CCI NG 3.7 Product: TOIBangaloreBS PubDate: 29-04-2020 Zone: BangaloreCity Edition: 1 Page: TOIBGCC3 User: sitadri.dhara Time: 04-28-2020 23:16 Color: CMYK

THE TIMES OF , BENGALURU 4 WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2020

TECH PATENTS BY INDIAN COMPANIES SOAR TOP TECH I’D LIKE TO SEE Technology patents’ share in total patents fi led PATENT FILERS Number of Emerging Technology Patents Filed 6,500 patents were fi led Technology Non-Technology Wipro, TCS, HCL, 330 A warm AR-powered hug by India domiciled companies Artifi cial Intelligence 100% * 1,793 1,836 1,526 1,338 Infosys, Reliance, in the US between 2015 and 604 ith the Covid situation AR-enabled animals have Sun Pharma, 2019, up from 4,600 193 Wforcing everyone to put that technology on 40.6% Welspun, Hindustan patents between 50.1% 51.9% 46.2% Cyber Security work from their homes, one everyone’s hands in a fun Petroleum 262 of the things I am, and I am way. I think we are just a few 2015 and 2018. In 2015-2018 the total, the share 107 sure everyone is missing, is steps away from making an IoT 190 2015-2019 of tech patents reaching out to a person and AR-powered touch real and is growing rapidly, 88 shaking their hand or giving a warm. It may sound like an 49.9% 48.1% 53.8% 59.4% Cloud Computing and within tech, the 181 hug. Even my smile is muted extravagant idea, but human share of emerging tech patents 702 and hidden below the mask touch goes a long way in is accelerating 2015 2016 2017 2018/19 Others* 958 when I am out shopping promoting mental Source: Nasscom for grocery essentials. health and psycho- I have imagined many logical wellness. solutions before, but Even after we what I really wish for come out of today is an augment- this, such tech- Streaming or WFH, cloud is the ed reality powered nology would touch that can be help with babies delivered safely while in neonatal maintaining social care and distancing. also elder big gainer from the pandemic ’s care. Maggie Inbamuthiah | MANAGING DIRECTOR, ANITAB.ORG INDIA has been so big that the peak uti- It has made GAME CHANGER lisation has almost surpassed collaboration a The past five to six weeks have 100%. “Software, pharma and IT been game-changing for the cloud. firms in tier-I cities have suddenly breeze, and The resilience of cloud infrastructure has increased their load. Work from been tested and has generated much home has catapulted the surge,” remote work so confidence about its potential among says Ashwin Kumar, director of everyone. As a result, for data centre and cloud operations productive example, companies that at Linode India. had email on premise Since the lockdown, more IT, Shilpa Phadnis, Habeeba Salim will now consider ITeS, banking and & Swati Rathor | TNN shifting it to cloud. Or firms have been signing up for our sectors like cloud services, says Rajesh he entire locked-down manufacturing as well Awasthi, global head of Tata Com- world is on a cloud and a as MSMEs will open up munications. “Covid-19 is accel- prayer. From banking to to adopting cloud erating digital transformation,” work-from-home to vac- solutions in the near-term he says. Cloud makes it far sim- cine design to all the pler to collaborate and share entertainmentT streamed 24x7, it Akhilesh Tuteja | documents in real-time, unlike , KPMG INDIA wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say PARTNER traditional methods where one would have to send files by a t that the cloud is what is underpin- Organisations that have We are seeing a trend We are seeing a lot of ool like email and then wait for ning them all. invested in IT, especially towards cloud adoption by engagement in the healthcare a response. The Covid-19 crisis tested the in cloud computing and open global healthcare organisations, as space. We have launched the VMware is witnessing higher maturity of cloud infrastructure technologies, have been able to make they look for capex reductions and Covid-19 Data Lake, a global demand for Workspace One, the – hardware, software, public and the transition to remote working business scalability. Organisations repository with up-to-date datasets cloud-based management plat- hybrid – and it has proven to be far more seamlessly. From enabling are migrating applications and data, that you can pull up and start Sasken is helping form that allows IT administra- resilient. Akhilesh Tuteja, part- us to manage our banking digitally and moving backups to the cloud. working. A little over 45,000 research tors to centrally control end us- ner at KPMG India, says the past and providing essential services like End-user workstations