Dec/07/2011

Wipro set for expansion in Bengal

Azim Premji, (right) Chairman, Wipro Group with West Bengal Finance Minister, Amit Mitra after a brief meeting with Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee at Writers' Building in Kolkata on Wednesday. Photo: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury

IT major Wipro’s Chairman Azim Premji on Wednesday met West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and expressed the desire to invest around Rs. 700-800 crore to expand its operations in the state.

State Finance Minister Amit Mitra, who was present at the meeting, told reporters here that the IT major wanted to make the investment at its proposed facility at Rajarhat near the metropolis.

Quoting Mr. Premji, Mr. Mitra said Wipro would create 15,000 jobs in the new project, which is double the number of those at the company’s Salt Lake campus.

He said Wipro also evinced interest in collaborating with the state government for creating paperless offices through the PPP (public private partnership) route.

The state government sources said 50 acres of land at Rajarhat would be given to Wipro soon. Wipro has already deposited 25 per cent of Rs. 75 crore for the land.

Wipro would get the possession of the land, once it deposits the full amount, the sources said.

DTC to come into force from next fiscal: Pranab

Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday expressed the hope that the Direct Taxes Code (DTC), which seeks to modernise tax laws in the country, will come into force from April 1, 2012.

“The proposed Direct Taxes Code brings together the policy initiatives on direct taxes. It is slated to come into force from the next financial year,” he said, while addressing an international conference on Tax and Equality.

In a bid to modernise the tax system, the government has proposed to replace the Income Tax Act, 1961, with a new legislation.

With regard to indirect tax reforms, the minister said, “We are moving toward an economy-wide, generalised value-added tax system of Goods and Service Taxes (GST) at all levels in the country.”

While giving details of the tax reforms being pursued by the Indian government, Mr. Mukherjee also called for greater international cooperation to deal with the menace of tax evasion and black money.

“Tax evasion undermines the intended benefits of a progressive tax policy,” the minister said, adding, “Resolution of these issues requires international cooperation and alignment of tax systems for better cross-border compliance.”

Quoting global financial integrity report, Mr. Mukherjee said annual illicit outflows from emerging economies and developing countries average between $725 to $810 billion.

Search resumes for evidence of life out there

Thank you for holding, our operators are no longer broke.

Astronomers announced on Monday that they had taken E.T. off hold and resumed searching for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations with a set of radio telescopes in Hat Creek, Calif. The project, part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, was suspended in April when the University of California's Hat Creek Observatory ran out of money.

Astronomers from the SETI Institute had been using an innovative set of radio telescopes known as the Allen Telescope Array to try to listen in on alien broadcasts from the raft of planets newly found by NASA's Kepler satellite. Under a new deal — as well as a public fund-raising effort that netted $200,000 — the SETI astronomers will share the telescopes with the Air Force, which is interested in using them to track satellites and space junk.

At 6:18 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on Monday, when the stars in Kepler's field of view rose in Hat Creek, the array was back on the job, looking for what Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute here called “technosignatures” of any inhabitants of those planets.

“We know there are planets there,” she said.

SETI's resurrection was announced at the start of a weeklong conference here devoted to results from the Kepler satellite, which is conducting a cosmic Gallup poll to determine the fraction of stars that harbour habitable, Earth-like planets.

ABOUT KEPLER

An overflow crowd of more than 500 astronomers signed up, and they got their money's worth in the first hour: William Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator, reported that Kepler had confirmed its first “Goldilocks” planet, one that orbits its star in the so-called habitable zone — the right distance from its star to have liquid water on its surface.

Kepler 22b, as it is known, is 2.4 times the size of the Earth and about 600 light years from here. It takes 290 days to orbit its star, which is slightly smaller and dimmer than the Sun. Mr. Borucki said that if it had a reasonable atmosphere, the surface temperature on 22b would be about 72°Fahrenheit, “a very pleasant temperature.”

But whether Kepler 22b is actually habitable depends on its composition and atmosphere, neither of which is known. Kepler finds planets by detecting starblinks when planets pass in front of their own stars; this allows astronomers to measure the sizes of the planets, relative to that of their home stars, but not their masses and thus their densities and compositions.

The size of Kepler 22b, however, puts it in a class of planets known as super Earths, about which little is known since there is no planet in that range in our own solar system. It could be mostly rock, making it about 13 times the mass of the Earth, or it could be mostly gas, like Neptune. Probably, it is somewhere in between, said Mr. Borucki, adding, “We have no planets like this in the solar system.”

He did say that because there could be water there, Kepler 22b was a good target for SETI.

