminals from countries like China, Russia and the U.S., who are using advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks to steal data from consumers and enterprises, security software firm Kaspersky has said.

APT refers to a format where the attacker gains access to a network/device and stays there undetected for a long period of time. The motive of the attack is to steal data and there is a longer term damage to the organization/user.

“APT attacks are on the rise globally and those affecting India are also growing. These attacks are originating from China, the US and Russia among other countries. A major chunk of the attacks like Equation, Turla, Darkhotel, Regin, Cloud Atlas infected India as well,” Kaspersky Lab deputy director of global research and analysis team, Sergey Novikov told reporters.

He added that while there were three APT announcements in 2012, the number grew to seven in 2013, 11 in 2014 and 10 in the first half of 2015. “As more and more devices get connected to the internet/network, the level of sophistication of these attacks is also on the rise,” he said. Novikov said the line of distinction between state- sponsored cyberattacks and those by criminal gangs is diminishing as similar techniques often get used.

A federal appeals court in Washington, where Judge Srinivasan serves, will hear one of its biggest cases of the year, one whose outcome will directly affect how Internet providers can alter one’s experience online. At stake are the government’s net neutrality rules banning telecom and cable companies from unfairly discriminating against new or potential rivals. Using their power in the marketplace to control what services consumers can access from their smartphones, tablets and PCs, Internet providers could be granted more latitude to favor preferred Web sites — if the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit says so.

As per reports, three judges from the D.C. Circuit have been named to hear the oral argument on Dec. 4. Much like the Supreme Court, the very makeup of this panel could subtly shape the course of events. Judge Stephen F. Williams and Judge David S. Tatel are the other two Judeghs who will decide this historic case with far reaching consequences in the US and around the world. That 2014 net neutrality case is known as Verizon v. FCC, and Tatel is the sole returning judge this time, drawing that much more attention to his role in the last round. Because both sides are claiming to have properly interpreted Tatel’s 2014 ruling, everyone’s watching to see how Tatel himself will now view this case.

Judge Sri Srinivasan is a relative newcomer to the court, having been appointed by President Obama in 2013. His views on net neutrality and technology aren’t clear, making him a bit of an enigma. He’s said to be a rising star. Srinivasan is reportedly on the Democratic Party’s shortlist for Supreme Court nominees.

Getting there certainly wasn’t easy. While under consideration for the D.C. Circuit post, some liberals attempted to torpedo Srinivasan’s nomination because of his past jobs. He’d previously been a legal assistant to the Bush administration and has represented clients such as Exxon on human-rights issues.

Mother Jones described him in 2013: “At a time when Republican obstruction has ground the confirmation process to a halt, and the outspoken progressivism — or even mild progressivism — of prior Obama nominees has run into GOP filibusters, Srinivasan’s unclear record offers Republicans few legitimate reasons to block him. It also means that liberals can’t be sure that Srinivasan actually shares their views.

Constellation Research, Inc. the research and advisory firm helping clients dominate digital disruption awarded Asha Aravindakshan, Operations Director for Global Talent at Ashoka with a SuperNova Award for her leadership in disruptive technology adoption. The Constellation SuperNova Awards are the first and only awards to celebrate the leaders and teams who have overcome the hurdles of technology adoption to successfully introduce emerging and disruptive technologies to their organizations. In the Future of Work category, Constellation looks for companies implementing the processes and technologies addressing the rapidly shifting work paradigm.

“The leadership demonstrated by each of the SuperNova Award winners is inspirational. Keep an eye on them—not only can these people keep up with the rapid pace of technological change, they can lead entire organizations to follow these changes,” said R “Ray” Wang, Chairman and Founder of Constellation Research Inc. “These are the leaders who are making the promise of technology a reality for the enterprise and consequently, the rest of society.”

Ashoka found itself in the familiar dilemma for growing companies: it had outgrown spreadsheets and paper intensive processes, compounded by the complexity of a global network of individual offices and homegrown systems.

Ashoka had already been using Salesforce.com CRM and decided to implement the Salesforce-backed FinancialForce HCM in fall 2013. This allowed Ashoka to do away with its spreadsheet-based system and has provided many benefits and efficiencies.

“The “everyone a changemaker” world that we are living in requires new forms of leadership where transparency and participation are necessary elements,” commented Diana Wells, President of Ashoka. “FinancialForce HCM was a critical intervention that has allowed Ashoka to ensure we are modeling in our own organizational operations the very change we are seeking to accelerate in the world at large.”

It is now possible for Ashoka’s executive team to manage more than 400 team members in less time than had previously taken to manage just 20. There have also been gains in employee engagement—97 percent of staff finished their self-reviews in less than two months in 2015 and decisions on performance reviews are now considerable less time.  FinancialForce.com also provided native integration with Salesforce.com CRM, as it is built on the same underlying platform.