are being articles are there on it. We also ers’ mobile devices and cloud- five to six weeks have been game- milk, to adding network capacity provisioned on cloud infrastructure. built a search engine specifi cally changing for cloud. Its resilience, hosted virtual desktops and ap- end menace of to ensure seamless Development and focused on Covid-19 that provides plications. “We already have a lot he says, has been tested and has telecommunication test environments a mechanism to do of customers for this tool. But generated much confidence connectivity, the are moving to search and even ask among everyone. until Covid-19, they were using it organisations are cloud, which gives natural language headlight glare mostly for on-premise work. Now, “The advantage of cloud is you overcoming challenges companies greater queries and it will many are using it to expand their can purpose it the way you need to survive and grow in agility and lowers on- come back with it and you can be operational very WFH options,” says B S Nagara- [email protected] these testing times. premise infrastructure responses ENGG SPECIALIST quickly,” says Madhusudan Shek- jan, chief technologist at VMware eadlight glares are univer- TCO (total cost of The 30-year-old firm has ar, head of solution architecture Vikas Arora | VP, Madhusudan Shekar India. VMware’s hybrid cloud sally reviled. But, more ownership) around 1,700 employees, a for startups at Amazon Internet CLOUD AND COGNITIVE | HEAD, SOLUTION solution HCX, which helps trans- Himportantly, they are a dan- Services, the India arm SOFTWARE & SERVICES, Vinil Menon | ARCHITECT, AMAZON fer applications across clouds, has ger to pedestrians, cyclists and majority of them in India of the world’s biggest cloud solu- IBM INDIA SVP, CITIUSTECH INTERNET SERVICES also seen a lot of interest. other motorists. So, when a Japa- It has centres in Bengaluru, tions provider. Lux Rao, director of solutions nese automotive company came , , , and When RBL Bank had to quick- transition finally happened when It’s too early to put a number to tomers, and applications that are & consulting at cloud solutions to in Ben- , and a presence across ly enable work from home func- the RBL IT team chose to use the spike in demand for cloud dur- specifically focused on video provider NTT India, says on- galuru to try and find a solution Finland, Germany, Japan, tions, including IT and backend Amazon WorkSpaces, a secure, ing this crisis, but most players say streaming and gaming, says glob- premise customers whose busi- to the menace, Sasken jumped at UK and USA support, it wasn’t easy. The sim- managed DaaS (desktop as a ser- they have received an unprecedent- al head Prabhakar Jayakumar. nesses were disrupted during the the chance. Specialises in product plest way to do it would have been vice). “No data from a managed ed number of enquiries and cus- “Since the lockdown, bandwidth lockdown will migrate to the It developed an adaptive driv- engineering and digital to allow employees to use their WorkSpace becomes available on tomers. Customer numbers have usage on our network has gone up cloud “to save themselves from ing beam system, integrating transformation own devices and connect to the of- the local machine and if you try surged particularly in two sectors anywhere between 20% and 25%. logistical and cash flow challeng- digital light processing (DLP), to fice network using a virtual pri- to the data, it comes across – pharma and education. Cloud- We usually plan out infrastructure es, and the additional monetary reduce glare on pedestrians and ral networks), as well as develop- vate network (VPN) or virtual as protected and until you have based video communication tools six months ahead, but the Covid onus of purchasing IT hardware cyclists and to ensure more pre- ing Python scripts for post pro- desktop infrastructure (VDI). But the key, you have no way of un- like Microsoft Teams and Zoom outbreak has reduced this time- or software assets.” cise control of light distribution. cessing. The solution is now used that’s a security minefield for an locking it,” says Shekar. RBL have seen quantum jumps in usage. line,” he says. Basically, our engineers devel- globally in various vehicle mod- industry like banking. Bank has deployed 200 Amazon Cloud infrastructure provider Linode, another hosting com- (With inputs from oped computer vision algorithms els, but Sasken said it cannot The work-from-home (WFH) WorkSpaces so far. DigitalOcean saw a spike in cus- pany, says the demand for cloud Swati Bhardwaj) that helped eliminate the menace name the brands because of non- of headlight glares, says Satish disclosure agreements. Burli, VP of product engineering These kinds of computer AN ISSUE OF TIGHTS LED TO ASKSID’S CREATION at Sasken. A vehicle headlight is visualisation technologies have CUTTING EDGE a wide array of uses. They are IIT Hyderabad even used in industrial setups. MADE IN INDIA “Specially designed industrial cameras on production lines, for not a single bulb, it’s a LED array. example, can detect minute flaws undergrads to focus Sasken’s technology blanks out using machine-driven algo- the LEDs that are aimed at an rithms. These flaws could be any- individual’s face. “So, when you thing from an uneven paint job, more on research walk in front of the car, the de- detecting component-mixing, or vice (a camera and DLP chipset) even a component that is not fit- [email protected] will track your movement and ted properly,” says Burli. IIT Hyderabad will soon blank out different groups of Sasken is also deeply engaged t a time when the Covid-19 have more industry- LEDs. At the core of the technol- with all the major semiconductor pandemic has put the spot- oriented MTechs, in areas like ogy is developing algorithms to vendors of the world, including Alight back on science, Indian additive engineering, e-waste recognise a human figure, then , and MediaTek. Institute of Technology (IIT) Hy- management, sensors and figure out where the face is, It works with them as they de- derabad director BS Murty says it medical device innovation. where exactly the eyes are, and velop a chip. It develops software, is important to encourage youth in In the two-year MTech then finally accurately mute out adds features and tests the BTech to develop a ‘research mind- programme, one year will only the offending glare, leaving chipsets. These chipsets are then the rest of the LEDs functional,” used in a whole range of sectors set’. He says students should be be dedicated to working inquisitive to delve deep into the Burli says. like automotive and telecommu- science stream and explore its nu- on projects Sasken helped with the devel- nications. Sasken describes itself merous possibilities. BS Murty | DIRECTOR, IIT HYDERABAD The AskSid team, including founders Sanjoy Roy (extreme left) and Dinesh Sharma (third from left) opment, porting and optimisa- as a chip-to-cognition company. He rues that in the current edu- tion of the algorithm, which re- “We work from the silicon, where teed but adds to the overall scien- When Sanjoy Roy was in the Netherlands cation system, students are fo- HOW THE PRODUCT WORKS quired building deep learning it all starts, all the way to the cog- cused on preparing for competitive tific knowledge, must also be en- some years ago and his wife Dolly needed a models developed using Keras nition stage where we are looking examinations to enter top tech couraged. pair of tights, they were flummoxed with an When a new brand is onboarded, the system library (an open-source neural- at data and sensing it – which is educational institutes like the IITs, The IIT Hyderabad director has online selection of 400 tights. Dolly had ingests the brand’s product data in its raw form, network library that enables fast where the end user experiences and barely get any lab exposure in asked all his students across 13 de- some specific requirements. But they just experimentation with deep neu- it,” says Burli partments to make use of the time such as catalog text, product images, PDFs the 11th and 12th classes. couldn’t get a proper answer online or from that they have now at home to come “One thing that we are going to the brand’s call centre. They finally had to Using AI/ML algorithms, it organises and start in IIT Hyderabad is, from the up with innovative ideas and send enriches this data into a global product proposals. The promising ideas go to an offline store to get the answers first year onwards, each student knowledge base consisting of product Q&As and will be funded by the institution, will be assigned to a faculty and That was the genesis of the idea for a product attributes the faculty will take the student to he says. conversational AI solution for , which a lab and showcase the exciting Murty, who has worked exten- A chatbot on the front end channels (website, sively in the area of metallurgical Roy and his then Mindtree colleague Dinesh FB, Skype, WhatsApp, mobile apps) is powered by HEAR THE PROF and materials engineering, points Sharma decided to build out that thanks to the advancement this product intelligence and is able to answer They founded AskSid in 2017. It’s today part questions from