An app to manage greetings over the Internet

We have been hearing about air pollution in New Delhi, with the Diwali crackers being the last straw. Most of us suffer from an online phenomenon that is a comparable nuisance.

Someone starts with a list of about a hundred colleagues and sends them all a common greeting the day before the New Year, Diwali, or something like that. The hundred of us blindly “reply to all” in the list sending our own greetings to everyone on the list. Then every one of us spends the festive occasion deleting the greetings received. Ten thousand minutes wasted. The emails serve one purpose – it tells the recipients that the sender is alive and is fit to use email.

Then comes greetings from your bank, the shop where you bought lettuce, some miscellaneous jeweler, and hundred others sending you greetings on the occasion. Many of them send you birthday greetings! Very touching to get a birthday greeting from your bank! The same bank that, when asked for a form, tells you that your request would be attended to in three working days!

There can be many ways of tackling this near-spam enterprise. The best would be for email software to identify pure greeting messages and put them in a separate folder. The software can make a consolidated list of senders available for inspection. You should be able to click on a sender’s name and send a message prepared by you in advance – one designed to be sent to all those who greet you. An email generated by a click should be going only to a single person, unless you indicate that it should be otherwise.

The solution could also be in the form of a well-designed app which people could use for sending greetings, in place of email. Would users be interested in one more app? Can we make it attractive enough to find a big clientele?

There are many possibilities. The app could possibly be branded in the name of a sponsor like Red Cross, UNICEF or other NGO and be popularized by them sending URLs through email. The apps could be linked to an e-wallet like PayTM by the user who downloads it. Every time the users send greetings, the app could transfer a pre-set sum of money, like say Rs 5 or 10, to the NGO. The app’s development and operations cost could be paid by an e-commerce site like “Favorites of my city”, and the app could offer a feature for the users to send gift packets through the e-commerce site when they send a greeting.

The app could be enhanced in many other ways. For instance, there could be a provision for the user to send a canned short message, such as the following:

“The kids are growing up well. Rama choreographed a dance item for the Diwali event at her school. She also fooled her grandma by making a phone call, in a voice resembling that of an uncle. Vinay is busy building his model planes.”

The app could also allow the user to type in a few lines of a customized message to selected recipients.

Srinivasan Ramani

Putting STOP signs on the Google Map

Can we put up traffic signs on something like Google maps using a suitable app to display them to drivers of vehicles at the appropriate time? You might wish to experiment, starting with 

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android-api/start

The other day my wife and I saw a distressing scene at a street corner; three girls who were sharing a scooter had been in a traffic accident. A car running along an intersecting street had hit them and one girl had a bleeding injury on her face. There was crowd around them offering help. The car involved was there on the side of the street and a young man who seemed to be the one who had driven that car was involved in helping the unhappy girls.

It is often pointed out that traffic is chaotic in India. Part of this is due to the absence of any enforcement of traffic discipline. Part of this due to the absence of essential traffic signs such as a STOP sign to show that traffic on the intersecting street have the right of way. Millions of vehicles rush through intersections free of any discipline. Any aggressive driver gets his way, till the day he crosses the path of an even more aggressive one!

Many drivers have a navigational aid mounted on their dashboard or windshield. The map app will use stored data to identify when your vehicle is reaching an intersection and if you have the right of way there. If not, it would flash a stop sign. You would bring your vehicle to a complete stop for a moment and then cross the intersection carefully. The app could warn of speed breakers, prohibited turns, one way streets, your exceeding the speed limit etc.

Do virtual street signs absolve the local government of their responsibility to display real-world signs? No, all they can do is to increase your chances of being alive as and when they fulfil their responsibilities!

Joking apart, there is a necessity for the government to get involved. They should participate in any project in this area to put relevant information on maps. They should ensure that there is a standard for encoding this information. The basic information should be made available in the public domain. What about the app developer? Why should he spend a lot of effort to build this national infrastructure? Well, we will give him the rights to display "paying" signs in addition to traffic signs - like the following:

What about liabilities of the app developer? That is no problem; they will show you a link named Terms and Conditions. As usual, you would ignore it and click on "I accept". The 5000-word T & C would include a line absolving the app developer of all and any responsibilities! (Warning! It may not be as simple as that! But you can worry about it when you have a prototype to show the lawyer!)