The Constellation SuperNova Award is a prestigious award that recognizes leaders who successfully and innovatively overcome the challenges of introducing new technologies to their organizations.

Constellation Research is a leading business research and advisory firm that helps clients transform business models with disruptive technologies and progressive strategies. Constellation caters to clients who have talent, influence, and vision. This community of successful senior business leaders excel and continue to advance in their careers.

Constellation Research, Constellation SuperNova Awards, Constellation Orbit, Connected Enterprise, Constellation Cosmos, and the Constellation Research logo are trademarks of Constellation Research, Org. All other products and services listed herein are trademarks of their respective companies. For more information visit www.ConstellationR.com.

Ashoka is leading the way to an “Everyone a ChangemakerTM” World. As the world’s largest network of changemakers and social innovators with more than 3,000 social entrepreneurs in 70 countries, Ashoka aims to bring about large-scale social change. Ashoka supports innovators to get started, grow their ideas, collaborate, reshape whole systems and influence societal transformation. Founded in 1980 with the belief that the most powerful force in the world is a big idea in the hands of an entrepreneur, Ashoka applies insights from the world’s leading social entrepreneurs to set in motion profound societal transformation. Current insights indicate that our rapidly changing world calls for an “Everyone a Changemaker” world, one where every person practices the critical skills of empathy, teamwork, leadership and changemaking.  For more information on Ashoka, please  visit:   www.ashoka.org. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

With an ever growing threat to cyber security, resulting in the world’s biggest threat/war being fought in the cyber world, nations, businesses and educational institutions are doing their every bit possible to safeguard their data from cyber threats. Professor Sachin Shetty will lead a consortium of 11 universities and national laboratories to improve the nation’s cyber security.

A cyber-security and networking systems expert, Shetty, an Indian American associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the  Tennessee State University, will lead the effort as project director. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the five-year, $28.1 million initiative seeks to improve the resilience and security of cyber networks.

These networks serve as the backbone of the infrastructure that delivers energy to the nation for the electric power, oil and gas industries. TSU will receive $930,000 to conduct studies in security risk assessment, software-defined networking, and robust control systems.

Shetty received his M.S. in computer science from the University of Toledo in 2002 and his doctorate degree in modeling and simulation from Old Dominion University in 2007. He has previously served as an adjunct assistant professor at ODU, teaching undergraduate classes in computer networking, network design and modeling and simulation; and an assistant professor at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., teaching data communications, wireless networking, electronics and circuits, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Shetty’s research interests lie at the intersection of computer networking, network security and machine learning, according to his bio on the TSU website. Recently, he has been working on security issues in cloud computing, cognitive radio networks and wireless sensor networks.

He has authored and coauthored more than 80 technical papers in various conferences, international journal articles, book chapters in research and pedagogical techniques. Shetty will be assisted in the cyber security project by L.H. Keel, professor of electrical and computer engineering at TSU.

Six teenagers of Indian origin, including three Indian-Americans, are among the winners of the 2015 Google Science Fair awards announced late last month. Google announced the winners of its fifth annual Google Science Fair, the web giant’s online science contest for teen researchers from around the world. Some 22 finalists between 13-18 years of age were honored at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

The three award-winning Indian-Americans are Anurudh Ganesan, 15 from Maryland, Deepika Kurup, 17 from New Hampshire and Pranav Sivakumar, 15 from Illinois. The three won the Lego Education Builder, National Geographic Explorer and Virgin Galactic Pioneer awards, respectively.

Lego Education, National Geographic and Virgin Galactic, are partners in the Google Science Fair. The three other award-winners of Indian origin were Girish Kumar of Singapore, Lalita Prasida Sripada Srisai from Odisha, India, and Krtin Nithiyanandam of the United Kingdom. They were honored with the Google Technologist, Community Impact and Scientific American Innovator awards. The grand prize went to Olivia Hallisey from Connecticut for creating a novel way to detect Ebola.

“In all of these finalists and the thousands of submissions from students in 100+ countries, we see something common. These students are inventive, thoughtful, and determined to help make the world a better place.

All they need is a chance and a platform to do so. And, unlike some of us adults, they are ready to try things that other people think are “impossible.” I find them inspiring,” Mariette DiChristina, Editor- in-Chief of Scientific American, who was the chief judge at the science fair, said.

Girish Kumar won the Google Technologist Award for helping improve learning through auto-generated study questions while the National Geographic Explorer Award went to Deepika Kurup for her idea to use solar-powered silver to create clean drinking water.

Krtin Nithiyanadam’s project focused on improved diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and won him the Scientific American Innovator Award while Pranav Sivakumar’s automated search for “gravitationally lensed quasars” earned him the Virgin Galactic Pioneer Award. Anurudh Ganesan took home The LEGO Education Builder Award for his unique twist on effectively transporting vaccines.

DiChristina wrote in Google’s official blog that it is “imperative for us” to support and encourage young people to explore and challenge the world around them through scientific discovery.

