Page 5 - Research

CPR CEO Yamini Aiyar quits two months after govt annuls FCRA permit

Yamini Aiyar, the CEO of Centre for Policy Research, will step down from her current role on March 31. Dr Srinivas Chokkakula, a senior fellow at the think tank, will succeed Aiyar

Govt launches fellowship portal for PhDs, post-doctoral aspirants

Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh on Tuesday unveiled a portal where students would get information and be able to apply for doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships of various departments of the government. Singh said the common fellowship portal (fellowships.gov.in) will save the energy and time of aspiring students and startups by enabling a simplified and streamlined process from the submission of applications. The applicants can create their profile on the portal and use the same information to auto-fill different applications, the minister said. "This portal will help all applicants by reducing their time and energy by getting full information and submission of applications at a single place by the click of a mouse," Singh said. The minister said departments under the Ministry of Science and Technology (Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, Council Of Scientific and Industrial Research) have come together for submission of application .

IPR laws facilitator, not barrier in process of research & development: FM

Intellectual property rights (IPR) laws, the policy are all being given a certain push as research and development are happening in very big scale in India now because the environment is being made conducive for that purpose, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Saturday. "So, we are trying to make them (IPR laws) as a facilitator, booster, and not certainly a barrier in the process of R&D. We've taken quite a few steps and I singularly thank the prime minister for this particular policy, which after a lot of consultation has come up in 2016," she said. The law is a balance of protection for those who innovate, and the commercial propositions with which patents can be of use for the society, she said at the book launch event of Justice Prathiba M Singh on Patent Law. Sharing details of the law, Sitharaman said, eight different items which have something to do with intellectual property have all been brought together under one umbrella. Everything to do with the policy ...

ICMR study shows Covid vaccine not responsible for heart attacks: Govt

Answering a query, Mandaviya said there had been attempts to create misconceptions about Covid-19 vaccines

Need innovation to deal with challenges greater than ever: Bill Gates

The need for innovation to deal with different challenges is greater than ever, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates said Thursday, asserting that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most transformative technology he has seen. Addressing students at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, Gates he encouraged them to leverage the technology for social good. "I am looking at India in a far broader way. I am lucky enough, through the work of the foundation, to look at innovators who can help with all kinds of problems -- starting with health, but also agriculture, gender, and climate. We need fantastic Indian innovation," Gates said during his keynote address on "Innovation for Public Good". "The need for innovation to deal with many different challenges is greater than ever. You are all lucky to be here and have gotten an incredible education. The complexity of how we take technology and shape it, you will get an opportunity to play a big role there," he said. Gate

India to have largest R&D presence outside US by 2025: Bristol Myers CEO

Bristol Myers also operates a research and development centre in Bengaluru in partnership with the Biocon Group's Syngene International

Edelweiss Aggressive Hybrid Fund: Trailblazer in performance, asset growth

The fund aims to provide capital growth and current income through a portfolio invested predominantly in equities, with a balance in debt and money market securities

India's first Gati Shakti Research Chair to be established at IIM-Shillong

The Chair will contribute towards high-quality academic research on multimodal logistics with a North-East focus

Indian consumers look for AI services but fear unethical use of data: Adobe

Although currently lagging, 76 percent of Indian brands already have or will adopt generative AI solutions within the next 12 months, Adobe noted in its report

Covid vaccine complications range from neurological to heart issues: Study

The viral-vector jabs were also tied to an increased risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disorder in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the peripheral nervous system

AI-model developed to detect extremist users, ISIS-related content on X

Using tweets from 2009-2021, researchers have developed a predictive model that can detect extremist users and content related to the militant group 'Islamic State' (ISIS). Their work could help social media companies identify and eventually restrict such accounts in a timelier manner and abate their impact on online communities, they said. The researchers from the Pennsylvania State University, US, identified potential propaganda messages and their characteristics and developed an image classifier to find the most frequent categories of images attached to tweets about ISIS. "The Islamic State group and its affiliates, sympathisers and followers continue to manipulate online communities to spread extremist propaganda," said Younes Karimi, a graduate student at the university pursuing a doctorate in informatics and the first author of the paper published in the journal Social Media Analysis and Mining. Apart from the ISIS-linked tweets they used for analysis, the researchers further

