Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addresses students at the Young Innovators Summit in Delhi

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella today met a gathering of students and educators at the Young Innovators Summit organized by Microsoft India at the India Habitat Centre, Delhi. The Young Innovators Summit brought together over 250 students and educators in Delhi NCR.  In conversation with Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India, Satya Nadella spoke about the role that technology will play in transforming the education ecosystem over the next decade, outlining the opportunity students have today to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems with technology.

Speaking at the summit, Satya, said, "We need to reformulate the relationship between technology and learning. It is very interesting to witness the way young innovators think today. What excited and inspired me from my meetings with students was the quality of their ideas, the scope of their ambition, deep passion and deep empathy turning into action. This is truly transformative, and is how societies and economies move forward."

Watch Satya Nadella in conversation with Anant Maheshwari at the Young Innovators Summit

The Young Innovators Summit also showcased examples of technology-powered innovation from the student community in India. Three young innovators talked about how they are using technology to connect the world and solve some of the biggest social, environmental and health challenges of our times.

• USING AI TO SAVE LIVES: PRATIK MOHAPATRA

OrganSecure, built by Pratik Mohapatra, uses a sophisticated set of machine learning algorithms to quickly match organ donors with recipients, providing real-time updates to people in need of a transplant. His idea of an AI-powered app that aims to match organ donors with people in need of an organ transplant in real-time, was one of the three winning ideas at the 2019 Microsoft AI for Good Idea Challenge.

A coding enthusiast, Mohapatra has been developing apps since he was 14 years old and has a keen interest in applying technology to life sciences. In his words, “While watching a web series that revolves around organ donation, I realized the pain and emotional trauma people go through when waiting for a transplant. I started digging deeper about the problem and spoke to doctors at leading hospitals in Bengaluru to comprehend the magnitude of the issue,” he shares.

Read more here.

• FIGHTING AIR POLLUTION WITH AI: ISHLOK VASHISTHA

Taking from their experience of living in the vicinity of New Delhi, which has one of the world’s worst air quality, Ishlok and four of his friends decided to use technology to tackle the problem. The team, comprising Ishlok Vashistha, Aakash Bhadana, Vasu Kaushik, Dipesh Narwat, and Bharat Sundal from Manav Rachna Institute of Research & Studies in Faridabad came up with Caeli, a smart anti-pollution face mask and portable nebulizer to help those with breathing ailments like asthma and other chronic respiratory diseases.

The mask and nebulizer are connected to a smartphone application via Bluetooth. The Caeli mask features an air filtration system and an Air Quality Index (AQI) sensor that constantly monitors the quality of air, while the Caeli app controls the schedule of the drug dispensed from the nebulizer depending on the user’s prescription and pollution levels. Their idea won the team the runners-up position at the Microsoft 2019 Imagine Cup World Championship.

Read more here.

• TRANSFORMING LEARNING THROUGH MINECRAFT: NAMYA JOSHI

Namya Joshi, a seventh-grade student at Sat Paul Mittal School, Ludhiana, Punjab, has become an icon and inspiration for many. Namya, a 13-year-old, loves training teachers and has been a crusader for making learning fun through technology. She has been helping teachers at her school convert their class lessons into interactive Minecraft sessions. Namya has conducted multiple Skype sessions across countries like Vietnam, India, Hungary, Finland, for both teachers and students to initiate them into the use of Minecraft in classes.

“Minecraft is a great platform”, she says. “If a child does not like reading books, for example, you can make them in Minecraft and get the child interested.”

Namya has been conferred with the REX Karamveer Global Fellowship and Karamveer Chakra Award, and is a winner of the ‘UNESCO Clubs 2018-2019 Worldwide Youth Multimedia Competition’ for creating a virtual library of books on Minecraft. Read more here.

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Make your tweets more engaging with these tips to add content to your Tweets

Twitter is what’s happening in the world and what people are conversing about. Standing out in the crowd, means making conversations more interesting through the use of Twitter’s various tools and products. Want to jump on the Twitter pro bandwagon? Here are some tips you can adopt to make your Tweets stand out. You can thank us later (on Twitter of course).

• Add photos or GIFs to your Tweets

Take a cue from Virat Kohli (@imVkohli), click the photo icon from the Tweet compose box to upload a photo or GIF from your phone or computer. You can add up to four photos in your Tweet. 

If Tweeting from the Twitter app, you can enhance the pictures - apply a filter, crop an image and add stickers. Click the Tweet button to post to your profile. 