“We’re especially glad that Ahmed Mohamed—the 14-year-old clock maker from Texas—took us up on our invite to attend this year’s event. Curious young scientists, inventors and builders like him should be encouraged and empowered,” she said referring to Ahmed who was arrested in September after rigging a homemade digital clock inside a case and showing it to a teacher who thought it was a bomb and alerted police. He was released later and was invited by President Obama to come to the White House.

“The past decades have brought tremendous innovations and challenges, and none of us knows what the future of scientific discovery holds. But I can tell you one thing: it’s going to be better thanks to these kids. They will be part of building a brighter future for us all—and as they do, those of us at Scientific American, Google, LEGO Education, National Geographic and Virgin Galactic will be cheering them on.”

Top corporate leaders from India and the U.S. have converged here to hold a series of discussions among themselves and with the leadership of the two countries to find ways for an active private sector engagement in strengthening bilateral ties.

These meetings gain importance given India’s need for massive funding in infrastructure and the ambitious goal set by the two countries to increase bilateral trade to $500 billion per annum from the existing about $100 billion. Leading the Indian side of the corporate honchos are Cyrus Mistry, chairman ofTata Group, Kiran Mujumdar Shaw (Biocon), Preeta Reddy ( Apollo Hospitals), Sunil Bharti Mittal (Bharti Enterprises), and Anil Ambani (Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group).

The group of U.S. CEOs is led by David Cote, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell International. He is also Co-Chair of the India-U.S. CEO Forum. The forum has four Indian-American CEOs – Ajay Banga, president and CEO of MasterCard; Sanjay Bhatnagar, president and CEO of WaterHealth International, Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe Systems, Indra Nooyi, chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, and Dinesh Paliwal, chairman, president and CEO of Harman International Industries.

Other American CEOs include Mary Barra of General Motors, Michael Burke of AECOM Technology Corporation, Ahmad Chatila of SunEdison, Andres Gluski of AES Corporation Paul Jacobs executive chairman of Qualcomm; Charles R Kaye, co-CEO of Warburg Pincus, Ellen Kullman of DuPont, Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical Company, Michael Mahoney of Boston Scientific Corporation, Douglas Peterson, of McGraw Hill Financial and James Taiclet of American Tower Corporation.

To increase the role of the private sector, for the first time ever, the Department of Commerce will host its U.S.-India CEO Forum on September 21, in close proximity to the Strategic and Commercial Dialogue (SCD), a media statement said.

The CEO Forum — chaired by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and Caroline Atkinson, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy U.S. National Security Adviser for International Economics — is the primary mechanism for engaging the US and Indian private sectors and leveraging business leaders’ recommendations to shape policymaking discussions.

The private sector co-chairs will give a readout of their recommendations at the SCD meeting on September 22. As part of the CEO Forum, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will host a half-day event featuring remarks from Pritzker and Minister of State for Commerce and Industry Nirmala Sitharaman, and a discussion between US and Indian CEOs on efforts to deepen bilateral economic engagement.

Indians around the world are known for their innovations and creativity, the rank of India in the list of Global Innovation Index has gone down further to 81 in comparison to its last year’s ranking. Switzerland, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands and the US are the top 5 position of this list. This study on Global Innovation Index was published collectively by Cornell University, INSEAD France and World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

The index enlisted 141 economies around the globe taking into account their innovation capacity and efficiency. The study shows that the nation has outpaced other countries in the Central and Southern Asian Region (CSA). China, Brazil and India, the leading nations in the lower middle income categories are competing close against developed world on innovation quality.

India has witnessed a consistent downfall in ease of doing business, decision-making on policies have been slow and the political environment has not been consistent. India has been falling positions in the overall rankings since the last 4 years. India’s was holding the ranking of 76 last year. However, the nation has bagged a place amongst the leading 10 outperformers.

“This change in ranking can be primarily attributed to two major factors. The first concerns the changing dynamics of the country’s political, educational and business environment, and the second concerns the structural change GII has undergone to improve itself as an assessment tool over the years,” the GII report pointed out.

According to this study, India has been performing well in innovation quality, knowledge diffusion, general infrastructure, research & development and investment. However, the nation has witnessed a poor performance in institutions and infrastructure, business sophistication, human capital and research, creative outputs and market sophistication.

“We believe that with the present growth trend the future ranking for India is going to improve as the data get revised and as the government continues to perform towards a development oriented growth path,” said CII Director General Chandrajit Banerjee. As per the report, the data collected is the perception of the local citizens owning to inactivity of the government for the given period.

This inactivity is due to slowing economy, high inflation and the widespread corruption.