Climate change driving birds in mountains to higher elevations: Study

Logged forests and climate change are driving birds in tropical mountains to higher elevations due to rising temperatures, a research by the Indian Institute of Science has found. While smaller bird species are able to withstand higher temperatures, and thus colonise these logged forests better, the larger ones appeared to be increasing in the primary (undisturbed) forests, researchers found after analysing 10 years of data. Logged forests refer to the commercial cutting of trees for sale as timber or pulp. Such forests have higher average temperatures and lower humidity than primary forests, thus hastening the movement of birds to higher elevations, the researchers said. Logging can thus lead to the loss of large-bodied, old growth-dependent species, and decrease the overall biodiversity, they said. Further, logged forests also have fewer foliage-dwelling insects, reducing the available resources for the birds. As large species require more energy, this disproportionately reduces

Science packed 2024: Human spaceflight tests, deep ocean exploration

After the momentous landing on the moon's south pole, India has now set its sights on more challenging missions -- sending humans to space and getting samples from the lunar surface back to earth. Test flights for both the projects are scheduled in the new year. For Indian scientists it is just not about the moon and beyond. Furthering deep ocean exploration, the country is scheduled to send aquanauts on board the "Samudrayaan", first to a depth of 500 metres in March, and later, achieve its targeted depth of up to 6,000 metres. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is set to begin the new year with the launch of XPoSat.? The X-Ray Polarimeter Satellite (XPoSat)? will seek to unravel the mysteries of the sources of X-Rays and study the enigmatic world of black holes. The satellite is set for launch on January 1 on board the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from Sriharikota. This would be followed by the insertion of the Aditya L-1 satellite at the Lagrange Point-1 on .

Study shows AI image-generators being trained on explicit pics of children

Hidden inside the foundation of popular artificial intelligence image-generators are thousands of images of child sexual abuse, according to a new report that urges companies to take action to address a harmful flaw in the technology they built. Those same images have made it easier for AI systems to produce realistic and explicit imagery of fake children as well as transform social media photos of fully clothed real teens into nudes, much to the alarm of schools and law enforcement around the world. Until recently, anti-abuse researchers thought the only way that some unchecked AI tools produced abusive imagery of children was by essentially combining what they've learned from two separate buckets of online images - adult pornography and benign photos of kids. But the Stanford Internet Observatory found more than 3,200 images of suspected child sexual abuse in the giant AI database LAION, an index of online images and captions that's been used to train leading AI image-makers such

Year on year, Indian companies squeeze spending on research and development

The little money they have invested in a decade went into recurring expenses

India needs to increase R&D spending to 3% of GDP: Kris Gopalakrishnan

Private sector must contribute 1.5% to such spending, he says in speech urging educational institutions to teach new technologies

PM Modi asks investors to explore limitless potential of Uttarakhand

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday asked investors to explore Uttarakhand's limitless potential in various sectors and convert them into opportunities. He was addressing a gathering after inaugurating the Uttarakhand Global Investors Summit at the Forest Research Institute here. Uttarakhand is a combination of divinity and development, the Prime Minister said. "Nature, culture, heritage - Uttarakhand has everything. You have to explore them and convert them into opportunities," Modi said. Recalling his earlier remark during a visit to Kedarnath that the third decade of the century belongs to Uttarakhand, he said the prediction is coming true. He also said the last ten years have seen the emergence of an aspirational India. Modi also launched the House of Himalayas brand to promote local products manufactured by women's self-help groups in the international markets. Congratulating the state government for the launch of the brand, Modi said it was in keeping with the concept o

Homegrown BoAt, Noise working on in-house R&D to fend off Chinese rivals

Boat and Noise have increased investments in research and development even as Chinese brands have begun inching into the top five

Johnson Controls Apac president bullish on India's 'sustainable' demand

While the Paris Agreement has accelerated clients' sustainability agenda, Rathninde believes it is much more than that

IIT-Mandi finds cost-effective alternative to metal 3D printing tech

Researchers from IIT-Mandi have found that the extrusion-based metal additive manufacturing process stands out as the most superior and cost-effective method in comparison to other approaches in metal 3D printing. According to officials, metal additive manufacturing (metal AM) utilises fine metal powders to construct robust, intricate components through computer-aided design (CAD) programmes or 3D scanning. "This layer-by-layer manufacturing process offers flexibility in designing complex structures, finding applications in diverse industries such as aerospace, automotive, spare parts, heat sinks, biomedical devices, and construction materials," said Naveen Kumar Bankapalli, Research Scholar, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mandi. "This analysis empowers individuals, industries, or researchers to independently develop and implement this technology, facilitating cost-effective mass production of metal parts," he said. Particularly noteworthy for aerospace applications due