Gardening app to help plant seeds of green love

All set for a holiday but worried about what happens to your plants at home? Well, this smart-gardening app could soon dispel your worries

Greenopia, a mobile app, can actually do the job of a gardener.

All set for a holiday but worried about what happens to your plants at home? Well, this smart-gardening app could soon dispel your worries.

Greenopia, a mobile app, can actually do the job of a gardener. The technology helps one understand which plants grow well in which climate, the kind of material required to grow them, the level at which seeds should be sown, and the amount of water required.

The brainchild of four students from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, the app was the result of a 2014 design talent challenge where youngsters had to use telecommunication technology to come up with ideas that could improve quali ty of life. "All of us are from small towns where we are used to having gardens, and we miss our plants," said Mayukhini Pande, cofounder of Greenopia.

The app comes with a kit that includes smart pots fitted with sensors. It can detect basic plant parameters like the soil's moisture content, its composition and the plant's exposure to sunlight.

"The idea is to get more urban professionals to grow something on their own; the app will help people make the right decision. People living in cities invest time tending to their plants but often lose interest after trial and error," added Mayukhini.

"The app will guide you at every step. You'll know when the first leaves and veggies will appear from the time you have sown the seeds," she explained.

The start-up has raised Rs 9 lakh after a year of working on the crowd-%funded model. Said Mani HK, cofounder and CEO, Greenopia: "The first set of kits will be only for those who have funded us. Commercially, the kit and the app will be available from November."

Your Phone, Your Network, Your Apps: Everything Would Change by 2020

Your Phone, Your Network, Your Apps: Everything Would Change by 2020

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Even as buyers wonder whether to buy a 3G phone or a 4G one, even as developers discuss which platform to develop their apps for, even as wearable makers and media houses harness the boons of 4G, elsewhere in the world, researchers are moving ahead.
Major telcos and device makers are betting on the arrival of 5G by 2018, or at the most by 2020. This would mean more than just buying another instrument and changing your data plan. Trend watchers and industry experts believe that this will change everything in the telecom value chain. The network infrastructure would change; bandwidth would be unimaginably high. Millions of users would be able to send across large data packets, say, a movie would transfer before you can say zap! This would mean many changes in mobile devices—not just in terms of wireless technology, but everything from battery and storage to camera and display, because with better connectivity people would want to do much more with their phones. As people do more with their phones, more data would get generated; so data centres would be impacted too. Homes and cities would get smarter. More signals would fly across the air, and perhaps more birds would die—unless technologists come up with a solution for that too.

5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey (Courtesy: University of Surrey)

Here, in this feature, we take a look at some ways in which global telecommunications is bound to change in the next couple of years. Would you be able to recognise the phone in your pocket? Would you buy CDs anymore? Would you pay a smaller or larger mobile bill? Read on to find out.

A network that understands the user’s needs
The 5G network will provide speeds that you cannot even imagine today. Prof. Rahim Tafazolli, director of 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at University of Surrey, said in a recent BBC News story that it would be possible to run wireless data connections at 800Gbps with 5G, which would, according to him, be a dramatic overhaul and harmonisation of the radio spectrum.
 
5G will be like the Internet. 5GIC likens the 5G network to the Internet in its ability to adapt, evolve and grow. It will not be a frigid network that chokes and splutters under pressure from smarthomes, cars and cities! Despite a constant increase in the number of connected devices, it will attempt to enable real-time responses for all.
Logically unlimited data rates. While such limitless bandwidth is not physically possible, it can be done logically; that is the innovation in 5G. The upcoming telecom era would give each user the satisfaction of getting seemingly unlimited data rates, while resources would be juggled and shared in the background. This would be achieved by predicting user demand, encouraging apps to perform bandwidth-intensive tasks during non-peak time, optimising network response times based on latency and making better use of available wireless networks.
Virtualisation at work. We are likely to see network virtualisation and cloud-like concepts implemented on the radio network. 5G is likely to use cognitive radio technology to enable different radio technologies to share the same spectrum. Base stations would be classified into radio units and baseband units, so that baseband units can be pooled to handle a high number of radio units. Optimisation of radio resource management (RRM) techniques is one of the key research areas of 5G.
Likewise, there will be a clear split between control and user planes, to facilitate heterogeneous network deployments. All user devices can be controlled on a macro layer, while user data is independently provided through a femto cell.
Smartantennae. Technologies like massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) and beam-forming active antennae will be at the heart of 5G. Smartantennae will help alter beam direction, enabling more direct communication. This would increase overall cell capacity, reduce interference and compensate for path loss with higher antenna gains. Such adaptive beam-forming algorithms are likely to be implemented on all user devices.
Versatile and responsible terminals. 5G, being a user-centric rather than operator-centric network, will shift the onus to the terminals to provide the best experience. 5G terminals are likely to have modulation schemes, error-control schemes and software-defined radios that can be downloaded from the Internet. These terminals will be able to access, choose and combine different wireless technologies and services from different mobile/wireless access network providers.
 
