IEEE SIT SB

Photo Source The traditional web which was introduced earlier used a centralized network approach. This involves a user who requests data and receives it back from a single main server. Later a distributed network was used which can be thought of as the current web protocol (working of chrome) where the requested data is fetched from a collection of servers working in coordination. But both these approaches had flaws in them.  1. Failure of the main server or the master server would lead to data unavailability. When the server hosting the data stops hosting for some reason, the data won’t be available to the users. This could be problematic when a user needs data immediately and it is not available. In such cases, a user might incur a loss.  2. Censorship – Any government, country, or organization may restrict access to websites for reasons like – threat to National security, inappropriate content, secure information, etc. In these cases, data is again not available to the pu...

"Don't exaggerate Ashkin" people said to Arthur Ashkin, winner of Physics Nobel prize 2018 when he described the idea of catching living things with light. Unconventional thinking and innovative ideas always lead to the origin of new research areas and the development of advanced techniques in Physics. Optical tweezers invented by Arthur Ashkin is one such extraordinary invention in recent times. Ashkin working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey became interested in applying a laser's intense beam to move small objects directly with the light field rather than through some effect of laser-generated heat. As a consequence of the extensive work on manipulating microparticles with laser light Arthur Ashkin designed optical tweezers. Optical tweezers, more accurately called a single-beam optical trapping technique, have become a widely used versatile method for noncontact manipulation of microparticles, cells, and even molecules and as a tool for the measurement of picone...

We have talked about blockchain in our previous blog, if you haven’t read it, you can go through it first ( Breaking Down Blockchain ) and come back here.  Non-fungible tokens are any form of a digital asset which can be a painting, digital art, game, gif, or video. It can also be a document that can be stored digitally on the internet. These tokens or digital entities are managed and circulated through blockchain. As blockchain comes with a package of properties  like the impossibility of hacking the network, transparency of transactions, data security, and validation, these features are being effectively used to implement the Non-fungible tokens framework. Non-fungible means anything which cannot be duplicated or interchangeable; token means a digital entity. The basic idea is to store the digital entity in the blockchain as a unique element that is owned by a unique person. These tokens are different from cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum. For instance, if you cons...

Photo Source The person beyond you is behind you, the person away from you is in front of you!! This is because of electronics. The entire human world is virtually linked, and electronics play a critical role in this. Electronics were born in the early 1900s, and their development accelerated when semiconductors were discovered in the 1930s. The third Industrial Revolution is credited with the invention of semiconductors. W e would still be in the mechanical world if semiconductors did not exist.  In recent years, diamond has been recognized as a semiconductor. Diamond is no longer restricted to being just an ornamental gem. Diamonds can meet the needs of a niche market for robust high-power devices. The semiconductor is the king in electronics and Lozenge as its new queen . The word "Lozenge" stems from the old French word "Losenge," which refers to a diamond's characteristic form. Photo Source Let us look at what distinguishes diamonds from other materials tha...

    Do you think your privacy and sensitive information  is protected while you browse the Internet? You should really read this blog to understand how people in the open internet try to steal data, passwords and other information. This post talks about "The Anonymous Network" which is a reference to "The Onion Network". You might have heard about “The Onion Router” which is abbreviated as “Tor”. At present we can safely say that Tor provides complete anonymity and data security for some level in the internet. So how does this Tor work? Before going to explore how Tor network works, we have to understand how cryptography works. Symmetric cryptography is a type of encryption method used to secure data. Generally a key is generated which is nothing but a mathematical function which encrypts (conversion of simple text to cipher text) the data and the same key is used to decrypt (conversion of cipher text to simple text) the data. For example, consider a text “hello” wh...

Photo Source   Have you ever thought about the Bitcoin, and wondered how it works? Well, Blockchain is the recent technology which can be understood as a transparent ledger system over the Internet which emerged as a decentralized secure network. It controls how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. work. It also has various applications in other domains like the industrial sector, banking, supply chain management and so on. So, let’s dive in and explore Blockchain. There are three main aspects of blockchain which essentially forms the basic pillars of this technology- Blocks, the Network and Mining . Blocks  mainly contain data comprising of information on various transactions, digital signatures and hashes associated with each block. In the crypto-currency domain, data mainly comprises of information on transactions like names of people sending and receiving currency, date and time of transaction etc. Miners create new blocks on the chain through a process called...

It takes a lot of work to build a supercomputer. It is seen as the pinnacle of human efforts in artificial computing for a reason. One man (Mr. Seymour Cray) started the entire supercomputer revolution but it took a 'supremely' superhuman effort to produce our first Indigenous Supercomputer. Who undertook the effort you ask? Mr. Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar, the father of modern Indian Computing.. Photo source It all started in the late 1980's. The only supercomputer available at the time was Cray-1, owned by the Americans. The Americans feared that if India got their hands on this powerful technology, it would only be a matter of time before we challenged their might in major fields of satellite communication and nuclear weapons. Hence an embargo was placed on Cray computers being sold to India. You know what they say, Necessity is the mother of Invention right?   India was not deterred and under PM Rajiv Gandhi, India set up the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing...