ACM NIT Jamshedpur

ACM Student Chapter NIT Jamshedpur, India.

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Jugaadathon: India's first open house Healthcare Hackathon

A guest post by Global Healthcare.

Glocal Healthcare is pleased to announce Hack Healthcare - Jugaadathon, a unique effort to bring together different sections of society to help address problems related to everyday health issues.

Jugaadathon is an event where innovators will collaborate intensively over a short period of time to create usable prototypes centered around healthcare and build entrepreneurial capacity.  The event will provide a platform for clinicians, engineers, entrepreneurs, designers and end-users to come together to advance knowledge-sharing across disciplines and catalyze better innovations for resource-constrained settings.

Multi dimensional teams will be formed at the event comprising of participants from different backgrounds. Each participant will bring their knowledge and expertise to the table to help develop an all round solution to the problem. Clinicians will use their medical background to clearly understand the problem at hand. They will provide the other team members all the information they need to engineer a solution to the problem. Engineers will use their knowledge of electronics, mechanics and programming to help implement ideas into a physical working prototype. Product Designers will bring their expertise of human factors in design and help develop a more finished product. CAD drawings and visual representations will go a long way in strengthening the idea pitch. Entrepreneurs and end users will understand the market and develop an overall platform to sell their product.

Problem statements for the event can be found at http://jugaadathon.com/problems.html. We are focusing on three key areas of healthcare namely Maternal and child health, Emergency and Critical care, and Mobile Health.

  The event, scheduled on 25th and 26th January, 2014, is expected to attract over 100 participants from 18 schools + organizations. Participants will be engaged in 36 hours of straight hacking to design and build solutions for healthcare problems that we will set before them. With us will be faculty, researchers and students from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as Indian entrepreneurs from tech and healthcare, who will act as mentors & facilitators throughout this fun & crazy weekend.

We are confident that this event will not only provide a memorable experience to all involved but also serve as a stepping stone for future startups. And of course, there are prizes worth Rs. 50,000 to be won!

  There are no eligibility requirements for this one-of-a-kind event, so apply today itself! (Apply Now: http://jugaadathon.com/apply.html)

Also, people are more than welcome to come and watch the hacking in progress.

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I am glad to announce that ACM NIT Jamshedpur is hosing a Guest Lecture on Multicore and Extreme Scale Computing: Programming and Software Challenges by Distinguished ACM Speaker Dr. R.K. Shyamasundar on 9th April 2013.  Dr. R.K. Shyamasundar is a Senior Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, JC Bose National Fellow and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Computing published by the Computer Society of India. He did his post-doctoral work with Prof. dr. Edsgar W. Dijkstra. To know more about the speaker and lecture, visit http://www.acmnitjsr.org/guest-lecture. Abstract of the lecture is provided in the Hash Box of the same page.

Don't miss this opportunity, freeze your calender now and ensure your presence on 9th April 2013. 

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ACM NIT Jamshedpur & Open Source For You presents TechLekh

ACM NIT Jamshedpur in association with Open Source For You presents, TekhLekh; a technical article writing competition. Open Source For You (earlier Linux For You) is India's leading and the complete magazine on open source. Now you have enough reasons to show your expertise in areas of your interest and have a chance to share the knowledge to the world. We will select top 3 technical articles to give out 2500 INR, Year long subscription of Open Source For You (/LFY), April issue of OSFY and much more. But the list of benefits doesn't end here, if your article fits in our requirements then we will get your articles published in the coming issues of Open Source For You and you will get paid for your article. Please note that being selected for 1st, 2nd or 3rd prize doesn't guarantee the publication of your article in magazine. Impress us and your article will be eligible for the publication even if you are not in the top three list.

General guidelines for Technical Articles

Maximum word limit for the article is 1200. 

It should be original. 

A person can't give more than 3 articles.

Send your entries before 4th April 2013 with your name, roll, branch, year, name of college to [email protected]

You may use non-copyrighted images, diagrams, tables, graphs etc in your article.

General guidelines for formatting Articles

Send in the article as editable document formats like ODT, TXT, DOC and RTF.

Including code in the article: There is no need to shade the code and program listings that you include in your articles. Simply use the format shown below, and we'll take care of the rest.

--------------------------------CODE-----------------------------

void main()

{

puts("Hello World!");

}

--------------------------------CODE-----------------------------

You can use this format to even highlight notes, cautions, warnings, acknowledgments, etc.

Please DO NOT copy-paste any text from publications in any media (and that explicitly includes the Internet) in your article. In case you need to use some text that is covered under a license permitting redistribution, it is desirable you mention the source (and other proper attributions) explicitly in the text. For example, you might say, "The Wikipedia defines the potato as a perennial plant of the Solanaceae, or nightshade, family, grown for its starchy tuber." This is important for all text that you borrow verbatim (please try to avoid it altogether) from a source. Copyright is an important issue.

