EVMs or Electronic Voting Machines are not much in the news. But quietly, this technology is enabling world’s democracies to elect their leaders in an efficient and secure manner. This includes prominently in India, proudly world’s largest democracy, which completed its multi-round election spread over 6 weeks earlier this summer, an election that reached out […]
Category: Short Takes
Screen Time: What and How Much is Too Much?
We are on screens on all the time, as faculty members in Computer Science and as human beings in a technologically developed society. Screens come in all form factors, from the mobile phone that has us wrapped around it continually, to multiple monitors at work, to surrounding gigantic screens for consuming our entertainment. This large […]
A Paean to the Homeland
Context: India, the country of my birth, celebrates its Republic Day on January 26th. This was the day when India adopted the constitution, which occurred on January 26, 1950. India had achieved independence from Britain on August 15, 1947, but for its first three years the country remained governed by the colonial Government of India […]
Generative AI and Cybersecurity: Anything to Look Here?
We have all been startled by the power of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its ilk of Generative AI tools, like Google’s Gemini or Meta’s Llama. One crucial question is can these be weaponized to make our cyberspace more insecure? I will reflect on three primary aspects of this question. First, there is some evidence that these […]
Cultivating Habits: -1 +2 for Researchers
Citation We know through countless books and media material that good habits are important. We are told this from our childhoods and we know of examples of good habits and the bad ones from all our readings. New Year is stereotypically the time when we have to resolve to make some of the first and […]
Short Take: Continuous Computer Vision on Mobiles
The area of continuous computer vision algorithms that can run on mobile or embedded or edge or take your pick of resource-constrained platform, has seen a great outpouring of work. This post is a look at how this field has been marching along, seen from the eyes of a computer systems person, as opposed to […]
Short Take: Review Paper or Next New Idea?
Should you concentrate on writing a review article on an area of study that you know well or move on to the next new idea of yours, perhaps even a small new idea? The allure of going on to the next new shiny toy … errrr idea, is strong. To me there is a valued […]
Big Tech, Big Brother, and the Virus: A Toast
This is the second of a two part series. One form of information that can help us with the CV quarantine is data about crowding at the grocery stores. There are many companies that provide video surveillance at retail stores and if only they would aggregate and anonymize such information and share publicly. We can […]
Big Tech, Big Brother, and the Virus: The Cautionary Tale
This is part one of a two-part series. Big tech can provide surveillance, we know that by now. It can provide the surveillance at as fine a level as you want — at our individual level and at minute-level precision. The cell phone and the credit card, the two indispensable parts of our daily lives, […]
Short Take: Policy Issues to Beat the Autocracy of Autonomous Systems
In a previous post, I discussed, through a dystopian scenario, how autonomous systems can reduce our lives to one of hapless destiny. And in the last post, I discussed some design and development principles that we as technologists can follow that can help us avoid plunging into such dystopian scenarios. In this article, I will […]
Distant Whispers from an Academic Engineer's World 