In the challenging time of a COVID-19 outbreak, satellite monitoring has been playing a pivotal role in curbing the spread of the infection, mainly by helping identifying risk zones and facilitating quick response. However, there remains a huge potential to use Earth-observation (EO) data to shed new light on societal and economic changes currently taking place. The spate of reforms announced by the Indian government designed to create and nurture private enterprises in the field of space exploration, satellite communications regulations and remote-sensing has not only inspired hope for countless space…

New Delhi: A group of students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati, has developed a drone with an automated sprayer to sanitise large areas including roads, parks, and footpaths. The student group, which has a start-up called “Racerfly”, has approached the Assam and Uttarakhand governments with their sprayer system which they claim can accomplish the task in less than 15 minutes which would otherwise take a person 1.5 days of work. According to Anant Mittal, a Civil engineering student at IIT Guwahati, the sprayer system can be deployed and…

As most of India slept in anticipation of a national holiday and the usual Independence Day celebrations the following morning, three gravitational wave detectors in the US and Italy observed one of the strangest signals to date. The twin Advanced LIGO detectors in the US and the Virgo detector in Italy are the most precise measuring devices ever built. They can sense extremely tiny disturbances in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, created when massive bodies like two black holes or neutron stars rapidly spiral in and merge. Since…

  The Government of India approved the Rs 3,660 crore national mission on cyber-physical system technologies: artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), machine learning (ML), deep learning, big data analytics, robotics, quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum encryption, data science and predictive analytics. Earlier the same year, NITI Aayog had published the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence discourse paper, which recommended setting up an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research, Analytics and knowledge Assimilation (AIRAWAT) platform. Meanwhile, the government had also constituted four committees on AI in four well-considered areas. These committees have…