Forbes list of Billionaires

Forbes list of Billionaires was out on March 10, 2010

What is interesting this time?

Bill Gates moves to No 2 making way for Carlos Slim of Mexico (Telecom tycoon)

Larry Ellison of Oracle (6th), Google founders Sergey Brin & Larry Page (24th), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (43rd). Apple founder Steve Jobs (136th) and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (212th) are the IT guys who make it to the list

Two Indians make it to the “Top 10″ – Mukesh Ambani (4th) and Lakshmi Mittal (5th)

Asia, South America and Eastern Europe are slowly entering this list dominated by USA and Western Europe!

USA (22), Swede (3), Germany (3), France (2), Spain (1), Canada (1), Italy (1), Hong Kong (2) and Saudi (1) represent the “old rich“; India (6), Russia (4), Brazil (2), Malaysia (1) and Mexico (1) represent the “Neo Rich” among the “Top 50“

In the “Top 5″ India has 2!

Mukesh Ambani (4th), Lakshmi Mittal (5th), Premji (28th), Anil Ambani (36th), Ruias (40th) and Jindal (44th) are the Indians in “Top 50″

Interesting times indeed!

Mobile World Congress 2010 @ Barcelona, Spain Day 1 highlights

Day 1 (February 15, 2010)

1 Microsoft Windows Phone 7 (seems very interesting departure from PC centric Windows Mobile)

2 Samsung Beam phone with built-in projector

3. 40 leading telcos (including Airtel & China Telecom) talking of global appstore architecture

4. Voice over LTE (delivered using IMS) getting traction

5. Intel & Nokia agreeing to merge their Mobile OS platforms (MobiLin & MeMo) into MeeGo platform

Interesting days ahead

US continues to bag a major share of Nobel prizes

October is the month for Nobel prize announcements. Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace and Economics Nobel prizes announced one after another had 11 out of 13 winners from USA. Isreal in Chemistry Nobel and Germany in Literature Nobel were the only countries outside USA. Of course one of the Chemistry Nobel prize winner (Venky Ramakrishnan) is of Indian origin (in fact from my part of the country!). The surprise this time surely was the Peace Nobel for President Obama when he has not even completed nine full months in his office!

40 years of Moon landing

July 21 (IST) we celebrate the 40th year of the the unusual milestone in scientific endeavor – landing on the Moon surface by human being. As part of the Apollo 11 project of NASA, two American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin set their foot on the lunar surface on this day in 1969.

For many of us it is also a special day; we all remember vividly as college students hearing the extra-ordinary Radio broadcast of the famous statement “One small step for man; a giant leap for mankind” live from the Moon that is quarter million kilometers away; at our age when I was just 17, that moment made deep impressions on us.

I went to Purdue University in 1976; Neil Armstrong is an alumnus of Purdue University; more interestingly, I was at the School of Industrial Engineering that was physically located in Grissom Hall (along with Aeronautical Engineering School) – named after another astronaut Grissom!

I joined IIT Kanpur in 1979; I was pleasantly surprised to find a sample of Moon soil carefully kept and displayed in the IIT Kanpur Library (as part of Indo US scientific exchange)

Michael Jackson is dead; for several hours there is deadly silence in some parts of many web-sites including Twitter and Google sites

The king of pop Michael Jackson died on June 26, 2009 at LA.

With 750 million album sales Jackson is a phenomenon unparalleled in history. Many of us are ignorant of this pat of human activity; but what caught my attention was the fact that Jackson’s death could bring down parts of Google and Twitter; people either got an error message or very slow to no response for several hours on these two hugely popular global sites, demonstrating that the online world is susceptible to the problems similar to the physical world (I remembered the chaos on the road when Rajkumar died in Bangalore or MGR died in Madras)

President Obama on consumer protection

In his weekly address to the Nation on June 19, 2009 President Obama talks of the need to create a fair and competitive market system that protects the interest of the common man. What is particularly striking are the following

“An epidemic of irresponsibility took hold from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.  And the consequences have been disastrous”

“We are going to promote markets that work for those who play by the rules. We’re going to stand up for a system in which fair dealing and honest competition are the only way to win———but not those that allow insiders to exploit its weaknesses for their own gain”

“And one of the most important proposals is a new oversight agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. It’s charged with just one job: looking out for the interests of ordinary Americans in the financial system” 

” Today, folks signing up for a mortgage, student loan, or credit card face a bewildering array of incomprehensible options. Companies compete not by offering better products, but more complicated ones – with more fine print and hidden terms”

“This new agency —–will have the power to set tough new rules so that companies compete by offering innovative products that consumers actually want – and actually understand. Those ridiculous contracts – pages of fine print that no one can figure out – will be a thing of the past. You’ll be able to compare products – with descriptions in plain language – to see what is best for you”

“Some argue that these changes – and the many others we’ve called for – go too far———That’s not surprising. That’s Washington”

“Well, the American people did not send me to Washington to give in to the special interests; the American people sent me to Washington to stand up for their interests.  And while I’m not spoiling for a fight, I’m ready for one.”