Lastly, what are the limits to this technology? Will one day even traffic signals will be run off cyber space? Data from users of navigation devices gives statistical information to servers as to how many vehicles cross which intersections and in which direction. Can one use such data from these servers to drive real-world traffic signals in a highly adaptive manner? 

xxxxx

Adarsha’s Star

Please refer to my previous blog post at http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.in/2017/02/what-are-we-hurtling-towards.html

I believe I have given enough time to readers to examine AJ's answer and to discuss it. Over a hundred people have visited the post above. So, it is time now for me to comment on the answer.

AJ (Adarsha Joisa) is right on both counts - the main answer as well as the answer to the sub-question. I had referred to a list of 92 stars brighter than magnitude 2.49. One of these can be said to be “nearest” to Adarsha’s Direction, defined as the intersection of the local meridian and the ecliptic at 6 AM that day. But the star may not be very close to the direction, and may even be more than ten degrees away. 

So, let us change the way we define Adarsha’s Star: On a given day, it will be the star closest to Adarsha’s Direction provided it is in the list of the 170 brightest stars (Visit http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/bright.html ). The dimmest stars in this list are of apparent magnitude 3.0.

The direction of the earth’s orbital velocity around the Sun changes even during the day. So, what is Adarsha’s Star on a given day at 6 AM in Tokyo may not be the one that is Adarsha’s Star at local time 6 AM in Los Angeles on the same day. I am not going to worry about refining the designation of Adarsha’s Star any further now, particularly when none of the 170 brightest stars may be within 5 degrees of Adarsha’s Direction at a given moment.

Let us ask what the purpose of this exercise is. We want to be able to point in a direction in the sky and say that it is the direction of earth’s orbital velocity. Ten degrees of accuracy is good enough for this purpose.

What about planets? The five planets visible to the unaided eye are useful in visualizing what we are hurtling towards at a given time. They have high visibility and are always close to the ecliptic.

Let us look at the sub-question. Many of the 92 stars above magnitude 2.49 are well away from the ecliptic. Since the ecliptic is fairly stable with respect to the stellar background, many of them have no chance in my lifetime, or yours, of being Adarsha’s Star!

What is Adarsha’s Direction today? At Bangalore, the Local Sidereal Time (LST)at 6 AM today (March 9, 2017) was 16 h 53 minutes, as per https://www.iiap.res.in/personnel/reks/software/javascript/calclst.php

(All points in the sky having Right Ascension = LST are on the local meridian, by definition). I looked up a sky map to find a point on the ecliptic which had the right ascension of 16 H 53 Minutes approximately.  I found that this point is within five degrees of the bright star Antares in the constellation Scorpius. That much accuracy will do for me. I am now very happy to know I am hurtling at 110,000 kilometers per hour, roughly towards Antares!

I hope that any policeman who stops me for speeding would have a sense of proportion, and not bother about an extra twenty kilometers per hour or so!    

What are we hurtling towards?

Outline of Virgo Author: AugPi at en.wikipedia, 

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

This is not a project idea, but an interesting question. It will help you exercise your reasoning and visualizing skills.
 

At any moment, the earth, as a whole, has a velocity in relation to the solar system due to its orbital motion around the Sun. Consider the stars as providing a frame of reference. If you represent earth’s velocity as a vector, it is pointing roughly in the direction of some star. Given that there are 92 relatively bright stars in the sky (the Wikipedia lists 92 stars brighter than magnitude 2.49), it would be nice to find a way of mapping the earth’s orbital velocity on any given night to one of these 92 stars. Then we can tell anyone interested that the earth is hurtling that night roughly in the direction of that star.  What a simple way to do this mapping? 

The first satisfactory answer posted as a comment on this blog will earn the author an honor. If the first name of the author is, say Herman, we will name star concerned as “Herman’s Star”. (Don’t make a mistake; “Herman” is used only to give an example. The star is going to be named after you!) A second clarification: Herman’s Star is not one particular star. At any given moment, there is one star which qualifies to be called thus. Over a period of time, different stars would qualify to be called Herman’s Star, one after another. To use another example, on any given date there is one Mayor in a given city, but the Mayor is replaced periodically.

A sub-question: Can every one of the 92 stars mentioned above be a Herman’s Star during your lifetime?

Let me not say more, I do not want to give you too many hints!

Your fingerprint is not your own! Meaning of privacy in India!