Apart from these, research is also on to reduce battery consumption of network devices (increasing their life on the scale of months or years, rather than days or weeks), optimising deployment and operating costs, and so on.
 
User-centric business models
Given that 5G is disruptively different from its predecessors, many new and user-centric business models are expected to arise out of it.
 
User can give and take. A recent report by The Telegraph, the UK, predicts that by 2020, each person will have an average of 27 devices. These devices might be in their cars, homes, offices or bags. But just imagine having to pay for the data transacted wirelessly by all these devices? Fortunately, this scenario of service providers and users playing a clear supply and consumption role is likely to change. Like in the case of a smart power grid, where users can sell excess energy from alternative sources to the power utility, 5G—likely to be the grandfather of all networks—will allow users to make money by charging others for the coverage they provide with Wi-Fi routers or femto-cell home base stations.
No more tech pushing. The user is expected to shape the very fundamentals of the 5G business. Rather than being just another telecom generation, where operators push a new technology to users, it is believed that 5G will be a network that evolves to meet the demands of users from totally new markets.

Evolution of mobile communications (Courtesy: European Commission)

Linda K. Moore, a specialist in telecommunications policy at the Congressional Research Service, writes in a recent report that, 5G might be shaped not by carriers pushing new technology but by demand from new customers, customers that are the mainstay of important industrial sectors other than telecommunications. These include transportation, agriculture, energy, mining, defence and public safety, entertainment, medicine and finance, to cite some examples where new technologies are influencing whole industries. These industries might prefer not to manage important parts of their businesses based on somebody else’s business model and may demand new techniques and service providers.
Information reselling. Since much more data is going to be generated by all our devices and apps in the 5G era, a whole industry is going to revolve around managing, mining and monetising this Big Data, albeit with privacy regulations in place.
User focus being a rather new paradigm in telecom networks, several consortiums are being formed around the world to understand the true 5G and the business models it is likely to give birth to.
All-new apps
What would you do with a mountain of money? Well, that is how you would feel when granted a seemingly unlimited data rate network connection, right? Add to this the fact that 5G is expected to have an extremely low latency, which means you would get responses instantaneously with delays imperceptible to the human brain. Naturally, apps would evolve amazingly.

Videos would be captured and transmitted on-the-go. Movies would be downloaded in seconds. You would be able to watch all your favourite television programmes on the phone itself. Social media would morph into a more exciting avatar, and so on. In a 2014 story by The Telegraph, the UK, experts predict that videos will represent 79 per cent of the data passing over the network by 2030. Standard-definition videos will disappear, and high-definition will become the norm, as 4K and 8K videos become more widespread. The download speed for a video stream is going to reach about 18Mbps, while the upload speed will also become increasingly important due to the popularity of apps like Instagram and iCloud. Sixty eight per cent of non-video demand will be made up by either augmented reality or mobile gaming.
That said, the real impact of 5G might be felt not just in entertainment and social apps, but also in businesses and other sectors like healthcare and automotive. Road-safety apps, for example, would become highly reliable as 5G would enable real-time, low-latency car-to-car communications. So, you would be getting instantaneous reports on the traffic situation and be alerted if a driver in front of you swerves suddenly.
Likewise, remote surgeries would improve with low-latency networks like 5G, because the doctor’s reactions to the patient’s condition would be captured immediately, just like in a real surgery.
The phone in your pocket
If the network is going to change, and also the apps, then the phone has to, obviously, change.
Wow, what clarity. If you are going to thrive on videos, surely you would need a better display on your mobile device. Several innovations, which seem cutting-edge today, such as automatic brightness adjustment, extremely high resolutions, smooth transition from one environment to another and correction of defective vision, could become mainstream in the phones of 2020.
Capture it live. Problems like slow zoom-in, late focus and bad image quality in poor lighting conditions will not be acceptable to next-gen users. Going by the research happening around the world, we are likely to get smartphone cameras that will behave almost like our eyes, capable of focusing in real-time, tracking objects and automatically adjusting to the environmental lighting.
Less charging, more working. As mobile devices become such an integral part of our lives, we need to start worrying about not just data costs, but also power. Fortunately, researchers are working on super battery technologies, which will enable devices to work for longer with shorter charges. A team at Stanford University announced last year that they had designed a way of increasing the capacity of existing battery technology by 400 per cent.
Likewise, battery packs and power bank companies are innovating to provide a full charge to batteries within a few minutes, rather than taking almost an hour. If the trend continues, we should be able to run the dream phone of 2020 for a week or more with a few minutes’ charge.
Supercomputing phones. Good network, great camera, super display—nothing would help if the processor is not up to it. I guess we need not worry on that front, with the low-power processor industry heating up with competition. If AT&T’s 2012 report is to be believed, we are sure to have a supercomputing phone in our hands by 2020!
So, whether South Korea wins the race by trialling 5G at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games or Japan keeps its promise of launching a 5G trial network for the Summer Olympic Games in 2020 in Tokyo, one thing is for sure—there is a lot of excitement in store for us in the days to come.