Ramanujan Rediscovered International Conference on Math & IT

As Head of IIIT-B I had to speak at the Conference

Ramanujan Rediscovered

Elliptic Functions, Q-series, Partitions and Related Number Theory, with parallel sessions on Mathematics and IT

A Tribute to Prof K. Venkatachaliengar’s life and work

It was nice to see Prof Bruce Berndt of Univ.. of Illinois; an outstanding mathematician. Prof Berndt has published 7 books on Ramanujan (Five on Ramanujan’s Notes and two on Ramanujan Lost Notes), Prof AK Agarwal, President of the Indian Mathematics Society  and several distinguished mathematicians attending the conference. The partial list includes

1. Prof Bruce Berndt, University of Illinois, US
2. Prof Krishnaswami Alladi, University of Florida, US
3. Prof Satya Deo, Harish Chandra Institute, India
4. Prof Shaun Cooper, Massey University, New Zealand
5. Prof Mike Hirschhorn, University of New South Wales, Australia
6. S. Bhargava, Mysore University, India
7. Ashok Kumar Agarwal, Panjab University, India
8. R. Balasubramanian, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, India
9. K. Ramachandra, National Institute of Advanced Studies, India
10. N. D. Baruah, Tezpur University, India
11. Frank Garvan, University of Florida, US
12. Tim Huber, Iowa State University, US
13. Song Heng Chan, Nanyang Technological University,
14. Pee Choon Toh, National University of Singapore, Singapore
15. Zhi-Guo Liu, East China Normal University, China
16. Hamza Yesilyurt, Bilkent University, Turkey
17. Michael Schlosser, Universität Wien, Austria
18. Ae Ja Yee, Pennsylvania State University, US
19. K. Srinivasa Rao, Mathematics Museum, PSTC, Kotturpuram, India

There were several contributed papers.

In a parallel track “Math &IT” there were several talks / Tutorials. Prominent speakers included

1. Prof. Ravichandran, IIM Indore
2. Prof. Y. Narahari, IISc
3. Prof. Vijay Chandru – IISc and Strand Genomics
4. Dr. M Sakthi Balan - Infosys
5. Prof. Veni Madhavan IISc
6. Prof. Ramanujan – CDAC
7. Prof. Raghavan IISc
8. Prof. Srinath IIIT-B
9. Dr. Ravi Gorthi, Infosys

It is an exciting are; it is time IT professionals take a serious look at Mathematics.

Mr K Dinesh, Co-Founder Infosys, Mr Srikantan Moorthy, Head, Education & Research too spoke on Day 1

All in all it is an enjoyable experience; one hopes to make it an annual conference organized by IIIT-B

(IIIT-B along with Indian Mathematics Society (and funding from Infosys, DST, Microsoft & Indo-US S&T Forum organized this 5-Day Conference at Infosys Campus)

India matters to the world – Vodafone and Suzuki find it

Two independent reports talk of

1. Vodafone ending the year (Apr 08- Mar 09) with 16.8% increase in profit on higher revenue from emerging markets mainly India
2. Growth in India raises Suzuki profit to $ 106 million

Interesting times indeed!

IEEE is 125 years old today

IEEE the world’s largest body of professional members turns 125 today (May 13, 2009), an important landmark

Not many organizations have been able to go through such transformations and “re-inventions” as IEEE has gone through over the decades.

Starting in 1884 as American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) the Institute had its beginnings in the East Coast of America (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) and the early members had telegraph, power and telecom background (Norvin Green of Western Union, Thomas Edison  and Graham Bell, respectively). An independent society Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) started in 1912 was influenced by Marconi and his wireless work. With the invention of television, radar, transistors, ICs and computers there was significant overlap in the societies’ work and they merged in 1963 to form IEEE. It was predominantly an American Society with 140,000 of its 150,000 members in USA.

Today IEEE is an organization with 375,000 members in 160 countries and 43% of its members are outside USA.

30% if world’s literature in EE & CS originate from 850+ IEEE Conferences & dozens of IEEE Journals / Transactions. IEEE has 1,300 standards under its belt.

I feel particularly happy as I have a long association with IEEE over 35 years; I am a Senior Member today; my office at RUTGERS (where I was teaching in 1997) had IEEE warehouses on my backyard (Piscataway in New Jersey). Bangalore happens to be one of the 8 cities where IEEE 125th Year celebrations are on

Let me wish IEEE yet another glorious century, nay, a millennium

Obama’s first 100 days

President Obama completed 100 days on April 30, 2009.

It is interesting to see the two extremes;

• on one hand, USA is going through difficulties that no one could believe will materialize even just a year back; financial crisis, collapse of investment banks, poor showing by almost all corporations, Wall Street mayhem PLUS natural calamities – floods, and now the news of swine flu;
• on the other hand, here is a President Obama is taking so many steps with a boldness that is unforeseen in human history

Naturally, every every survey concludes that  about 15% just hate the President – not done anything to bring cheers; yet, 80+% of the people continue to feel Obama is their best bet; he is honest, he is capable and he is bold enough to attack the problems in so many fronts that even if a fraction succeeds it will make huge positive difference to the citizens

The next 100 days will be interesting to watch, particularly the way Obama administration handles the flu crisis