IEEE Compute is celebrating All India Computer Society Congress (AICSC), Hyderabad with its third edition. IEEE Compute, the IEEE Computer Society India Student Activities Newsletter is awaiting the launch of its Third Edition at AICSC 2016, Hyderabad. We invite all volunteers to be a part of the event that happens simultaneosly online and offline. Keep visiting our Facebook and Twitter pages for updates. Here is the story of IEEE Compute’s past editions in a short info-graphic. Thanks to Indra Kumar for this wonderful design.

The NIE IEEE Student Branch’s Computer Society Chapter is one of the active Computer Society chapters with an amazing strength of around 75. It was initiated back in early 2015 and by September 2015 it was officially inaugurated. It had around 15 members in its first year followed by a whopping 60 new members this year which has been our biggest achievement.

Since its inception we have had various events under the CS Chapter. Last year, the official inauguration of the CS Chapter was done in the gracious presence of IEEE Computer Society Chairman, Bangalore section, Dr. Bindhu Madhava. A Scratch workshop was also done by the CS chapter.

We started this year with an exclusive session on Open Source and Basic Programming sessions. Under the odd semester fest, Adroit, of our student branch, the CS Chapter hosted a talk by Mr. Farhaan Bukhsh, a GSoCer of 2016, on FOSS. We also organised a humanitarian event for an NGO, Divyadeepa, under which our volunteers from the CS Chapter contribute towards the computer education of the underprivileged kids.

We plan to celebrate the IEEE Day in coming week at the Hub level with members from all over the hub coming together to meet, discuss and share ideas.

IEEE CS gave our members chance to volunteer for and attend the All India IEEE Computer Society and YP Congress 2015 held at Delhi. We got to meet the IEEE Computer Society Chair and Membership Director, and various personalities from the industry which gave our members exposure to opportunities.

We aim to get better and continue being an active member body by volunteering for computer society.

Team IEEE Compute lauds the efforts of the volunteers at IEEE Student Branch THDC-IHET and thanks Mr. Nitin Kumar Gupta, Asst. Prof., Dept. EE and Branch Counsellor, IEEE Student Branch THDC-IHET, Tehri, Uttarkhand for sharing this awesome story with us.

I remember the time when I used to read the Batman Comics, with my mouth gaping open in awe at the stunts Batman pulled off with his Batmobile. How at the press of a button, the car would leave his home on its own and reach his location never failed to fascinate me. Like me, I’m sure many others must have fantasized seeing driverless cars on roads. These dreams might have seemed too good to be true as it was always overshadowed by skepticism about its feasibility in our lifetime. Thanks to Google, our doubts can now be dismissed without a second thought.

An autonomous car is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and navigation without human input. Autonomous cars can detect surroundings using a variety of techniques such as radar, LIDAR, GPS, odometry, and computer vision. Advanced control systems interpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths, as well as obstacles and relevant signage. Autonomous cars are operated via control systems that are capable of analyzing sensory data to distinguish between different cars on the road, which is very useful in route planning to a desired destination. Some of the advantages of introducing driverless cars include fewer fatal accidents, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, lower road infrastructure costs, and the arrival of a convenient and hassle free mode of travel for the blind, disabled and the elderly. Though the concept of autonomous cars has been around for a while, it was only recently in 2011, that some states in the United States passed the legislation to allow the operation of driverless cars, after Google lobbied for robotic car laws. In May 2014, Google announced plans to create a driverless car that had neither a steering wheel nor pedals, and unveiled a fully functioning prototype in December that year, which they planned to test in 2015. The project team at Google has equipped a number of different types of cars with the self-driving equipment, including the Toyota Prius, Audi TT, and Lexus RX450h. Google has also developed their own custom vehicle assembled by Roush Enterprises and uses equipment from Bosch, ZF Lenksysteme, LG, and Continental. Google’s robotic cars have about $150,000 in equipment including a $70,000 LIDAR system. The range finder mounted on the top is a Velodyne 64-beam laser which allows the vehicle to generate a detailed 3D map of its environment. The car then takes these generated maps and combines them with real high-resolution maps of the world, producing different types of data models that allow it to drive itself. As of June 2014, the system works with a very high definition inch-precision map of the area the vehicle is expected to use, including how high the traffic lights are. In addition to the on-board systems, some computations are performed on remote computer farms as well. While testing their autonomous vehicles on public roads, Google always has test drivers ready to take over if the car is not driving itself safely or smoothly enough. In August 2016, their cars traveled a "total of 170,000 miles of which 126,000 miles was driven autonomously (i.e. the car was fully in control)." As of June 2016, Google had test driven their fleet of vehicles, in autonomous mode, a total of 1,725,911 miles (2,777,585 km). There are, however, quite a few limitations to this idea. According to “Computer World” ,Google’s self-driving cars were in fact unable to use about 99% of US roads. As of the same date, the latest prototype had not been tested in heavy rain or snow due to safety concerns. As the cars rely primarily on pre-programmed route data, they do not obey temporary traffic lights and, in some situations, revert to a slower "extra cautious" mode in complex unmapped intersections. The vehicle faces difficulty identifying when objects, such as trash and light debris, are harmless, causing the vehicle to veer unnecessarily, leading to reduced fuel efficiency and time wastage. Additionally, the LIDAR technology cannot spot some potholes or discern when humans, such as a police officer, signaling the car to stop. To ensure safety of passengers and pedestrians, the Californian DMV suggested imposing strict regulations on the use of such vehicles stating that there must be a steering wheel and pedals on each car and a minimum of one occupant in each car while in transit. Also, the occupant would be held responsible in a situation where there are damages, irrespective of whether they were at the wheel or not. Google however, projects to overcome these shortcomings and come out with a commercially viable product by 2020 which will be made available to the general public. So it won’t be much longer until you see driverless taxis, buses and private vehicles transporting goods and products on the roads near you. The vehicles of the future are here.

A bunch of people at google thought, maybe the user does not require to dump his current phone to get amazing new features of the newly developed phones. They thought, why not we make the different components of the phone such as the speakers, the screens all into different modules and the just assemble them together on a single core structural frame. This laid the foundation for project Ara.

The Project Ara was launched by google in the fall of 2015. This idea purely caters to the urge of personalising one’s smart phone. It’s the concept of modular phone, wherein, the user has the freedom to attach various components of the phone such as cameras, screens, speakers etc. of different specifications to their phones. The core components like the processors, GPU and Antenna clusters are fabricated into the frame of the phone. The contact points are places across the frame to make these core components accessible by the accessory modules (camera, speaker, screen module etc.). This creates a sea of options for the user to configure their phone as per their convenience.

The independent hardware modules of the phone would be made available in the market to buy from. As an example, if a user wishes to capture some detailed photos, he can just simply slide out the existing camera module from his phone and replace it with another camera module with higher resolution available in the market. This enables the user to greatly personalise his phone as per his requirements.

Electronic waste possesses a huge problem now a days. The Project Ara could also be seen as an attempt at reducing the electronic waste generated by discarded phones. With the conventional phones, the only way to stay updated with latest mobile computing technology is to replace the existing phone with a new one, but with Project Ara, user can stay updated to latest technology by just replacing the previous functional module with the latest functional module. This reduces the cost of upgradation as well and is better on carbon footprint.