The bounty hardly stops there. Natalie Batalha, Kepler's deputy science team leader and a professor at San Jose State University, unleashed an avalanche of new planet candidates, bringing Kepler's potential bounty to 2,326 exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. Among them, she said, are 207 objects that are about the size of the Earth and 680 others up to 10 times the size of Earth, or super Earths. In all, 48 of the putative planets are in the Goldilocks zone, Dr. Batalha said.

And so there are plenty of targets for the re-energised Allen Array, named for Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist who paid for the array of 42 telescopes. Dr. Tarter said that the SETI effort needed about $100,000 a month to keep operating and that in the long run, the Air Force money would not be enough to keep it alive.

Computer scientists may have what it takes to help cure cancer

The war against cancer is increasingly moving into cyberspace. Computer scientists may have the best skills to fight cancer in the next decade — and they should be signing up in droves.

One reason to enlist: Cancer is so pervasive. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Emperor of All Maladies,” the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee writes that cancer is a disease of frightening fractions: One-fourth of deaths in the United States are caused by cancer; one-third of women will face cancer in their lifetimes; and so will half of men.

As he wrote, “The question is not if we will get this immortal disease, but when.”

Dr. Mukherjee noted that surprisingly recently, researchers discovered that cancer is a genetic disease, caused primarily by mutations in our DNA. As well as providing the molecular drivers of cancer, changes to the DNA also cause the diversity within a cancer tumour that makes it so hard to eradicate completely.

The hope is that by sequencing the genome of a cancer tumour, doctors will soon be able to prescribe a personalised, targeted therapy to stop a cancer's growth or to cure it.

STEVE JOBS' CANCER

According to Walter Isaacson's new biography “Steve Jobs,” a team of medical researchers sequenced the Apple executive's pancreatic cancer tumour and used that information to decide which drug therapies to use. Since Mr. Jobs's cancer had already spread, this effort was even more challenging. Each sequencing cost $100,000.

Fortunately for the rest of us, the cost of turning pieces of DNA into digital information has improved: The costs dropped a hundredfold in the last three years. The tipping point before widespread use is believed to be $1,000 per individual genome, which is a reason for the major investment in reducing its cost. Given such dramatic improvement, we could soon afford to sequence the genomes of the millions of cancer patients, which only billionaires could afford a few years ago.

How can computer scientists help?

First, as recently reported in this newspaper [NYT], the cost of millions of short reads of one cell by a gene sequencing machine is dwarfed by the data processing costs to turn them into a single usable three-billion-base-pair digital representation of a genome. To make personalised medicine affordable for everyone, we need to drive down the information processing costs.

Second, we need to collect cancer genomes in a repository and make them available to scientists and health professionals. The computer scientist David Haussler of the University of California, Santa Cruz, for example, is creating one. Plans are that this five-petabyte (5,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) store will house more than 20,000 genomes.

Third, finding a personalised, targeted therapy for each tumour among myriad possible combinations of drugs is like finding a very small needle in a very large haystack. Researchers are exploring the engagement of people when traditional hardware and software are not up to the task.

An inspirational example is the Foldit game — developed by the computer scientist Zoran Popovic at the University of Washington — that recently attracted thousands of volunteers to uncover the structure of an enzyme important to H.I.V. research.

BIG DATA CHALLENGE

Cancer tumour genomics is just one example of the Big Data challenge in computer science. Big Data is unstructured, uncurated and inconsistent, and housing it often requires a thousand-fold increase in size over traditional databases. It is not pristine data that can be neatly stored in rows and columns. YouTube alone holds nearly one exabyte of videos, which is one trillion megabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

The Big Data research challenge is to develop technology that can obtain timely and cost-effective answers to Big Data questions. A Berkeley team of eight faculty members and 40 Ph.D. students is rising to that challenge via three initiatives: inventing algorithms based on statistical machine learning; harnessing many machines in the cloud; and developing crowd-sourcing techniques to get people to help answer questions that prove too hard for our algorithms and machines.

Algorithms, machines and people gave our new lab its name: the AMP Lab. AMP technology could help the war on cancer. It needs new algorithms to find those needles in haystacks. To process genome data faster and more cheaply, the war needs new infrastructure to use many machines in the cloud simultaneously. And it needs to be able to engage the wisdom of the crowd when the problems of cancer genome discovery and diagnosis are beyond our algorithms and machines.

It may have been true once that expertise in computer science was needed only by computer scientists. But Big Data has shown us that's no longer the case. It is entirely possible that we have the skill sets needed now to fight cancer and to advance sciences in myriad other ways.

The night after we made that argument, I awoke in the middle of the night with this question etched into my mind: Given that millions of people do have and will get cancer, if there is a chance that computer scientists may have the best skill set to fight cancer today, as moral people aren't we obligated to try? (David Patterson is a professor in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.) — New York Times News Service