drilling hubo

The HUmanoid roBOt, or HUBO, from Rainbow Co. and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) Humanoid Robot Research Center, looked very good at some times during the first day but ran into a bit of trouble.
For instance, when it had to use a drill to cut a hole around a black circle on a wall, it didn’t go all the way around the black circle in one area.

Above: Team KAIST’s HUBO robot failed to drill the whole way around the black circle on the wall at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona, California, on June 6.

Image Credit: Screenshot

Still, KAIST’s HUBO did move quite quickly in the process of completing the tasks.
By the end of the first day of the competition, Tartan Rescue’s CHIMP robot was at the top of the standings, with eight points, having completed all tasks in 55 minutes and 15 seconds.
The robot even managed to get up on its own after falling. Amazon, Foxconn, and Google, among others, are sponsoring the Tartan Rescue team, which hails from Carnegie Mellon University. (Tartan Rescue team members Tony Stentz, Eric Meyhofer, and David Stager are all said to be working on Uber’s autonomous vehicle project; team sponsor Google, of course, has its own driverless-car initiative.)

Above: Tartan Rescue’s CHIMP robot picks up a drill for the wall task at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona, California, on June 4.

Image Credit: Screenshot

The Tartan Rescue CHIMP and other robots on wheels, like Team NimbRo Rescue from the University of Bonn’s Computer Science Institute, moved more quickly and smoothly than humanoid robots taking steps with feet. The ATLAS robot that several software-only teams chose to rely upon has feet, not wheels.
Generally speaking, the robots on display during the competition moved quite slowly. Watching DARPA’s live stream from home, it was hard not to shout at the screen to tell the robot to come on and move forward and start doing the task already.
And it was painful to watch the robots fall, partly because many of them are fragile. After the wipeouts, crews could be seen approaching the robots. Seeing multiple people huddled around these machines was a comforting reminder of just how dependent cutting-edge robots still are on human labor.
The ATLAS Hercules robot, from team TRACLabs Inc. of Webster, Texas, took a particularly bad fall today during the egress task, which involves getting out of a vehicle after driving it forward.
At first Hercules looked like it would succeed in the task, with onlookers clapping, but then, while stepping down from the vehicle, things went sideways — literally. Hercules put its left foot down on a step stool on its way down to the ground, but then appeared to lose its balance. The robot in slow motion tilted to the left, then fell all the way to the ground with a great thud. “Awwwwww,” said people watching on site. “Nooooo,” I said, while watching from my living room.
But hey, at least Hercules did manage to drive the vehicle, a Polaris Ranger.
There were little errors to laugh at, too. Today the ATLAS Warner robot from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Carnegie Mellon University — sponsored by Nvidia and Axis Communications — dropped the drill it was going to use to make a hole in a wall, and then moved on to the next task.

Above: The WPI-CMU Warner ATLAS robot drops the drill it was going to use to make a hole in a wall at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona, California, on June 6.

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