People with common heritage of Madhya Pradesh (MP) and residing in New York New Jersey Tristate area came together and celebrated their  First Friends of MP Family Picnic in New Jersey  on Sun 20th Sept, 2015. The whole day Picnic was a grand success, with participation from people of all parts of New York New Jersey Connecticut, and with origins in Indore, Bhopal, Gwalior, Khandwa, Dewas and other towns of MP.  The pleasant sunny weather and ambience of Liberty State Park, NJ right next to Statue to Liberty added to the fun atmosphere. The Friends of MP Conclave in New York in early 2015 gave a booster to the NRIs from MP to coalesce for a friendly family get- together.

With around 120 attendees of all ages, the day started with Indore’s traditional  Poha -made on the site by men participants – laced with Ratlami Sev, Jeeravan and accompanied by Jalebi/Kachori. Then followed sports and games and catching up of friends, many meeting each other after many years and connecting on many common roots / relationships. Lunch again was MP’s signature  Choorma – Dal – Batee, which was really relished by all. Future years may see  Baflaa, which is truly a Malwa Cuisine. Lunch was followed by a Social Hour of introductions and plans for future such get – together and with much larger participation. While thousands of people from MP may be in the NY Tristate area, this was the first such gathering of its sort at the people’s level in many years, making attendees happy and nostalgic.

The planning and execution for the event was managed by a Core Team of Jitendra Muchhal, Rakesh Bharagava, Dr. R Kakani, Rajiv Goyal, Rajesh Mittal, Raj Bansal, Pankaj Gupta and Navneet Trivedi over last few months . Right from name labels to conversations, usage of Hindi and Malwee language was encouraged through out the day, also coinciding with MP’s hosting of World Hindi Conference this month.

Sameer Hinduja, a prominent Indian American and cyberbullying expert from Florida Atlantic University, has received a $188,776 grant from social networking site Facebook to study cyberbullying and dating violence among teenagers. The overarching goal of the study is to illuminate the nationwide prevalence, frequency and scope of cyberbullying and electronic dating violence among a population of youth in the US.

“Cyberbullying is a unique form of digital abuse that involves a range of tormenting, humiliating, threatening, embarrassing and harassing behaviors and has gained a lot of attention in recent years,” explained Hinduja in a university statement last week.

“Many teenagers across the United States also experience dating violence that typically consists of various forms of mistreatment from insults and rumour spreads to threats and physical assaults, added Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Centre and professor of criminology and criminal justice.

Hinduja and his collaborator Justin Patchin, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Centre, will rigorously construct a nationally-representative panel of teens – ages 12 to 17 years old – who will be surveyed with parental consent.

Apart from descriptive findings by age, gender, grade, and other important demographics, they also will collect data on contributing factors to perpetration and victimisation, as well as the negative outcomes that stem from cyberbullying participation as an aggressor or a target.

There are a number of similarities between cyberbullying and electronic dating violence. Both naturally employ technology and lead to specific emotional, psychological, physical, and behavioural consequences. Cyberbullying tends to occur between individuals who do not like and do not want to be around each other. Electronic dating violence transpires between two people who are attracted to each other, at least on some level.

“Most previous studies have focused on local schools or school districts as data sources. This leads to a key methodological limitation – the potential lack of generalizability – which can be addressed with a nationally-representative replication,” Hinduja commented.

Results of this study will be disseminated through blogs and fact sheets posted on the Cyberbullying Research Centre’s website. Hinduja received the “Global Anti-Bullying Hero Award” for 2015 from Auburn University for his efforts and contributions on the subject.

He recently spoke on Capitol Hill at a Congressional Briefing about cyberbullying and dating violence among teenagers.

The U.S. Labor Department has cleared Infosys Ltd of any wrongdoing and closed its investigation after American technology workers at Southern California Edison complained their jobs were wrongfully outsourced to foreigners working on H-1B visas, Infosys has confirmed.

“Infosys fully cooperated with the (Department of Labor) in this activity,” the company told Reuters in a statement, noting the company was confident from the start that it had complied with U.S. immigration laws.

As per reports, the Labor Department is still investigating similar complaints by U.S. workers into Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., a second IT firm hired by Southern California Edison, and HCL Technologies, an IT firm that Disney hired last year as part of a restructuring of its Orlando-based IT division, a department spokesman said.

H-1B visas are often used by the technology sector to bring highly skilled foreign guest workers to the U.S. Critics say the laws governing the visas are lax, and make it too easy to replace U.S. workers with cheaper, foreign labor. Separately, the Justice Department is looking at whether HCL, Tata, Infosys, Disney and Southern California Edison discriminated against U.S. workers on the basis of citizenship, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The review, which may not become a formal investigation, was sparked after the Labor Department referred complaints it had received from workers. Infosys said it had not received “any indication” of a review by the Justice Department.

The scrutiny by U.S. officials comes after the New York Times and other publications reported that laid-off American IT workers at Disney and Southern California Edison were being forced to train their H-1B replacements in order to receive severance.

