Soon, implantable electronic shrink wrap to heal human hearts


WASHINGTON: Researchers have revealed that laminating devices, which could enhance human health and performance by marrying electronics with the human body, onto tissues could help achieve natural motions, without mechanical constraint.

John A Rogers, PhD, of the departments of materials science, engineering, and chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and editorial advisory board member for ACS Nano, talked about materials for a new generation of electronic devices that promise to revolutionize health care in the world of tomorrow, at the American Chemical Society meeting.

Rogers said that materials, mechanics designs and manufacturing systems are now available for electronic systems that achieve effective elastic moduli and bending stiffness's matched to the surfaces of major organs of the body, including the skin, the heart and the brain.

The researcher said that laminating such devices onto these tissues leads to conformal contact, and adequate adhesion based on van der Waals interactions alone, in a manner that can accommodate natural motions, without mechanical constraint.

The key aspects of this type of technology were highlighted, with an emphasis on the materials, the soft lithographic manufacturing methods and several examples of clinically relevant modes of use.

(ANTI HUMAN)humanoid' Eliza WILL INCREASE UNEMPLOYMENT ,WHILE INCREASING PROFIT

'Blond humanoid' Eliza might take over low-end BPO work

'Blond humanoid' Eliza might take over low-end BPO work
Eliza is IPsoft's virtual service desk employee, and is someone you can see on your computing screens when you interact with her
BANGALORE: Eliza is a blonde humanoid that can answer upto 1 lakh emails, and 67,000 phone calls every day. She (doesn't look nice calling her 'it' ) can even strike a conversation with you about, say, your favourite cappuccino, somewhat like Apple's Siri.

Eliza is IPsoft's virtual service desk employee, and is someone you can see on your computing screens when you interact with her. She handles the back office grunt work, interpreting voice inputs to investigate and diagnose IT incidents. Like IBM's Watson that beat humans in the game of Jeopardy, Eliza — the newest artificial intelligence sensation — is drawing attention from people around the world.

"When I met N R Narayana Murthy in New York recently, he told me he wants to have a date with Eliza the next time he's in the US. He can see better than most, the wave of cognitive and autonomic technologies that is about to sweep us," says Chetan Dube, a former math professor turned founder and CEO of New York-based IT autonomics service provider IPsoft.

Eliza, currently deployed in a few blue chip customers in the US, is taking over routine helpdesk tasks that were done previously by an army of engineers. The software algorithms sitting behind the computing system resolves business process queries without human intervention.

Automation is fundamentally changing the way IT and BPO services are being delivered. India's $20 billion BPO industry is increasingly deploying some form of automation to take over routine helpdesk tasks performed by offshore employees. Infosys BPO, for instance, has implemented automation solutions across different process areas - in traditional ones like accounts payable, order processing, payroll etc, and in newer ones like electronic discovery, trade promotion management, and master data management.

"It takes us three months to train a manual agent. But the machines will absorb standard operating procedures within seconds. And you would have created the most competent virtual help desk engineer. What is liberating is that the machines will be non-linearly scalable," says Dube.

Anantha Radhakrishnan, global head of enterprise services, transformation and technology services in Infosys BPO, says automation will delink the direct dependence of revenue growth on people addition as long as service providers move to transaction and outcome-based price models. "At another level, automation will help grow the BPM (business process management) market as it will enable business cases to become viable in new process areas and to become attractive for clients," he says.

Automation is challenging the conventional wage arbitrage model. Indian BPO companies employ a million people. They are moving up the value chain doing a complex repertoire of work, but the rise of machine intelligence and automation would upskill them to handle still higher tasks. "The last decade belonged to labour arbitrage. This decade will belong to labour automation. Analyst firm ISG did a study recently that found that the gains realized in IT outsourcing through labour automation are in the spectrum of 60-80 % as opposed to the conventional wage arbitrage, which is now hovering around 15-30%," says Dube.

Keshav Murugesh, group CEO of WNS, said automation would take over lower end tasks in the coming years. "There is research underway that will enable automation of some high end tasks to bring additional process efficiencies. Development of highly intuitive self-service applications could also reduce some type of volumes and increase efficiency in the days ahead," he said.

Roots of Ray Dolby's India connection


Ray Dolby, who passed away on Sept. 12 in the US at the age of 80, created a niche area and made amazing products, ensured that products continuously evolved and dramatically improved over five decades. He also ran a profitable corporation successfully without getting too greedy or becoming arrogant; and, with his wife, contributed liberally to philanthropy.

After undergraduate education, Dolby moved to Stanford for his Master's Degree in 1957 and then to the University of Cambridge for his PhD in Physics in 1961.

He took the unusual step of working for the United Nations for the next couple of years and that brought him to India for a Unesco assignment in New Delhi. He had to record several pieces of Indian music (both classical and folklore) and for this, he went to several ashrams in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.

Those were the days of analogue audio recording -- both spool and cassette type. Dolby would carry loads of audiotapes and got frustrated when he found that concerts of amazing quality he had personally listened to were terrible on recorded tape, primarily due to the "hissing" noise created by the sitar and veena and the ceiling fan noise. His genius converted the challenge into an opportunity.

By "amplifying low-level high-frequency sounds during recording, and cutting them out during playback, Dolby Laboratories managed to produce much better sound in audio cassettes. 'Dolby' became synonymous with high-quality audio. After his India assignment, he went back to Cambridge and with an initial savings of $25,000 started the company in 1965. The company moved to the US in 1976, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Dolby Laboratories started with its first product Dolby 301 with Type A Dolby Noise Reduction. Over the years, the company created products for stereo and surround sound, embraced the digital world and pioneered high-quality sound for thousands of movies, including 'Star Trek'. Recently, it addressed the need for high-quality sound in mobile handsets and smartphones.

By following an unusual business model of directly making professional-grade audio equipment, and only licensing its technology for consumer equipment and by capitalizing its intellectual property through dozens of patents (Dolby alone had more than 50 patents) yet charging very low royalty, Dolby Sound touches more than 7.2 billion consumers today. Dolby Systems has won several Emmy, Grammy and Oscar awards.

An inspiring engineer, amazing products and an admirable corporation, thy name is Dolby.

(Prof Sadagopan, director of IIIT-Bangalore, discovered Dolby's India connection several years ago when he met him by chance in an airport lounge)