ALUMNI NEWSMAKERS

Sunday, June 19, 2005

Naresh Chand Gupta was recently promoted as senior vice-president of the US-based Abode Systems. “It feels great,” he says. “I have lived there before when I did my masters. I go to US several times a year on work. But from now on, I will be stationed there permanently. So in that respect, it will be a bit different,” he adds. In his new position, Gupta will join the company’s executive team and will be responsible for identifying emerging technology and business opportunities for Adobe. “I look at my career as a global one. It can take me anywhere. The world is flat and people are mobile,” says Gupta, probably taking a leaf out of Thomas Friedman’s latest book. Gupta is expected to relocate to the company’s headquarters in San Jose, Cali- fornia from India where he was the managing director of Adobe Systems India. Talking about the success of entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, Gupta says an ecosystem has evolved in the Valley, which encourages free flow of ideas. “That culture encourages entrepreneurship and risk taking. And this is not a new phenomenon. Hewlett-Packard was started out of a garage in Palo Alto way back in 1939. People are willing to go out and start something new,” he says. Gupta is happy that India is also experiencing a similar entrepreneurial wave. “Many IT entrepreneurs in Bangalore have started operations from their houses. The government has to play a key role to encourage entrepreneurship,” says Gupta. Adobe’s India division is extensively focussed on product development for its worldwide operations and over 450 engineers are engaged in software development in India. PageMaker 7.0, which was released in 2001, was rolled out of the Indian campus. The company has filed for more than 20 worldwide patents in the last four years. Adobe India professionals have also engineered other Adobe products like Frame Maker, PageMaker, Postscript, Acrobat Readers on alternative devices and the Photoshop Album Starter Edition. But piracy is a major problem for the company. “More than 90% of Adobe’s products used in India are pirated,” says Gupta. Adobe India is on a major awareness generation drive in this respect and the company is also offering its suite of products at reasonable prices to institutional and individual users. Gupta is a gold medallist from IIT Kanpur. He joined Adobe in 1996 as a computer scientist of the corporate research group where his work resulted in six patents to his credit. In 1998, he relocated to India to start work on the research and development centre in India. Reading is a favourite pastime for Gupta. “I have bought seven books for this weekend,” he says. He recently finished reading Freakonomics. “The book puts a lot of things into perspective,” he says. He plans to read Tipping Point, What Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to Know and Three Billion New Capitalists. He is an avid trekker and has gone on trails in Uttaranchal. He is also a sports junkie. “I play badminton, cricket, tennis and volleyball,” he says matter of factly

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Professor Vijay Kumar and his student engineers, including Rahul Rao and Sachin Chitta, at the University of Pennsylvania, have received a $5 million grant from the Department of Defense to develop large-scale "swarms" of robots that could work together to thoroughly search large areas from the ground and sky. Penn's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory will receive the five-year grant from the federal government under the Defense Department's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program Apparently, the ‘Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors’ or the Swarms Project, as it is known, takes organizational cues from the natural world where tens or even hundreds of small, independent robots work together to accomplish specific tasks, such as finding a bomb in a crowded city. The Swarms project is based upon the success of the GRASP Lab's smaller-scale Multiple Autonomous Robotics (MARS) project, which managed the movement and behavior of about a dozen robots. "Our objective here is to develop the software framework and tools for a new generation of autonomous robots, ultimately to the point where an operator can supervise an immense swarm of small robots through unfamiliar terrain," said Vijay Kumar, director of the GRASP Lab at Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science and principal investigator of the Swarms Project. "There is an obvious military application, to be sure, but the same principles apply whether you are looking for an terrorist in an urban environment or localizing the source of a chemical spill in a city." While MARS demonstrated the feasibility of such a program, the Swarms Project will take the complexity involved to a new level. To get a better grasp of swarming behavior, Kumar and his colleagues are looking to the natural world for inspiration. The SWARMS project brings together experts in artificial intelligence, control theory, robotics, systems engineering and biology with the goal of understanding swarming behaviors in nature and applications of biologically-inspired models of swarm behaviors to large networked groups of autonomous vehicles. Our main goal is to develop a framework and methodology for the analysis of swarming behavior in biology and the synthesis of bio-inspired swarming behavior for engineered systems. We will be interested in such questions as: Can large numbers of autonomously functioning vehicles be reliably deployed in the form of a “swarm” to carry out a prescribed mission and to respond as a group to high-level management commands? Can such a group successfully function in a potentially hostile environment, without a designated leader, with limited communications between its members, and/or with different and potentially dynamically changing “roles” for its members? What can we learn about how to organize these teams from biological groupings such as insect swarms, bird flocks, and fish schools? Is there a hierarchy of “compatible” models appropriate to swarming/schooling/flocking which is rich enough to explain these behaviors at various “resolutions” ranging from aggregate characterizations of emergent behavior to detailed descriptions which model individual vehicle dynamics? "There are a number of interesting behaviors seen in the natural world that we'd like to incorporate, at least analogously," Kumar said. "We might want to see the stalking behavior of a wolf pack, the searching behavior of ants or honeybees or the quorum-sensing behavior of bacteria. "In fact, much like ants or bees, these robots will be rather dumb individually, but collectively they'll be capable of performing very complicated tasks." While the GRASP engineers are not attempting to recreate biology, they are striving to understand what general principals in biological behavior that might be useful in getting robots to think as a group. Eventually, Kumar and his colleagues will demonstrate their biologically-inspired algorithms on practical vehicle platforms, such as the robot blimps, unmanned aerial vehicles and the small "clodbuster" four-wheeled robots already in use at GRASP. "The MARS project was really about getting robots to interact in a physical space, to see their world and react to the obstacles around them," Kumar said. "With the Swarms Project, we are going beyond the orbit of MARS in that we are getting robots to talk amongst themselves about their image of the world around them." A graduate of IIT Kanpur (1983), Vijay Kumar earned his M.S and Ph.D (1987) from University of Ohio where his dissertation was on Motion Planning for Legged Locomotion Systems on Uneven Terrain.