Tata said the company is cooperating with the Labor Department’s ongoing probe and is “fully compliant” with U.S. immigration laws. Southern California Edison said its contracts with Infosys and Tata require both firms to follow all “applicable laws.” Disney declined to comment on the U.S. government reviews. A spokesman said the company’s IT restructuring has led to a net increase of about 70 new in-house jobs. HCL declined to comment. The lay-offs have prompted an outcry from some U.S. senators, several of whom also called for probes into abuses.

Companies such as Infosys that have a workforce composed of 15 percent or more H-1B workers are required to try recruiting U.S. workers first and attest they are not displacing Americans.

But they are exempt from these requirements if they pay H-1 B workers more than $60,000 or hire those with a graduate degree.

Experts who have studied federal H-1B pay data say that in the vast majority of cases H-1B workers are paid more than $60,000, complicating enforcement of discrimination claims by the Justice Department or wrongful displacement at the Labor Department.

Further, the Labor Department cannot launch an investigation into alleged H-1B visa abuses unless it receives a complaint from a worker or credible third party. “Qualified American workers are going to keep getting replaced by less expensive foreign workers,” said Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley, one of several lawmakers planning to introduce a bill this year to bolster the Labor Department’s powers. “Current law hamstrings the Labor Department so bad actors go unchecked.”

A U.S. based company founded by a group of Indian-origin entrepreneurs which produces artificial milk has won a Dutch sustainability innovation prize of 200,000 euro, media reported.

An international jury chaired by Steve Howard, chief sustainability officer at multinational IKEA Group, awarded Ryan Pandya of Silicon Valley startup Muufri the runner-up prize of the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge 2015.

It is the largest annual international competition in the field of sustainability innovation, green challenge. Muufri has identified the proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals in milk and is developing a blending process that has the potential to eliminate vast amounts of greenhouse gas emissions being generated by commercial dairy farming.

The biotech startup was founded in 2014 by bio-engineers Pandya, Perumal Gandhi and Isha Datar. The winner of the Dutch Postcode Lottery-organised award was Jurriaan Ruys (47), co-founder of the Dutch start-up Land Life Company. Ruys won 500,000 euro for his technology for nature restoration.

“It is inspiring to see how these green entrepreneurs are contributing to a better world… All of these ideas have potential for business success and to go to scale — which is the only way we are going to tackle CO2 emissions,” Howard was quoted as saying.

At a time when a debate is raging about smartphone addiction among the millennials (those born after 1980), here comes a way to help you identify if you are suffering from a modern-day phobia: fear of being without your mobile phone.

To gauge if you are suffering from nomophobia (missing smartphone fear), scientists from Iowa State University have developed a set of questions to help you identify if you suffer from this.

In the study, participants were asked to respond to statements on a scale of one (strongly disagree) to seven (strongly agree). They interviewed nine students about their smartphone experiences and then developed a questionnaire based on these responses that was tested on 301 other students.

Caglar Yildirim, a PhD student in human computer interaction at the Iowa State University (ISU), and Ana-Paula Correia, an associate professor in ISU’s School of Education, identified four dimensions of this modern-day phobia.

These were: the fear of losing connectedness, not being able to communicate, not being able to access information and giving up the convenience, the university said in a statement.

The questionnaire includes statements such as “I would feel uncomfortable without constant access to information through my smartphone” or “I would be annoyed if I could not look information up on my smartphone when I wanted to do so”.

It also had questions like “Being unable to get the news (eg, happenings, weather, etc) on my smartphone would make me nervous” or “I would be annoyed if I could not use my smartphone and/or its capabilities when I wanted to do so”.

“Running out of battery in my smartphone would scare me”, “If I were to run out of credits or hit my monthly data limit, I would panic” and “If I did not have a data signal or could not connect to Wi-Fi, then I would constantly check to see if I had a signal or could find a Wi-Fi network” were other questions on the list.

The participants also answered statements like “If I could not use my smartphone, I would be afraid of getting stranded somewhere” and “If I could not check my smartphone for a while, I would feel a desire to check it”.

Another section of the questionnaire asked participants how they would react if they did not have their smartphone with them.

They responded to the statements like “I would feel anxious because I could not instantly communicate with my family and/or friends” and “I would feel nervous because I would not be able to receive text messages and calls.”

The team then calculated total scores by adding the responses to each item. The higher scores corresponded to greater nomophobia severity, the team noted in a paper published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

Traditional Mars rovers roll around on wheels and they cannot operate upside-down in rough terrain. To overcome this problem, NASA scientists are building a Hedgehog robot that will hop and tumble on the surface instead of rolling on wheels.

Along with researchers from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the NASA team is building a five-kg robot that is specifically designed to overcome the challenges of traversing small bodies like asteroid or a comet with low-gravity conditions and rough surfaces.

“Hedgehog is shaped like a cube and can operate no matter which side it lands on,” said Issa Nesnas, leader of the team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement.

The construction of a Hedgehog robot is relatively low-cost compared to a traditional rover and several could be packaged together for flight.

The mothership could release many robots at once or in stages, letting them spread out to make discoveries on a world never traversed before.