Rising up to every challenge. What a game! 💯 👊🇮🇳 #NZvIND pic.twitter.com/5kUSbD3P4m

— Virat Kohli (@imVkohli) January 31, 2020

• Share and watch videos on Twitter

There are two ways to share videos on Twitter: You can either record a video by simply tapping and holding down the capture icon, or you can  import/upload a video (less than 02:20 duration) saved on your phone or desktop. All the videos that you see, like and engage with on Twitter have been uploaded using either of these steps. On that note, this video from Anushka Sharma (@AnushkaSharma) will make your day:

Time for some internet positivity rn. ✨🌼 #HappyTweets #LoveAndLightProject pic.twitter.com/6ZUxXavrQT

— Anushka Sharma (@AnushkaSharma) August 21, 2019

• Add an interesting link to a Tweet (and don’t worry about the character count!)

You can paste a URL of any length into the Tweet compose box and it will automatically get shortened to a maximum of 23 characters.

After pasting the link, click the Tweet button to post the Tweet to your timeline. This is  what it will look like:

Learn from the best, here’s an example of how @SrBachchan does it:

T 3435 - Kaveri , daughter of Suchitra and Shekhar Kapur @suchitrak, @shekharkapur .. her new single .. her first International release under Swedish American label Snafu ..https://t.co/urBwb0StVh

All good wishes ..

— Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) February 8, 2020

• Go live with Twitter

The euphoria of attending a concert, the joy of witnessing your friend go down the aisle and the pride of winning an award – some things are best expressed in real time, right? With Twitter, you can have your followers be a part of your special moments. Just go live through video and show them what you’re up to, instead of describing it to them. All you need to do is, swipe left post opening the camera icon in the Tweet compose box. This will allow you to select the live mode. 

Just the way Comicstaan live streamed their #BlueCarpetScreening with our favourite internet celebs.

@imrohitkoli21 We are Live... join your favourite Internet celebs for a fun-filled LIVE streaming of @comcistaan #BlueCarpetScreening at https://t.co/5LglSsaIk3

— Comicstaan (@comicstaan) July 13, 2018

• Add fun captions on your photos 

While adding photos to your Tweets, you can choose to write a caption to describe the image for the visually impaired, while at the same time, making your Tweet more engaging. To insert a caption, click on ‘add description’ and type out  your description in the given space. If you do not get the option to set image descriptions automatically, you can follow these simple steps to turn them on in your settings. Go to the Settings option in your profile, tap on ‘Accessibility’ and then click to opt for ‘Compose Image Descriptions’.
A description can be added to each image in a Tweet but not videos and GIFs.
So be creative and win your followers with the coolest Tweets!

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EC-Council Launches CEH Master Hacker Certification

EC-Council, the leading global information security certification body, has recently launched Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Master credential to address the rising demand for performance-based training and certification for ethical hackers. 

“We are committed to using innovative and new approaches to train cyber experts to prevent cybercrime and to promote a safer and secure cyber environment. CEH Master uses a new methodology to prepare the students for real-world jobs. It will go a long way in sharpening the skills of the students who will be better prepared to address the challenge of preventing cybercrime,” says Mr Jay Bavisi, Founder and CEO of EC-Council Group.

CEH certification path

This new initiative is in keeping with EC Council’s commitment to align the curriculum with the demand of the industry. It is for this reason that CEH has emerged as a certification of choice in over 145 countries since 2003. With the launch of the CEH Master, EC Council continue to set standards in the ethical hacking certification and training sector. 

CEH Master credential is awarded to hackers that have both the CEH and the CEH (Practical) certification. It prepares the candidate for actual challenges by evaluating their capability against problems from the real-world. This unique approach is a departure from the regular both the multiple choice exams and simulation-based exams and allows the candidates to hone his/her skills and abilities by working on actual real world challenges. 

With the next exam, security professionals are required to demonstrate the understanding of attack vectors by performing network scanning to identify live and vulnerable machines in a network, performing operating system banner grabbing, system hacking, steganography, steganalysis attacks, enumeration and even cover tracks. They must also conduct a variety of web server and web application attacks including directory traversal, parameter tampering, XSS, perform SQL injection attacks and different types of cryptography attacks as part of a rigorous 6 hour online and proctored exam. This is truly revolutionary.

CEH Master is a badge of honour for any ethical hacker who wants to make a mark in this challenging field. To become a CEH Master, a candidate must successfully pass the  CEH  exam and demonstrate competency in managing real world hacking challenges via the CEH (Practical) Exam. This demands the prospective ethical hacker to discover and exploit real-time vulnerabilities while auditing the systems set up by EC-Council in the cloud, thus enhancing the challenge and better preparing him/her for the job.

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Microsoft Research AI Project helps Dehradun RTO in automating driver's license testing

Do you know a whopping 59% of respondents to survey conducted by SaveLIFE Foundation admitted that they did not give any test to obtain a driving license. The numbers seems to be correct, given I have personally seen people around me claiming the same.The challenges with this system range from the subjectivity of each evaluator to the burden of evaluation falling solely on human shoulders. A Microsoft Research team under HAMS (Harnessing AutoMobiles for Safety) project is currently enabling the Regional Transport Office (RTO), Dehradun, Uttarakhand to automate the same process.