Photo:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Francis_Galton,_Finger_prints,_1892_Wellcome_L0032701.jpg

A website I often use made an offer recently – a free SIM that I could use for free for a couple of months. My wife was interested and we decided to try it. Everyone has heard of the well-known promotional offer by a cell phone company.

I filled in a form online, which said to keep the Aadhar card ready and wait for the delivery rider. He turned up in a day and asked if we had received an SMS message. We had and my wife brought her cell phone to read out that SMS. Meanwhile, the man pulled out a fingerprint reader. What was that for? He said that she should have her fingerprint recorded and that their system would get it verified. We said we did not wish to give the finger print as we were not confident that it would be safely handled. Instead we offered other ID and address proof and were willing to give a Xerox copy. The man said that would not be acceptable and we spoke to his supervisor about it over phone. The supervisor said that “this” was a government scheme and the alternative was not acceptable.

In that case, we said, we did not want the SIM!

The Aadhar card was devised by well-meaning people who had thought of various safeguards to avoid misuse. However, this is a country in which privacy means little. A person sharing a train ride could strike up a conversation with you and within minutes, ask you where you work and at what salary!

No wonder, anyone could walk in and have you give them your fingerprint to be used by some app on their cellphone! How does the customer know that the fingerprint will not be stored and used on a different occasion to “prove” his/her presence at some strange place? Does the law provide any safeguards? After all, the delivery man need not even be a staff member of the cell phone company, but be an agent hired on daily wages. You may not even learn his name or ask for his ID.

This poses major risks in a country in which over 25% of adults are illiterate.

We need researchers to find ways and means of making identification possible without any risk of abuse of the technology.  

Secure voting Protocols for Online Elections

Photo by: Simon A. Eugster, Sealing wax on letters, CC BY-SA 3.0

Please refer to http://obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2017/01/failure-modes-of-internet-based.html for a short post on risks in online voting. This is a follow-up article discussing a few interesting technical issues. The post quoted above deals with the current state of the art and says

“A service provider usually makes available the software and related infrastructure for running an election to the entity holding the election over the Internet. The service provider is selected to be a trusted partner, and is beyond suspicion”.

It is quite unnecessary and undesirable to use systems that require the service provider to share secrets with the voters. A cryptographic technique named  

Homomorphic_encryption

enables voters to encrypt and publish their votes. Election results can be computed using the encrypted votes without decrypting individual votes. We can expect such techniques to be in practical use in future. A whole variety of safeguards are, however, required to ensure that an election is carried out in a fair and transparent manner without any mischief-makers being able to alter the results.

Discussions of some of the considerations involved can be found in

Swiss Online Voting Protocol  (select from the displayed page the PDF document with this name and download it) and in 

A Review of the Underlying Concepts of Electronic Voting

Creating an online service and an app for conducting secure elections and persuading organizations to use them is not mere technical work. It requires entrepreneurial spirit, management & marketing abilities in addition to technical knowledge and skills. A student project involving a team of three or four students could address this problem.

Straightforward engineering is not sufficient to implement a system in which a service provider does not have to share secrets. The need for advanced cryptographic techniques and the need to design a system free of weaknesses make this project a special one. If it was any simpler, many software houses would be marketing their solutions by now.

Can You Invent a Better World through Technology?

  

(Don’t worry! The competition described below is quite different from the one illustrated by the photograph above!)

IEEE Computer Society offers you an exciting opportunity to participate in a global student competition. Students are invited to create an innovative solution, based on the IEEE Computer Society 2022 report, that will solve a real-world issue. Visit

https://www.computer.org/web/membership/student-challenge?lf1=7391628140d264316068135c61505191

The IEEE report mentioned above focuses on 3D printing, big data and analytics, open intellectual property movement, massively online open courses, security cross-cutting issues, universal memory, 3D integrated circuits, photonics, cloud computing, computational biology and bioinformatics, device and nanotechnology, sustainability, high-performance computing, the Internet of Things, life sciences, machine learning and intelligent systems, natural user interfaces, networking and interconnectivity, quantum computing, software-defined networks, multicore, and robotics for medical care. Visit

https://www.computer.org/cms/ComputingNow/2022Report.pdf

Surely, the world will change a lot in the coming years and the 23 technologies covered in the IEEE Report will contribute to much of that change. Your challenge is to visualize an innovative solution based on some of these technologies and describe it briefly. Reward to the winner?  Travel expenses and some money!