The basic concept is a cube with spikes that moves by spinning and braking internal flywheels. The JPL Hedgehog prototype has eight spikes and three flywheels.

The spikes protect the robot’s body from the terrain and act as feet while hopping and tumbling.

“The spikes could also house instruments such as thermal probes to take the temperature of the surface as the robot tumbles,” Nesnas added.

Two Hedgehog prototypes — one from Stanford and one from JPL – were tested aboard NASA’s C-9 aircraft for microgravity research in June 2015.

During 180 parabolas, over the course of four flights, these robots demonstrated several types of maneuvers that would be useful for getting around on small bodies with reduced gravity.

Researchers tested these maneuvers on different materials that mimic a wide range of surfaces: sandy, rough and rocky, slippery and icy, and soft and crumbly.

“We demonstrated for the first time our Hedgehog prototypes performing controlled hopping and tumbling in comet-like environments,” noted Robert Reid, lead engineer on the project at JPL.

The team hope the robot could weigh more than nine kg with instruments such as cameras and spectrometers.

The researchers are currently working on Hedgehog’s autonomy, trying to increase how much the robots can do by themselves without instructions from Earth.

Their idea is that an orbiting mothership would relay signals to and from the robot, similar to how NASA’s Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity communicate via satellites orbiting Mars.

The mothership would also help the robots navigate and determine their positions, the space agency noted.

India-born Padmasree Warrior, former Cisco CTO, may become the Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, the struggling internet company, news reports said last week. A Bloomberg report quoted by Business Insider said Sept. 2 that Twitter’s CEO headhunting firm has reached out to Warrior to head the company which is entering the fourth month of its CEO search after Dick Costolo resigned earlier this year.

While Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has taken the reins as interim CEO, pressure is said to be mounting for the company to appoint permanent leader as executives jump ship, morale suffers, and the company’s stock gets pummeled. The report said that company stock is down more than 20% since the search began.

Twitter’s board was to meet last week to discuss the status of the CEO search, which is being led by recruiting firm Spencer Stuart, Bloomberg said in the report. The reports described Warrior, 54, as somewhat of a surprising candidate for the Twitter CEO job, given that her background is in hardware rather than the advertising-based consumer internet business.

Warrior, who studied at IIT-Delhi and at Cornell University, was Cisco’s CTO and Strategy Officer but Cisco announced in July this year that she was leaving the company amid a reorganization of top deck in which Chuck Robbins took over CEO.

The report did not specify whether Twitter’s outreach to Warrior and CBS Interactive boss Jim Lanzone about running the struggling internet company had resulted in any serious discussions about the CEO job. But the Bloomberg report mentioned that some candidates that Spencer Stuart has contacted had doubts about whether they were serious candidates, given that many believe Dorsey will eventually get tapped for the job.

Twitter has said it is looking at both internal and external candidates for the CEO job. But until now, the focus has primarily been on internal candidates such as revenue chief Adam Bain and Dorsey. Dorsey is also the CEO of digital payments company Square, and Twitter’s board has previously said the permanent CEO will have to make a “full time commitment” to Twitter.

Mahindra, India’s largest SUV maker is ready to make its debut on America’s roads. But it’s starting with two wheels, not four. Mahindra hopes to win over city and campus dwellers with a $2,999, Vespa-like electric scooter called the GenZe, which will go on sale in the fall in California, Oregon and Michigan. Sales could soon expand to other states and Europe. If buyers like it, Mahindra could use the GenZe as a springboard into the car market, just as Honda made the leap from motorcycles to cars here in the 1970s.

The strategy has risks. Scooters have never been as popular in the United States as elsewhere — people in China buy as many electric scooters in a day as Americans do in a full year, for example. And consumers might not trust Mumbai-based Mahindra, which scrapped an attempt to sell vehicles here five years ago because it couldn’t meet safety standards.

“The pressure has really been on to make sure that we get this right,” said Terence Duncan, the head of customer engagement for the GenZe and one of its chief designers. “What we’re doing, really, is introducing the brand to American customers.”

To appeal to skeptics, Mahindra designed the GenZe in Silicon Valley with features favored by tech-savvy millennials, like a secure laptop charging port under the seat. It opened its four stores in San Francisco and Portland because buyers there are more accepting of two-wheeled transportation. In Michigan, buyers can get a GenZe at the Ann Arbor factory where it’s made.

The GenZe only goes up to 30 miles per hour, so riders won’t need a motorcycle license. Its most innovative feature is a 28-pound removable battery, which riders can unhook and carry inside to charge. The battery takes 3.5 hours to fully charge, and the scooter goes for 30 miles on a charge. A 7-inch touchscreen display tells drivers their speed and range.

Only about 5,000 electric scooters will be sold in the United States this year, according to Ryan Citron, who analyzes the market for the consulting company Navigant Research. Among them: the ZEV 2700 and the Bravo EVT-168, which cost about the same as the GenZe. By comparison, 30,000 will be sold in Europe and 3.9 million in China, where electric scooters cost less than half the price of a GenZe because they use a cheaper type of battery.