IMPORTANT. You could avoid pasting the figures in the document. Please include just the figure titles (like Figure 1: Figure title). Attach the figures separately with the email, preferably in PNG or JPEG formats. These could be compressed into a single ZIP file with the figure/image names intuitive.

If you are aiming high and want to get your articles publish in addition to win prizes. Here are few personal tips.

Write articles on open source technologies which itself covers a myriad of topics viz. networking, system administration, software development, embedded systems, and even hands-on tutorials for newbies. Following are few article genres which worth consideration. 

Tips & Tricks for software developers or IT implementers

Cool tweaks for FOSS enthusiasts

FOSS on Mobiles

Virtualisation

OpenJDK or Java on Linux

OpenBSD, Linux kernel, gnome, Tizen, Ubuntu phone OS, Network programming, parallel and/or distributed programming in in C, Python, Java, security tools etc.

How can I do ‘that‘ on Linux

Reviews of latest open source tool.

But of course you are free to write for other topics. If you have got any interesting idea, just go for it.

 Best Wishes to all potential writers.

For more exciting events in Ahaan, visit Ahaan's homepage.

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India's fastest supercomputer unveiled by C-DAC

India's fastest supercomputer, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), will now make possible Precise weather forecasting, faster tapping of natural resources in the sea and designing of customised drugs for individuals.

The supercomputer has been upgraded to 524 teraflops, about 10 times faster than the present facility. With an investment of Rs 16 crore, it was developed in a record three months.

Param Yuva II will also give a boost to research in space and bioinformatics, among others. Developing research-based applications will take lesser time than before and complex problems will be solved in a simpler way. For instance, if it takes about 18 to 20 years to discover a new drug now "from designing to testing” Param Yuva II will help reduce this time to 15 years. The supercomputer would also help in reducing the time-frame in weather predictions. If researchers currently collect satellite data to predict the conditions for a six-km region, the supercomputer could help cover a wider region, may be up to 10 km.

About 300 people from the C-DAC team were involved in the making of the supercomputer, which also promises to be energy efficient with 35% reduction in energy consumption as compared to the earlier facility.

Satyanarayana said, "The facility is a stepping stone for the petaflop version of the supercomputer that India has envisioned. What we need to do now is speak to users, researchers and scientists and take feedback from them on the issues relating to usage of the facility and help them in accelerating their research work for the benefit of common man."

C-DAC director general Rajat Moona said, "Although we initiated the project in June 2012, we only intended that it would upgrade the facility. However, we later realised that it could be upgraded to half-a-petaflop (524 teraflop) and we achieved this within three months."

Moona said, "The list of top 500 supercomputers in the world is released twice in a year, in June and November. Had we launched Param Yuva II in November, it would have been in the 62nd position."

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Sound waves used to increase disk drive capacity

Researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) have found a way to use high-frequency sound waves to improve magnetic data storage techniques.

The breakthrough could allow greater amounts of data to be stored on both hard disk drives and NAND flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs).

"We're near the peak of what we can do with the technology we now use for magnetic storage," said Pallavi Dhagat, an associate professor in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "There's always a need for approaches that could store even more information in a smaller space, cost less and use less power."

The technology is called acoustic-assisted magnetic recording, according to the electrical engineers who discovered it. They presented their results at the12th Joint MMM/Intermag Conference in Chicago this week. The researchers have filed a U.S. patent application as well.

A depiction of acoustic-assisted magnetic recording (Image: OSU)

When magnetic recording materials are temporarily heated, even for an instant, they can become momentarily less stiff and more data can be stored at a particular spot, according to the researchers.

But, the technique has proven difficult to effectively increase capacity because the heating tends to spread beyond where it is wanted and the technology involves complex integration of optics, electronics and magnetics, the researchers said.

With acoustic-assisted magnetic recording, ultrasound is directed at a highly specific location on the platter while data is being stored, creating elasticity that allows "a tiny portion of the material to bend or stretch."

After the ultrasound is turned off, the material immediately returns to its original shape, but the data stored during the process remains in a dense form.

While as yet untested, the researches said ultrasound should also have the same effect on solid-state memory used to make SSDs.

"This technology should allow us to marry the benefits of solid state electronics with magnetic recording, and create non-volatile memory systems that store more data in less space, using less power," said Albrecht Jander, also an associate professor of electrical engineering and collaborator on the research.

This approach might work with materials already being used in magnetic recordings, or variations of them, the researchers said. Researchers will continue to explore performance, materials and cost issues.