buyers instantly and at scale research that is taking place. We in additive manufacturing, the of Nasscom’s DeepTech Club are revamping our curriculum, civil engineering stream will once The central knowledge base constantly learns again be a sought after discipline. It supports 15 languages and is used by retail where every theory subject will from a variety of sources, including customer Additive manufacturing, also brands in the US, Latin America, European have a lab associated with it. It will conversations and unstructured data Sasken employees at a session with actor & director Ratna Pathak known as 3D printing, is a trans- Union and Apac be a hands-on lab, where the stu- Shah in Bengaluru dent does experiments. We plan to formative approach to industrial implement this from August 2020,” production that enables the crea- says Murty, a winner of the Shan- tion of lighter, stronger parts and ti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of systems. It uses data, computer- aided-design (CAD) software and 3D From economics at LSR to IT in Mercedes-Benz the most prestigious science awards in India. object scanners to direct hardware In fact, IIT Hyderabad has set a to deposit material, layer upon [email protected] Kolkata, she did her schooling student, particularly because of secure and robust network con- target of generating Rs 200 crore layer, in precise geometric shapes. INSPIRATION from Maharani Gayatri Devi their leadership programmes – nections with high capacity. per year for funding institute Murty said that with more arti Singh did something Girls’ School in Jaipur, and her and two years with Accenture “Despite these challenges, in research by 2024, compared and more manufacturing extraordinary. After grad- was all very logical. “If you have vacations were spent in the lush before joining MBRDI in Janu- about a week, we were able to to the current level of Rs companies betting big on Auating in economics from a good analytical mind, it isn’t tea estates of Assam, where her ary last year. get hundreds of people equipped 50 crore a year. additive manufacturing Delhi’s prestigious LSR College, difficult. By the fourth term, my parents lived. “Twelve years of The coronavirus pandemic to work from home,” Aarti says. Murty says that in and developing coun- she did a Master’s in IT from SP classmates accepted that I too boarding life made me very in- has brought fresh challenges her She thinks post-Covid, digi- the last decade or so, tries like India focus- Jain Institute of Management & was smart,” chuckles Aarti. dependent, responsible and way. MBRDI’s R&D teams need tal technology will converge there has been a focus on ing on creating mas- Research in Mumbai. Today, Aarti, 43, is vice-pres- adaptive,” she says. very powerful systems to get with daily life, with boundaries encouraging research in sive infrastructure to She says she always tries to ident of IT at Mercedes-Benz Maharani Gayatri Devi was their work done due to high ceasing to ex- the country, where the boost growth, the de- learn something which she Research and Development India also a big inspiration for the memory and graphic require- ist and driv- insistence is on coming mand for civil engi- doesn’t know well. “At that point (MBRDI) in Bengaluru, one of girls in her school. “She would ments for data-modelling and ing a cultural up with a product. While neers will pick up IT was a field that was coming Mercedes-Benz’s biggest engi- talk to us about her life and how simulation. They also need very change. it is a good approach, he in the coming up and something I wasn’t suf- neering and R&D arms in the she strived to change what wom- says that blue-skies re- days. ficiently aware of,” she says. world. She leads a team of about en could do and become in soci- Budding technologists should focus search, where a re- IT was a challenge initially. 600 people who work on cyber ety. She was not just an epitome on developing technical expertise and al-world applica- Almost 95% of the students in security, digital workplace, en- of beauty, she had a lot of sub- building products and solutions which, apart tion of the re- her batch were engineers, and terprise platforms and network stance,” says Aarti. from being innovative, are easy to use search is not she looked like a misfit. But she & cloud services. She had a 14-year stint with -PRESIDENT OF IT, guaran- was good at finance, and soon Aarti’s spunk perhaps comes GE – an organisation she had Aarti Singh | VICE -BENZ R&D INDIA she realised that like maths, IT from her upbringing. Born in always dreamed of joining as a MERCEDES