Citron said about 46,000 gas-powered scooters will be sold in the United States this year. Any scooter has a tough time selling when gas prices are relatively low, he says. Citron believes the electric scooter market will grow to around 20,000 annual sales by 2024 as companies like Mahindra and Oregon’s Boxx Corp. enter the market. Another one to watch is Gogoro, a Taiwan-based scooter maker that wants to develop stations where riders can swap out batteries.

Mahindra is targeting college campuses and plans to supply scooter-sharing programs like Scoot. So far, it has around 300 GenZe orders from people who paid a $100 deposit. The company expects to make about 3,000 scooters in the first year, Duncan said.

This isn’t Mahindra’s first attempt to crack the American auto market. The $16.9 billion conglomerate, which controls about 40 percent of the SUV market in India, began courting U.S. dealers about a decade ago with the promise of delivering vehicles by 2009. But Mahindra had trouble meeting U.S. vehicle regulations and canceled its plans in 2010.

Mahindra sells tractors in America but wants to build its name in urban areas, said GenZe CEO Vish Palekar. So in 2012, it set up a small group in Palo Alto and told them to come up with a vehicle that would get people around cities more easily. “If we’re going to be relevant here, we need to create something transformative,” Palekar said.

Mahindra hopes that eventually leads to the four-wheel market. It would be logical to target GenZe buyers with vehicles such as the Reva e20 electric car, which will soon debut in Europe. Executives are tight-lipped about their plans, but Mahindra has opened a Detroit-area tech center that’s working on bringing its vehicles up to U.S. safety standards.

Dr. Jayaraman Sivaguru, a North Dakota State University (NDSU) James A. Meier Jr. professor of chemistry and biochemistry, recently received a three-year, $440,000 award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop environmentally benign, green strategies for performing chemical reactions with light.

The funding also provides research opportunities to graduate and undergraduate students. The research program in the Indian American professor’s group focuses on using light for special photochemical reactions.

“Harnessing the power of light to synthesize chemical compounds during light-induced transformations is very challenging. Our methodology has the ability to provide an opportunity to develop sustainable strategies with minimal impact on environment,” Sivaguru stated in an NDSU press release.

Based on the NSF funding, his research group will evaluate the use of visible and ultraviolet light to synthesize complex molecules. One of the research goals is to gain a fundamental understanding of interaction of light with photo-reactive substrates.

Facebook cancelled an Indian-origin student’s internship after he exposed a serious privacy flaw in the social media giant’s messenger service, a media report said. Aran Khanna’s application, Marauder’s Map, used data from Facebook Messenger to map users’ location when they sent messages, Boston.com reported here last week.

The computer science and math student at Harvard University in Massachusetts, US, posted about his app on social media sites Reddit and Medium in May this year and soon it went viral.

The app caught the attention of Facebook and Khanna was asked to disable it. However, before it was disabled, the extension was downloaded more than 85,000 times and “shared on over 200 publications”, according to Khanna.

About a week later, Facebook released a Messenger app update to provide users “full control over when and how you share your location information”. Facebook cancelled Khanna’s summer internship, saying he did not meet the high ethical standards expected from the interns.

The student accepted another internship with a tech start-up in Silicon Valley and later detailed the experience in a case study titled ‘Facebook’s Privacy Incident Response: A study of geolocation sharing on Facebook Messenger’ in the Harvard Journal of Technology Science.

Two Indian tech tycoons, Wipro chairman Azim Premji and HCL co-founder Shiv Nadar are in the Forbes’ first ever list of the 100 richest people in the technology field, dominated by Americans with Microsoft founder Bill Gates at the top.

Two Indian-Americans tech czars, Romesh Wadhwani, CEO and chairman of Symphony Technology Group, and Bharat Desai, co-founder of IT consulting and outsourcing company Syntel also figure on the list released last week.

Premji, 70, with a net worth of $17.4 billion is ranked 13th on the list followed by Shiv Nadar, 70, in the 14th spot with $14.4 billion. Wadhwani, 67, is ranked 73rd with a net worth of $2.8 billion while Desai, 62, with $2.5 billion is in the 82nd spot.

Premji’s Wipro, India’s third-largest outsourcer, reported a 10 percent rise in revenues to $1.9 billion in the last quarter, on the back of new business from clients such as ABB and Philip Morris, the magazine noted. Nadar, Forbes noted, has diversified into healthcare with HCL Avitas, a new firm in partnership with John Hopkins Medicine International, which has opened 10 clinics in Delhi.

Wadhwani has a degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. His Symphony Technology Group is a collection of 20 companies spanning big data, analytics and software.