“The main challenge in the traditional driver’s license test is the burden placed on the human evaluators and the resulting subjectivity that a candidate faces. Automation using HAMS technology can not only help relieve evaluators of the burden but also make the process objective and transparent for candidates,” says Venkat Padmanabhan, Deputy Managing Director, Microsoft Research India, who started the HAMS project in 2016. Padmanabhan developed HAMS along with Akshay Nambi, who joined the project as an intern and is now a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research India, and Satish Sangameswaran, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Research India, who helped the team bring HAMS out of the research lab and into the real world through external partnerships.

Microsoft Research’s HAMS project enables the driver’s license testing to be an objective and transparent process that helps grant licenses to well-tested drivers. The system doesn't require an invigilator to be present with the candidate in the car. The system is competent enough to get the final results on the basis of the driver's actions and conditions of the environment just in time. While it may sound like a very IoT kind of project where lot of sensors needs to be at work, the team at Microsoft has utilized a simple smartphone to achieve the goal.

HAMS in essence uses a mounted smartphone on car's windshield which uses rear camera to monitor real time road condition  as well as the driver's gaze using front camera of the phone. On top of it, the team has developed AI models for efficient and robust operation.

For driving tests, HAMS has been customized to include capabilities such as precise tracking of the vehicle’s trajectory during designated test manoeuvres, for instance, parallel parking or negotiating a roundabout. This tracking enables HAMS to determine precisely, for instance, whether the driver stopped in the middle of a manoeuvre for longer than is permitted or tried to course correct by rolling forward and backward alternately more times than allowed. Today, if you take the driver’s license test at the Dehradun RTO, you will be doing so in just the company of a smartphone affixed to your car’s windshield. HAMS, running on the smartphone and on an edge server onsite at the testing track, will do the rest and produce a detailed report shortly after you finish navigating through the test manoeuvres.

“The successful deployment of the HAMS-based driver license testing at the Dehradun RTO is a significant step towards the Transport Department’s goal of providing efficient, world-leading services to the citizens of Uttarakhand. We are proud to be among the pioneers of the application of AI to enhance road safety,” said Shri Shailesh Bagauli, IAS, Secretary, Government of Uttarakhand. “On an average, over 50 candidates take the HAMS-enabled automated license test every day at the Dehradun RTO. Due to the comprehensive nature of testing, just about 50 percent candidates pass the test, ensuring that only qualified drivers are given a driver’s license,” says Nambi.

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Stellar Research finds, 7 out of every 10 individuals are vulnerable to data breach & privacy RISK while disposing off their devices

Global data care expert Stellar has conducted & announced findings of world’s largest known study of residual data in used devices.

The study analysed a sample size of total 311 used devices comprising hard drives, memory cards, and mobile phones at Stellar’s central laboratory in India. The analysis revealed that a majority 71% of these devices contained personal data, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and sensitive business information. In a larger perspective, the report establishes that 7 out of every 10 individuals are vulnerable to data breach & privacy risks while disposing their old storage devices.

The study was performed to ascertain the awareness levels amongst device owners, regarding usage of secure data wiping methods at the time of selling old storage devices. It also aims to create awareness about data privacy risks when file deletion or drive formatting are used with a faulty assumption as permanent data removal action.

The devices analysed in the study were procured from individuals, online portals & resellers across multiple locations. Majority of these devices were analysed using a publicly available DIY software - Stellar Data Recovery that discovered thousands of files containing personal data.

The residual data can easily fall into wrong hands, and can lead to identity thefts, financial frauds, personal security threats & user privacy issues. Businesses can be vulnerable to data theft & misuse of business-critical information like financial reports, trade agreements, intellectual property, business intelligence and trade secrets to name a few.

"This lack of awareness among customers at large can lead to an alarming rise in acts of cybercrime. It also underlines the acute importance of adoption of data sanitization procedures by individuals and organizations as a safeguard at time of disposal of old IT assets”, said Sunil Chandna, CEO, Stellar. “The Personal Data Bill 2018, when approved as a law could trigger development of a secure ecosystem leading to high awareness & risk mitigation actions by consumers & organizations,” said Chandna. 

The latest 2019 study is a second and a part of continued program of Stellar to measure the risk awareness using NAID Second-Hand Device Study Principles.

NAID (National Association for Information Destruction), an international watchdog for the secure data destruction industry with more than 2000 member companies globally, has commended Stellar for being the first organization to conduct this study by using NAID principles.

 “The Stellar Second-Hand Electronic Device Study and similar studies before and after, demonstrate the gravity of the problem to regulators, businesses and consumers,” said Bob Johnson, NAID founder and i-SIGMA CEO. “By employing NAID’s principles to conduct the study, STELLAR has assured the results are accurate and the personal information found in the process was fully protected at all times”, said Bob.

The detailed report is available for download using the link - https://www.stellarinfo.com/ResidualDataStudy.php

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