Syntel, co-founded by Desai and his wife Neerja Sethi, now generates over $900 million in revenue, has a market cap of over $3 billion and more than 24,500 employees across the globe. While 51 American billionaires are on the list, tech barons from Asia made a strong showing as well, with 33 people hailing from that region. Forty of the 100 live in California.

Bill Gates, who’s also the world’s richest man, ranks number one among tech tycoons, with a net worth of $79.6 billion. Number two on the list is Larry Ellison, founder of database software firm Oracle, with a net worth estimated at $50 billion.

The third richest on the list is Jeff Bezos with a net worth of $47.8 billion followed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the fourth place with $41.2 billion. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are ranked fifth and sixth respectively.

Altogether, the world’s 100 richest tech billionaires are worth $842.9 billion. Just seven women made the list, the wealthiest of whom is Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, with an estimated net worth of $21.4 billion.

Nearly all of the 100 are self-made billionaires: 94 made their own luck, 3 inherited their fortunes, and 3 have inherited fortunes but have been actively expanding them.

With the elevation of Pichai, 43, as the CEO of Google, Indian Tech managers have been drawing unique attention in the international media. The Wall Street Journal reported Pichai’s appointment is a reminder that the CEOs of some of the world’s most recognisable tech companies share origins from India. One of the reasons for Indian managers’ success is that they are future oriented, a leading American financial daily has said, with Google’s Sunder Pichai joining the fast expanding club of Indian-origin CEOs.

“Indian managers are future-oriented, and had a paradoxical blend of genuine personal humility and intense professional will,” the Journal said, citing a recent study by Southern Hampshire University. “These leaders achieved extraordinary results and built great organisations without much hoopla,” the daily said as it listed out the Indian origin executives that are heading top companies in the US.

“Nowhere, perhaps, is that more starkly on display than at Microsoft. Since taking over as CEO, Satya Nadella managed to achieve what had once seemed impossible: to make Silicon Valley like Microsoft again. He did so by embracing collaboration and not treating rivals products as enemies–in some ways the opposite of his often-flamboyant predecessor, Steve Ballmer,” the daily reported.

While Indian managers are not in many cases the founders of the companies they lead, they are respected managers who have held numerous positions in their companies, working up the ranks, it said. Adobe chief Shantanu Narayen, 53, according to the daily, has been described by colleagues as quiet but incredibly competitive. Since becoming CEO in 2007, he has led a dramatic transformation at the company, it added.

Sanjay Jha, the 52-year-old CEO of chipmaker Globalfoundries, had previously run Motorola Mobility and had served for years as a senior executive of Qualcomm, it said. In another article, The Wall Street Journal said Pichai’s ascent reflects his ability to create strong products, including Google’s Chrome browser and later the Chrome operating system.

But it also shows his ability to identify competitive pressures, manage others and smooth over differences, both internally and with Google’s business partners, it said. At Google, Pichai showed a flair for championing challenging but strategically important projects such as the Chrome browser, which today has 45 percent market share globally, according to research firm Statcounter, up from one percent in early 2009.

For many Americans, going online is an important way to connect with friends and family, shop, get news and search for information. Yet today, 15% of U.S. adults do not use the internet, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of survey data.

The size of this group has changed little over the past three years, despite recent government and social service programs to encourage internet adoption. But that 15% figure is substantially lower than in 2000, when Pew Research first began to study the social impact of technology. That year, nearly half (48%) of American adults did not use the internet.

A 2013 Pew Research survey found some key reasons that some people do not use the internet. A third of non-internet users (34%) did not go online because they had no interest in doing so or did not think the internet was relevant to their lives. Another 32% of non-internet users said the internet was too difficult to use, including 8% of this group who said they were “too old to learn.” Cost was also a barrier for some adults who were offline – 19% cited the expense of internet service or owning a computer.

The latest Pew Research analysis also shows that internet non-adoption is correlated to a number of demographic variables, including age, educational attainment, household income, race and ethnicity, and community type.

Seniors are the group most likely to say they never go online. About four-in-ten adults ages 65 and older (39%) do not use the internet, compared with only 3% of 18- to 29-year-olds. Household income and education are also indicators of a person’s likelihood to be offline. A third of adults with less than a high school education do not use the internet, but that share falls as the level of educational attainment increases. Adults from households earning less than $30,000 a year are roughly eight times more likely than the most affluent adults to not use the internet.

Rural Americans are about twice as likely as those who live in urban or suburban settings to never use the internet. Racial and ethnic differences are also evident. One-in-five blacks and 18% of Hispanics do not use the internet, compared with 14% of whites and only 5% of English-speaking Asian-Americans – the racial or ethnic group least likely to be offline.

Despite some groups having persistently lower rates of internet adoption, the vast majority of Americans are online. Over time, the offline population has been shrinking, and for some groups that change has been especially dramatic. For example, 86% of adults 65 and older did not go online in 2000; today that figure has been cut in half. And among those without a high school diploma, the share not using the internet dropped from 81% to 33% in the same time period.